Gospel Desserts

 

Week 5's Gospel mentioned the grain of wheat (which must die before it will bear fruit).

We tried making rice crispie treats with puffed wheat (and added chocolate and peanut butter chips).

They were pretty good!  Not as crispy, but still very tasty, and we shaped them into giant wheat seed shapes, so that was..  Extra thematic!

Palm Sunday has been a source of some of our strangest Gospel Desserts.  My favorite is still the time I scooped ice cream directly into the hands of the Zoomlians for  Palm Sundaes.  

For some reason, they weren't big fans of that.  I don't know, something about being scarred for life or something.

I can't believe that it never occurred to me: we get actual food from palm trees.

I made a date cake!  I would have gone with coconut, but we have a few who are not coconut fans.  

Anyway, mission accomplished for another Lent, next Sunday is Easter!!

Gospel Desserts Week 3 and 4

 

The Gospel for the third Sunday had Jesus cleansing the Temple by making a whip of cords (and flipping tables and what not).

I went with the theme of "whipped," and we had a whipped pistachio mousse topped with whipped cream.

I totally cheated on the mousse.  It's instant pistachio pudding (a long time guilty pleasure), sifted to remove the nut fragments and folded into whipped cream to lighten it up.

Honestly: super easy and soooooo good!

Which brings us to last Sunday when it was an extremely complex and abstract Gospel, and Laetare Sunday, and Pi Day, AND Daylight Savings Time horrible switch.

And it's the only day for dessert, so...

We had pink lemonade (pi)es with chocolate chip snakes on them because Jesus mentioned "Just as Moses lifted up the bronze serpent in the dessert desert, so will the Son of Man be lifted up."

He also talked about being the light of the world, and the pies were super light and fluffy.

Did I mention the time change may have made me a little loopy?

Anyway, it's another easy dessert: 1 can of pink lemonade concentrate, two tubs of whipped topping, 1 can of sweetened condensed milk, and one (softened) brick of cream cheese.  

The original recipe had no cream cheese and 2 cans of condensed milk, but I knew from experience that that would be too sweet for us, and the cream cheese also stabilized the texture.

Gospel Desserts Week 1 and 2

 

The first Sunday of Lent always has the gospel about Jesus going into the dessert desert.

This year's gospel was the super short one from Mark.  It doesn't give a lot of detail, but it mentions that Jesus was in the desert for 40 days among the wild beasts.

Beasts are good!  I have a ton of animal cookie cutters!

I made sugar cookie dough and kept adding cocoa powder so that I had 4 different shades of dough that, when the chunks were mixed together,  blended beautifully as I rolled them out,.

They were pretty, but not very sweet, especially as we got into the darker cocoa sections, so I made them into sandwiches with a bit of frosting.  

 

That had the added effect of halving the number of cookies so that they all disappeared the same day!

The second week's gospel was the Transfiguration, when Jesus revealed his glory.

So we made this nice chocolate cake...

That, when opened, revealed a "glorious" interior!

Gospel Dessert Laetare Sunday

This week was Laetare Sunday with it's reminder to "Rejoice always!" and that "Rejoicing in the Lord must be our strength!"

I made some Laetare punch (watermelon Kool Aid with some "bold" ginger ale).


The gospel this week was the one where Jesus cures a man born blind by putting mud on his eyes.

When I drew the Walking with Jesus poster, I planned to have the kids color it in.  I realized that the mud puddle didn't look recognizable, so I decided to color it in myself, lest it be colored something non muddy.

Unfortunately, the kids interpreted it to be a campfire, so they drew it on fire.

Flaming mud puddles of doom!?!

At any rate, the dessert was chocolate pudding to look like mud, and the kids put whipped cream on it to symbolize flames.

Gospel Desserts Week 2 and 3

 Lenten Sunday 2 had the gospel of the Transfiguration, in which Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor, showing His disciples His Divinity.

So I made divinity (the candy).  It went great until I accidentally added an oil based flavoring...  The candy is made to be fluffy and uses beaten egg whites, so that tiny bit of oil turned it from fluffy nougat to... something a bit denser but still tasty.

So I failed in my quest for divinity, I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. Probably.

Week 3's gospel was the woman at the well, a favorite gospel and a favorite dessert!

I didn't have any blue jello on hand so I made it with unflavored gelatin (I joked about making water flavored jello).  I actually used 4teaspoons of powdered gelatin, 1.5 cups of sugar, 3 cups of water and a cup of ginger ale (mixed in after it had started to gel).

