celebrating brody

So tonight I wanted to do something special as we celebrated and remembered Brody. We didn't make it out to Brody's grave, but will soon. Instead we laid low at home.

Since it's his birthday, I wanted to at have a sweet treat to celebrate. I had been pondering it for a few days - something simple but kinda fun to be a birthday cake for him. We have Halloween candy from our party at church and a bunch of them are laffy taffy. Since those candies are so hard, I decided not to ruin my teeth eating them or let Brayden or Erik either. Instead, I wanted to do my own Chopped dessert and find a recipe where I could melt the candy. (On the chopped TV show, they melt candy often and use it in recipes. I felt the need to try that myself!)

So I found a recipe for laffy taffy frosting that I could put on the leftover whoopie pies we had in the freezer from Erik's birthday.

It started out well and grand.... I got my laffy taffys out and pulled out ten cherry ones.

I threw them in a pot with some butter and milk and found out that, yes, candy can really melt down into beautiful liquid:

I started blending it with my handheld mixer. Brayden was intrigued by the noise. I was making decent progress whipping up the butter until I heard a strange noise and suddenly found butter on my shirt... and on the wall, the microwave, the knives in the knife block, all over the powdered sugar bag... and even on Erik's jacket hanging on a chair in the next room. 

Seriously... what happened? I was baffled until I saw this: 

Notice the beautifully misplaced whisk thingy? Yeah, that wasn't super great! 

Here's a sideways glimpse of the frosting and a bit of the mess... 

Now I can't say it turned out exactly as I pictured. Well, it kinda did. The cherry frosting was decent, but then I realized that adding a little bit of almond extract would make it extra amazing, since we've always enjoyed almond buttercream and cherry almond is a good combination. 

So I went for it and went to the fridge, pulled out the small extract bottle, looked at the peppermint extract bottle and thought, that seems a little off, but mostly right, put a bunch in the frosting, and then it dawned on me. Nothing about the beautiful peppermint extract carried the flavor of the almond extract my head was planning on. Total pregnancy brain moment! It definitely over flavored the frosting to be minty... but it wasn't bad enough to not eat it. 

So I grabbed two thawed chocolate whoopie pies, dolloped a bunch of frosting on each (chocolate peppermint is great, right?), added some mini chocolate chips for good measure, and then brought it over to my boys. We sat down, sang happy birthday to Brody, and enjoyed our little treat. Happy moments and happy memories and dreams of being with our little one again. 

And yes, here's the proof it must have tasted decent enough.... :-)