Cream Horn recipe

As promised, here's the recipe for the cream horns I made last week. These are easier than they look, just a bit time-consuming. My friend Staci is even going to make them this week with her kids. And no, I promise I'm not turning into a cooking blog.

Cream Horns
(The instructions for the horns are from Cuisine at Home magazine; the filling recipe is from my friend Chef Tara)

1 box sugar ice cream cones
1 box frozen puff pastry (thawed)
1 egg
1 tsp water
1/2 cup turbinado sugar*
1 box (4-serving) instant pudding (vanilla or chocolate)
1 cup whipping cream
almond flavoring
powdered sugar

A few preliminary notes
*Turbinado sugar is a coarse, tan-colored sugar. I found it easily at the grocery store (sold as a brand called “Sugar in the Raw” in little packets). You’ll use it in this recipe to sprinkle on the outside of the horns. Do not substitute regular granulated sugar which will burn.

When I made these, I doubled the batch (used 2 boxes of puff pastry) and I finished with 23 horns. I made two batches of filling so I could fill half the horns with chocolate, half with vanilla.

The trick with the puff pastry is to keep it as cold as possible. Follow directions on the box to thaw it (takes about 40 minutes on the counter). Cover it with a damp paper towel when you’re not directly working with it and put it back in the fridge if it starts to get too mushy.

Making the horns
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spray the parchment paper with nonstick spray.

Prepare the sugar cones by wrapping each in foil, then coating with nonstick spray. Slice the puff pastry into three sections (along the fold lines) then into 1/2 inch-wide strips (the long way) with a pizza wheel. Form horns by wrapping 3 strips of pastry around each mold, starting at the tip and overlapping the strips to prevent gaps. (The horns are very “forgiving” and look great once they’re cooked even if the strips aren’t the same thickness. Just be sure to overlap the edges and squeeze the tip closed so the filling won’t leak out). Rest the horns on the cookie sheet with the end of the last strip underneath. I fit 8 cones to a sheet.

You can re-use the cone-molds over and over. Just wipe them off a bit and spray them lightly again with nonstick spray between batches.

Whisk the egg and water together. Lightly brush each horn with the egg wash. Sprinkle them with the turbinado sugar. Bake for 20 minutes or until golden. Cool on a rack for 2 minutes, then remove molds. Cool pastry completely before filling with cream.

Cream Filling
Whisk 1 pkg pudding with 1 cup cold milk (half of what it normally calls for). In separate bowl, whip cream, 2 Tsp. powdered sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla to soft peaks. For the vanilla flavored cones, I also added 1/4 tsp almond flavoring. Fold the pudding and the whipped cream together until you get one color.

Another possible filling idea: Whip cream with 2 Tsp. powdered sugar and a squeeze or two (to taste) of strawberry jam. It makes a light, tasty strawberry whipped cream.

The horns look best if you use a pastry tip and bag to fill them. Or in a pinch you can use a Ziploc bag with one corner cut off. Fill the horns no more than a couple of hours before serving so they don’t get soggy.

Miss Austen regrets

I watched the “Complete Jane Austen” series on PBS last night (as I have for the last few weeks). Last night, I think because of the Superbowl, they did not show a new novel but a special film called Miss Austen Regrets. It was a somewhat fictionalized pseudo-biography, but we all seem to enjoy imagining what Jane was really like and I thought this film was well-made and compelling. I especially loved the moment where Reverend Bridges—the man who seems to have loved Jane the most, but now they’re both older and he’s married—asks her why she would not marry him. He tells her that he would have let her keep writing. She says she would have been too busy mothering children and would not have had the time. I completely agree with her. Some people say, “Oh, how sad that a woman with such a keen sense of the romantic never married,” but the truth is that had she married (and naturally had a household to run and children to bear and raise) there’s absolutely no way she would have written any of her books. They were written in the leisure time granted to her by her spinsterhood, her poverty and her freedom.

Maybe this is why I write about motherhood so much. It’s my way of having it both ways and only both ways. If I were not a mother and wife, I could not write what I do. Yes, I get frustrated by the fact that I have no time, no space, no “room of my own” in which to carve out a writer’s life, but what would I be writing about if I had those things and no family to inspire me? I’d like to think I would have nothing to say.

