Breast Cancer Awareness Month: Get your Mammo-Grahams!
October is officially National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. All kinds of related events take place during October: The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure takes place in cities across the country, the American Cancer Society holds its Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event, and National Mammography Day takes place on Friday, October 16th.
A couple of years ago, when I was doing a lot of party planning and catering, specializing in theme menus, the more inventive the better, a friend asked me to cater a unique party. A childhood cancer survivor, she and her mother had decided to throw a big bash celebrating 20 years of being cancer-free. Having been to a few shindigs of mine before, she knew the kind of funky, funny food I loved to put together, and she wanted her own food to be very irreverent, sort of thumbing her nose and laughing in the face of cancer. An example she thought of was serving deviled eggs – with black olive “tumors†in them. I asked if she really, REALLY wanted me to run with that, and she insisted she did, as long as it was still good food, so off I went, creating a whole menu devoted to different kinds of cancer.
One of my favorite items I invented for that menu was the “Mammo-Grahamâ€, which I share with you here today in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As you can see, it’s a fairly realistic edible depiction of the procedure, as anyone who has undergone one will attest:
This is actually very easy to put together, and, yes, inexpensive too. One option for the, er, fleshy part of the Mammo-Grahams was making them out of marzipan, but that could get very pricy very quickly. So I based them on a recipe for potato candy I found in Paula Deen’s dessert cookbook from The Lady and Sons; it’s normally used to make Easter Egg shapes. TO make about a dozen, depending on cup size:
October is officially National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. All kinds of related events take place during October: The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure takes place in cities across the country, the American Cancer Society holds its Making Strides Against Breast Cancer event, and National Mammography Day takes place on Friday, October 16th.
A couple of years ago, when I was doing a lot of party planning and catering, specializing in theme menus, the more inventive the better, a friend asked me to cater a unique party. A childhood cancer survivor, she and her mother had decided to throw a big bash celebrating 20 years of being cancer-free. Having been to a few shindigs of mine before, she knew the kind of funky, funny food I loved to put together, and she wanted her own food to be very irreverent, sort of thumbing her nose and laughing in the face of cancer. An example she thought of was serving deviled eggs – with black olive “tumors†in them. I asked if she really, REALLY wanted me to run with that, and she insisted she did, as long as it was still good food, so off I went, creating a whole menu devoted to different kinds of cancer.
One of my favorite items I invented for that menu was the “Mammo-Grahamâ€, which I share with you here today in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As you can see, it’s a fairly realistic edible depiction of the procedure, as anyone who has undergone one will attest:
This is actually very easy to put together, and, yes, inexpensive too. One option for the, er, fleshy part of the Mammo-Grahams was making them out of marzipan, but that could get very pricy very quickly. So I based them on a recipe for potato candy I found in Paula Deen’s dessert cookbook from The Lady and Sons; it’s normally used to make Easter Egg shapes. TO make about a dozen, depending on cup size:
