Valentine's at the Neals

One of my favorite 'creative' things to do is set the table.  Yup.  Sounds strange, but it's a bit of an obsession for me.  Napkins, glasses, baskets, runners, but especially plates.  I have to STOP, but Kohls keeps having these amazing deals, like 80% off with a 30% off coupon.  Seriously, how can I resist that?

So, Valentine's weekend (because, really didn't we all celebrate it on the weekend?  Monday is SO boring.) was a great opportunity to fuss-it-up.  I had an small dinner party on Saturday night and then my annual 'I love my kids' dinner on Sunday.  I forgot to take a picture of the kids tablescape.  In fact, I also forgot to take pictures of the food, because I just get carried away with the great company...as it should be.

So, my dear husband was kind of enough to re-create the dessert he made on Saturday so I could take a picture of it for you.  Beignets.  French for donuts.  Why is it that the french word always sounds so much better??   He used a Paula Dean recipe.

I've been a little tired lately, so he offered to be in charge of dessert (and actually the bread too).  He wanted to make Beignets and I suggested we have some dipping sauces to go with it.  We had something similar to this at a restaurant several years ago.  I had these cute little Miso Spoons which turned out to be the perfect amount of dipping sauce.

I did a dark chocolate cinnamon ganache (really, just cream, good chocolate and cinnamon), a berry coulis and my favorite butterscotch syrup.)  Make the dough a few hours ahead of time and when you're ready for dessert, pop them in the fryer for a minute for a light, fluffy, warm treat.