I Don't Just Bake Sweets

It seems I mostly blog about desserts... but I did try two new supper recipes in the last few days. Sunday I made home-made corn chowder and yesterday I made honey-garlic chicken legs. I won't post either recipe though, because neither was GREAT. They weren't terrible either though. I am not a huge soup fan so I thought maybe if I made it, I would like it better... I didn't. It wasn't the soup's fault. I even wished for the soup to turn out great because I had a funny title planned for the blog I would write about my delicious soup. The chicken tasted good and smelled fabulous, but it wrecked my black pan. I even lined my pan with tinfoil but the sauce got under somehow and I can't get it clean. I guess I just have a lot better luck experimenting with desserts and snacks than with "real" meal food. Tonight we are having sloppy joes - they will turn out great because I just have to add water and tomato paste.

I Can't Believe He's Two!!!

It was Jacob's second birthday this weekend... and that means CAKE! He is really into trains right now so I made him a "Choo Choo" cake. He ate the gummi bear passengers and the chocolate wheels first and then he ate my gummis and chocolates, and then he didn't want any cake. Oh well, we still had a fun evening!

Blow!

Cake!

So for playgroup this week I thought I would experiment on the kids... I have this recipe for allergen-free cupcakes. No milk. No eggs. No butter. No nuts. Sounds interesting for when you have nothing in your cupboard... and they actually turned out really great! They are very moist and chocolatey and delicious. Though I did make vanilla icing to put on top and used butter in that! Also, I think I have finally figured out how to put my recipes on these posts without them somehow looking completely different everytime. I'm not very good at computers. Anyways.... I took 19 cupcakes to playgroup (the recipe made 21 for some reason, and one needed to be taste-tested before I iced them and one needed to be tested after I iced them) and between 5 adults and 9 kids (though Daniel didn't eat one) only 1 was left. I saved it for Jeff.

Allergen-Free Chocolate Cupcakes

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Recipe By: Martha Stewart Cupcakes

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups flour

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup baking cocoa

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup vegetable oil, plus 1 tbsp

1 tbsp white vinegar

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/4 cups water

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350.

Sift dry ingredients together.

Mix liquids together until well blended. Add flour mixture and mix until very smooth.

(Batter will be very thin)

Line muffin pan and fill each 3/4 full.

Bake 20-25 minutes rotating once.

Cool completely.

Dust with cocoa powder and/or icing sugar just before serving.

Move Over Reese...

Now here is a yummy treat!  No oven needed, just a microwave, and you can make your very own "Reese's Pieces."  Jacob kept saying "Mmmmmm.... Mmmmmmm" the whole time he ate one, it was cute. Then he asked for another. Seeing as how not healthy these are, I gave him a peach instead. I also forgot to follow the instructions to cut after chilling for five minutes, so the chocolate kind of broke apart a bit. I got busy shredding a gigantic zucchini that was given to me. I don't have a food processor so I hand grated it and it took about half an hour. So the chocolate was good and set by that point. After cutting and being annoyed with myself I remembered that if I had just let it come to room temperature it would have cut easily. Oh well, they still taste good. Keep chilled!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

2 ½ cups graham crumbs

1 cup peanut butter (I use creamy)

1 cup butter, melted (I use hard margarine)

2 ¾ cups icing sugar

2 cups chocolate chips, semi-sweet

Mix all ingredients (except chocolate) in medium bowl.
Press into 9x13 pan.
Melt chocolate chips (with 1 tbsp of margarine and peanut butter if desired)
Spread melted chocolate over crust. Chill 5 minutes and cut into bars before chocolate is completely set. Chill to set chocolate before serving.


PS. I grated 16 cups of zucchini, in case you wanted to know.

That's a Wrap!

Someone from church gave us a whole bunch of apples. I contemplated making applesauce, which seems easy enough, except that I don't have an apple peeler/corer  and they are very small apples. I don't really know when I would find the time to peel two grocery bags of tiny apples. So I made an apple crisp. Yum. What next? Apple turnovers are good, but every recipe I found said to use a package of pre-made pastry dough. I didn't have that in my fridge. So maybe I could try apple pie? But I only had a 1/2 cup of hard margarine. No shortening or butter. Also, I don't have a proper pie plate. But what do I find then??? A recipe for something called a Wrapper Pie: no pie plate required!!! I was missing half the things needed to make it, but I figured I could make something up. Voila! The "Mini WrApple Pie" is born! This was the most perfect looking one of the bunch:

Perfect!

So delicious hot or cold (I tried it both ways, now I just need to try it with ice cream!). Jeff rated them an 8/10, but the one he ate wasn't as pretty looking.

I still have about 4 cups of sliced apples left, so I stuck them in the freezer. I found an interesting recipe for Apple Brownies that maybe I will try, or I will just make these again.

Mini WrApple Pies

Ingredients

• CRUST
• 2 ½ cups flour
• 1 tbsp sugar
• ¼ tsp ground ginger
• ¼ tsp salt
• ½ cup canola oil
• ¾ cup milk
• FILLING
• ⅓ cup brown sugar
• ⅙ cup flour
• ½ tbsp butter
• 2 cups apples, diced small

Method

Roll out dough to 1/4" and use 4" circle cookie cutter to make 12 circles.

Roll each individual circle out quite thin.

Make a pile in the center of each circle with the filling.

Carefully fold dough over making 5 pleats.

Put a couple of slivers of butter on top of apples.

Sprinkle with sugar.

Bake at 400 for 20 minutes.

Makes a dozen.

Too Busy To Bake?

Not with this recipe!!! A good friend told me I had to make my chocolate chip cookies just so that I could post the recipe on my blog. They are delicious and so fast! In order to save time, I don't really make cookies... I stick all the dough in one pan and cut them into about 48 cookie-bars once cooled. (You can make these as regular cookies, just watch the bake time... about 10-12 minutes)
So I baked these up a couple of days ago, and we already had to hide them in the cupboard because we ate about half of them in one day.

Busy Mama's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• ¾ cup sugar
• ¾ cup brown sugar
• 1 cup hard margarine, softened
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 egg
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 1 cup chocolate chips

Method

Heat oven to 375.

Beat sugars, butter, vanilla and egg together.
Stir in flour, baking soda and salt.
(Dough will be stiff)
Add chocolate chips.

Press dough into ungreased pan 13x9x2.
Bake 20 minutes until golden brown.
Cool in pan.

Goodbye Ugly!

Our kitchen had THESE ugly tiles for our backsplash. To me they look like bathroom tiles from the 80's.

Tulips!?!

So today Jeff and I (though I must confess mostly Jeff) painted over these tiles with a nice shade of pale gray.  The boys were really good and it was finished in one morning.

So now my kitchen is a little less blue, but a lot less ugly.