Meal # 44 Death by Chocolate

I wanted to make a birthday cake for my friend Amy who comes to our homegroup on Monday nights so I dabbled with a recipe from online. It was to die for! Here are the layers if you need a chocolate fix yourself!
Devil's Food Cake cooked and crumbled with chocolate syrup: let sit.
Chocolate pudding (not instant!)
Cool Whip
Reeses pieces
Reeses peanut butter cups

Repeat...it was delicious!

I think everybody gave this 5 stars!

Tiff

Meal # 44 Blueberry Jam

This was over the summer and I just realized I haven't blogged about it. It all started when Tamara found a blueberry patch that we can go picking in. She rounded us up and we spent a Wednesday morning sweating and picking blueberries. I ate about as much as I picked. When I weighed out it was like 4 pounds! They were delicious. I was not discriminating however and did pick a few sour ones. Tamara was very picky and chose only the plumpish sweetest ones. Owen had trouble filling up his pail because he is like 3 years old. Beth mostly just chased Owen around but managed to be cool and collected in the heat. We decided that we would combine our pickings and make some jam. How hard could it be? We met up the following Saturday at Beth's huge house with the best kitchen. We washed and boiled our jars and took out the sure-jell directions (which were double sided with about 4 different ways to make jam depending on blah blah blah). We first pureed the berries in a food processor. Then I read the directions and it said to add 7 cups of sugar. This was the first sign that it was going to be long day. Everyone questioned me and had to read the directions for themselves. I was pretty sure Noris was not going to let me do this because she is all about watching what she puts in her body BUT I managed to work my charm and calm them all down by saying that we must follow the directions because we know NOTHING about jam. They knew that this was true so I dumped 7 shiny cups of sugar into the berry puree. Then we boiled the jam/sugar and then we thought "Oh, that was easy!" We poured the very hot jam into the jars and screwed on the air tight lids. We put them into a huge pot and started boiling them. Here is where my cooking instincts crept in. It did not seem like a good idea to put glass on the bottom of a huge pot of boiling water. So I began to google this and come to find out that it was not a good idea. I maybe began shrieking about getting the jars out of the huge pot of boiling water. This maybe freaked us all out because we were imagining the glass jars exploding on us. That is when we noticed the innocent lemon juice on the counter. I asked, "Did anyone put the lemon juice in? I feel like that is important." From the blank stares, I gathered not one of us put lemon juice in. So what did Tamara and Beth and Noris decided (not me) to do? Unscrew all the boiled jars and dump out the jam back into a pot and bring it back to a boil while adding the lemon juice. I wanted no part in this because I hate doing things twice. But I helped reboil both the jam and the jars because I may have mentioned botulism and said that people can get really sick if there is any bacteria caught in the lids. Hence the boiling of the jars. Some of them got boiled 3 or 4 times because every time any of us touched a boiled lid or jar with our hands we felt the need to reboil. Okay so we were about to put the filled jars back into the huge boiling pot of water but I was insistent that we put something in there so that the jars are not touching the bottom. We finally put a bunt pan or something down in the water with the jars on top and that worked. We ate a fabulous lunch made by Beth as we finished our project. The directions (which I kept reading wrong too and eventually torn off the only needed part) said to let them sit for 24 hours and then enjoy. So I didn't try the jam until Tuesday and it was ....very very sweet. :) But delicious! Quite an experience...but I wouldn't have changed a thing!

Jamming,

Tiff