Friday morning garden pickins..

We're leaving in awhile for a family reunion in Marthaville, Louisiana and won't be back until Sunday so I leave you all with this photo of what came from our garden this morning;one cucumber, quite a few onions, a few Sweet 100 tomatoes, and a few beets. Hopefully when we return Sunday there will be a lot more to pick.




My vegetables usually come from my own garden but sometimes they come from the local farmer's market, too. Support your local farmer's market!

Fresh from the garden!

We got a few things from the garden today; a hand full of green beans, an onion, two zucchini, two cucumbers, some kale and chard leaves and a hand full of Sweet 100 tomatoes. The green beans and greens have been washed, cut and put in bags in the fridge and most of the tomatoes have been eaten. Here's a picture of the rest of it:



Things are finally starting to ripen, get large enough, and just generally be ready to be picked. We have so many tomatoes and cucumbers coming and there's even another yellow squash growing and so far it isn't mushy. I just love fresh produce from my own garden!

Blueberry and Chocolate dessert bowls

I spent some time Sunday making dessert bowls for a Memorial Day barbecue and jam session Rod and I were invited to attend. We took barbecued chicken, mashed potatoes, baked beans, and three dessert bowls - two dark chocolate and one blueberry. Wow, the response was amazing! Almost everyone at the session was male but they all wanted to know just how I made the bowls and where they could get the pan to make them and if I'd share the recipes. I told them I'd blog about it so here it is, partially for their benefit and for anyone else who might catch this.

For the blueberry bowl, I just used Martha White Blueberry Muffin Mix (yes, I cheated!) and followed the directions on the package, filling the pan to the fill line and baking 12 minutes. After baking, I let it cool in the pan about 10 minutes, then turned the pan upside down over my butcher block and the bowl easily came out of the pan. It split in two places but I wasn't too worried about that.


Here's the blueberry bowl, made in the 5" pan, after baking.


And here's the finished bowl, after being filled with vanilla pudding and topped with whipped cream. I had a little pudding and whipped cream left and set those aside, figuring I could use them for something. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the bowl after the first slice was cut so I can't show you the inside of it. By the time I thought of it, the entire thing had been eaten! But trust me, it was as pretty as it was tasty and my other half described it as "incredibly good".

The chocolate bowls took a little more time. Rather than use a cake mix, which to me just doesn't do the Better Baker justice, I decided to make Hershey's Especially Dark Chocolate Cake on the back of Hershey's Special Dark Cocoa. Oh my, if you like dark chocolate, this is the recipe for you!



I assembled the ingredients and sprayed the Cook's Choice Better Bowl Maker with Pam with flour. I've discovered that the Pam spray with flour is the best choice of vegetable oil spray when using the Bowl Maker.


I filled the Bowl Maker to the fill line with the cake batter and baked it according to the Hershey's recipe. I had a little of the batter left and set it aside, figuring that just like the leftover ingredients from the blueberry bowl, I'd think of something to do with it. When I removed the pan from the oven, the cake had risen above the pan so I used a knife to slice off the excess so that the top of the cake was even with the pan. I let the pan cool a few minutes, turned it over the butcher block, tapped the bottom with a knife a couple of times and the cakes slid out.

As I stood looking at the excess cake sliced off the chocolate bowls, I had a thought about filling those bowls. I crumbled the excess cake and dropped half of it into each of the two chocolate bowls. I then mixed the leftover vanilla pudding and whipped cream from the blueberry bowl and the leftover cake batter from the chocolate batter and poured that over the crumbled cake in the chocolate bowls.





Once the men at the get together yesterday tasted the chocolate bowls they were scarfed up in about 15 minutes! Err, the edible bowls, not the men!

I would definitely consider these bowls a real hit at any kind of gathering. They're so versatile and easy to use and it's nice to show up at a function with something different!