Scones for the Win!

I know. January 16th and it's only my second post of the year. Lame. Even though I haven't been in school, I've been working 40 hours a week and simply not taking my camera into the kitchen when I make things. However a few delicious things have come out of our itty bitty kitchen in the past week or so:

Thanksgiving Detox Soup
Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Bites
lots of Yogurt Flatbreads
& BBQ Veggie Chili

The recipe I have for you today was made at my parents house a few weeks ago. But it was so good that even though it's out of date I'm going to share it anyway.

I've never been a big scone person. They're always pretty dry. Let's be honest: if I'm going to treat myself, I'm going to make a milkshake out of Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Bites and Trader Joe's french vanilla ice cream (not that Kyle and I did that last weekend or anything). But these aren't just any scones. These scones are pumpkin, whole wheat, AND vegan.

And tasty enough that I may have survived on them for two days when I came back to an empty kitchen in Pittsburgh.

I came across the recipe, here. These were created the same day as the previous baking adventure. Aka- Molly took all the sweet pics. Enjoy!

This is step (the whole - mixing dough by hand thing) that is always the hardest. This go round I did learn the lesson that it should be done with a pastry cutter. I also was able to take advantage of having a boy in the kitchen :)

The rolling of the dough into circles/ cutting it into quarters part was by and far my favorite part. Not really sure why..

Then we made a tasty glaze:

And viola! Best breakfast, lunch, desert any/all time of the day snack. 

Semi Healthy Baking?

It's possible, believe it or not. Given the amount of butter and sugar that most of my recipes have been calling for lately, I think this was necessarily. Mike suggested we make zucchini bread and I was all about it (I hadn't made a cake-y bread in ages). When I told Molly what was going down she volunteered to document (read: the pictures for this post are awesome).

First: After a lot for google and foodgawker searches, we settled on this recipe. They're pretty healthy all-in-all. There is some white flour, but we did replace the oil with applesauce. We added a little more chocolate (the bar we bought was 4.25 oz) and made a bunch of muffins instead of bread and some muffins.

Ingredients:

Mike shredded the zucchini:

Wet Ingredients

Chocolate!

Into the super-greased muffin tins (yes, one of the pans is for giant muffins - just because Molly found it in the cabinet)

And in significantly less than the time listed in the recipe later:

Unfortunately they came out a little tough. 50 minutes was way too long for muffins. If Mike hadn't made a point to check them, they definitely would have been burned to a crisp. 

I was much happier with the recipe we made after this, but I'll save that for the next post.

Happy 2012!!

Nuts for Christmas

I'm so clever.

This year I was really stuck on what to get my aunt and my nanny. So I defaulted to what I do best- food. My sister had made them both candied nuts in the past, so I figured that was a good place to start. My mom has a collection of recipes for this sort of thing, but I wanted to try something new. I settled on a recipe for lemon pepper nuts and cinnamon sugar nuts. I altered them both slightly and settled on these combinations:

Lemon Pepper on the left, Cinnamon Sugar on the right

My mom tends to have every nut under the sun on hand, which was real convenient for this recipe. I settled on this combination:

Peanuts, almonds, walnuts, and I even shelled a bunch of pistachios. 

To coat the nuts, I beat an egg white with a tablespoon of water until it was frothy. I'm not sure if I beat it quite long enough, but it seemed to work fine.

Next, I melted butter and brushed a cookie sheet with it. 

I preheated the oven to somewhere around 350 (I don't remember the exact temp, sorry!). I then set the timer for an hour and fifteen minutes. Yeah - that long. Every twenty minutes or so I checked them and moved them around so the sugar didn't burn and the nuts didn't combine into one sugary mess. After an hour and fifteen the cinnamon sugar were done.

The lemon pepper nuts took another twenty minutes or so. I think it had something to do with the lack of brown sugar. But eventually they came out nice and crispy:

My nanny and my aunt were both pretty happy to get them yesterday. I think I liked the lemon pepper ones the best. The cinnamon sugar ones weren't quite up to snuff, so I definitely think I'm going to keep trying different recipes

I also made my relatives some of this "Christmas Crack." too. Which I think went over the best. It was kind of a last minute thing so I didn't document it. It's often made with matzoh during Passover (ie. I've been familiar with it since I joined my best friend's Jewish family in the 7th grade). I definitely recommend it for any occasion.

I also have an old-school Betty Crocker cookie recipe on the way, so stay tuned, and Merry Christmas! 

Magic Mallow Bars

I've had a thing for rice crispie treats since I was a senior in high school. In those days we often added food coloring, or used different cereal (ie. cinnamon toast crunch). My friend's mom used to get mad when we made them, they're so irresistible. Since then, I've graduated to inhaling the cocoa puff treats our dining hall at Pitt used to make and adding everything to them from peanut butter to Nutella to marshmellow fluff. 

I read Avery's blog an awful lot, and when she posted this recipe for kitchen sink crispie treats, I knew it was for me. My friend Candice needed a gift for a co-worker, so I jumped at the chance to give these a try. 

The kitchen sink ingredients:

We chopped up the peanut butter cups. And neither Candice or I cut off a finger ;)

I've never made these before by microwaving the marshmallows (I've always melted the butter on the stove, then added the marshmallows). I think this way was easier though.

