Thanksgiving Breakfast

Although we no longer have little ones in our household, I still get a kick out of seeing the cute turkey veggie tray that Keely made a few years ago as well as the one I made last year. This year? Keely hinted for me to make these turkey-looking cinnamon rolls. Seriously? How could I resist?

I can't wait to see the look on Steve's and Keely's eyes when they see what I have in store for them for breakfast. Yes, it's the little things. I may have just started a new tradition!

Happy Thanksgiving! :)

A Progressive Halloween

I've always liked the idea of participating in a progressive dinner: a great way to entertain with a limited amount of work. We did just that for Halloween with our sweet friends and neighbors, the Hesters, Jonardis, and Crawfords. What a wonderful way to spend the evening!

After handing out candy for a couple of hours, we walked a few doors down to the Hesters to start. The night began in Harry Potter style as their son Noah first welcomed us. Bob and Cynthia started us off with drinks and appetizers. Both the guacamole and jalapeno poppers were delicious!

Noah was all decked out as Harry Potter.

Bob and Cynthia started us off with drinks and appetizers. (Loved his hat!)

Next came the main course, just one door down at the Jonardi's house. Rick and Hilda served chili with Mexican cornbread. I would have never thought of preparing meatless chili, but it was so good! I didn't miss the meat at all, and we definitely needed to save a few calories for dessert! ;)

Hilda and Rick served the main course.

The night ended at our house with dessert. I made coconut bon bons as well as an orange velvet cake with cream cheese icing. This is my favorite cake to make for UT games. Now, it's my favorite cake to make for Halloween! Since both events happened last night, it was the perfect choice.

Steve patiently waits to dig into the desserts.

What a great night! We all agreed this is something we want to do again. And to top it off . . . UT actually won one!

The best neighbors!

Steve, KK, Hilda, and Rick

The whole gang having dessert.

Cheering on the Vols. Well, at least one of them was!

Sweet Potato Pie

Although I've been enjoying my book club for over a year now, I hosted one of our meetings for the first time this week. This month, we discussed Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Such a weird title. But, I have learned to trust absolutely any book my friend Missy recommends. I read it many years ago, and remembered loving it. I loved re-reading it as well.

To prepare for our discussion, I knew I wanted to plan a menu that would tie in somehow. (For example, I made coconut bon bons when we discussed Lorna Landvik's Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons.) The obvious choice was to make a potato peel pie. One site stated, "I warn you, it tastes like paste. The more authentic it is, the nastier." No thank you. Instead, I opted to make a potato pie. Sweet potato pie, that is. Mmmmm. It was my first time making one, and something I will definitely make again!

Sweet Potato Pie

Ingredients:

• 2 cups mashed sweet potatoes 
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 stick butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 (9 inch) unbaked pie crust
• 3 egg whites
• 1/4 cup sugar

Directions:
For the filling, combine first 8 ingredients. Mix thoroughly. Add milk and continue to mix. Pour the filling into the pie crust and bake at 350° for 45 minutes. Cool to room temperature before covering with meringue.

Meringue: Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Slowly add sugar, beating until stiff and glossy. Spread over pie filling and bake for 10 minutes, or until meringue is browned.
Cool and serve.

Adapted from: Paula Deen 

Mimosa Bar

With a tennis team named Overserved, we always offer some kind of "special" drink when we host a visiting opponent. So far this season, you could have enjoyed Bloody Marys and milk punch. For our most recent match, however, my teammate Lynn and I set up a mimosa bar.

I first got the idea from Pinterest (of course). Sure, you will find some fancy and beautiful presentations in Pinterest Land that require matching milk jars, labels, and such. This version, on the other hand, is quite simple. I think it is perfect for a more casual setting such as a family get-together, tailgating, etc.

Lynn provided different variations of fruit juice by Simply: lemonade, orange, lemonade-raspberry, and cranberry. I provided two bottles of champagne. Typically, mimosas are made by combining equal parts juice and champagne. Since this is a self-serve bar, one would have the flexibility to adjust that ratio. No judging here! ;) Although we only offered fresh raspberries in keeping with the "simple" theme, you could certainly expand the fruit offerings to include orange slices, lemon slices, cranberries, blueberries, etc.

As soon as Lynn showed me her silver champagne bucket, I knew it would be the perfect match to one of my vintage tarnished silver trays I display above my stove.

I also used this mimosa bar as an opportunity to practice what I learned in my calligraphy class. Yes, I know. I still need more practice!

