I hosted a Lord of the Rings weekend! Each day during weekend we watched an extended-edition Lord of the Rings movie while sharing a meal.
Original Weekend Schedule (With an intermission at the halfway points!) :
Friday: 7-11 pm, dinner and dessert with The Fellowship of the Ring
Saturday: 12-4 pm, lunch and tea with The Two Towers
Sunday: 9 am-1 pm, breakfast and second breakfast with The Return of the King
We have limited seating for movie-watching on our projector, so we limited our guestlist to eleven people - and even that was pushing our limit of semi-comfortable seating.
In the future, I hope to have more of these (maybe every 2-3 years), and be able to invite more people. I would probably also schedule it for a three-day weekend. I originally planned on working on Friday and leaving early, until I realized exactly how much I needed to do to prepare for dinner that evening!
I made a detailed calendar to ensure I could make everything in time. The calendar was updated as I went along, and there was a snow day on Wednesday. The latest version was updated before Friday:
So here's the full menu with recipes for everything I made during the weekend!
Friday: The Fellowship of the Ring with dinner and dessert
Roast Beef
Adapted from here: https://culinaryginger.com/roast-beef-dinner-sunday-roast/
2-3 pounds of beef rump or round roast
vegetable oil
salt
pepper
rosemary
Preheat oven to 400
Coat the beef well with the oil, then sprinkle on a decent amount of salt, pepper, and rosemary, evenly all over.
Heat a pan on the stovetop over medium-high heat. Sear the beef on all sides. Transfer the beef to a pan in the oven (the recipe suggests using an oven-safe pan to sear, and then moving it directly, but I don't have an oven-safe pan, so I just transferred it to a baking sheet). Roast the beef for 15-20 minutes per pound of meat.
I chose roast beef because I thought a traditional English dinner seemed perfect for Friday night's Hobbit feast!
Roast Chicken
I knew not everyone would be happy eating roast beef, so I made sure there was also chicken! Since I was already going through the trouble of making everything else, I settled for a roast chicken from the grocery store, heated in the oven after everything else had finished baking.
(The image above is leftover chicken a day or so later - with all the other food, only the legs were eaten during the event)
Bread
I followed this recipe almost exactly, so I think it's better if you just get it from there (there are pictures of each step!): https://www.karenskitchenstories.com/2014/03/white-bread-with-poolish.html
Here's a copy, in case that link ever breaks:
INGREDIENTS
Poolish
500 g unbleached all purpose flour
500 g lukewarm (80 degrees F) water
.4 g (less than 1/8 tsp) instant yeast
Final Dough
500 g unbleached all purpose flour
21 g salt
3 g (3/4) tsp instant yeast
250 g 105 degree F water
All of the poolish
INSTRUCTIONS
The night before you bake the loaves, mix the poolish in a large bowl by hand or with a dough whisk. Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit at room temperature for 12 to 14 hours. If your kitchen is really cold, let it sit a bit longer, until tripled in size.
Once the poolish is ready, in a large tub (I use this one), add the flour, salt, and yeast and whisk together.
Add the water to the poolish to loosen it from the sides of the bowl and scrape it into the flour mixture.
Keeping a bowl of water nearby to wet your hands, mix the ingredients with your hands by folding and pinching alternately for about 3 minutes, until the ingredients are integrated and there is no apparent dry flour. The dough will be very shaggy.
Cover the container and allow the dough to rise for about 2 to 3 hours, until it has increased in size by about 2 1/2 times, stretching and folding every 30 minutes three times during the first 90 minutes.
Pour the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide it in half with a bench knife or dough scraper. Shape each half into boules and place them seam side down into floured bannetons or floured towel lined bowl. In this case, I used one oblong banneton and one round banneton. Cover with oiled plastic wrap.
Place two Dutch ovens in the oven, and preheat it to 475 degrees F.
Allow the dough to rise for about an hour.
When you are ready to bake, cut parchment into two 9 inch by 15+ inch pieces.
