Shake It Off

by Suzanne Nelson

  For each shake, you’ll need: a glass mug or mason jar, 2 to 3 wooden or plastic skewers, a straw, and a blender.

  The key to making any crazy shake is accessorizing your glass mug before you blend your shake. First, drizzle chocolate sauce around the edge of a glass mug, coating the edge and the top of the mug. It’s okay if it drips into the inside of the mug and down the side; overflowing fudge sauce will make your shake look even more scrumptious. Put the mug in the freezer for 1 to 2 minutes. Then, remove the mug from the freezer. Now the fun starts. Using the ingredients in each recipe, press some of your extras—sprinkles, crumbled cookie, candy bar bits—into the sauce along the outside of the glass. You have to be quick! As soon as you’re happy with your decorating, put the mug back in the freezer and leave it there while you make the rest of the shake.

  Next, you can prepare your skewers, which you should load up with the most delicious, and most eye-catching, ingredients from the recipe. Have fun and get creative! Once the skewers are full, set them aside.

  Now it’s time to blend your shake! Mix on “frozen drink” setting until fully blended. After grabbing your mug from the freezer, pour the shake into it. Top the shake with a heaping mountain of whipped cream (you could use homemade, Reddi-wip, or Cool Whip) and garnish it with more sprinkles or candy pieces. Lastly, stick your decorated skewers into your shake, add a straw, and enjoy! Each recipe below suggests some flavor combos, but remember that there’s always room for accessorizing and experimenting.

  Ingredients for the shake:

  2–3 scoops chocolate ice cream

  ½ cup ice-cold milk

  ½ cup brownie chunks (you can bake everything-but-the-kitchen-sink brownies, complete with pretzel bits, toffee bits, and dark and white chocolate morsels, but a plain brownie works perfectly as well)

  Ingredients for accessorizing the shake:

  ¼–½ cup fudge sauce or ganache (for the edge of the glass)

  Chocolate sprinkles

  ¼ cup toffee bits

  7–8 mini marshmallows

  ¼ cup pretzel bits

  2–3 caramel squares

  Handful of plain or caramel popcorn

  3–4 Oreo cookies

  1 brownie square

  Whipped cream

  Directions:

  Prepare your glass mug as described on page 254. Once the fudge sauce is ready to be decorated, cover it with sprinkles and toffee bits. You can stick mini marshmallows, pretzel bits, caramel squares, or popcorn into the sauce as well. Next, stack your skewers with alternating marshmallows, Oreos, and caramels. Be sure to include one big brownie square on one skewer as well.

  To make your shake, place 2 to 3 heaping scoops of chocolate ice cream in your blender. Pour in the milk and add the brownie chunks. Blend it up, pour it into your glass, and start decorating! Don’t forget to add plenty of whipped cream. Add a straw and enjoy!

  Ingredients for the shake:

  2–3 scoops mint chocolate chip ice cream

  ½ cup ice-cold milk

  3–4 York Peppermint Patties, broken into pieces

  Ingredients for accessorizing the shake:

  ¼–½ cup fudge sauce or ganache (for the edge of the glass)

  Chocolate sprinkles

  Handful of semisweet chocolate chips

  5–8 Junior Mints

  3–4 York Peppermint Patties

  1-2 peppermint sticks

  Whipped cream

  Directions:

  Once the fudge sauce is ready to be decorated, cover it with sprinkles and chocolate chips. On your skewers, alternate Junior Mints and Peppermint Patties. Blend up your shake ingredients, add the skewers and peppermint sticks, and top your whipped cream with any leftover chocolate chips and candies. Delicious!

  Ingredients for the shake:

  2–3 scoops vanilla ice cream

  ½ cup ice-cold milk

  4 mini Heath bars

  2 Twix bars

  Ingredients for accessorizing the shake:

  ¼–½ cup fudge sauce or ganache (for the edge of the glass)

  Heath toffee bits

  Rainbow sprinkles

  Chunks of cut-up Twix bars and mini Heath bars

  1–2 chocolate chip cookies

  Whipped cream

  Directions:

  Cover the edges of the glass with toffee bits and rainbow sprinkles using your fudge sauce. You can add chunks of cut-up Twix or Heath bar as well. Prepare your skewers with alternating Twix and Heath bar chunks, or add pieces of cookies. Mix up the vanilla ice cream and milk with more Heath and Twix bars, and accessorize with whipped cream, skewers, and the rest of the toffee bits and sprinkles. Set a chocolate chip cookie on top, and enjoy!

