This is waaaaay late, but it was a busy week around here!  I did a whole lot of concocting in the kitchen for Mother’s Day last weekend.  To begin with, the doodlebugs and I made an olive oil sugar scrub for their mom:

….complete with using glue and paintbrushes and tissue paper to decorate the jar.  I got the sugar scrub recipe here.

Then I made more sugar scrub for my mom and my sister, involving much less glue and much less mess:

Then is was on to the baking!  I made Joy the Baker’s The Best Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies and they really were the BEST.  So yummy and buttery and chocolatey and GOOD.  A couple of things different from “regular” chocolate chip cookies:

Brown half the butter…

You just can’t go wrong there.  It smelled so yummy and nutty.

Scoop, flatten and chill the dough….

You MUST make these.  By the way, I LOVE the Joy the Baker blog.

Then it was on to The Smitten Kitchen’s Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp Bars:

You are supposed to cut the strawberries and rhubarb into a small dice.  So I started with the rhubard by slicing it lengthwise  and it did this:

….which made it really hard to dice.

Also VERY yummy!  My turned out a tiny bit mushy and it was because I put in too much fruit.  I thought a few more strawberries and a little more rhubarb wouldn’t hurt.  Then as I was putting the crumble in the pan, I saw that I didn’t have quite as much as I should for the amount of fruit I put in there.  But still and all, they were really yummy!  And by the way, I LOVE The Smitten Kitchen blog too.  Both blogs are silly and fun and always have great recipes.

Finally, it was on to overnight French toast (which I compiled from several recipes online so I’m not linking to one here):

Melt butter, brown sugar and corn syrup in a pan:

Then pour it in a baking dish.

Mix up eggs, half and half and vanilla, and cut up the French bread (which I got at Panera and it is really really yummy as regular toast too):

Then proceed to forget to take any more pictures.  I layered the bread in the baking dish, poured the egg mixture over it, put it in the refrigerator overnight, took it out and let it come to room temperature while we drove to Connecticut, put it in my sister’s oven for 40 minutes.  It was really yummy.  That butter, brown sugar on the bottom gets caramelly and the tops of the bread get toasty-crispy.  Three totally successful recipes that I will definitely make again.

While in Connecticut, we brought my sister our old couch.  Ours came in and her old one went out to the truck, where my 11 year old nephew proceeded to hang out:

He’s so silly.