Remove the Dutch ovens from the oven and remove the tops. One loaf at a time, place the parchment over the dough and place a plate over it. Flip the dough over, remove the basket, and lift and place the loaf in the Dutch oven by using the parchment as a sling (leave the paper under the dough). Cover the Dutch oven and place it in the hot oven. Repeat with the second loaf.
Bake covered for 30 minutes, and then uncover it and bake it for 15 to 20 minutes more, until the interior of the bread reaches 205 to 210 degrees F and the bread is golden brown.
Lift the loaves out of the Dutch ovens with the parchment and let them cool fully on a wire rack (remove the parchment from the bottom of the loaves).
Place your ear next to the loaves and listen to them crackle as they cool. Smile.
A few weeks before the weekend we had planned to have this event, a friend posted a picture of a beautiful loaf of bread that looked exactly how I imagined the ideal bread at this event would look. I messaged her and asked for the recipe. She didn't send me the exact recipe she used (which is "from Ken Forkish's book Flour Water Salt Yeast"), but she sent me the above link because it was close enough to what she had made.
I had never made bread outside of a bread machine before, so this was an adventure!
I opted for dish-towel-lined bowls instead of bannetons, but I did get a dutch oven and a kitchen scale to make this recipe! The kitchen scale is something I had been meaning to get for a while, and I figured I would make plenty of use of a dutch oven in the future, since I don't have any other cast-iron cooking tools.
If you would like to attempt this yourself, I strongly recommend using a tool of some sort to keep track of what step you're on, and to plan out well in advance when you're going to do what. There are quite a few steps, and some of them take a very long time. I ended up losing an hour of cook time because I decided to go to the grocery store after step five when I intended to do so after step eight.
I also recommend relying on something other than parchment paper to lift the loaf out of the dutch oven - parchment paper that has been baked in an oven can become very brittle, and you don't want to risk it ripping while you're pulling the bread out!
Additionally, since I only had one dutch oven, I saved the remainder of the dough for the next day, leaving it in its towel-lined bowl. It didn't come out nearly as pretty or fluffy as the first day. I'm not sure how I would handle this in the future. This might just be a bread dough that needs to be baked and eaten in the same day the dough was completed, or maybe I need to store the extra dough better, or maybe I should have just baked the extra dough and it would have tasted good later.
Potatoes
gold potatoes
sweet potatoes
olive oil
salt
pepper
Cut up the potatoes into something resembling 1 1/2-inch cubes
Pour some oil into a baking sheet
Put the potatoes in the oil and coat them well
Add salt and pepper, and make sure those too coat the potatoes well
Bake in the oven at around 400 degrees until they're done
This is pretty much the only recipe I've eaten where I actually liked sweet potatoes. Too many recipes put too much emphasis on the "sweet" and not enough on the "potato", and I feel like this recipe actually treats sweet potatoes like potatoes and doesn't try to make the sweetness do anything but add a bit of extra flair.
I didn't adapt this from any particular recipe, but from a meal I shared with friends. They brought this dish, and I loved it! When planning out the meals for the Lord of the Rings event, I contacted the friends and made sure I remembered correctly what all was in the dish, and figured out the rest myself.
I think I ended up using three gold potatoes and one sweet potato. Gold potatoes are much smaller than sweet potatoes, and I had about an even amount of each kind of potato.
I also ended up baking it at whatever temperature the oven needed to be at for other things - I put them in while the bread was still baking at 475°, and left them in while other things cooked at 400°. I recommend making sure the baking sheet is well-greased, because when they were finally done they had all stuck to the pan!
Macaroni and Cheese
8 oz block good cheddar
pasta
3 T butter
1/3 cup flour
1 cup half & half
1/2 tsp nutmeg
black pepper to taste
Shred the cheese
Cook your pasta of choice and set aside
In a sauce pan melt about 3 tablespoons of butter.
Add in about 1/3 cup of flour and cook until golden brown.
Add about 1 cup of half and half and cook until it starts to thicken
Add shredded cheese of choice
Stir until the cheese is melted.
Add about 1/2 tsp of nutmeg
Add the pasta into the pot and stir until coated
Add more half and half if it’s too thick; add more cheese if it’s too thin
Once the pasta is coated, top with a bit of black pepper.
