Chocolate Eclair Dessert

It's been a while since I posted a new recipe. I have a few sets of photos related to different recipes that are ready to be written about, but I haven't had the motivation to do so. This blogging thing is apparently something that is slightly difficult to get back into after a long gap.

Fortunately, I made something wonderful this past week. It's a recipe that my grandma used all the time when I was little. It is possibly one of the best desserts ever. It is also incredibly simple to make.

I've had the page marked in the cookbook to make this, but I haven't had a good reason to make it until this past weekend. This dessert is just as delicious as a remember and much easier to make than I expected. I made the chocolate frosting slightly thicker than it should have been and I used cinnamon graham crackers instead of honey. If you can, I recommend using a 9x13 cake pan that doesn't have sloped sides. My pan had sloped sides and that make placing the layers of graham crackers weird (gaps around the edges and such).

Chocolate Eclair Dessert
2 packages French vanilla instant pudding (3ish ounce size)
3 C milk
1 8 oz carton Cool Whip
1 lb box of graham crackers (honey or cinnamon)
2 envelopes pre-melted baking chocolate
1 t vanilla
3 T salted butter, softened
1 1/2 C powdered sugar
3 T milk

First, coat the 9x13 inch pan with a layer of butter.

Make the French vanilla pudding according to directions but only use the 3 cups of milk.

Add the entire carton of Cool Whip.

Fold the Cool Whip into the pudding. You have to fold it or the Cool Whip will lose its nice fluffy consistency.

Place a layer of graham crackers in the pan.

Carefully spread half of the pudding mixture over the layer of graham crackers.

Lay down another layer of graham crackers.

Spread the remaining pudding mixture over the new layer of graham crackers.

Add another layer of graham crackers!

Now make the chocolate frosting. Do this by placing the chocolate, vanilla, milk, and softened butter into a mixing bowl.

Stir it all together. It will seem kind of awful and thick.

Stir in the powdered sugar. This somehow gives it a very nice and smooth consistency. If the frosting seems too thick to spread on the graham crackers, add a little bit more milk. Don't add too much. You don't want it to be runny!

Spread the frosting on top of the layer of graham crackers.

Now for the hard part... You have to let this lovely dessert sit for 12 hours (in the refrigerator!). This allows the moisture of the pudding to soak into the graham crackers and soften them.

Here's a side view of the delicious layers:

Enjoy!

Drawing 1: Finally an update!

Sorry about the complete lack of updates about anything. Baking hasn't been going well, so I haven't made any new recipes. My Drawing class is going fine, I just haven't had time to take any pictures and post them! Until now, that is. Here you go! (I think I may get a better camera eventually... the camera on my phone isn't the best.)

The midterm was several weeks ago. The table in the middle of the room was set up with several boxes, spheres, bags, and cups. Here is what I decided to draw:

Sometime after the midterm we covered pop art. Our assignment was to choose any common object and draw it. I like peanut butter so I decided to draw a Jif peanut butter jar:

Next we had to draw just anything around the art classroom. I like the folds in fabric, so I chose drapery.

The homework for that week was to draw anything around your house. I drew the hallway, but I'm not sure where I put that drawing. I'll post it later, I guess!

A week ago we did perspective drawings, but since I drew the hall way from a 1 point perspective, I didn't have to do that. The other part of the assignment was to use a 4 inch by 5 inch grid to draw anything we wanted. We made a view screen out of clear acetate sheets and cardboard. I suppose I can post a picture of that later. Anyhow, I decided to purchase some silk flowers and draw them. I liked the tiger lily best:

I'm going to say that is my best drawing yet.

On a non-drawing-related note, I recent purchased a print from Charmaine Oliva. She's kind of awesome. Here is the print above my flowers and some of my books

I will hopefully update more often. We'll see!

(Just as a note, everything was drawn with charcoal (either charcoal pencil or stick) except the Jif jar, which was done in colored pencil.)

Drawing 1: Week 4

Instead of class during week 4, we had a snow day. It was very windy, cold, and snowy out. I managed to make it to class, but the few who made it were sent home after the assignment was explained.

The topic for the week was negative space. The first part of the assignment was to draw a few objects by shading in the negative space. No outlining was allowed. Just shade things dark. Here are my attempts:

The second part of the assignment was to place a ball in a rectangular space, fill in the background, and place a shadow. I did two of these. Drawing an object without having such an object to look at is not easy.

The final part was to draw an apple or some such thing in a similar style to the second part of the homework. I found a tomato in the fridge. It was slightly moldy, but I didn't include that in the drawing. Just the tomato part.

That was all of week three. Nothing too exciting, but also not very easy.

Drawing 1: Week 3

Week three of class was about contour drawing and surfaces. The platform in the middle of the room had lots and lots of paper bags arranged on it. Most of the bags were crumpled. We had to do a contour drawing of three bags, with just the outlines. Thickness and flow of the lines is what was important, not perfection. Here is the first drawing I did.

The other in-class drawing was of three bags, but this time we had to fill in the detail of one of the bags. I chose an extremely crumpled up bag to fill in the details of. It was very very frustrating. I thought it looked awful until I finally looked at it again half a week later.It looks pretty good. I should have filled in more of the shading!

We had several options for homework that week. Since the crumpled bag was so horrible to draw and shade in, I decided to draw and shade crumpled pieces of paper. I did the shading too dark.

This is not an easy thing to do if you want good results. I will have to practice more!

Drawing 1: Week 2

The second week of the drawing class focused on creating shadows and shading. In class we had to draw balls and boxes with proper shading and shadows with either charcoal or pencil (I chose charcoal!). There was a large platform in the middle of the room, covered with a white cloth, that had various sized boxes and balls arranged on it. This set up is what we had to use to draw our still life of simple objects.

First, we had to sketch thumbnails from different angles until we found a set up we wanted to draw. Here are my thumbnails: 

I did more thumbnails that I needed to. I couldn't figure out how I wanted the items arranged in my drawing.

I finally decided to draw an area that had three balls which almost made a straight line. The light was shining pretty much directly down on the objects, so there wasn't much shadow. This took me a few hours to draw:

I gave up on the in-class drawing when I couldn't think of any way to alter or improve it.

The homework assignment for the week was to create a still life drawing of three or five objects. I spent almost an hour creating a set up of objects I liked. Here are my thumbnail drawings:

The first set up was of three glass jars filled with either candy or sugar. While making the first thumbnail, I realized that candy inside of a glass jar is a very difficult thing to draw. This made me change the set up and started a search for simple objects. I finally decided on a small glass jar full of sugar, a tiny potted plant that I'm growing, and a spool of thread. 

The drawing took me three nights to complete. I had to draw at night to get the shadows how I wanted them! Kat was very helpful during the day:

That is, she was helpful until she decided to knock over the plant and thread while I was gone one day. She fortunately did that after I was finished with everything except shading the background.

Since I decided to set things up on the coffee table, I had to sit on the floor by the couch to get a nice angle. Here is another view of my set up:

The towel is on the floor because I was using charcoal to draw. Charcoal is very dusty and I didn't want to get that in the light colored carpet. That would be an awful thing.

Here is the final version of my drawing. Somehow the corner got bent. I might have to blame Kat for that...

And that concludes week two of my adventures in drawing. Maybe one day I'll figure out how to take better pictures...

Edit: I was told to make the background dark. Looking at this picture, I need to figure out how to make it even darker! And to take non-fuzzy pictures. New camera is needed, I guess :(