Unfortunately, we were able to complete only one match before the rain came. Under these conditions, though, the mimosa bar turned out to be the most perfect Plan B.

Adapted from: Sweet Phi.

Fourth Annual Cinnamon Roll DOE

This week, I taught another class on experimental design concepts. I really enjoy what has now become an annual tradition of demonstrating this Lean Six Sigma tool by experimenting in class with my basic cinnamon roll recipe. (Pinch me! I get paid to do this!) :D

Each year, I try to come up with a different theme. The first class I tried this simulation in enjoyed red velvet variations. Two years ago, the class got to try different orange variations. Last year's theme was chocolate. This week? I wanted to experiment with healthy substitutions. Yeah, it's pretty ironic to see "cinnamon rolls" and "healthy" in the same sentence. The challenge was on!

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

1. Would a healthier substitute for the sugar that I use in the dough make a difference? What if I used natural honey instead of refined white sugar?

2. Would a healthier substitute for the oil that I use in the dough make a difference? Lately, I've been using coconut oil for so many things. Maybe it would work for the cinnamon rolls, too?

3. Would a gluten-free cinnamon roll be preferred? Doubt it. But, would it at least be tolerable? One blogger swears that tapioca flour mixed with coconut flour produces a great dough. (And, if it's on the internet, it must be true. Right?)

4. Would a healthier substitute for the brown sugar that I use in the filling make a difference? What about using coconut palm sugar instead? It even looks like brown sugar!
5. Would a healthier substitute for the butter I use in the filling make a difference? I first learned about ghee last year when I completed a Whole 30, and I've been cooking with it ever since. Ghee is clarified butter that is pure butterfat without the milk solids and water. It is better tolerated by those with dairy sensitivities, and it's even found to lower levels of unhealthy cholesterol. Now, wouldn't it be nice for a doctor to say, "Since you need to lower your cholesterol, eat cinnamon rolls!"  (Keep dreaming . . .)

6. Would a healthier substitute for the really sweet glaze icing make a difference? What if I used natural honey here, too?

7. Would placing a label on the package (either gluten-full or gluten-free) make a difference? Here, I was speculating that some people may look at a gluten-free label and already have some preconceived biases about the taste before even taking a bite.

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:Dough Sugar        Regular sugar            Honey
B: Dough Oil             Canola oil                   Coconut oil
C: Dough Flour         Gluten-full                   Gluten-free
D: Filling Sugar         Brown sugar               Coconut palm sugar
E: Filling Butter          Regular butter            Ghee

F: Icing                       Regular glaze             Honey

G: Label                     No label                       Label

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

The first four batches were made with the regular bread flour (gluten-full):

Batch 1: Dough made with regular sugar, canola oil, and bread flour. Filling made with coconut palm sugar and ghee. Honey icing and no label.

Batch 2: Dough made with honey, canola oil, and bread flour. Filling made with brown sugar and real butter. Honey icing and a gluten-full label.

Batch 3: Dough made with sugar, coconut oil, and bread flour. Filling made with brown sugar and ghee. Regular glaze icing and a gluten-full label.

Batch 4: Dough made with honey, coconut oil, and bread flour. Filling made with coconut palm sugar and real butter. Regular glaze icing and no label.

The last four batches were made with the tapioca and coconut flour (gluten-free):

Batch 5: Dough made with sugar, canola oil, and gluten-free flour. Filling made with coconut palm sugar and real butter. Regular glaze icing and a gluten-free label.

Batch 6: Dough made with honey, canola oil, and gluten-free flour. Filling made with brown sugar and ghee. Regular glaze icing and no label.

Batch 7: Dough made with sugar, coconut oil, and gluten-free flour. Filling made with brown sugar and real butter. Honey icing and no label.

Batch 8: Dough made with honey, coconut oil, and gluten-free flour. Filling made with coconut palm sugar and ghee. Honey icing and a gluten-free label.

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:

As before, I collected 10 surveys for each batch, for a total of 80 observations. After analyzing the results, I learned that only one thing made a difference: changing the flour significantly affected the likeability score. This is depicted in the chart below by the very long bar.

This was the boldest factor I've tested in the various cinnamon roll DOEs. I wasn't surprised at all by the results. When I picked up the dough to knead it into rolls, the gluten-free dough felt like dried crumbly Play-doh. It was awful! It seemed to take forever just to get it to stick together. I'm certain that if I had collected data on some visual assessment in addition to the likeability score, it would have bombed here, too. They were a hot mess: little tiny blobs that never did rise. (See graph below.)

