Hot Chocolate with Whipped Cream

I love whipped cream.

Back at Thanksgiving, I bought some heavy whipping cream, intending to make whipped cream to go with my pumpkin pie - but since someone else brought a can of whipped cream, it never got used.

It's just been sitting in my fridge, calling to me.

Yesterday, I finally gave in - and about time too!  Technically (according to the date on the package) the whipping cream expired last week... but it smelled fine to me, so into the mixer it went!  5 minutes and a little sugar later, and ta-DA!  Finger-licking delicious.

Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) all I had to eat it with were my fingers.  So I made microwave "real" hot chocolate for all of us, so we had somewhere to put our whipped cream :)  Mmm, mmm!

Whipped Cream

• roughly 1 cup of heavy cream
• roughly 1/4 cup of sugar (i used raw) *i mistakenly wrote 3/4 cup in the original post
• 1/2 tsp vanilla (i didn't measure)

Hot Chocolate

• handful of chocolate chips (i literally put my hand in the bag, grabbed at the chocolate chips, and put that many in a mug)
• tiny bit of butter - less than a "pat"
• 8 to 12 oz of milk, depending on the strength you like and the size of your mug

Instructions

1. Pour cream into bowl of mixer, the colder the better.  Whip for 3-5 minutes, slowly increasing to the max intensity. When it starts to puff up and form "soft peaks", add sugar and vanilla, continuing to whip to combine.  Be careful not to over whip, or you'll make butter!
2. Meanwhile, put chocolate chips and butter into a mug, microwave 30 seconds.  Stir, microwave another 30 seconds.  Add a tiny bit of milk, stir, and microwave another 30 seconds.  Stir - if not yet melting and mixing, microwave for 30 seconds more.  If still not mixing or you're getting a weird tootsie-rollish thing, add more butter - the fat will help the chocolate mix with the water in the milk.  When combined well, go ahead and add the rest of the milk, stirring while adding.  Microwave for another 60 seconds or until hot chocolate is the temperature you like. 
3. Add whipped cream and drink up!

I'm not really sure how much whipped cream this made, since I ate so much of it off the spoon.  I'd guess probably 2.5 to 3 cups?  We consumed it all on 4 hot chocolates with AMPLE whipped cream.  (No, the baby didn't get one - I had 2!)

Cookie Surprise!

Yaaay weekend!

I'm still experimenting with meringue cookies... today was a flop!  

I'm not sure what I did wrong, but they wouldn't whip.  At all.  

So I dumped the mess into a pan, added chocolate chips, and cooked it!  Here's what happened...

I opened the oven and thought: Sweet!  Giant chocolate chip cookie!  Let's get that out of the pan and eat it!

Oh shoot!  I broke it!

It's hollow!  And somehow, delicious!  

The outside is crispy and light, and the layer under the air is like marshmallow!

To make your own hollow cookie, pour flopped meringue in pan on top of parchment paper
bake at 250 for 1 hour, turn off oven, and leave pan in, undisturbed, for a few hours, until oven is cooled off.

Turkey Sandwich for Breakfast!

I made bread on sunday night! I love my mixer! I more or less followed this recipe from the book that came with ol' red, and made them into a variety of sandwich shapes. I didn't know how much they would rise, they turned out pretty enormous!

So... I made a giant turkey sandwich on homemade bread for lunch. Yay! When I got to work, it looked so much better than my yogurt that I ate half for breakfast! I'm eating the other half now... haaaaaalf a sandwich! (sung as only the best-roomate-ever-other-than-your-husband can sing it, tune of hallelujah choir). They're so much better in halfs!

And beyond the bread, my sandwich gets even better! Fresh fixins from Costco! I bought 12 tomatoes. Giant ones. I really only wanted 3 or 4, but hey, it's Costco. Also, a bajillion pounds of lunchmeat and cheese! Freezer is stocked, and now we don't have to wait in the line at the stop&shop deli! Yaaay! One hour of costco-suffering may have saved us hours of stop&shop suffering. Or maybe not... that's the tricky thing about costco... you're never sure if it was worth it.

Now that we're homeowners with storage space, we often ask ourselves: Should we man up and pay the membership fee at Costco? And so far, our answer keeps being "eh...", ie, indecisive. So this past weekend, I convinced Husband to accompany me to Costco under Mom's supervision and membership, this time through the eyes of potential members for the first time. Our theory was, it can't hurt (and if it so happens that they have snow blowers, bonus! Alas, they did not).

What a zoo! I'm so proud of Husband for not losing his temper while we were there, I know I came very, very close! Especially when I picked up the package of a bajillion individually frozen chicken breasts and got chicken juice all over me! Ewwww! And no purel or napkins or anything of the sort in sight! (Don't worry, I still bought the chicken, what a deal! Though obviously a different package...)

What's with the men buying weird things? We saw a man with a cart full of nothing but mountains of Coca Cola! And another buying trays and trays of Lysol wipes (where was he when I was covered in chicken juice??), and yet another with several BAGS of avocados! (aguacate! my second favorite spanish word!)

$260 later, no cookies, covered in chicken goo, and full of questions about what that man would do with all those avocados, we loaded up the car and headed home. How did we spend that much and not even come out with a package of cookies??!??!!! The jury's still out on whether or not we'll join... but we've at least postponed the decision until we run out of granola bars, which will be several months from now judging by the size of the box!