I intended to make the mac & cheese myself, using this recipe I found:
https://bromabakery.com/2018/10/stovetop-mac-and-cheese.html
But I never got a chance to test that recipe beforehand to see if adding mustard and worcestershire sauce to mac & cheese actually tastes any good, so I then planned on just using the other ingredients and seeing what I came up with, and adding seasoning as needed.
Fortunately, Cate Mumford had already arrived for the evening by the time I was starting the mac & cheese, and she knew off-hand how to make a delicious mac & cheese using ingredients that I already had and didn't necessarily intend on using for the mac & cheese!
Instead of using milk plus either American cheese like the recipe I found suggests or Velveeta like I was planning on using, Cate used half & half for the extra creaminess, and that worked wonders!
I provided a block of Old Croc cheddar cheese, because in previous attempts at making mac & cheese I realized that the predominant flavor of the dish will be whatever cheese you put in, no matter how boring it is or how many seasonings you try to add or how much you try to tame the flavor with more creaminess. To make really good mac and cheese, you must start with a block of cheese that you would be happy to eat on its own with nothing else added. And it's also better if it's a block of cheese, and not pre-shredded, because pre-shredded cheese doesn't like to become unshredded again, and when making mac & cheese, you want the cheese to want to stick together. (Fortunately, I did not learn this particular lesson the hard way.)
(side story: There was a time in college where Mickey and I got mac & cheese at the burger place on campus over the weekend, and instead of mac&cheese, it was macaroni mixed with melted cheese. "How hard is it to make mac and cheese?," I wondered at the time. Well, my best guess now is that they used pre-shredded cheese that really didn't want to be melted together - and probably didn't use much of anything to make it creamy!)
Brussels Sprouts
I unfortunately never got to the brussels sprouts while making dinner for this event. Here's the recipe anyway (it's all in the photo above, but here's a transcription, modified slightly to my tastes):
1 lb brussels sprouts
as many cloves of garlic as you like
2 T olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon of ground pepper
Preheat the oven to 425
Wash the brussels sprouts under cool water
Trim off the ends of the sprouts and remove any discolored leaves
Cut the sprouts in half lengthwise, and transfer to the center of a baking sheet
Chop the garlic
Drizzle the sprouts with oil
Sprinkle the sprouts with salt, pepper, and garlic
Toss everything together with your hands
Turn the sprouts cut-side down on the pan and roast 20-25 minutes
They're done when they're crispy on the outside and soft on the inside!
You might seem to notice a trend here - this is the third recipe so far that was basically "toss food in oil, salt, and pepper, and stick in the oven". Salt and (freshly ground) pepper are amazing.
Fortunately for the green beans, I had already started chopping the garlic...
Green beans
You guessed it! "toss food in oil, salt, and pepper [and garlic], and stick in the oven"
This wasn't originally what I was planning on doing with the green beans. I had been planning on boiling them while other food was being made, then adding salt later. But since I was an hour behind because of my mistake with the bread, and because so many other things still needed to be done, I abandoned the brussels sprouts in favor of green beans simply because the green beans would cook faster. And I think I have found my new favorite way of eating green beans.
Since I already chopped the garlic for the brussels sprouts, I cooked the green beans the same way as in the brussels sprouts recipe, minus most of the chopping. I had a bag of pre-washed green beans, so I just threw them in a pan with oil, salt, pepper, and garlic, and we were good in 10-15 minutes.
Beer and wine
I didn't hand-brew beer or anything, so not much to report here. Thanks to James and Jenna for bringing extra wine!
Carrot Cake
Cake (all in picture above; here is a transcription):
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3 cups finely-shredded carrot
1 cup cooking oil
4 eggs
Preheat oven to 325
Grease and lightly flour baking pans (either one 13x9x2" or two 9x1.5" round)
Shred pretty much an entire small bag of carrots (I used a cheese grater to do this)
In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon
Add carrot, oil, and egg to bowl, beating with electric mixer until combined
Beat on medium speed for two minutes
Pour batter into cake pan(s)
Bake for 40-60 minutes until done (stick in a toothpick and it's done if it comes out clean)
Cool in pan for ten minutes, then remove from pan and let cool completely on wire rack before frosting.