  Ingredients for the shake:

  2–3 scoops strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, or cherry ice cream

  ½ cup ice-cold milk

  Ingredients for accessorizing the shake:

  ¼ cup strawberry, or any other kind of berry, sauce (for the edge of the glass)

  Red, white, and blue sprinkles, plus any red-white-and-blue or star-shaped candies you want to add

  2–3 red Twizzlers, one cut into pieces

  ½ cup fresh strawberries, blackberries, and blueberries

  Whipped cream

  A patriotic donut

  A sparkling candle (optional)

  Directions:

  Instead of fudge sauce, use berry sauce to adorn your glass with sprinkles and bits of Twizzler. Your skewers can get festive with berries and Twizzler pieces. Top your berry shake base with a peak of whipped cream, plus more sprinkles, patriotic candies, berries, and Twizzlers. Leave space for a whole donut on top, as well as your skewers. For extra pizzazz, carefully stick a sparkling candle right into the donut—and enjoy!

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at I Only Have Pies for You!

  I approached the oven with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Could it be that I’d finally done it? I reached for the handle, then hesitated, breathing deep. The pie definitely smelled right. The kitchen of Pies N’ Prattle was steeped in the scents of caramelized butter, cinnamon, and apples. A promising sign.

  I opened the oven a crack and peeked in. No! The caramel apple pie I’d spent my entire afternoon making looked like a natural disaster. The crust was a sinkhole, cratering into the caramel apple filling; only its sad, crinkled edges remained.

  I ripped off my oven mitts and launched them across the room, letting out a cry of frustration. I’d always had a temper worse than a grease fire—flaring in an instant and tough to douse. My parents often laughed about the fervor with which I’d thrown myself on the floor as a toddler whenever I was told I had to eat my peas or go to bed. It wasn’t a trait I was proud of, but I never could seem to get a handle on it, either. In fact, I might’ve hollered again over my pie fiasco if the muffled voices of our customers in the main room hadn’t stopped me.

  “¿Qué pasó?” I heard Mrs. Gonzalez say. “Is that Dacey? Is she all right?”

  Mom’s bell-like laughter sounded from the other side of the kitchen door. “She’s fine. Just doing some baking is all. She’s so much like her great-grandma Hazel … a bundle of pint-sized passion, especially when it comes to pies.”

  Like GG Hazel? I scoffed, staring at my sunken pie. I’d never known GG Hazel in person. She’d died long before I was born. I knew about her, though. Every person in Bonnet, Texas, did. There was one, universally acknowledged truth about Hazel Culpepper: That woman could bake pies.

  And I couldn’t. But Mom kept insisting on this resemblance I supposedly had to GG Hazel. As if Mom’s saying it might give me the pie gene that seemed to have skipped my DNA.

  “Dacey?” Mom stuck her head around the door. A quick scan of the kitchen told her I was alive and well, but she still said, “Scale of one to ten, hangnail to Armageddon. Go.”

  Mom had played this game with me for as long as I could remember, asking me to pick a number on a scale of one to ten as a way of gauging the severity of any prob
lem. It was her not-so-subtle way of reminding me to control my temper.

  “Two,” I mumbled grudgingly. “Not Armageddon, but my pie does look like it’s been hit by a meteor.”

  “Caramel apple crumble it is, then.” Mom smiled. “You come from a long line of great pie bakers, Dace. Don’t worry so much. You’ll grow into your talent.” She took my apple “crumble” out of the oven and slid it into a pastry box. I had no idea what poor victim Mom might give it to, but I hoped I’d never set eyes on the disaster again. “Now come on out and say hi to everybody. They’ve been asking after you.”

  I followed Mom through the swinging doors. The snug main room—painted a cheery daffodil yellow and crowded with armchairs, settees, and coffee tables—instantly brightened my mood. More than that, though, were the waves, smiles, and “hello”s I got from the dozen or so folks in the shop.

