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Saturday, February 4, 2012

Chocolate Festival

For certain, by the time we paid admission, drove to, and bought a few goodies, a local chocolate festival would have set us back over a 100 bucks. I already half-ass committed to taking my daughter and her cousin to this annual local event. I researched online and discovered the 15 dollar admission, and 7 bucks for kids. This was a 4 hour event for charity. I could justify the cost, as a fundraiser, for a great cause. I just couldn't squeeze the money out of our budget, and found it excessive to try. So, we had our own chocolate festival at home today!

I should have taken photos of the banners the girls made. They hung their banners and drawings all around the kitchen. Use your imagination and visualize... yarn, paper, and crayola markers in action by two 10 year old girls. The mood was festive and fun.

The girls were perfectly capable of reading the instructions on the cake mix box, measuring the ingredients, using the stand mixer, and greasing the bundt pan. I stepped back and let them do their thing! They baked a pretty good chocolate cake by themselves. Life lessons learned for them.

I made the chocolate frosting recipe from the back of the Hershey Cocoa can for the cake. We found that we had way more frosting than we needed for a bundt cake. The remaining frosting was thinned down slightly with some milk, which worked perfect for dipping, strawberries, bananas, pretzels, and marshmallows.

What kind of chocolate shindig would this be if we didn't have chocolate chip cookies? Again, the good old stand by Toll House recipe worked just fine. Mister sandwiched his cookies together with the frosting and reviewed it with 5 stars.

Anna made our favorite muddy buddies (aka puppy chow) again. You can read about this delicious treat from an earlier post here.
 Toss a few candy sprinkles into the mix and one great good time was held by all.

There are plenty of leftovers to share and a stash for sugar cravings through the week.

The girls decided this should be our annual event. A February tradition. Smack dab in the middle of winter, we now have a new occassion to look forward to. This was a nice distraction to break- up the cold weather blues. Our chocolate festival was a priceless good time, tasty treats, and lessons learned. It may have been priceless memories but the cost was well under 30 dollars.

  • bananas $2.00
  • strawberries $3.49
  • pretzels $1.99
  • marshmallow (leftover from Christmas)
  • rice chex $1.99
  • peanut butter $3.49
  • chocolate chips (leftover from Christmas)
  • chocolate cake mix ( yeah shudder, I use boxed cake mix sometimes) .99
  • Eggs $2.19
  • chocolate syrup $1.99
  • candy bars $5.97
  • for general purpose the various ingredients I already had on hand I won't count such as flour etc.

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