I recoiled at the taste, because I was expecting apple juice. It wasn’t that at all. It was chocolate-chip cookies. Liquid cookies. And not just any cookies –

These Percy Jackson Lotus Flower Cookies are vegan and have a hint of rose flavor! Meredith Foster teams up with Rosanna Pansino on Nerdy Nummies to make these delicious shortbread cookies! Makes 2 dozen Things you'll need Ingredients 1 teaspoon kosher salt 3 ½ cups all purpose flour 1 ½ cup vegan butter 1 cup powdered sugar 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 2 teaspoons rose water Equipment Large mixing bowl Medium mixing bowl Hand mixer Whisk Baking sheet lined with parchment paper 2 inch circle cookie cutter Plastic wrap Decoration Pink vegan frosting in a decorating bag fitted with a #366 tip Let's get started! Preheat oven to 325ºF. In a medium bowl whisk together salt and flour. In large bowl, beat butter and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add vanilla extract and rose water. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low until well combined. Divide the dough into two halves and then wrap each half in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until chilled. Roll out dough to about ¼ inch thick and then use a cookie cutter to cut circles. Place the cookies onto a lined baking sheet and then bake for 12 minutes. Time to decorate! Use a #366 leaf tip to pipe pink frosting onto each cookie in a lotus flower design (PICTURE at 4:34). Start with larger petals on the outside and work your way to the center, making the petals smaller as you go. TaDa! If you feed these Percy Jackson lotus cookies to your guests, they’ll never want to leave! Lotus Flower cookies from the movie 'Percy Jackson & the Olympians

I think I am doomed to become like Peter Pan. I have an aversion to growing up, and I prefer to spend my time in an imaginary land filled with monsters, magic, and middle school kids. Okay, so I just really like children’s books. So sue me. I would probably post more blog posts about legit literature if I ever read it, but I don’t. So today you get a sampling of one of my favorite children’s series: Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan. I discovered Percy Jackson about a year ago, and I was rolling with laughter as I read each book. Rick Riordan is hilarious! For instance, here are some chapter titles from The Lightning Thief (book 1 of the series). Chapter 1: I accidentally vaporize my pre-algebra teacher Chapter 2: Three old ladies knit the socks of death Chapter 6: I become supreme lord of the bathroom Chapter 10: I ruin a perfectly good bus Chapter 12: We get advice from a poodle Just reading these chapter titles made it one of my new favorite books. Reading the hilarious, action-packed stories with all sorts of history lessons about ancient Greece hidden in awkward encounters with modern Olympian gods just solidified my love for them. This series is second only to Harry Potter in my mind. And that is saying something. Okay, so you get the point that Percy Jackson is awesome. So here’s the how it relates to food. Percy is a demigod: his dad’s a Greek god and his mom’s a mortal. Because he’s a demigod he gets a lot more interaction with the gods than mortals. One of the perks of being a demigod is that he can eat the food of the gods – ambrosia – which has healing properties. That is, unless he were to eat too much – then it would burn him from the inside out. Anyway, Percy describes ambrosia not as fruit salad, but as little squares. In The Last Olympian (book 5), Percy narrates, “I took out a square of ambrosia – part of the emergency god-food I always kept with me. It was a little bashed up, but Nico chewed it” (Riordan 254). The books don’t give us much more description of ambrosia than this, so I got to get creative in my interpretation. I had always pictured ambrosia squares as kind of like lemon squares, only less cakey, sweeter, and more creamy. They had to be able to travel well on hero quests, without getting much worse than “a little bashed up.” So I searched high and low for a recipe to fit those criteria. That’s when I discovered a recipe for Cream Cheese Bars on AllRecipes.com. I altered it only slightly, adding a little flour and lemon to the mix. Here’s my adaption, to make it into ambrosia. Ambrosia Squares Prep time: 15 min. Cook time: 45 min. Total time: 1 hour. 1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix 1/2 cup butter, melted 1 egg, beaten 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened 2 eggs, beaten 1 ½ tbps lemon juice 1 tbsp flour 3 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 15 x 10 inch sheet pan. Mix together cake mix, butter or margarine, and 1 egg. Press mixture into pan. (It should look like play-doh.) In a small bowl, mix together cream cheese, 2 eggs, lemon juice, flour, and confectioners' sugar. Pour mixture on top of cake mixture. Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce temperature to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C), and bake for 25 to 35 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Sift about ½ cup powdered sugar on top. Cool completely and cut into squares. These things are AMAZING! And very simple to make. The cake mix layer has the consistency of a soft sugar cookie with a yellow cake flavor. The cream cheese layer is like creamy lemon cheesecake. What could be better? You can adapt it to however you might imagine the ambrosia squares by adding different ingredients to the cream cheese. Maybe add marshmallow cream, or chocolate, or raspberries, or vanilla extract. Whatever you feel would qualify as “god-food,” you can add. I highly recommend these addictive little treats. But be careful not to eat too much! You may not burn to a crisp, but you will definitely have to burn off a lot of calories!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. First we eat with our eyes. With those two sayings in mind, I am going to show you images I found on the internet of blue food. There are some that would cause me to raise my eyebrows, but I would give them a try: I wonder what blue steak would look like? Would it be served with blue cauliflower? Some foods just don't look palatable to me in my otherwise favorite color: Blue mashed potatoes are one example. Blue egg and blue bacon is another. Is it the shade of blue that makes a difference? Is one blue more or less palatable in these strawberries? Some blues aren't expected, but wouldn't cause me to hesitate: And some blues have been tried, enjoyed and would be welcome again any old time! What foods would you shun if served in blue? Which would you eat without hesitation? For more fun, beautiful and interesting blue posts, please visit our host, Smiling Sally by clicking on this logo. Tomorrow I will resume talking about craft tools. I will eventually run out of them and move onto other things!

“Nothing like watching your relatives fight, I always say.”