Each Day Is a Gift... Look how we spent ours!: April Fools "Surprise": Take 2

So last year I had the brainstorm idea to surprise my family with a fun April Fools Meal. I'm going to TRY to post a link if you want to check out last year, but I am offerring NO guarantees that it will work! LOL!

http://karneifamily.blogspot.com/2010/04/april-fools-food-fun.html

I mistakenly set the proverbial bar too high for my first year of doing such a prank. The kids literally started talking about "How Mommy was going to trick them..." MONTHS in advance. They even talked about it at school to their teachers & friends! I racked my brain for weeks! To make it even more complicated we were hosting company that evening so I couldn't go too CrAzy! I had a super ephiphany moment while frantically roaming the aisles of Wal-Mart literally that afternoon! I was going to make a dessert pizza! But not just any dessert pizza. I wanted it to look like an ooey-gooey, fresh from the oven pizza! My plan was to serve them a normal dinner (with the exception of the jell-o juice...it was such a hit last year!) and then swoop in with, "Who saved room for pizza???" LOL! I even went as far as to roast garlic (I made risotto with it) so the house would smell italian! I'm such a trickster I know! Ha!

It went over fabulous!!! I was even pretty impressed with myself! I just threw this together so I'm going to do my best to try and come up with a recipe.

Ingredients:

1 roll sugar cookie dough
1 cup strawberries, sliced
1-2 Tablespoons sugar
squeeze of lemon
red food coloring
cornstarch
mini marshmellows
white chocolate shavings
red fruit roll-up

Directions:

Take the sugar cookie dough "log" and pat it out into a circle on a foil covered pizza pan. Bake for 8 minutes at 350 degrees.

While that is cooking, place the strawberries and about 1/4 cup water in a sauce pan over medium heat. Stir in sugar & a squeeze (1/2 tsp) of lemon juice. In a small bowl take 1/2 to 1 Tablespoon (depending on desired thickness and amount of strawberries) of cornstarch and deslove into equal amount of water until completly dissolved. It will look like white water. Add to strawberry mixture. Stir constantly, sauce will thicken very quickly once it starts to boil. If you don't stir it constantly it will get lumpy and well, that's not good. Remove from heat and stir in red food coloring. Set aside.

By now your cookie crust should look like this...

Let it cool for about 5 minutes (or longer if you have time...I was a little rushed since this was a last-minute idea.) And then spoon your sauce over your crust to look like this. Sorry for the blurriness...again I was scrambling here.

I really wanted to add fresh mint to my sauce to make it look more authentic, but if my kids even smell herbs they turn up their noses and say it smells "herb-y". Clearly they did not inherit my food obesessions.

Now comes the fun part!!!

Take mini-marshmellows and smash them between your fingers to help them spread out. You don't have to pulverize them, but just give them a little smoosh. It helps encourage them to spread out and not up! I guess even food doesn't like to look wider. LOL! Just kidding!

Place back in the oven for 3-5 minutes until the marshmellows start to get all gooey & puffy. Then crank up the heat on the oven to broil and let them get toasty brown. This was my favorite part! But caution...DO NOT take your eyes off it! It will change from toasty to nasty in seconds! Sugar does that! I was determined to make it look AND feel like pizza! I had to get the gooey factor in!

SUCCESS!!!

But you could still see too much sauce & seperation of the marshmellows, so I "bound" it together by shaving white chocolate over the top. The shreds that didn't melt kind of looked like shredded parmesean, yet another added cool factor.

For even more fun I cut circles of red fruit roll-up for "pepperoni". I would have added other toppings, but my kids would have definitely known something was up if REAL veggies or heaven forbid something scary like a mushroom was on it! LOL!