A New Chapter Begins

When I agreed to help host a baby shower for my niece Hannah, I immediately knew a children's book theme would be perfect since she is an avid reader. This one was so much fun to plan!

Damaris, Hannah, Jackie, and KK

Even though designing the invitation involved tediously searching and copying each character's image, it was worth it as I was able to reminisce about each one. I re-read many of them. Why not? Even C.S. Lewis said, "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

We asked each party-goer to bring a book to help build a library for Baby Lawson. Anticipating duplicates, I also created a book plate for each person to slip inside instead of writing directly on the book. Surprisingly, I believe there ended up being only one duplicate!

These well-known characters helped shape the menu, and each book was used as table decor, too. And now for the fun part:

For starters, Jackie, Damaris, and I served honey glazed almonds, blue cheese dip and crackers, deviled eggs, and goldfish. Some names were jazzed up a bit, and I made food labels that matched the particular children's book.

The "stinky cheese" dip  was a mixture of cream cheese and blue cheese, a layer of pepper jelly, then topped with slivered almonds.

My sister Vicke made her famous deviled eggs. . . dyed green, of course!

For the savory table, we had veggies and several dips, pigs in a blanket (sort of), chicken salad sandwiches, fruit salad, pasta salad, and meatballs.

The meatballs were a hit! Even people who normally said they didn't like meatballs liked these. Damaris didn't use the common recipe with grape jelly. Instead, she mixed a bag of frozen turkey meatballs, one can of cranberry sauce, and one jar of chili sauce, then heated in a crock pot on high for about 3 hours. Yum!

Drinks included bottled water as well as punch.

 
Jackie made the punch: a mixture of blue Hawaiian Punch, pineapple juice, and Sprite Zero. It was delicious!

The most eye-catching table featured the sweets: cupcakes, homemade butter mints, moon pies, banana bread, red velvet cookies, and gourmet popcorn.

Jackie made and Greg decorated the Hungry Caterpillar cake. It was too cute!

My Aunt Marilyn made the butter mints, and her daughter Cindy formed them into adorable baby bottles. Although this recipe is already in our family cookbook, this was my first time I recall ever having them. Delicious!

 

This is the same banana bread I've been making for years.

I have posted about these red velvet cookies before, too. Notice the subtle name change. ;)

The gourmet popcorn has pretty much become a staple at our parties now. This recipe is so versatile! It was first introduced by Keely as her Christmas Crunch. I made a pink variation for Buffy's baby shower as well as Hayley's baby shower. Damaris made a blue and gold variation for Natalia's Georgia Southern graduation party. This time, she made a multi-colored version. It got a subtle name change, too.

The party ended with a toast. . . milk toast, that is . . . thanking party-goers for showering Hannah and Chris with lots of love, gifts, and books!

Greg and Jackie

Lastly, I made bookmarks for the take-home favor:

So glad to be a part of enlarging Lawson's world!

Soon-to-be-Parents Chris and Hannah

Mom, Hayley, Jackie, Hannah, Marilyn, KK

Greg, Jackie, Hayley, and Hannah

Vicke and Rylan

Blueberry Coffee Cake

Tomorrow we will be having a family brunch to celebrate Dad's 78th birthday. I'm so grateful for his health . . . still going strong! Although Mom requested that I bring cinnamon rolls, I wanted to try something new since I've been knee-deep in my cinnamon roll experiment this week. I knew it would be the perfect opportunity to make my Aunt Marilyn's blueberry coffee cake.

Whenever it's blueberry season, I think of Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Joe. They used to have so many bushes! When Dad would take us to visit, we were fortunate to leave with some of their bounty. This is one of my favorite pictures of them.

Marilyn and Joe

Marilyn tells more:
"Have I ever mentioned that I love blueberries? I do! When we lived on Hwy 151, we had probably 20 or more bushes. Joe would help me pick each day. Being the person I am, I always had to pick each bush until the ripe ones were gone. Joe could not stay in one spot, though. He picked from one end of the row to another . . . never completing a bush. We would then pour our berries into a big bag. I would have a bowl full, whereas he would only have a hand full! He ate and talked the whole time, telling story after story. So many wonderful memories! After Joe and I would pick and pick and then bag them up, Cindy would take them and sell them at the golf course. Guess who kept the money? :D  Well, the Good Lord closed one door for me. But over the last few years, He has opened another one. I have two special friends that have blueberries, and they let me go pick them. It is amazing how you can solve all of your problems just by picking berries. I love my friends and am so grateful for them!"

Not surprisingly, Marilyn has many blueberry recipes. This is one she has been making for years. When she takes it places, everyone loves it. I'm betting that tomorrow, the Birthday Boy will too! 

Siblings: Marilyn and Dad

Blueberry Coffee Cake

Ingredients for Cake:

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
• 2 cups self-rising flour
• 1 cup sour cream 
• 2 cups blueberries
• 1/2 cup chopped almonds

Ingredients for Glaze:

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 2 teaspoons milk (I added a little more for desired consistency.)
• 1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Directions:
Cream butter, add sugar and mix until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time. Add almond flavoring. Stir in the flour and alternate with the sour cream. Mix well. Pour into a greased 9x13 casserole dish. Sprinkle with the blueberries and almonds. Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes. 
Mix together ingredients for glaze and pour over warm cake.

