Snowman Slaughter

Wow. What a day. It ended up being busier than I expected, but it was wonderful. A family photo shoot, a quick stop at Em's house (always a highlight in any day), cooked 2 fun dinners, got to tell our dating/love story to some awesome girls, and then I just got done hosting a 7 course meal for my brother and cousin, and their fun dates.  It's been an awesome day, but it meant that I have not sat down at the computer all day until right now (other than to retrieve the recipes I needed for the dinners). 

So I thought I'd share with you two of my Pinstrosities today (with that much going on, there's bound to be at least one minor Pinstrosity, right?). The theme of the 7 course dinner tonight was snowmen. Thanks to Google Translate, our "restaurant" was "le bonhomme de neige", which we assume is french for "The Snowman". We tried to get more creative than that...but I swear that for every 3 syllables in English, there were 32 in French, and while that would have been fun, we had trouble pronouncing "le bonhomme de neige" as it was. Anyway...each course had something to do with snowmen...or they were supposed to at least...we forgot with one of the courses to assemble it. Oh well. So...here are two of the courses from tonight's meal. Tasted great but the visual appeal was a little lacking. 

The Original Pin

Looks simple enough right? I wasn't doing the meatloaf part, but I loved the snowman mashed potato part. So I jumped into it. What could go wrong? Scoop mashed potatoes together and decorate. Well, my mashed potatoes were a little thin...so scooping them didn't really work, so we worked them into balls...sorta. And then I went to decorate them and found that I didn't have a whole jar of peppercorns like I was sure I did...so I improvised. 

The Pinstrosity

A huge thanks to Em for letting me use her plates!

Mmmm...doesn't that just look yummy. One of the other snowmen was wider than he was tall...the potatoes were just too gooey for this to really work well. This one here isn't bad, but not what I had visualized. And then...when my smart-alecky brother was served his plate he said, "Um...excuse me, but my snowman peed." I laughed, because it's true. Tonight I used instant potatoes and I added too much water...and then I didn't have any instant potato left and didn't have time to boil up a real one. Next time, I'm just making "real" potatoes. 

And then dessert. Of course it would be dessert. 

The Original Pin

http://www.justapinch.com/recipes/dessert/other-dessert/holiday-cheesecake-presents.html

I actually didn't find these on Pinterest...I have a card in my cook book (don't know where I got it from), but when I did a search online just now I found the exact picture and recipe that are on my card. 

Aren't those cute? Cheesecake squares! The recipe says to cut them in rectangles, so I thought I'd just go one step further and use my circle cookie cutters and make a snowman rather than presents. That part went just fine. But I couldn't find the gel decorating icing and didn't want to use regular decorators icing...so I decided to make a raspberry syrup (basically frozen raspberries with some sugar and water...ta da. We grew up doing that with strawberries and figured raspberries would do fine, and they did). All went well until I tried to add the raspberry sauce to the snowmen cheesecakes. I tried to drizzle the sauce to look like a scarf and it looked like the snowman had had his neck slit. So then I tried to drizzle the sauce "artistically" over the snowman and it just ended up looking like the snowman had been disemboweled.  

The Pinstrosity 

Taste? Fantastic. Visual appeal? Ew. 

So maybe I didn't score high in the presentation but I think everything tasted good. I hope.

UPDATE: I posted up the entire dinner on the family cooking blog I am a part of. I uploaded pictures of the courses and the decorations, and I provided links to the recipes and directions for the diy decorations. You can find the post here: http://mowercooking.blogspot.com/2012/12/le-bonhomme-de-neige-7-course-meal.html.