Puffed up 'mallows:

Then I just dumped everything in and mixed. It got real sticky, real fast, but that was expected. I poured the mixture into a 9 x 9 glass dish covered in tin foil and then sprayed with Pam, for easier removal. Then Candice melted more chocolate and we drizzled it over the treats. I had Christmas sprinkles from the dollar aisle at Target that seemed that the perfect final addition:

I didn't taste test them myself, but I heard they were gone pretty quickly. 

White Chocolate, Macadamia Nut, Caramel Cream Cookies

Finals week knocked me over, I'm not going to lie. It feels like it's been forever since I last posted! Cooking has been going down, both documented and undocumented. Nick and I have had some baking fests and Kyle and I baked up storms of Christmas cookies. More details on those to come, though. Today's post is about my first attempt at making Kyle and my favorite cookie, white chocolate macadamia nut.

I found this recipe via foodgawker (of course). I knew macadamia nuts were expensive, but daaayum. Totally worth it though. 

Unfortunately I haven't been the best at documenting lately. I've also been doing this completely by my ipod, so please excuse the even-more-than-usual-less-than-professional pictures. 

I ground up the nuts with my underused nut grinder. It made the pieces really small though, so I don't think I would use it again in the future. 

The recipe called for two teaspoons of milk, which I didn't have (I've been on an almond milk/banana smoothie kick lately, ie. I can't seem to keep milk in my apartment). Instead, I cut the butter by two tablespoons, and added a quarter cup of caramel cream.

The recipe for the cream came from this cookie recipe. Spoiler Alert: Kyle and I made these cookies last weekend, so I knew I couldn't go wrong adding it. It is the epitome of spatula-licking good. Note: if you're trying to make this cream yourself, I couldn't get the sugar to melt on it's own like the recipe says it will, so i added a little bit of cream earlier on. Clearly, it turned it just fine.Also, do NOT take your eyes off the pot once you turn it on high- it boils up almost immediately.

Dough:

It was awkwardly thin, so I popped it in the fridge for about fifteen minutes. Then it was perfect scooping consistency.

I was really pleased with how they turned out. I actually ate a bunch of them (if you've been keeping up with this blog, you'll know that I usually eat more of the dough/batter than I do of the finished product of anything I bake).

They were part of Kyle's Christmas present, and I think he was pleased as well :)

More recipes from the last few weeks to come!

Only the US would have a holiday devoted to eating

...But I am NOT complaining.

In addition to going to home for the longest period since May, I spend a lot of last week/ weekend making and eating some really delicious food. It began on Tuesday with this...

That's right. An inside-out, deep fried pizza, full of broccoli and onions. Courtosy of Kyle's hometown pizza shop. I'm not usually a big deep fried person, but I was in heaven with this. Yes, I did eat the entire thing. And no, I didn't regret one bite.

My family's thanksgiving feast was fabulous as usually. I didn't miss eating turkey at all really, and my Gram's famous stuffing recipe is conveniently vegetarian. By Saturday there were enough leftovers to justify make MORE food. My friend Mike and I whipped up a whole bunch of goodies. 

I'm not going to go through intricate detail since I'm a little strained for time (the number one thing I will not miss about college is finals). But here are some pictures and recipe links, enjoy!

Orange, Cumin, Vegetarian Chili

Betty Crocker Smores' Bars (with pumpkin spice marshmallows, peanuts, walnuts, and pecans!)

Peanut Butter, Oatmeal, Chocolate Chip Cookies

The Best of Fall in a Single Cookie

I don't know about you, but when I read/hear anything about the flavors "pumpkin," "ginger," or "molasses" I immediately think of the months October, November, and December. And what better way to celebrate the season (/ console myself that the weather is actually getting colder now) than to make a recipe to combines all three?

Eat, Me, Delicious had posted this recipe for Pumpkin, Ginger, Molasses Cookies last Monday. And with my first few hours of the week on Friday (yeah, it was one of those weeks) I knew I had to make them. I had a suspicion I knew someone who'd be all about helping me, so I invited Kyle over to help:

(Yep, I'm super lucky, and my boyfriend actually likes baking with me. Or he's a really good liar).

I had the ingredients on hand for the most part. I was a tablespoon short on the butter, so I just added two extra teaspoons of olive oil. 

It was pretty much your basic cookies recipe. I liked that it called for whole wheat flour from the beginning. I creamed the butter and sugar, and Kyle measured and mixed the flour and spices

I didn't realize the dough was supposed to be refrigerated for an hour before baking when we started, and I was kind of short on time (FeelGood was making sandwiches for The Original Magazine's Release Party - shameless plug, I know). Instead I put it in the freezer for 20 minutes or so and that seemed to do the trick. 

Next, we rolled balls of dough in sugar and put them on the baking sheet. Kyle gets most of the credit for this since I was running around cleaning and getting ready.

I think we ended up making them larger than we were supposed to. They took almost 20 minutes per batch (vs. 10-12 min) and we only got about 2.5 dozen (instead of 3.5). However, it did give us an excuse to eat them immediately when we took them out of the oven though! (Had to make sure they were done, right?)

The sugar baked into them more than the original recipe, or at least that's what I figure from the pictures. Either way- these were delicious! (and also fantastic with ice cream, if you're feeling adventurous). Christmas cookie season is quickly approaching and I can definitely say that this recipe will be repeated.

Happy Early Thanksgiving!