Fruit Roll-up Fail

A few weeks ago a friend shared around a link to a blog that had a bunch of DIY things on it. One of those things were homemade granola bars. I gave them a try and they are fantastic. So I figured other things on that site would be good too. There was a recipe for homemade fruit roll-ups and I thought, great! My kids are always begging for them so I figured making my own with nothing but fruit in them would be great.

The original recipe called for mangoes but they are expensive (and I could see S saying she didn't like them). Reading through the comments on the original blog I saw that you can make them with strawberries. Again I thought great! Strawberries were on sale this week so I picked up some. I followed the recipe - puree them in the food processor, spread them thin on a parchment lined cookie sheet (I don't have Silpat mats), and pop them into the oven.

After three hours I checked them and parts of them were dried to a crisp and others were still goopy. I left them in for a while longer in hopes that the goopy parts would dry out. Most of them did but of course that made the dried parts get crispier. Finally I pulled them out. Next I covered them with wax paper, just like the recipe says. I flipped it over and began to pull the parchment off. This is what I ended up with:

It doesn't look anything like what it's suppose to although it does taste good. J says it tastes a little sour to him so maybe I should have added some sugar to it. I was trying to figure out what went wrong and all I can come up with is that I had the puree spread too thin in some places and too thick in others. It looked like it was even but apparently it wasn't. Also, I think having a Silpat mat would have helped. Next time (if there is a next time) I may also spread all the puree in one tray rather than splitting it up. They will most likely end up more like fruit bars rather than roll-ups but that's okay with me.

C has a dinner meeting tonight so it was just the kids and me for supper. When I asked them what they wanted to eat their response was pizza. Now, ordering pizza and having it delivered here is expensive. And since I had to go to the grocery store anyway I picked up the stuff to make our own pizzas at home.

I picked up what I thought was just two crusts but there were actually two crusts per package so I had the potential to make a LOT of pizza. I ended up sticking one pack in the freezer. The other pizzas ended up being half cheese, half ham/pineapple (J's request). Here they are before baking and after:

Of course S pulled her "I'm full" routine which just means that she's tired of eating whatever it is we're having. She started saying that after her cheese came off and I refused to give her a new piece until she finished her current one (yeah, I'm mean that way). J gave the pizza two thumbs up. So at least I got that right today!

I had planned to make blueberry muffins today but the failed fruit roll-ups took so long that by the time they were done it was almost time for the pizzas to go in. I will make the muffins tomorrow. They aren't my homemade ones but I'll add some little touches to make them seem like more than just a mix. Sometimes you just have to go for easy over homemade!