Look honey, I baked! (chocolate cake by Cullen)











Pardon the pun, but this really takes the cake for procrastination!! This treat is officially Oliver's 32nd birthday cake (his 32nd birthday was in September of last year). For almost a year he has been asking when he is going to get his birthday cake - and since I find no joy in baking I have spent a year telling him to forget it! Well honey, I finally did it. I baked. Happy belated birthday!

The Recipe is from the Country Living website.

Homemade ice cream

When Oliver saw that YDFM had bags of fresh cherries he found his inspiration to make homemade ice cream. After roasting the fresh cherries on the stove top they were dropped into the blender with half & half, egg yokes, sugar and salt. From there everything went into the Kitchenaid ice cream maker attachment. Towards the end he added bits of toasted almond and chunks of dark chocolate. I don't normally like chocolate cherry ice cream - but this is stuff is perfection!


If you want to try it for yourself click here for the recipe. 

Guest Blogger: Amanda in Philadelphia - Sugar Junkie

It's been three months since our guest blogger, Amanda's, last post; that post remains the third most popular on And Topher Too (so go back and read it)! She recently committed to improving her overall health and today I'm very happy to be sharing a few of the challenges and successes she's faced along the way. Thanks Mandy! - Cullen

Sugar Junkie by Amanda D
September 2011 was when I made a conscious decision to be healthy. Not to diet, and not to lose weight, but to change my habits. Though I walk or bike every day as a means of transportation, I wanted to make sure my body was strong so I joined a gym. And while I ate relatively well, with lots of real foods and fresh vegetables, I regularly indulged in full fat local yogurt, humanely raised local beef, and many, many home baked goods.

Cutting back on red meat was easier than I expected. I choose chicken sandwiches or vegetarian options when I eat out, but don’t deny myself a cheeseburger when all my friends want to go to Five Guys. After a few months I found my body craving beef less and less, particularly when I upped my intake of kale, spinach, and other leafy greens. Habit #1 broken!

My next challenge was sugar. I spent the first month of this new lifestyle staring at my flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen and thinking of a million tasty ideas - Millet muffins! Banana chocolate chip bread! Chocolate orange cookies! It wasn’t these individual items, which I made with cage free eggs from the farmer’s market and half the sugar in the recipe, that were my downfall. It was my addiction to sugar, to having treats in the house all the time, that was the habit I needed to break. And much like the beef, I found after a few months that I no longer craved sugar. An orange or some berries in the evening were all I really needed. Habit #2 broken!

Until about a month ago - when I noticed a big bowl of discounted Valentine’s Day candy on my friend’s kitchen table. I mindlessly began snacking on them. Little did I know that with those little hearts I would awake my sugar addiction. I found myself buying candy bars, baking small batches of cookies and muffins, and eating cupcakes for lunch. I have simultaneously been dealing with a torn rotator cuff, working with a trainer and a therapist to strengthen and heal my muscles. My body has ached horribly and I have been very down on myself. It wasn’t until yesterday that I put it all together.

I came across this tidbit on the internet: “We are most often addicted to the foods we are allergic to.” A quote from Dr. Mark Hyman that rang loud and true in my ears. I’ve been living with this injury a long while, but over the last month I feel the aches and pains everywhere. And I really believe that with every bowl of ice cream cake I have been eating, I have been making it harder on my body to get healthy and heal itself. I have no scientific proof, I have no doctor’s opinion behind me, I just know that I felt better, slept better, and had more energy a month ago, before my sugar binge began.

So today is the first day of breaking my old habit. Again. And I won’t see this as defeat, but a lesson in what healthy really looks like for me. Wish me luck!

Easter with friends

We spent Easter Sunday in Baton Rouge with Oliver's best friends from high school (it works in our favor that they married one another). Mandy's* Easter goodies were impressive as always (her baking and cake decorating skills are second only to my cousin Amber, a full time cake decorating professional). Pictured here are Mandy's hollow Rice Krispie Treat eggs filled with M&M's, coated with white chocolate and individually decorated. Just below them, in those perfect clear take out containers, you'll see traditional Rice Krispies, coated in dark chocolate and each uniquely decorated. There were also very cool ostrich eggs made of white chocolate, filled with pudding and topped with a cake ball to look like egg yoke! 


