Beach, Wedding, and Mai Tais

Flipping through gram’s notes, this recipe for Mai Tai’s stood out to me. Not because it’s a Mai Tai… but because it’s unlike any Mai Tai recipe I have ever seen. This thing could seriously take the paint off a car. So.. using the hubs as my taste tester, we started out with the base recipe (pictured below) and made our own modifications to make it ‘more fun sipping’ drink and less ‘my whole body is on fire’ drink.

Strawberries and Cream

It’s curious, every time I sit down to write out a recipe I spend a little time thinking about what grams would say. What memories would she remember about these recipes that I don’t? How did she create or find a recipe? I would say a good half of all the recipes in gram’s books are from friends, relatives or other cookbooks and this one is no different. It’s on an old piece of type paper from 1978 from her friend Shirley MacKay. Gram’s binders are filled with torn out pages from magazines, recipe cards ‘from the kitchen of’ various friends or jotted down notes from a restaurant she’d visited and she convinced a chef to share with her. Grams was funny like that. She could pretty much talk anyone into giving her a good recipe.

White Peaks and Zest

When I came across not one, BUT TWO lemon sponge pie recipes, I was ecstatic! Now these recipes do take a bit to figure out, as there aren’t a ton of instructions AND there is a lot of old terminology that I have to google just to know how to prepare them exactly. Here’s a little old school baking knowledge I’m about to throw down.