Happy 4th of July!

Pulled Pork

Baked Beans

Laura’s Butter Sugar Cookies

I hope you had a great 4th of July!  We had friends over for dinner and I decided make pulled pork with Hawaiian buns, coleslaw, and good old fashioned baked beans. For dessert I made a Red Velvet Cake.  My friend Laura brought over some delicious sugar cookies that she sprinkled with blue and red sugar.  The nice thing about making pulled pork, is that you can make several days before and heat it just before you serve it with barbecue sauce.  Because there are so many small batch and great barbecue sauces, I decided to cheat and used a gourmet sauce to pour over the pulled pork when I was heating it up.  I also have a good recipe on the website you can use that I make for baby back ribs if you want to make your own sauce.  I made garlic butter and spread it over the Hawaiian buns and grilled them to add a little texture to the soft and buttery buns for the sandwiches.   I made a classic coleslaw to pull it all together.  I made my go to baked beans which is Susan’s recipe and it is so good because it has bacon and ground beef which makes it very hearty and the butter beans add creaminess to the dish.  You can also make it a few days before which makes having a get together easier and one thing less to do on the day.  The Red Velvet Cake is a classic American cake and it’s my dear friends Mother’s recipe that I have posted before.  It uses 1 ounce of red food coloring which is a little daunting, but the frosting overrides my questionable use of the food coloring because it is so delicious, rich and creamy.  When you read the directions, it seems a little strange because you make a paste by cooking flour and milk together and cool it before you add it to creamed butter, sugar and vanilla and then you whip it like crazy until it is soft and fluffy.  I double the frosting recipe because it is so good and it gives me extra to decorate.  I made simple rosettes on the cake and used a toothpick that I dipped in food coloring gel and “brushed” the toothpick on the rosettes to add color and a little fireworks effect.  I found some candy at the store and placed them all around the cake and printed some stars that I found on line and taped them to some wood sticks that I painted white.  If you had some pretty red or blue striped straws, that would also work.  The day was perfectly topped off with a fireworks display from all the pyromaniac people that live on the lake that went on all evening long.  Click here for the recipes and printable stars….