Rubber Ducky You're NOT the One...

Hello All! Our party planning reader Diana saw this adorable pin for a baby shower, rubber ducks in blue punch! Cute right?! Well her's did not quite go as planned, hilarity (or golf) ensued...

The Original

http://tidymom.net/2011/ducky-baby-shower-punch/

How stinking cute is that?!

The Pinstrosity

As we can see this one is so stinking....well stinking. Sorry Diana, but you said it yourself! This TOTALLY looks like something that would happen to me, I am the queen at disastrous kitchen events, Diana you are not alone!

Ok down to business, first off, Diana thought that because it was Kool-Aide, she would be using water (I am assuming she used water, that's what she said in the email, if this is wrong Diana and you DID in fact use the juice mix please let us know so we can investigate further!) . In the original recipe it calls for Ginger Ale and White Grape Juice specifically, there is problem number one. Next we have the duck issue. You have to specifically by a rubber duck that floats, as in the kind you use for your kiddos bath time. Diana's duck did not float! Note here, test your ducks! Her punch turned green, and slimy, and her duck didn't float and there were no bubbles or foam from the sherbet. Disastrous. Bubbles come from adding soda to the sherbet, not just water and sherbet. Lucky for her though, the soon to be father at the shower was a pro-golfer and she had brought along a little golf game (for whatever reason I'm not sure but she should thank her lucky stars she did, it saved the green punch!). She took the golf balls from the game added them to her punch and pretended it was golf inspired, nice save Diana.

So to sum it up here are the pointers:

Use the juice mix from the recipe

Buy the right type of Kool-Aide (Blue specifically)

Make sure your duck floats

Add your sherbet to the juice/Kool-Aide mix NOT water

Do NOT add sugar though, Diana and the original website mentioned that, and said it was already super sweet without the sugar!

For the original recipe hit up the link at the bottom of the original picture!

This, if done properly could be an awesome treat and super fun decoration for a baby shower or kids party! But if you are throwing a golf  themed party, you know how to make that punch now too!

                                              -Emilee

Holy Chocolate Balls!

So I know it's like 8 P.M. and I didn't post till right now....so sorry, it was a crazy day! But alas, my house is clean! Three cheers for motivation! Anyways, when I checked out our email to see what we had received as of late, there were several awesome entries, but THIS one looked the most delicious, so I picked you Jamie! Awesome, P.S. Jamie is a great story teller most of this is all her, but I digress! Here is your Pinstrosity for today!

The Original

http://blog.babygizmo.com/2012/06/peanut-butter-graham-cracker-balls/

The Pinstrosity

First off, do you see why I call them "Holy  Chocolate Balls"? Look at that heavenly mess! Purely angelic! Oh goodness. By the way the REAL name for these delectable's are Peanut Butter Graham Cracker Balls (my title is more exciting right? right?) Our lovely Jamie followed the directions exactly! But there is a few holes in the recipe that needed some tweaking. Jamie did the foot work herself and let us know exactly what went wrong in her email:

"The recipe is pretty straight forward. Mix two ingredients together, form into balls, freeze, dip in chocolate, roll in chocolate chips, done. Sounds simple, right? Well, kinda. As I was mixing the two ingredients together, about half of the graham cracker crumbs ended up in mine, my  husband's, and my baby's mouth. Commence more grinding of graham crackers. So NOW I have my mixture of peanut butter and graham crackers. The recipe didn't say what size balls they should be (first issue here, carry on)...so I was generous and created whopping 1" balls. The allotted amounts of ingredients with this size ball gave me 16 balls instead of 24. Whatever, it's less for us to eat (great reasoning). I put them in the freezer for an hour.

The next part of the process requires those 10 invisible hands you don't have. When the chocolate was melted, I took all the balls out, stuck a toothpick in the first one and ate it. Oops. Ok, so I stuck the toothpick in the second one and dipped it in the chocolate. You need one hand to hold the toothpick, one hand to keep the bowl still and one hand to cover the ball in chocolate because the chocolate was too thick  (problem number two, we will address at the end) to move the ball around without it falling apart. Getting it covered was semi difficult and pulling it out of the chocolate was hard but possible. I immediately put it in the little, adorable, miniature chocolate chips and needed one hand to hold on to the toothpick, one hand to spoon the chips on it and one hand to keep the bowl still. Once the ball was "complete", it was freaking heavy and almost 3" wide but I managed to get it to the plate successfully.This process took time and the farther I got, the more I realized it was harder to keep the balls together. Here is what I learned and what was missing from the recipe....

1. Make the balls less than an inch because they will quadruple in size by the end. (As we saw in the picture, I mean look at them compared to the plate! Holy Chocolate Balls!)

2. Only pull a few balls out from the freezer at a time to cover in chocolate because as they sit out, they lose their firmness, fall apart and make it impossible to cover in chocolate.

Those were Jamie's suggestions here are a few we thought up as well.

3. Add milk to the chocolate to make it not so thick, it also depends on the type of chocolate your using. If you are using candy bar chocolate it is going to be THICK. If you use bakers chocolate it shouldn't get to thick, but again, nothing a little milk and stirring can't easily fix.

Marquette here with an added note (which I also put in the comments). Emilee asked me a few days ago what I do to thin chocolate when I use it and I generally use the shortening method, but I know there are other methods out there. In fact, here's a link with various methods (which include the double broiler, the shortening, milk, cream, etc). http://www.ehow.com/how_5062950_thin-melted-chocolate.html 

4. These can be done by yourself, but these seem to be better served by two, plus it's always fun to cook with a friend :)

 In conclusion, Jamie said that they rocked! Delicious! Another awesome party desert that done with the right little tweaks could be delightful to make as well as to eat!

                                             -Emilee