Monday, February 25, 2013

Oh, you say February's almost over?

It has been a busy month so far! Time to catch up on all the fun things in February!

First up, Aaron turned 25 at the beginning of this month! A whole quarter-of-a-century old! I love birthdays! We had a fun, food-filled day! Breakfast started out with these beauties:



I bought this adorable donut pan from Target last year, and I'm finally finding some recipes that I enjoy to make! Baked donuts are so much better than glazed donuts (unless you decide to buy Krispy Kreme), so I highly recommend them! They're healthier than fried donuts at any rate. These were sweet and cake-like, and because they were in donut form, I could pretend that they were breakfast food and make them for Aaron's breakfast. 

Chocolate Baked Donuts
Makes 12 donuts
Adapted from Prepared Pantry

Ingredients
For the Donuts
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1/3 c. cocoa powder
1 tsp. baking powder
1 pinch salt
2 large eggs
2/3 c. granulated sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 c. milk
2 Tbsp. butter, melted

For the Glaze
1 c. powdered sugar
2 Tbsp. water
1/2 tsp. vanilla

Directions
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease a baked donut pan.

Combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. In another bowl, whisk the eggs with the sugar, vanilla, milk, and melted butter. Add the liquid mixture to the flour mixture a third at a time, stirring after each addition. Stir until the batter is smooth.

Fill the donut cavities 2/3 full of batter. Bake for 8 minutes. Cool for several minutes in the pan and then place the donuts on a cooling rack.

For the glaze, mix the water a little at a time into the powdered sugar until it is the desired consistency, adding the vanilla.

Glaze the donuts and let the glaze dry while the donuts are sitting on a rack. Be sure to store in an airtight container so they don't get stale.


We invited some of Aaron's cousins over, and made a mountain of food for dinner. We made 3 spaghetti loaves, 2 1/2 batches of Bri's famous breadsticks, corn, broccoli, and oven roasted potatoes. Mountains of delicious food.

In my family, we grew up eating Dairy Queen ice cream cake for our birthdays. I found a great recipe to replicate it, and bought some of Aaron's favorite ice cream from the BYU Creamery, Graham Canyon. It started with a layer of fudgy chocolate wafers, a layer of ice cream, a layer of chocolate ganache, another layer of ice cream, a final layer of ganache, and topped with milk chocolate shavings. We about died of joy when we took our first bites. Here's the recipe I used: Tin Roof Ice Cream Cake. Very doable! I highly recommend it!

We ate and we ate. Oh, what a feast it was!

It was wonderful to spend the day with my best friend and to be surrounded by friends and family! I love you Aaron, and I can't wait to spend every birthday with you for the rest of our lives!

I'll do some more catching up in the next few posts!

2 comments:

Rosanne Bailey said...

Aaron is 26 since he was born in 1987. Dad

Unknown said...

So close. He was actually born in 1988. Thanks for checking that I know my husband's age though!