Recent happenings

I suppose the thing that always happens here in the summer is that the weather inevitably gets hotter! It was 47C/117F one of the days last week during pick-up at school and it went up to 49C/120F just before getting home. YIKES!!!

Obviously you can see my interpretation of it. HAHA!

Graham and Charlie finally painted their clay bowls from Graham's birthday party a couple of weeks ago. Not bad, not bad:

Although, Graham accidentally broke his (the one with blue). Thankfully he wasn't too upset by it.
Speaking of the birthday party, I had Graham write "Thank you" notes to his friends.  His friend Anna got 3 smiley faces on her card compared to just the one for all his other friends. Graham is so convinced that he is going to marry Anna one day :-)

My creativity was tested again a couple of weeks ago during Charlie's splash day at school.  We were put to the task of bringing fruit to school, with an "underwater/sea creature" theme. And this is what I came up with - a shark watermelon. Well, it sort of looked like a shark.  Charlie called it Pac-man fish instead. Close enough I suppose!

So you wonder what else I do during the day while the boys are at school? Go to tea of course! Some friends and I went to a fancy tea restaurant at a local mall. Wow, really fancy tea for quite the range of prices!

I was actually quite disappointed with the muffins and macarons are almost too sweet to my liking anyhow.  The croque monsieur was quite tasty though so that made up for it.

It was interesting to roam around the store and find tea cups worth Dhs 1,500 or about USD400 each and tea pots worth Dhs17,000 or approx. USD4,700!!!! YIKES!!!

And one last Home Learning for Graham - Light vs. Dark. Hopefully we will get some basil at the end of this one, although Charlie just spilled the soil today when the ball he was kicking accidentally bounced off the plant/cup:

This was pre-spillage. Let's hope the plants recover from the shock!

Last but not least, this might be my new favorite summer dessert - Summer Tiramisu with strawberries!  Thankfully the strawberries were on sale that day:

You are suppose to soak the ladyfingers in lemon juice but not realizing that for the summer tiramisu, I had soaked them in with the boys' chocolate mix drink. And instead of raw eggs, I mixed the mascarpone cheese with Cool Whip.  Hopefully "extra creamy" Cool Whip is equivalent to "double cream"??!

We brought the tiramisu to a friend's home last night as we were invited over for dinner.  There was quite some pressure as to how good it would taste as it was my first time making it AND there were two other professional baker-friends as well whom had brought their desserts.  With my first bite into it, I thought it was quite yummy and there were some nice compliments as well. Hopefully they were sincere about it :-P  Either way, definitely a keeper for the recipe book!