Frosting:
6 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
8-oz package of cream cheese, softened
4 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1-2 tablespoons milk as needed
Beat together the butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy
Add the sugar and cinnamon, beating well
Add the milk a little at a time, until the frosting is spreadable
Frost!
I made carrot cake because it seemed like a very English/hobbitish type of dessert! I got the cake recipe from my Better Homes and Gardens's New Cook Book cookbook, and the frosting recipe from a recipe for gingerbread cupcakes*. That little bit of cinnamon gives the cream cheese frosting something a little extra and this frosting seems to be far superior than standard cream cheese frosting for most uses of cream cheese frosting :D
This recipe uses so many more carrots than I thought it would! Usually when I buy carrots I only need one or two of them and I wonder why they don't come in any packs smaller than eight or so. I was grateful in this case that I didn't have to go back to the store for more carrots! I used every carrot in that bag of eight or so and it was just barely enough carrot for three cups of shredded carrot.
Shredding also took a long time. I think next time I would try using my food processor?
But in the end everything worked out! Everyone loved this cake :)
*will add this recipe later as its own post
Chocolate Pudding Pie
Recipe from here: https://whatsinthepan.com/no-bake-chocolate-pudding-cream-pie-oreo-crust/
1 Oreo pie crust
2 boxes instant chocolate pudding (3.4 oz each)
2 cups half & half
8 oz cool whip, thawed
chocolate bar/cocoa powder for garnish
Remove lid from crust packaging
Combine each box of chocolate pudding with a cup of half & half each (you can do this in one bowl, but you're going to divide them in half next so you might as well leave them separated now). Mix for two minutes, or until the pudding mix is dissolved in the half & half. Let sit in the fridge for five minutes so it thickens.
Add one bowl of pudding (or half the mixture if you combined them) into the bottom of the pie crust. Spread evenly using a spatula. Be careful - the Oreo pie crust is crumbly!
Add half the package of Cool Whip to the other bowl of pudding, and mix together until uniform
Add this mixture to the pie crust, on top of the first layer
Spread the remaining half of cool whip on top of the pie by itself
Shave a chocolate bar on top with a vegetable peeler, sprinkle some cocoa, and/or add pieces of chocolate bar as garnish
Refrigerate for at least four hours or freeze for at least one hour before serving, to allow the layers to become firm.
If you choose to freeze, make sure it thaws for several minutes before attempting to cut into it!
First I have to say: I'm sorry, Mom, I bought a crust for this pie.
We have a fantastic pie crust recipe (which I will also post eventually), and for a normal pie there is no reason to use any crust but that one. It's light and flaky and delicious on its own. Other pie crusts are too crumbly or too dry or just seem to be there so you can call it a pie and not just a bowl of sweet fruit.
But I really liked the idea of using an Oreo crust for this particular pie, and I really liked the idea of not having to add in any extra prep steps (like making pie dough the night before). And I think it just makes sense for a chocolate pie to also have a chocolate crust!
I chose this recipe because I wanted to have a chocolatey dessert, and I wanted something less-involved because I was already making another dessert.
Saturday: The Two Towers with lunch and tea
Minestrone Soup
1/2 cup olive oil
several cloves of garlic
green beans (I used a couple handfuls)
carrot (I used pre-cut carrot matchsticks and added a handful or two)
celery (I used maybe eight stalks?)
kale (I used a handful or so)
zucchini (I think I used two?)
water or broth
1 large (28-oz) can crushed tomatoes
1 can red kidney beans (15.5 oz)
1 can white kidney beans
1 can chick peas
parsley
marjoram
Italian seasoning
celery seed
fennel seed
crushed red pepper
salt
pepper
tortellini
parmesan cheese for serving
Chop all the vegetables! I cut the green beans in half and the celery into 3/4-inch slices. I used pre-cut carrot matchsticks so I didn't need to chop those (but if I didn't have those, I would shave slices directly into the pot using a vegetable grater because I don't like big chunks of carrots). I could only find a bunch of kale and not pre-chopped, so I washed the kale and then ripped it into small pieces. I cut the zucchini into quarters and then chopped to about the size of the celery (maybe larger).
