School’s Out for Summer Cookout

Today was the day, and the cookout went off without a hitch. Here was the menu:

Hot Dogs
Hamburgers
Homemade macaroni and cheese (I’ll post that recipe another day)
My two salsas
Veggie kebabs (squash, onion, and bell pepper marinated with salt, pepper, cumin, and lime juice)
Grilled corn on the cob

The dessert table was a big hit. In the end, the sugar cookies I made in the molds baked up perfectly at 17 minutes, and they stayed soft and chewy when I put them straight into airtight containers after popping them from the molds. My brownies baked up like usual.

I love the color of the melted white chocolate drizzled on top of both, but I made a major mess with it in the kitchen. I mixed the white chocolate with about 2 tablespoons of heavy cream to make it smooth and pourable. I poured the aqua molten chocolate in a pastry bag, but it was too hot to handle and kept popping out the top of the bag. It was like being covered in hot wax; my hands were bright red at the end of it. For the second batch, the blue chocolate, I used a Ziploc bag and that was tons better.

It was a great day, and all the food was good. I’ve been going on and on about this dessert table for ages now, but really Adam made the cookout great. He is really a great griller, the hot dogs and burgers were perfect. He grilled anything he was handed (and some of our guests brought all kinds of exciting things to grill), and it all came out delicious. It wouldn’t have been a cookout without him out there in his In ‘n Out Burger apron.

The festivities started at 3, and our last guests (all our train passengers) headed out just after 10. I managed to get 8 people in my Mazda hatchback when we realized it was the last train for quite a while.

Some more photos:

My niece Grace was a fan of the dessert table. She would take something, lick the chocolate on top, and hand it to my brother or my mom. And move on to something else to lick.