Ah, Purim, we hardly knew ye

If anyone is wondering, making a bar mitzvah right before Purim kind of eats into the whole Purim celebration thing. I mean, by the time we got over the sheer exhaustion (actually, we still haven't!), it was kind of late to start on an elaborate Mishloach Manot idea, you know, if any ideas had popped into my tired brain. We were certainly not going to pull off anything like last year, much to the chagrin of a few friends and even some of their extended families. I did, however, accept a few jobs that had to be filled to enhance some other people's simchat Purim. First, I baked a whole bunch of these:Hamantaschen, filled with apple, raspberry, apricot, caramel, black currant, and chocolate.

I made various sized Mishloach Manot

smallmedium, and large (really giant!).

Here's another of the giant before wrapping:

I love the little plastic containers full of cookies and hamantaschen on this one - so cute! And lots of yummy cake pops and chocolate bark with dried fruits and nuts.

For the seudah, we are lucky enough to have a seudah tradition with two other families, who were very adamant that we take the year off and not make anything, knowing better than we did how tired we would be (not even figuring on the sick kid who had to get treatment at Terem on Purim night for THREE hours - did I mention our Shabbat Zachor curse? It involves one of our kids throwing up on almost every Shabbat Zachor. This year I was silly enought to think we had beaten it. But it was just a little slow out of the gate, making its presence known shortly after Shabbat.). But they did relent and allow me to contribute to dessert - individual Kahlua cakes and rainbow mini-cupcakes.

These were a couple of items that I had served over the bar mitzvah Shabbat, but now had time to make again and photograph. The seudah was a lot of fun, and we are very blessed!

With all the chaos, Purim came and went and we will look forward to a calmer one next year.

Happy Countdown to Pesach!

Dvora