Add oil to a large pot and heat on medium/medium-low heat
Add garlic to pot and cook until the garlic starts to soften
Add the rest of the fresh vegetables and cook until they're soft (maybe about 20 minutes)
Add water or broth so you actually have a soup
Add the beans, tomatoes, and seasonings to taste, and let simmer for at least another 20 minutes.
When ready to serve, bring soup to a boil, add cheese tortellini pasta and then cook using pasta's package instructions (I used frozen tortellini, which takes 4-5 minutes to cook). DO NOT DUMP YOUR SOUP IN A STRAINER
Serve with freshly-grated parmesan cheese on top!
So this is a recipe I came up with on my own! My first try, I used a list of ingredients from a canned minestrone soup I like as a base, then added a few other things I like, and then used this recipe as a basis for what order to put everything in, and then added seasoning to taste. I wrote down my list of ingredients, and have since improved on them a bit.
In previous iterations of this soup, I've used six cans of chicken broth to start. This time, I wanted to ensure my soup was vegetarian, so I decided to see what I could do without any chicken broth. I almost bought veggie broth instead, but every veggie broth I could find has onions as a main ingredient, and I really hate onions. But then I realized - veggie broth is just vegetables cooked in water, so there really is no need to buy veggie broth when I will basically already have that anyway.
So I decided to stick closer to my mom's amazing veggie chili recipe, which doesn't have any water or broth added at all and still manages to have some liquidity to it because of all the moisture in the vegetables. In fact, I realized, my minestrone recipe is basically the same recipe, with a few different seasonings and types of beans. All I needed to do to give my soup more of a soupy broth was add water! I was afraid that would dilute the taste too much, but it didn't!
For the Lord of the Rings event, I made the soup several days in advance. It's a recipe that takes long enough that I didn't want to cook it when also trying to cook other things, and I also could just heat it up the day it was being served without compromising on taste. In fact, it's possible that it tasted better the day it was served than the day it was cooked because the flavors had time to set in :)
I also cooked the tortellini in the soup the day it was served instead of the day I cooked the soup because of the way pasta acts in soup. If you leave pasta in soup for too long, it soaks up all the broth and you either have not enough broth to have a soupy soup, or the pasta disintegrates. Tortellini doesn't disintegrate in soup, but it does soak up the broth. I definitely made the right choice here, because even the next day after serving there was almost no broth left in the remaining soup because the tortellini ate it all. It's still good leftover, but it's definitely not as soupy as the day before.
Deli Meat Sandwiches
This was my first time buying cold cuts from a deli counter instead of pre-packaged! I've never really cared for pre-packaged cold cuts, but the deli counter was always so intimidating and I've never wanted lunch meat enough to actually brave it before.
The lady at the Harris Teeter deli counter was awesome - she walked me through what to do, suggested specific meats/cheeses and amounts of those meats/cheeses I might want to get, and gave me free samples of everything I wanted before I decided for sure that's what I wanted to buy!
I ended up with:
Half a pound of turkey (store brand)
Half a pound of ham (store brand)
1/4 pound colby jack (not store brand)
Half a pound of swiss (store brand)
For the sandwiches, I also got a few loaves of sliced bread (I wanted some of the bread for the French toast on Sunday), some mustard, lettuce and tomato. I completely forgot about the lettuce and tomato until Mickey wanted a sandwich the following day >.<
Cheese
I got an assortment of tasty snacking cheeses. One of my favorite snacking cheeses is Merlot BellaVitano, and I found a large brick of it at Costco! I also got a Havarti cheese that I unfortunately don't remember the name of, and a Red Dragon cheddar cheese because I thought it sounded sufficiently LotR-esque.
Vegetables
I had a tray of celery, sugar snap peas, and sweet peppers. Unfortunately, I completely forgot that other people like dip with their veggies until I was actually serving them so we were dip-less.