It snowed again on and off yesterday. It was beautiful, of course, but I’m tired of the snow. I feel trapped in my house. Trapped by the endless winter. Buried under it. There was much shoveling to do yesterday (and more shoveling later and still there was a new skiff on the ground this morning). I went to church without Ken because he stayed home with Nora (still sick, always sick) and when I got home, as I turned around to pull the car into the driveway, I got stuck in the gutter. My wheels were spinning and the thought hit me that now I was good and truly “stuck in a rut.” We are all stuck in a rut. I wonder if we’re just living through the same blizzard over and over and over again. “There’s no way that this winter is ever going to end,” says Phil Conners just before he kidnaps the groundhog and drives it off a cliff.

McKay spent at least two hours playing in the snow yesterday afternoon. He has taken over the pile to the side of the house (the one created by the repeated shoveling-off of the driveway) and has dug tunnels and caves into it. He is a child who also needs to carve out his own personal spaces. He is a cave-dweller. A fort-builder. He once asked for padlocks for his birthday. He wants treasure boxes, room, a bedroom of his own. One day when I could not find him anywhere in the house, I finally discovered him wedged into a tiny 2’ by 2’ space in his closet, alone, reading.

And yet, McKay would be miserable as an only child. He and Ethan are more than roommates; they are best friends. McKay is most happy when they are together, pacing circles into the carpet of their room, role-playing some elaborate space-battle scenario. I know that he would not trade the closeness of our crowded home for a room of his own and the silence that would go with it, just as I would not trade my domestic busyness for all the privacy and free time in the world.

The truth is that we don’t get to consciously make these choices. Even Jane could never have seen her options in front of her simultaneously since the consequences of her resistance to marriage only developed over time. But I can still take a good look from my present vantage point and say that, knowing what I know now, I would still live my life as I have lived it. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few things I wish I could take back—my kitchen tile, my laser eye surgery, my entire 7th grade year—but when it comes to my family and the choices I have made to marry and be a mother to each of my children, even if it means I will never ever be the subject of a PBS special, I have no regrets.

and then there was one

It started with Nora. One minute she was fine and the next she was vomiting all over the floor of the boys’ room—a floor which unfortunately happened to be covered at the time with 8 million Lego pieces. I’ll spare you the details of that cleanup.

Nora spent the next 24 hours proving the old adage that ‘what goes down must come up or at least out the other end.’ Much laundry was involved.

By Wednesday, I had caught the bug. I tried to call in sick to my job but my bosses (ages 1-12) said my benefits package did not include sick leave. Go figure.

Wednesday night and early into the wee hours of Thursday morning, Ethan and Gabie took turns racing for the bathroom…and not quite making it. Nora continued her pattern of filling her diaper (and pajamas and socks) with radioactive liquid waste every two hours.

And Thursday afternoon, McKay called home from school to say he was feeling lousy and needed to come home early.

Only my husband Ken is still standing, untouched by the plague that has spread all around him. Wish him luck.

tooting my own cream horns

I made a special treat for book group last week. At our monthly meetings, we take turns bringing refreshments, only we don’t call them refreshments; the term we use is “delicacy.” It sounds more lovely—more literary—to put it that way. But it also makes me feel more than a wee bit of pressure to make something fancy, something out of the ordinary, or at least something…well…delicate. You just don’t bring snickerdoodles to book group. Or at least no one ever has.


Thus the impetus to make these cream horns which my friend Tara insisted were “easy yet totally impressive.” And guess what? Tara was right. They took a while to construct, but they were simple enough that even a klutz like me could pull them off. And the book group ladies raved about them. I was reminded of my multi-layered Jell-o rant (and subsequent apology, please don’t read the first without reading the second) and I felt duly chagrinned. I can honestly say that there’s nothing wrong with a small culinary triumph once in a while. I was proud of myself, especially since I made the horns while simultaneously attempting to put Nora down for a nap, a process that involved no less than 21 trips between the kitchen and her room, trying to convince Nora that she did indeed want to stay in bed by herself, to which she would sweetly reply ‘kay Mom and stay just long enough to give me time to close her door, walk back into the kitchen, wash my hands and begin rolling strips of dough into a cone shape and then I would hear the bedroom door pop open and she’d come trotting out into the hall, and her entrance into the kitchen would be followed by me washing my hands (again) since they were now greasy and then walking her back to her room and telling her to get back into bed (‘k mom) and then.… well, you get the idea.