Like working with dry, crumbly Play-doh

What a mess!

Not only did the gluten-free dough significantly decrease the likeability score on average, but it also significantly increased variation. You'll notice below that survey responses spanned the entire range of the rating scale from 1 to 5. In other words, opinions were all over the place!

Interestingly, there was essentially no difference in the likeability score when changing any of the other factors. The more I started thinking about the analysis, though, the more I was afraid that I may have missed something. It was very apparent when observing the different taste testers that there were two distinct groups of individuals: those who cared about healthy alternatives and those who couldn't care less. I was afraid that the extreme effect of the dough change may have overshadowed other important ingredient changes. Hindsight, I probably should have done a separate DOE for those two customer segments. 

It wasn't practical for me to start the baking process over again. Instead, I created a subset of my data, focusing on only those recipes that used the regular bread dough (gluten-full) and continued to explore the ingredient changes. 

It turns out that a couple of other factors were indeed significant after all! 

Changing the original sweet regular glaze icing to honey appears to hurt the likeability score when you're only focusing on the nice, gluten-full cinnamon rolls. 

On the other hand, it appears that using coconut oil instead of the canola oil appears to significantly improve the likeability score. We found a winner!

Bottom line: People preferred the nice, gluten-full cinnamon rolls over the gluten-free alternative. Not even close. When using the original bread flour (gluten-full), it appears that changing the icing to honey hurt, so keep using the regular glaze icing. If you want to reduce some of your sugar intake, though, it would be OK to substitute honey for the sugar in the dough (not icing) and substitute coconut palm sugar for the regular brown sugar in the filling. You could also substitute ghee for regular butter. Those three substitutions didn't hurt the likeability score. I'm also getting a clue that I should be changing the canola oil to coconut oil. I'd like to test that one again just to be sure. As before, I’m already looking forward to the next round of experimentation!

A Doc McStuffins Birthday

I have always loved celebrating birthdays! I have fond memories planning over-the-top birthday parties for Keely with some kind of theme:  Minnie Mouse (twice!), Little Mermaid, Barney, Pocahontas, etc. While I'm certain Keely will never outgrow wanting some amount of pink and sprinkles for her birthday celebrations, it's been a long time since I've planned a Disney themed party.

Needless to say, I was thrilled when my friend Damaris asked me to help her plan little Olivia's third birthday party. The theme? Doc McStuffins. Wait. What? Who? This was the first time I had even heard the name of that character! So, if you're like me, here is a quick synopsis:

"The series chronicles a girl named Dottie "Doc" McStuffins who decides she wants to become a doctor like her mother. She practices her dream by fixing toys and dolls. When she puts on her stethoscope, toys, dolls, and stuffed animals come to life and she can interact with them. With help from her stuffed animal friends – Stuffy the Dragon, Hallie the Hippo, Lambie the Lamb, and Chilly the Snowman – Doc helps toys recover, or "feel better", by giving them check-ups and diagnosing their illnesses."

What a wonderful role model! From the start, I knew this would be a fun project!

The invitations were adorable. I created the graphic while Damaris turned it into a clipboard and even added a real band-aid for a nice finishing touch. The birthday girl approved, so we knew we were off to a good start.

Now for the menu. We wanted foods that sounded good with Doc's stuffed animal friends (Stuffy the Dragon, Hallie the Hippo, Lambie the Lamb, and Chilly the Snowman) or at least tied into the overall theme of wellness. Then, I created food labels similar to the ones I made for Keely's UT graduation party, Hayley's POP! baby shower, Hannah's book-themed baby shower, and Natalia's Georgia Southern graduation party.

For starters, party-goers could enjoy chicken bites, hummus, muffins, applesauce, and cream cheese stuffed strawberries.

 

In addition to the main foods, the kids could enjoy edible cotton balls (marshmallows), lollipops, cookies shaped like band-aids, Hershey kisses, vitamins (M&Ms), cotton swabs made from pretzels dipped in white chocolate, and "gauze" (fruit roll-ups). 

 

 Even drinks were "doctored up" as fluids and Lambie's pink lemonade.

Olivia's mom and dad, Theresa and Joey, provided each party-goer with a doctor's bag filled with M&M vitamins, band aids, wet wipes, a cookie, and stickers. Each child was able to give a check-up to their own favorite stuffed animal. I'm certain a great time was had by all!