Wine
I finally got around to opening the bottle of Riesling I got on my trip in upstate New York for my cousin Wendy's 50th birthday!
Lembas bread
Recipe for cookies from here: https://www.jocooks.com/recipes/classic-shortbread-cookies/
1 1/2 cups salted butter, softened
1 cup powdered sugar
3 cups all-purpose flour
Preheat oven to 325
Add the butter to a large bowl and blend until smooth
Add the powdered sugar and continue mixing until well-incorporated
Scrape down the sides of the bowl and combine thoroughly
Add flour and mix at low speed until well-blended. The mixture will be crumbly and soft
Pat dough into the center of an ungreased cookie sheet, then roll flat using a rolling pin
(or roll them on parchment paper, then put the whole sheet in the pan)
Cut into squares about 2.5"x2.5"
Use a knife to gently mark the diagonals of the squares to look like the lembas bread in the movies
Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until just done (when the edges start to brown they are definitely done, but it's better if you can get them just before then)
Use a spatula to remove them from the pan and finish cooling on a cooling rack
Leaves adapted from this video (there's also a lembas bread recipe there that I did not try): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a84YytetjKE&t=273
green construction paper
scissors
green marker
brown twine (I used the same twine linked to in the video description: smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B008H0PBZE)
Fold the construction paper diagonally to form a square. Cut off the extra part of the rectangle. Unfold the square.
Fold the square diagonally on the other diagonal. Unfold the square.
Fold and unfold the square in halves, to create more creases
Fold the square along all of the creases you just made, like you would when making a paper snowflake: Fold the square into quarters and then fold along the diagonal crease to create a triangle.
Round the corner of the triangle opposite the centerfold crease with the scissors, creating a half-oval-leaf-shape with points at each end of the centerfold crease
Unfold the former square and you should have four evenly-shaped leaves connected by a square in the center (as seen above)
Using the green marker, trace each of your folds on one side of the paper
Draw thinner lines connecting the center to the outside of each leaf, in a leaf pattern
Fold along the square created by the edges of each of the leaves, folding so the leaf patterns are on the outside
Put two cookies in the center
Wrap the leaves closed
Cut some twine and tie around one side
Serve & enjoy!
Whenever I mentioned this event to someone, they asked me if I was going to have Lembas bread! I am not an elf, so I can't create a food that will feed a man for an entire day with one bite, but I can make something that a hobbit would happily gobble up several of in one sitting (and that looks similar to the lembas bread in the movies).
There are a million "lembas bread" recipes out there - some variants on shortbread, some attempting to feed a man for a day - but I always thought the movie lembas bread looked like shortbread, so I just went with a simple shortbread recipe.
I briefly considered finding some sort of actual leaves to wrap my cookies in, but it seems the closest thing we have here in non-Middle Earth is banana leaves, and those don't seem easy to come by in my area (nor do they look quite right). When I found the video I linked to above, I thought it looked pretty close to my vision of how I wanted my Lembas to look! The video gives some instruction on how to make the leaves, but I found it easier to just figure it out myself.
Later, when watching the movies, I realized that the elven leaves only have three lobes instead of four (they look just like the leaf pins on the elven cloaks - because of course they do!). So in the future, I'll probably stick more closely to the leaf shape they're supposed to be:
Tea
What is an English afternoon without tea? We brought down the kettle and an assortment of teas and mugs to choose from. The Lembas doubled as English biscuits!
Sunday: The Return of the King with breakfast and brunch
Sausages
I had some frozen turkey sausages already, so I cooked up some of these (I think they're Jimmy Dean's)
Eggs
Cooked to order - made some scrambled and some fried
Bacon
Baked in the oven to varying levels of crispiness because not everyone likes their bacon burnt to a crisp like I do
French Toast
Recipe from my Better Home and Gardens "New Cook Book" (1981) (pg 88).