Don’t ask me why I thought I could multitask two such delicate projects or why it took me 21 failures with Nora to finally give up and send her downstairs to watch TV with her brother. I’m a bit obtuse sometimes. Maybe I was making dunce cones and I just didn’t know it.

She escapes!

Not since the broken foot episode of ’06 has a single development had a more catastrophic effect on the quality of life in our home.

My friends, Nora has learned how to climb out of her crib.

I know, I know. It’s a shocking turn of events. I had planned for Nora to sleep in her crib until at least her 16th year. (And then we were going to send her off to the convent). But clearly she has a mind of her own. The first time it happened, I was in total denial. Nora had been in her room for a couple of hours, taking a nap. Suddenly, there she was in the hallway. She must have been teleported, I said to myself. Or maybe I just forgot to pull up the railing. Or Gabie let her out. There’s no way she could have climbed out on her own. I am just not ready for that.

Then came Saturday (hereafter known as black Saturday) when I realized that my daughter had in fact not learned to aparate from room to room, she had merely learned to hug the corner of the crib and swing her legs over the railing to freedom. She had also picked up the useful skill of turning a doorknob and opening her door. (Who taught her to do this?!! Has she been sneaking out at night to attend secret Baby Club meetings? What other tricks does she have up her fuzzy-pink-polyester-sleeper sleeve?).

When I put her down for her nap on Sunday (hoping against hope that she had forgotten everything since the day before—hey I can dream, can’t I?) she stayed in her crib for about 10 seconds after I closed the door. Then I could hear her clunking around and jabbering from another part of the room. Sighing, I figured I’d get her out and try lying down with her in my bed. I opened the door and saw, of course, an empty crib. But the rest of the room was empty too. I began to panic as I scanned the closet and under Gabie’s bed. Where did she go? Maybe she did have a teleporter. Then she started to giggle and I saw a shadow behind the blinds. She had climbed onto the window sill, between the closed blinds and the glass, and was standing there like an actor waiting for the curtain to rise before her big show.

Sleeping Beauty by Maxfield Parrish

Now that I have seen her escape with my own eyes, I have graduated from denial into a stage of total despair. Will she ever go to sleep before midnight again? Are her naps—oh, her naps, her lovely, lovely naps, her glorious 3-hour naps, her naps that happily overlapped with Gabie’s TV time, the only time all day when I could get anything done—are they gone forever? I look back nostalgically at the pleasant, week-old memories of a peacefully sleeping daughter and I wave at them as they recede—too soon! it’s much too soon—into the distance.

We put up the bunk bed on Monday night. Gabie sleeps in the top and Nora (theoretically) will sleep in the bottom bed. She hasn’t yet, but at least that’s our plan. Nora’s plan is to avoid sleep entirely. Suddenly, I can’t remember how I ever got the other three kids to go to sleep in a real bed. They all sleep in real beds now, so apparently they somewhere, somehow made the transition, but how on earth did they do it?

I think the other kids were much older when they realized that they could scale their wooden prison bars. I swear Ethan was nearly three and even then, we only set up a new bed for him because I was pregnant with McKay. By that age, I could reason with him and offer him incentives to stay in bed and convince him that big boys slept in big beds. Nora is only 20 months old. She is tall for her age and precocious in the climbing department (yes Mother I see the poetic irony here) but she is not to be reasoned with. I can tell her that she needs to stay in bed and she just looks at me with her soft blue eyes and plays dumb. Stay? she says, smiling. I’m sure I don’t know the meaning of that word. Now excuse me, I have better things to do than sit here while you rub my back and sing to me and try desperately to convince me that I’m tired when anyone could tell that I have at least 2 hours of full energy power left. Goodbye you foolish woman.