Brazilian Confections

I was looking over a new (to me) blog that has me feeling 'cuisinely creative' again:
http://lunchinabox.net/

And she had a link to another blog, which in turn had a recipe for these Beijinhos de Coco ("coconut kisses") which looked way too simple to be true.
http://trembomenglishversion.blogspot.com/2007/06/beijinho-de-coco-coconut-kiss.html

Three ingredients? Naah! So I thought I'd give them a shot -- and they turned out really good! And while I was doing a bit of reading up on them, I stumbled across a different version of the same thing, only they're chocolate versus coconut, and they are called Brigadeiros.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigadeiro

For those who can't be bothered to go look at those pages for the recipes, it's simple:
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 Tbsp butter

For the Beijinhos - 3 to 4 Tbsp shredded/flaked coconut (added AFTER cooking) (I also added some coconut flavoring I had for candies).
For the Brigadeiros - 3 Tbsp baking cocoa (added BEFORE/WHILE cooking)

Cook the stuff in a pan over lowish heat, stirring until it basically forms a pudding (sticks more to itself than the pan). At this point if you were making the Beijinhos, you would stir in the coconut... then dump into a bowl & chill. Form according to tips I have below.


I made a double batch of them, and they are fantastic! They pull together very quickly. The real work is in forming them. They are *extremely* sticky. I chilled the concoction, then used my now-standard latex (actually, nitrile) gloves for pulling little 1/2 Tbsp sized blobs off & putting them on wax paper on a cookie sheet. Then I chilled them again, and the next day I rolled them into little balls. I used Alton Brown's "wet hand, dry hand" method to cover them in chocolate sprinkles... right hand to extract them from the wax paper (which they stuck to!) and attempt to gently fling them into the little bowl of sprinkles, then the left hand to scoop sprinkles over/around them & put them into little paper cups.

Once I had them in the little cups, I pushed a small chocolate chip (for the coconut kisses) or Andes Mint chip (for the chocolate Brigadeiros) into the top/center of each one.

Roasted Garlic and Lemon Potato Salad

I made some roasted garlic & lemon mashed potatoes the other day, and it occurred to me (while eating some leftover potato salad that our neighbor Jodi was kind enough to give us) that it would probably be a Tasty Thing to combine them. So to capture my thought I'll put what I'm *thinking* of doing here but I probably won't get around to actually trying this for a while yet (still have leftovers of the other stuff!) - so don't take this as "verbatim" or anything.

handful of baby red potatoes, cooked & cut into largish (salad sized) chunks
couple hard boiled eggs, diced
several cloves (one bulb?) of roasted garlic, chopped
zest of 1 or 2 lemons
1 Tbsp prepared mustard
mayonnaise
spices to taste (salt? pepper? paprika?)

I'll post any updates, successes or failures, etc. when I get around to making this.