It tasted great and was enough to make water for two wells.  The wells are made of rice crispy treats with some chocolate chips swirled into the melted marshmallow mixture.

Gospel Dessert: Temptation in the Dessert and More Lent

This Sunday's Gospel was the temptation of Jesus in the desert, after which he was cared for by angels.

Angel food cake!

Just angel food cake this time, unlike previous years when I gave the kids the choice between angel's food cake and devil's food cake...

In other news, we got our vine and branches up, as well as our Walking With Jesus poster.

And we've started the scripture cross over our lenten altar.

Because Choclo is preparing for his Confirmation, we're also trying
to focus on the gifts of the Holy Spirit this Lent.

He "opens" one gift each week and we try to find how Jesus uses it in the Gospel and how we can use it in our lives

Palm Sunday Gospel Dessert and NJ

 I was up in NJ, visiting Mumpy and Pa (my parents) this weekend, but I got back Sunday afternoon.

Between unpacking and whatnot, about all I had time for was this palm sundae.

This year the kids insisted on putting a bowl between their palms and the ice cream, but I was ok with that.

Klenda went with me to NJ, and we all had a lovely time!

 We had fun hanging out with Mumpy and Pa, listening to stories and playing games.

 We looked at family pictures and we watched birds and fish on the lake.

We saw some of these (uncommonly beautiful) Common Mergansers.


 Most of the daffodils that we had planted in the fall were blooming, and a few of the perennials were coming up.

It's funny, between the higher altitude and the higher latitude, they are about 3 weeks behind us in Spring.

And of course we got to pray together and talk about spiritual things.

It was such a lovely time!

Gospel Dessert

The gospel this week was the one of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus says,"Let the one without sin cast the first stone."

We made chocolate rice crispy treat "stones."

Simple and yummy!

No stones were actually thrown during this dessert...

Gospel Dessert Week 4, Plus April Fool

Actually, this was our April Fool breakfast: green eggs and spam! 

The "eggs" are vanilla pudding (tinted green) with canned apricot halves for the "yolks."

The spam was actual fried spam because, really, that's enough prank right there!

I forgot to get a picture of our gospel dessert!

We had planned to do chocolate rice crispy treats cut into bricks and built into a house, like the father's house in the parable of the prodigal son (yesterday's gospel).

Unfortunately, I discovered I was out of marshmallows!

I did brownies instead, but they were a bit too fudgy to build with, so we ate them with ice cream.

Ice cream sundaes are what we eat after confession anyway as treat, since we are celebrating our return to the Father, so it makes sense as our usual "fatted calf."

In related news, Klenda and Leena had friends over for a cooking party.  They made themselves raspberry pork chops, mashed potatoes (from scratch!), brussels sprouts, and these fabulous scones for dessert!

Gospel Dessert Week 3

This week's gospel involved the parable of the fig tree that bore no fruit.  The orchard owner was going to tear it out, but the gardener offered to give it special care to give it another chance to bear fruit.

Our dessert was these yummy (and fruitful) fig cookies.  I think they are traditionally Italian Christmas cookies, but they turned out more like the apotheosis of the Fig Newton.  So good!

Which reminds me, it's been quite a week for desserts, considering it's Lent and all!








Last week we had cream puffs for St. Joseph's Day. I think that's an Italian tradition.

And Monday was the Annunciation.  I like to do angel food cake for this, but I just couldn't manage it.  So we had ice cream!

Lent Gospel Dessert, Week 2

This year, the second Sunday of Lent crossed over with St. Patrick's Day.

The gospel was the Transfiguration, so we made our St. Patrick's Day cupcakes into a mountain for the Transfiguration.

After a week and a half of Lent, all that chocolate felt glorious!

Lenten Gospel Dessert Week 1

This week's gospel was the temptation in the desert (Matthew's version).

We had a desert dessert: this tan spice cake with sprinkles of brown sugar "sand."

It was delicious, if a bit ironically dry.

The majority of the comments were not on this cake, but relief that I didn't do the devil's food and angel's food cakes.  For some reason.

Gospel Desserts!

 Our Gospel Dessert for the first Sunday of Lent was an angel food cake with clouds of whipped cream and rainbows as a nod to the first and second readings with the covenant of Noah.


The Gospel was Mark's super short description of Jesus in the desert: he went, he was hungry, he was tempted, the angels ministered to him.


 The second Sunday Gospel was the Transfiguration.  This is one that comes up every year, and I've never been completely satisfied with our dessert interpretation.

I think that, deep in my heart, I've always thought the perfect dessert for this would be a croquembouche.  I know this because I saw one 25 years ago, the one time the Emperor and I watched The Martha Stewart Show.

It was the most glorious, difficult, and time consuming dessert I'd ever seen.

Seriously, people, friends don't let friends watch Martha Stewart!

It's a mountain of cream puffs surrounded by a golden glory cloud of caramelized spun sugar.

I've made cream puffs before, but I was a bit intimidated by the spun sugar!  It turned out to be so fun that we all were spinning it, and we didn't want to stop...

Kinda made a horrible mess of rock hard yet sticky bits of sugar over much of the kitchen, but that's not the point!!

So we ended up with an enormous "glory cloud."

Also, my mountain isn't as tall as is traditional, because I decided not to glue it together with more caramel.  Maybe after another 25 years.

Still, I do feel like we did THE definitive Transfiguration dessert.  This is a transformation of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, cream, and water (with a bit of cocoa in the cream puff filling).


It wasn't as funny (to me) as the definitive Temptation in the Desert dessert, but it was a lot of fun to make!

Gospel Dessert: Palm Sunday

I was away visiting my folks for the weekend, but, when I got back,  Klenda had made a tiramisu cake with a palm theme.

We're excited to be entering Holy Week!

It's also spring break week for Klenda and Mxyl, so we'll be doing some special things with them.

We'll be helping out with decorating the church for the Triduum.

We won't be doing any of our usual classes, although we will visit the Basilica for Adventurers.

Hope you are having a great Holy Week, too- let's keep each other in prayer!

Gospel Dessert: Raising of Lazarus (Plus our April Fools)

For the Gospel Dessert, we made Lazarus's tomb out of brownies.  Easy peasy and very chocolatey - thank you, Klenda!







I'm getting behind on my blogging, so I'll put our April Fools silliness here, too:

For breakfast, we had a dessert disguised as breakfast.  Our "eggs and bacon" are really vanilla pudding with apricot halves as yolks.  The bacon is apple butter, put on the plate with a fork.  The picture is from a previous year since I forgot to get a photo this year.



For lunch, we had dinner disguised as dessert.  The "cupcakes" were meatloaf with mashed potato frosting.  We got miixed reactions to that one, as you can see.


For dinner we had breakfast: actual bacon and eggs!

Gospel Dessert: Healing of the Man Born Blind

 This was a tricky one, and we nearly made tapioca (it reminds me of eyes).  Fortunately, we went with the slightly less weird "mud pie." 

Jesus made mud to cure the man's sight.

And we certainly had some wide eyes when Klenda brought out the pie she made!

The...aroma!

In other Eating Chocolate During Lent news, at Mass on the Annunciation last Saturday, Father declared that it was a feast day, not Lent, and we should eat all the sweets we wanted to!

Now that's spiritual advice that was easy to swallow!

Providentially, our neighbor had just brought us a box of fancy candy!

Gospel Dessert: Woman at the Well

 One of our favorite Gospels and one of our favorite Gospel desserts!

Blue jello in a sort of fountainy shape for the water.

And then we build the well around it with chocolate rice crispy treats!

In the unlikely event that you've never made these, you melt half a stick of butter and a handful of chocolate chips (in a large pot), then stir in a package of marshmallows (small are easiest, but normal size is fine).  When the whole mess is melted, add 8 cups of rice crispy cereal and stir it all together.

You spread it out on foil, and cut it into bricks when cool.

One word of caution, because the bricks touch the jello, you can't assemble this in advance (the jello will make the bricks soggy).

Enjoy! We are almost half way through Lent!

Gospel Dessert: Transfiguration

 The Gospel was the Transfiguration, as it always is the second Sunday of Lent, and I always find it tricky. 

I think a croquembouche would be perfect!

But... then I'd have to make it...

This time, I went for this "jewel" cake!




In glorious Transfiguration like colors!

With a "Glory Cloud" of whipped topping!


Ummm...  It's basically jello and cool whip.

It looked great!  It tasted like eating cool whip.

The younger you were, the more you liked it.

Oob and Choclo had seconds!