As a person who barely cooks and never bakes Mandy's skills impress me. Add to that that she did all this with two little boys and a five week old girl and I am speechless. AND she goes back to her full time job at a biology lab next week. High five to super woman!


One of the couple's several sister/sister-in-laws** also made half a dozen of the ever-impressive silk tie die eggs. Except to make this fun decorating technique even better then usual - they filled their eggs with cash! Way to up the intensity of the same old egg hunt! Thanks again to our friends for making us feel like family on the holidays. We'll never be able to find the words to tell you how much it means to us. 

*For anyone at our wedding, Mandy made the mini Whoopie Pies that disappeared in seconds after the dessert table opened. 
** Shout out to Sam's sister Stephanie!
***I also had the pleasure to finally meet Kari and Stewart, of www.raringstogo.blogspot.com. Kari is Mandy's younger sister as well as a fellow blogger. Check out their blog soon - they'll be moving from Texas to India later this month!

Breaking the habit: sweets

Sugar, sweets and artificial sweeteners have recently been the topic of conversation among both my friends and the media. One friend asked how I handled my craving for sweets while another friend expressed concern about her daily Diet Coke. A blog I follow just did a post about Stevia (a sugar substitute). Food Matters is promoting their new documentary by highlighting the fact that Americans eat 22 teaspoons of sugar every day and both the Huffington Post and MSNBC ran articles in February about the possibility that diet sodas increase the chance of stroke.

My response to all of the above is bound to unpopular: it's time to retrain your taste buds to only enjoy naturally occurring levels of sugar (think: strawberry at season's peak). Once your palate has changed artificial sweeteners and sugar/corn syrup based foods will not taste good, instead they will almost burn. Have that happen in your mouth a handful of times and you will no longer crave those foods. 

Don't believe me? What if I told you that in college, when my roommate and I ran out of tea bags, I would happily drink hot water and Sweet'N Low? In the ten years following college I drank at least one Diet Coke can everyday and couldn't recognize the taste of corn syrup. And until two years ago I was a major fan of sugary breakfast cereal. Today, I neither crave nor like any those foods.

It started in 2009 when I began the slow and steady work of phasing all artificial sweeteners out of my diet. I started with breakfast cereal (it was hard giving up my Honey Bunches of Oats) and worked my way through Quaker Oats granola bars, Vitamin Water, M&Ms and flavored yogurts (think Yoplait). Only one habit remained: my daily Splenda** packet served with my morning cup of coffee. In January I decided it was time to give it up too. 

The first six weeks of coffee without sweetener were bad. One of the best parts of my sleepy eyed, slow moving, morning ritual had suddenly become one of the worst parts. I tweeted about it to my close friends and I grumped about it to Oliver*** whenever he would listen. I declared I'd quit drinking coffee altogether. "Who needs it?!" But still, I brought my travel mug into the office with me everyday and day by day I drank a little more and a little more. Until now, now I think I ALMOST like coffee without sweetener (just don't ask me to give up the half and half). 

My heart healthy perspective on sweets is simple: abide by the same "real food" rules used for other foods. Eat foods made from ingredients you can picture growing in nature. If it came from a plant eat it - if it was made in a plant don't. Treat treats as treats. Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. Abide by those rules for long enough and I think most sweet tooths will naturally sort themselves out. And you might even be surprised by what unexpected* real foods start to taste like real treats!

* Now that I dislike foods like flavored yogurts and chocolate chip granola bars I've been surprised to discover to how much I love juicy in-season watermelon, carrot juice with ginger, and strawberries with cream. 
**There is currently a television commercial that shows a woman sprinkling a packet of Splenda over a bowl of strawberries. I find this commercial ABSURD. If strawberries are not sweet enough then they are either terribly out of season or it's time to reevaluate your palate. 
*** Oliver, we met three years ago today. You inspire me. I love you more then ever. Thanks for everything you do.