3 eggs, beaten
3/4 cup milk
1 Tablespoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
10 slices dry white bread
butter
maple syrup for serving
In a shallow bowl, beat together eggs, milk, sugar, and cinnamon. (The recipe in the book also calls for a 1/4 teaspoon of salt here without putting it in the list of ingredients... I don't think I added the salt, nor am I sure I would recommend it. Just use salted butter.)
Dip bread in the mixture, coating both sides. (I tend to soak my bread here, which often means that I can't quite use all ten slices the recipe calls for, but the bread gets more french-toasty :D)
Heat a skillet over medium heat and melt butter in the pan
Cook the bread on both sides in the butter in the pan until golden-brown
Add more butter as needed while cooking
Serve with maple syrup
This recipe is really hard to mess up! It probably doesn't matter how much of each ingredient is in there as long as there's about as much egg as milk and you include a reasonable amount of sugar and cinnamon. When making a half recipe because I wanted to make extra french toast, I accidentally put in twice the needed amount of sugar, so I intentionally added twice the needed amount of cinnamon and everyone loved those slices even more than the original batch!
Fresh Fruit
I served a crate of clementines, a bunch of bananas that had been properly ripened, strawberries, and blueberries.
There was so much other food that these were barely touched, so my coworkers got to enjoy clementines and banana bread muffins. (Alan brought the strawberries and blueberries to his parents' house.)
Magical Mimosas
sparkling wine
ginger beer
lemon juice
orange juice
Add some wine to your glass. Add about as much ginger beer as wine. Add some lemon juice. Add orange juice to taste.
Adapted from a Felix Felicis drink recipe (below). This recipe is already great, and adding orange juice made it possibly better and definitely a breakfast item. The citrus of the lemon and orange plus the carbonation of the ginger and wine plus the spice of the ginger make it taste like Gandalf's fireworks on a cool summer night (or like you're about to have the luckiest day of your life).
Cinnamon rolls
I have a few good cinnamon roll dough recipes (all very similar), but this is the one I used:
3/8 cup milk
3/8 cup water
1 egg
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
4 Tbls butter
1/3 cup sugar
Put ingredients in bread machine
Set to dough setting
When dough is ready, roll flat
Brush with melted butter
Liberally sprinkle cinnamon and sugar evenly over flattened dough (if you'd like a cinnamon-to-sugar ratio, do about 2 Tbls of cinnamon to 5 Tbls of sugar)
Roll dough and cut slices about 1 1/2 inches in width (keep them uniform)
Place together in a cake pan, swirls up
Cover and let rise 40 minutes
Bake at 400 for 20-25 minutes
Frost with the same frosting from the carrot cake:
6 tablespoons softened unsalted butter
8-oz package of cream cheese, softened
4 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1-2 tablespoons milk as needed
Beat together the butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy
Add the sugar and cinnamon, beating well
Add the milk a little at a time, until the frosting is spreadable
This is my family's cinnamon roll recipe! We only recently discovered the cinnamon cream cheese frosting and my mom decided to try putting it on cinnamon rolls one day. Before then, we always frosted them with a simple powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla frosting. My family usually has these for breakfast on Christmas morning!
You can now have these delicious cinnamon rolls at my parents' bed and breakfast on "Cinnamon Roll Sunday". (There's also a photo of them in the LMH photo gallery!)
Leftovers
I never did settle on a final name for the second meal of Sunday. I used "Brunch", "Second Breakfast", and "Elevensies", though we didn't actually get to this meal until about 1 pm because we ended up starting the movie much later than intended. "Brunch" seemed the most accurate, since I intended this to be a breakfast & leftover lunch and dinner meal, served at a time that one might be happy eating either breakfast or lunch/dinner. "Second Breakfast" seemed very hobbity, which was another theme I was going for, but in order to have this be strictly second breakfast we would have had to start eating much earlier in the day, and neither my friends nor I are morning people. "Elevensies" also seemed appropriate, since I originally intended for this meal to be eaten at 11 am. Elevensies is traditionally more of a late-morning version of afternoon tea, with tea accompanied by a small snack, so that also wasn't quite right, although it was also hobbity.
We had so many leftovers that there was plenty to choose from by the time we were hungry again :)
I hope to do this again in a couple of years!
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