Minty Mojito Freeze

If you haven’t heard of the Mojito cocktail, then I can’t imagine what rock you’ve been living under.

And, if you’ve never had a Mojito, then you don’t know what you’re missing!

It’s like lime and mint and sugar and rum have a party inside a Collins glass springform pan and your mouth is invited!

I love lime and mint together, but I make a point of not drinking pop, so when a coworker of mine was kind enough to drop off a pile of her old Kraft magazines, I got excited when I spied this recipe for a “Mojito Freeze” in one of the summer issues.

There were a few problems with the original recipe of course — I had to replace the Cool Whip (what is that stuff, anyways?) with real whipped cream and then I added some rum flavour to make it more cocktail-like!

But I was still a little skeptical at first — as someone who works in a liquor store and thinks that drinking is serious business, whether or not it was possible to capture all that awesome refreshing taste of a Mojito in a frozen pie seemed questionable (so glad I was wrong on this one).

Also, I had never made a frozen dessert.

Panna Cotta Parfaits

Panna cotta! How could I have gone so long and never known about it?

Since I consider myself a serious pudding addict, it makes me kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t ever tried panna cotta until just a couple weeks ago.

I’ve made panna cotta for myself a couple times since then, and there are definitely a few things I’ve learned about it.

First: it’s important to use high fat dairy products, since using regular milk instead of creams will detract from the smooth texture of your panna cotta.

Second: panna cotta’s sweet, light flavour is good with almost anything — no joke!

It especially goes well with peach, lemon, mint, vanilla, and white chocolate — all of which are in this recipe!

Rum-Spiked Brownies Bites with Candy Cane Buttercream

Sometimes I wish there was 30 hours in a day — hell, give me 40! — this time of year, I could definitely use them all and still want for more.

That said, today, and today only, I give you permission to cheat by using box-brownie mix.

Normally it’s something that would make squirm in horror, but sometimes things just gotta get done the quickest way possible!

It’s okay — by adding a bit of rum, vanilla, and extra cocoa, it’s hard for anyone to tell that you had a little help!