Mardi Gras & the Princess and the Frog

What do those two things have in common?

If you've seen the movie The Princess & The Frog, you know they have everything in common, because it takes place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

So when I was thinking about how we could celebrate, I didn't want to just go the obvious route:






So instead we celebrated, as usual, in the kitchen.... by making "man-catchin' beignets" (once again if you've seen the movie, you will understand the reference):








(But if you haven't seen it....Charlotte's family is throwing a Mardi Gras party and Charlotte tells Tiana she's going to need about 500 of her "man-catchin' beignets". My girls thought that phrase was super funny and repeated it over and over.)


From Google:

"In the US, beignets are associated with the city of New Orleans where they are served at restaurants such as Café du Monde. They are also the official state doughnut of Louisiana.

A beignet (pronounced /bɛnˈjeɪ/ in English, /bɛˈɲɛ/ in French; French for "fried dough") in the U.S. is a pastry made from deep-fried dough, much like a doughnut, and sprinkled with confectioner's sugar, or frostings."


I'd been promising the girls that we'd make them since we saw the movie over a year ago. But I try to stay away from anything at all that's deep-fried, so it just never happened. (It's bad enough to eat fried stuff, but to make it myself and actually see and smell all the oil that's being soaked up into stuff I'm about to eat, makes me a little sick.) But for Mardi Gras I figured it'd be a fun way to celebrate, New Orleans-style.



I made the dough the night before and then rolled it out:










Cut it into little squares and then -gulp- let it fry:











Watched 'em drip dry and then sprinkled with powdered sugar et voila:












Turns out there's a good reason why Charlotte called them "man-catchin'" too: