We Make Mildly Content Pancakes

Mother Duck and I always enjoy trying new recipes, and more often than not, we find that we stumble upon them quite by accident rather than by seeking them out.  The other day, we decided to watch a Youtube video whose most appealing attribute was the thumbnail showcasing insanely fluffy pancakes.  Called “happy pancakes”, these are made with pretty much the same ingredients as regular pancakes, but with the addition of fluffy egg whites to make them huge and puffy.

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Recreating the Plaza Inn’s Chicken and Taters

The Plaza Inn seems to be a bit of an obsession for me this year.  And since I enjoy recreating foods from Disneyland (Tigger Tails, Blue Bayou gumbo, and the Pixar Fest cake), I thought it was time I tried my hand at making the Plaza Inn’s famous fried chicken and ridiculously yummy mashed potatoes.

Recreating the Pixar Fest Cake…Mostly

As you may remember, during our most recent trip to Disneyland, a special several-month-long event called Pixar Fest was taking place.  The festivities came in the form of special merchandise, food, fireworks, and parades, and one of the things I was the most excited about was a three-layer cake (the colors being yellow, blue, and red) that could be found at the Plaza Inn.

The Duck’s Disneyland Dessert Tour 2018

It is now time we talked about the desserts at Disneyland, including some special limited edition stuff they had in celebration of Pixar Fest!  One nice thing about the snacks at Disneyland is that they often come in large servings, meaning you can save some money by sharing (Mother Duck and I shared the curros and grey stuff twist, sometimes with food to spare).  I will be ranking all of the treats we’ve had, including those from last year’s visit, which will be in italics.  Oh, and if you want to read last year’s dessert post, you can find it here.

The Duck’s Disneyland Food Tour 2018

Before we cover rides, I’d like to rank all of the food we had at Disneyland, including a few things we tried last year (in italics).  I’m feeling rather hungry, so let’s get right to it.  If you’d like to read last year’s food post, you can find it here.

The Secret of Disneyland Gumbo

During the recent trip Mother Duck and I took to Disneyland, we ate a variety of delicious things.  Our favorite meal was at the Blue Bayou, though it was not our main entrees that we remember the most fondly.  Rather, it was the gumbo that came prior that was the most scrumptious savory thing we had that fine weekend.  With our next visit to the “happiest place on Earth” sometime in the future, we had no choice but to see if we could make our own Disneyland gumbo at home.

Replicating Disneyland’s Tigger Tail

With our newfound skills at caramel-making, Mother Duck and I have been seeking out new and exciting ways to use caramel.  After our experiments with caramel-covered popcorn balls, the next thing we decided to try was our own homemade Tigger tails.  You may remember this particular treat being mentioned in my post discussing the various desserts we had at Disneyland during Spring Dapper Day of 2017.  Tigger tails are marshmallow, covered in caramel, covered in sugar, with stripes of chocolate.  They are very tasty and very sweet.  And they seemed easy enough to replicate.

Bonus Post: Great Grandmother’s Muffins

While I write a decent amount about food on this blog, I realized that I rarely include any actual recipes.  The other day, we decided to make some muffins using an old family recipe, created by my great grandmother on my mother’s side, who originally hailed from Genoa, Italy.  This is not exactly an Italian recipe; I just thought that was an interesting detail to include, nonetheless.

Bonus: The Duck’s Caramel Popping Corn

You may recall in the recent past, I talked about a caramel dobos torte we made.  While we didn’t end up being particularly thrilled with this cake, we did learn how to make caramel in the process.  With this newfound skill, we decided it was time to put it to good use and make some homemade, caramel-y treats.  But first, we needed to replicate our caramel.  This proved to be more difficult than we expected, as caramel is still a rather tricky process despite having done it before.  After three attempts, we finally had a brand new batch of caramel.

Fun and Confusion with Caramel

From time to time, Mother Duck and I enjoy baking new things.  Well, to be more accurate, we don’t always enjoy the process of baking, but we certainly enjoy the results.  One recent recipe we decided to try was a caramel dobos torte, a twelve-layered cake with caramel buttercream, the recipe for which came from British baker Mary Berry.  Now there’s a nice name if there ever was one.

First of all, I’ll just tell you guys now that we had no intention of actually making twelve layers.  That’s a bit too fancy for us.  Though we had actually halved the recipe, no, we did not plan on making six layers, either.  Rather, we were perfectly content with two layers because cake is cake, no matter how many layers it has.  And yet, even now, we were getting ahead of ourselves because the first step of the recipe was creating homemade caramel.  This is something we had never done before, and it felt like a monumental task indeed!