bins score and gingerbread

with sour cream icing...er...glop

two bucks! 

 

when friends give you strawberries

 

The strawberry fairies keep coming to my porch so I guess that means I have to bake up something and eat them up fresh as well. We've been enjoying tiny strawberry shortcakes, and this summer cake from smitten kitchen. So good!  

this is all I do now

 

Bake a few muffins here, a batch of cookies there, and oodles of sun tea and iced coffee everywhere. A girl can cope, can't she? 

let's hear it for another round of scones!

 

Aren't they pretty? 

covid baking adventure:

Baking goodness part two. I baked up this super easy apple cake from Dinner at the Zoo. While it does use an entire stick of butter, it only uses one cup of flour. I generally only use one apple for the top. This recipe has a crisp topped with a lovely buttery cake center. If feels a little wet from all the liquid the apples release, but it is so good! Make sure your toothpick is dry when you test it for doneness. Test it right smack dab in the middle too. I love this with coffee. The mister eats a tiny slice in one bite. I think it could be good as a gluten-free cake too if that's what hops your frog. 

covid baking adventure: breakfast muffins

I'm lucky I like to bake. It means we usually have an extra bag or two of flour hanging around. It's crazy how everyone has snagged up all the baking supplies, yikes! This recipe is super easy and uses only two cups of flour. I've been getting glorious fresh eggs from a friend's hens and I love how yellow the muffins turned out. Half the muffins got the basic treatment, while the other half got a dusting of cinnamon and sugar. I bet these would freeze well. They are definitely better the day they are baked but they also toast up nicely. Recipe is from I Heart Naptime. 

a pandemic tradition, I hope

 

Aka weekend scones. We had buttermilk and so I gave the mister puppy dog eyes and asked him if he could make is famous buttermilk scones, which are really from a recipe I found, but I just hate combing the cold butter to the flour. I have no idea why but it irks me. Scones are my favorite favorite and so I puppy dog eye it up and the mister makes the dough the night before and I bake them up the next morning. These have chopped crystallized ginger in them. SO GOOD! I would share the recipe if I could remember where I found it. I hope I can convince him to make a batch of dough every weekend. Fingers crossed! 

I finally baked the hummingbird cake!

Have you ever tried a hummingbird cake? I have only had one once before...many, many years ago. I was 13 or 14, visiting my sister and she had baked one. I thought it was way, way, way, too sweet. Even so...it stuck with me all these...decades? I finally made one...a little less sweet.

Traditionally, a hummingbird cake has coconut in it and is iced with cream cheese frosting (the recipe I used did not use coconut IN the cake). I omitted the coconut (mister is not a fan) and iced it with whipped cream that had a touch of buttermilk in it. Swoon! I used this recipe which was perfectly not-sweet...more like a banana bread. I used fresh pineapple, but canned will do in a pinch. I used 5 mini cake pans (a gift from the ever uber lovely zameander) and we ate it all up in two days...delicious!

sugar rush {a little post valentine's day goodness}

I've had this idea for magic bars for years. Years, I tell ya! Even before I made the pie. I don't know why it took me so long and while the photos look a bit tired, I have to tell you, these were ooey-gooey good! If you do decide to whip up a batch of valentine magic bars make sure you have a crowd over to enjoy them!

 

One of the things I did differently than the classic recipe was cutting out much of the butter to make the bottom crust. I used strawberry wafers, the kind that used to come with a scoop of ice cream when you ate out in the 1970s. Not necessarily good for you but these are magic bars which are simply tasty. I used about 3/4 of a pack I found at the dollar store. so gourmet!

I also added a second layer using Nabisco's Famous Chocolate Wafers. It's the chocolate and strawberry combo I was after in the first place. Pop about half a package of the wafers into a plastic bag, seal, then crush with a rolling pin. Your kiddos will love this part!

Next up I scattered marshmallows, m&ms and chocolate chips. On top of that I poured 140z of sweetened condensed milk. I know. Sweet! If you do try this, do not do what I did, add the sweetened condense milk on top of the cookie crumbs, then add the chocolate chips. Bake at 350 for about 25 minutes then add your marshmallows and m&ms. This way, the marshmallows will get gooey without browning...same as the m&ms.

Enjoy with a cold glass of your favorite milk drink. These are much better cool or the next day and of course shared with friends in small bites.

sweet november: dessert

Today's word is dessert. Dessert. I have to admit that while I probably have the largest sweet-tooth on the planet. I am not really a dessert girl...unless it's for breakfast, think scones, coffee cake, pie. At least, when I think of the word dessert, I tend to imagine some sort of baked alaska or creme brulee (good golly do I LOVE creme brulee) when the reality is, at home, when the mister reaches for the ice cream some time after dinner, I am usually pouring a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys instead. See? Breakfast...ish.

 

As it stands, I have not been to the grocery store in a while and I have not had a decent bowl of cereal in a few weeks (I'm trying to kick my cereal habit). I was thinking of baking pumpkin donuts for today or making an icebox cake (I've had an idea for an ice box cake since last year that I have yet to do) but I was feeling utterly defeated by an early morning asthma attack and we had no whipped cream. What we did have was a box of brownie mix and some peanut butter chips.

But brownies on their own are hardly worthy of a dessert crown so I baked 'em up in a pie pan and then popped the rest of the batter into two small ramekins and a pilfered pyrex storage container. I like my brownies a little less gooey than is the norm so I usually make 'em a little longer. The pie pan baked up in about 28 minutes but the ramekins took longer (about 40) as they were deep dish. I know this because I dipped a spoon in for a photograph and eked when I saw the goo!

So next time you want to serve a fancy dessert why not make it brownies? A wedge of brownie dusted with powdered sugar or a dollop of barely sweetened whipped cream would pack a punch as would individual deep dish servings served up in pretty white ramekins. I got mine from Target.

****Hello November and thanks for joining us! It's officially a photo-a-day challenge (with words if you like but not necessary, I just tend toward wordiness). Click here to see the photo list and here to see Tara's photos.  Hopefully you'll be inspired to play along with us, and at the end of the month we'll have weeks worth of fun photos to share with each other! Think of it as a guided way to get all NaBloPoMo  on yer blog.  Leave a comment and share your sweet november photos.****

banana oat muffins

 

 

  I had a hankering for banana muffins and found this recipe online. The granola topping was my own flair...these I will definitely make again!

and then came the cookies

A while back, I entered a cookie recipe in the great Pillsbury Bake-Off. I had an idea and worked on about five variations of the ideas before settling on a cookie to enter. It was chosen because of its overall appeal to my taste testers. There were others we liked a little more but I needed something that could come out tasty consistently all the while looking happy. One of the cookies that didn't make it was inspired by my favorite chocolate crackles. I love the texture of those cookies and was trying to figure out a way to replicate it without making a chocolate treat. 

After much internet searching I found a cake-mix cookie hack (at Tidy Mom) and tried it. Delicious if not a tad too much. I tucked that idea back into my brain and carried on like I usually do. After baking the cake batter blondies I wanted to make a cake batter cookie, so out came the cake mix and the sprinkles and soon, happiness was served.

 

 I used a yellow box mix for these and they held the texture nicely. I would compare them to a thinner, flatter, cake-mixier snickerdoodle. They are super easy to make and your kiddos can play as well.

Enjoy!

pinterest strikes again

and has turned me into a cake batter addict...cake batter blondies. sugar overkill, but oh sooooo tasty!

**click here for Gracie's original post.