Third Annual Cinnamon Roll DOE

When I teach experimental design concepts, I could discuss varying machine settings such as machine speed, temperature, pressure, product mixes, etc. to see how each one affects some important output measure such as production rates or off-quality.  Or, I could show the students how these concepts come alive by varying the basic recipe of my cinnamon rolls. No brainer, right? So, for three years in a row, I’ve been doing just that. Today marks the Third Annual Cinnamon Roll DOE (Design of Experiments).

Here are the new questions I wanted this experiment to answer:

1. Do females have different preferences re: cinnamon rolls than males? Here, I was speculating that females preferred chocolate variations whereas males would not.

2. Is a chocolate chip dough preferred to the basic plain dough that I normally use?
3. Is a chocolate icing better than the plain sugar glaze that I normally use?

4. Should I top the cinnamon rolls with mini chocolate chips or not?
5. Is it OK to freeze the cinnamon rolls? I experimented with this previously in the Second Annual Cinnamon Roll DOE and learned that freezing the rolls appeared to hurt customer satisfaction. My students seemed very surprised by the result. In fact, most said they didn’t even realize that some of the rolls had been frozen! Therefore, I wanted confirmation of these initial findings. I realize that freezing the cinnamon rolls wouldn't necessarily make them taste better. I was just hoping that the test subjects couldn't tell a difference so that I could be able to make these rolls well in advance for my friends and co-workers.

As before, for those of you who just want to bypass the details and simply find the answers to these questions, simply scroll to the bottom of this post. For the rest of you . . .

Here is another way of listing the factors, or changes, that I wanted to try:

Factor:            Current Condition:     Change to Try:
A: Gender        Female                      Male
B: Dough          Plain                         Chocolate Chip
C: Icing             Glaze                       Chocolate
D: Topping        None                        Chocolate Chips
E: Frozen          Not Frozen               Frozen

I made 8 different batches of cinnamon rolls, each with differing combinations of above. 

Four of the batches were made fresh this morning (not frozen):

Batch 2: Plain dough with plain sugar glaze icing and no topping, then tasted by a male (This is actually the status quo condition, or the control group.)

Batch 4:  Chocolate chip dough with plain sugar glaze icing and chocolate chip topping, then tasted by a male

 

Batch 5: Plain dough with chocolate icing and chocolate chip topping, then tasted by a female

  
Batch 7: Chocolate chip dough with chocolate icing and no topping, then tasted by a female

The other four batches were made a couple of weeks ago and frozen. I took them out of the freezer to thaw last night:

Batch 1: Plain dough with plain sugar glaze icing and chocolate chip topping, then tasted by a female

 
Batch 3: Chocolate chip dough with plain sugar glaze icing and no topping, then tasted by a female 

Batch 6: Plain dough with chocolate icing and no topping, then tasted by a male

Batch 8: Chocolate chip dough with chocolate icing and chocolate chip topping, then tasted by a male 

As before, I asked each student/co-worker who wanted to participate in this experiment to taste a particular batch (or batches) of cinnamon rolls. (A big thanks to all who participated!) Then, each was asked to provide a "likeability" score (using a 1-5 scale) by completing the following survey:

This time, I collected 10 surveys for each batch, for a total of 80 observations. After analyzing the results, I learned that freezing the cinnamon rolls, adding chocolate chips to the dough, and using chocolate icing significantly affected the likeability score. This is depicted in the chart below by the very long bars.

Even though most of the responses were very favorable, I learned that freezing the cinnamon rolls (Factor E) had the most significant negative effect on the likeability score. Darn. That’s twice now. One of my students suggested that next time, perhaps I should freeze the rolls before baking them instead of after baking them. So, I’ll be anxious to try that in the next round of experimentation. (See last graph below.)

Using chocolate chip dough (Factor B) also had a negative effect on the likeability score. That is, the average likeability score from those batches where I used the chocolate chip dough was statistically significantly lower than the average likeability score from those batches that I used the plain dough. (See second graph above). Hindsight, I think this makes sense. I noticed that the chocolate chip dough didn’t rise nearly as much. I guess the chocolate chips were just enough to weigh it down.

One surprising result for me was the negative effect due to the chocolate icing (Factor C in the third graph above). Really? Gosh, I loved it! It did, however, reinforce a key teaching point that I’ve been making for years:  expect to be surprised! (This is why businesses should be making data driven decisions instead of strictly relying on gut . . . but I admit I'm pretty biased here.)

Interestingly, there was essentially no difference in the likeability score among the females and the males (Factor A). Also, there wasn’t a significant difference between having chocolate chip toppings or none at all (Factor D). See the first and the fourth graphs above.

For this experiment, I found a clue where possibly the dough and freezing method interact; that is, what happens when you combine these two variables? The data suggests that if I use the chocolate chip dough combined with freezing the batch, the likeability score plummeted. Using the plain dough, however, there wasn’t much of a difference between the likeability score of a frozen batch or a fresh batch. So for me, that means hope! Perhaps if I just leave the dough alone, then freezing may be OK after all.

Another potential interaction involved gender and icing. Now this one did not surprise me. It appears that males preferred the plain sugar glaze icing whereas the females preferred the chocolate icing. Since I loved the chocolate icing myself, perhaps I can make this variation for, say, my all-ladies book club!

Bottom line: These results were more like the very first cinnamon roll DOE. For most of the factors, it looks like I should simply "leave well enough alone." That is, stick with the plain dough, plain sugar glaze icing (unless I’m sharing with a bunch of ladies only!), and don’t bother with the chocolate chip topping.

I'm still hopeful that freezing the rolls will not hurt the likeability score as long as I don’t modify the dough. So once again, that means more testing. I’m already looking forward to the next round of experimentation!