  There was Mrs. Gonzalez with her fussy baby Marco and little daughter Alma. There was Mrs. Beaumont and her Friday afternoon knitting group. Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Walker were arguing over their game of Scrabble, and Ms. Jackson was working on the romance novel she’d been swearing she’d have finished by the summer solstice. They weren’t customers so much as permanent fixtures in Pies N’ Prattle. They’d been coming to our shop since before I was born, and knew almost as much about my life as Mom and Dad did.

  It was like having a bunch of aunts, uncles, and grandparents watching over me 24/7—and not just in our shop, either. Our small, homespun town of Bonnet was bordered by the Brazos River on one side and the Jenkins cattle ranch on the other. A hiccup took longer than a drive down our main street. Bonnet’s single traffic light had made the front page of the Bonnet Times when it had finally been installed two years ago, and Bonneters loved to boast about the bona fide hitching post that still stood, as it had for over a century, outside The Chicken Shack. But people looked after each other in Bonnet, and it gave the town a coziness and familiarity that I loved.

  “Don’t forget, Selena,” Mom said to Mrs. Gonzalez, who was leaving with Alma and the squalling Marco in her arms. “Two slices of the lavender honey pie an hour before you nurse Marco and you’ll both sleep through the night. You’ll see.”

  Mrs. Gonzalez hugged her, gushing her thanks, then waved to me and headed out.

  “Poor Selena,” Mom murmured. “A colicky newborn and now her restaurant closing its doors next month.”

  Together, we stared out the window at The Whole Enchilada—the tiny but delicious Tex-Mex restaurant the Gonzalez family owned on Main Street. It sat between two vacant stores; those had once been the Bonnet Soda Shop and Shoe-La-La Consignment.

  “That’s the fifth business to close in the last six months,” I said. “And we’re not even counting the Longhorn Loop.”

  Just saying the name of Texas’s oldest wooden roller coaster made my throat hitch. It wasn’t that I was particularly attached to the ride. But when the coaster closed six months ago, the loss of the tourist attraction had been a virtual death knell for Bonnet’s businesses. Visits from out-of-towners had always been few and far between. Still, for over a century, Bonnet had boasted two claims to fame: Hazel Culpepper’s pie shop and the Longhorn Loop. Now we had only the pie shop left, and the tourists were dwindling.

  “It’s not good,” Mom said. A second later, she straightened her shoulders, adding, “But it’s no use drowning in a river of worry, either.”

  There it was. Mom’s glass-half-full MO. She smiled at our shop full of regulars. “We have our tried-and-true Bonneters.” Then she turned to the picture of GG Hazel that hung on the wall, alongside Hazel’s favorite apron. The photo was part of a framed article from the Bonnet Times, May of 1945. Mom reached out and pressed her fingertips to Hazel’s cheek. “And we have GG Hazel to inspire us. I just wish we still had her Heartstring Pie, too. Now that would be something folks would talk about all over Texas.”

  A reverent hush fell over the shop at Mom’s mention of Heartstring Pie. There wasn’t a soul in Bonnet who hadn’t heard the stories about my great-grandmother’s most famous pie and the supposed “curse” surrounding it. Nor was there a soul who hadn’t, at one time or another, hoped to be the one to find the missing recipe for it.

  “I had a piece of Heartstring Pie,” a gravelly voice said behind us. It was Mr. Jenkins. With his six-foot-four-inch frame, thick silver mustache, and broad build, he might’ve seemed imposing, except that I’d known him my entire life. “Just once when I was eight.” His expression softened into nostalgia. “Hazel brought me a slice after my mama’s passing. I didn’t want to touch a bite of it at first. Couldn’t eat a thing, let alone talk or even cry. But Hazel, she leaned over me and said, ‘Now, Jeb, just the tiniest nibble will ease you. It won’t stop the hurting, but it’ll make it tolerable.’ She spoon-fed me a bite and, next thing I knew, I was in her lap, the floodgates open.” He shook his head. “Strangest thing, too, but it did help. I don’t know how, but it did.”

  I’d heard Mr. Jenkins’s story many times before, and it always gave me a little tingle of warmth, like there was a part of me that believed there was some magic in that pie. But then I brushed the thought away. I knew it was a silly idea.

  “That sounds like Hazel’s Heartstring Pie, for sure,” Mom said reverently. GG Hazel had passed away when Mom was only five. Even though Mom didn’t remember her, she’d grown up steeped in Hazel’s larger-than-life legend, fostering a loyalty so deep that she felt “called,” as she put it, to do right by Hazel and the pie shop. “That pie was a treasure.”

