For da Mummies

I guess I have to just break down and admit it... I'm crafty, creative, and DIY all the way. I prefer creative over the other two... for some reason "crafty" conjurs up images of cat ladies and women who consistently give poorly glued gifts whose houses are covered from top to bottom in felt and whicker. People with TIME and ROOM are crafty.

But, I must confess, I qualify with none of the above stereotypes but I guess that I am crafty. Even though I think that my definition of crafty is more like... creative, bored, and unchallenged.

In any case, I have picked up the hobby of making chocolates. I don't actually make the chocolate itself, I get the chocolates melts from a local shop (try to avoid Michaels for this one... there is a small business in town that I'd rather support) and melt them down to either put into molds or covered other things with (or, as I'm finding, make other things out of). I actually really enjoy it (I also enjoy when I ask MOH to come over and help me with any given chocolate project and we end up dipping strawberries into said chocolate) and I do believe I'm getting pretty good at it.

I try to give chocolates as personal gifts. Last Christmas I made peppermint bark and snowflake shaped chocolates (hmm... wonder where those could pop up again...). For this Mother's Day, I wanted to make oreo truffles for FMIL. I also wanted to send some up with NY with my parents. They go and see my stepdad's mom and aunt who live on Long Island. I got the recipe here and regardless of the fact that mine don't look half that perfect, they were super easy and fun to make! (Oh... and now looking at it... I forgot to put vanilla in mine... CURSES! Oh well... MOH thought they tasted good... and no one has to know...)

So basically, you take oreos and grind them up, mix them with cream cheese, roll into balls, and cover with chocolate.

Before I start let me preface this with a few tips that I learned from experience:

1. Read the recipe. It calls for Vanilla Extract.
2. Check to make sure that you have enough milk chocolate melts before starting instead of only making half a batch of milk chocolate and then being forced to hope your recipients like dark chocolate...
3. Do a practice run first... that first batch never comes out right...
4. Save a truffle for your fiance... woops...

Here is about how ours ended up looking:

Our oreo cream cheese balls (sans vanilla) chilling in the fridge... and no, that's not a bottle of wine right above it... or a tub of port wine cheese in the back corner...

That's one little oreo cream cheese ball floating in a sea of scrumptious chocolate... mmm

I could have taken more time on this step to make them look more perfect... but we had already walked 3 miles that day and were pretty freakin tired.

They look dericious and that's really what matters, right?

This is dark chocolate in a squeeze bottle.
You drop the bottle in water to melt the chocolate and
then you can do such things as...
Pretty little swirls and stuff...
Ok, so some are a little malformed... but as long as they're edible...

Here they are all nestled in their cute little boxes
The dark chocolate with milk chocolate swirled ones...
They came out a little more uniform than the first milk chocolate ones

I love the boxes and the ribbon we found! Such a nice little presentation!

For my mom, I did something different. My mom is a salty person. (Don't ask... the caramel coated apple fell pretty far from the french fry on this one) Mom dreams of potato chip ice cream and pretzel cake. So instead of endowing her with more chocolate (she still hasn't eaten all the chocolate covered cherries - her one sweet weakness - from their tenth anniversary in March) I thought I'd make her a special surprise.

There are few salty things that can be improved upon by chocolate. The except proves the rule... Chocolate covered pretzels are by far one of my favorite things ever. So... here you go MaMa.

Pretty self explanatory... dip pretzel rods in melted chocolate...
You can prettify if you like, I drizzled some dark chocolate over them.
The two vertical ones were saved for MOH and I. It was our reward for working our butts off!

Yesterday after a crazy day at work... I made some more with blue-tinted white chocolate.
I was a little wonky... but I felt like getting funky so I actually wrote mom on a few
Mom's all packaged up and tied with my awesome ribbon!

I know that wasn't really wedding related... but do you know how easy it would be to make chocolate covered pretzel favors or something? So I have shared my ideas with anyone who happens to Google "Plan Wedding" and "Meh" and "Hell"

Now in week 2 of crazy May... I am signing off to change the laundry and take a nap...

-Bo. J.