  “Miss Edie?” Mr. Jenkins said to Mom. “Speaking of pie, could I get a slice of your pecan pie for my Mazie? Her rheumatism’s acting up again and we’ve got company coming—”

  “Of course.” Mom flew behind the sales counter to box up the pie. “And I’m sending you home with a slice of pineapple pie, too. Just the trick for aching bones.” Mr. Jenkins reached for his wallet, but Mom waved it away. “On the house.”

  Mr. Jenkins clucked his tongue. “Edie, how many times have I told you to quit giving your pies away for free?”

  Mom put her hands on her hips, feigning indignation. “Jeb, you run your ranch the way you see fit, and I’ll do the same for my shop.”

  He gave a deep chuckle, tipped his Stetson cattleman hat to her, then smiled at me as he headed for the door. “Dacey, I’ll see you at the stables in the morning?”

  I felt a swell of excitement. I boarded my horse, Ginger, at the Jenkins ranch and I never missed a day of riding if I could help it. “Count on it!” I told him.

  I’d been riding Ginger in Western horse shows since I’d gotten her in the third grade, and I’d taken riding lessons at the ranch long before that. Dad teased that if he hadn’t witnessed the event himself, he would’ve sworn I was born in a saddle. My temper never got the better of me when I was around horses. I itched to be riding Ginger now—instead of stuck here at the pie shop.

  I could feel GG Hazel’s gaze on me, as if she’d heard my thoughts. I studied the black-and-white photograph, taking in Hazel’s fair skin, wavy black bob, small mouth, slightly crooked nose, wide-set eyes, and dark arched brows.

  Mom didn’t much resemble Hazel, but everyone was always commenting that I did. I couldn’t see it. Yes, I had Hazel’s dark hair, though mine was longer, curlier, and more unruly, usually tied back in a mussed knot. But her eyes were nothing like mine. Hers had a confident clarity and an almost clairvoyant quality that made people believe she could help them with whatever troubles they brought before her. Of course, that glimmer in her expression might also have been pride in the flawless Heartstring Pie she offered up to the camera.

  What I apparently had inherited from her was her temper. The story went that Hazel had once pitched an entire banana cream pie at Bonnet’s mayor, simply because he’d suggested removing Main Street’s old hitching post. How bad did my luck have to be that I’d gotten GG Hazel’s only flaw and none of her charms?

  I sighed and scanned the newspaper article for the
hundredth time.

  HAZEL CULPEPPER BAKES UP HEALING AND HOPE

  Just days after D-Day, our own Hazel Culpepper, alongside other Red Cross volunteers, was saving the lives and lifting the spirits of dozens of American soldiers at Normandy Beach, France. Only it isn’t her nursing skill that’s earned her the nickname “Healing Hazel”; it’s her pie. Since returning to Bonnet, Hazel’s been busy baking up pies for our returning veterans.

  “I saw our boys suffering,” she says. “Many were weary and shell-shocked. Some were plain brokenhearted from what they’d seen and done. The best comfort I could offer was a lending ear to hear their sorrows, and a pie to please their bellies.”

  Hazel and her Heartstring Pie, in particular, are earning the admiration and devotion of every veteran for miles around.

  “Hazel has a knack for knowing when a soldier’s down,” Fred Cooper says. “That’s when she comes knocking with her Heartstring Pie. One slice, and peace settles in my soul. I can’t ever forget the war, but I do take some comfort from Hazel and her pie.”

  The article, I knew, had been reprinted in papers from Houston to Dallas, and soon much of Texas was flooding in to visit Bonnet for a taste of the famous Heartstring Pie.

  Only now, the Heartstring Pie recipe was gone, and the pie with it. According to Mom, GG Hazel had hidden the recipe years ago, when she discovered that my grandma Mabel planned to turn the pie into a moneymaking machine. Mabel began claiming the pie could work legit miracles, from curing cancer to preventing aging, and she was going to sell the recipe for a pretty penny to anyone desperate enough to believe.

  “Hazel never wanted the recipe to be misused like that,” Mom had told me. “She didn’t want anyone selling Heartstring Pie for a profit and cheating folks into believing the pie was some sort of eternal life elixir.”