Recipe Wednesday: Apple Peanut Butter muffins

We've made this muffin recipe before and it was a huge hit, so thought I'd make them again and this time share them on the blog.

APPLE PEANUT BUTTER MUFFINS

All the ingredients and the recipe in the background

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup sugar, divided

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 ¹/₂ teaspoons cinnamon, divided

¹/₂ teaspoon salt

1 ¹/₂ cups shredded apples (about 2 medium)

1 cup lowfat buttermilk

¹/₂ cup creamy peanut butter

¹/₄ cup coconut or canola oil

1 egg, slightly beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

I promise, our floor was clean and he
didn't put any of the cups on the floor

1. Preheat oven to 400°F and line a 12 cup muffin tin with cupcake liners.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, 3/4 cup sugar, baking powder, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, and salt.

3. In another bowl, stir together the shredded apples, buttermilk, peanut butter, oil, egg, and vanilla.

4. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry, stirring until just mixed, being careful to not over mix.

5. Spoon the batter into the muffin tins. Combine the remaining sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle evenly over the muffin tops.

6. Bake for 18-20 minutes, or until the tops spring back when lightly touched. Cool on a wire rack.

Fresh outta the oven!

As you can see from the photo of the just baked muffins, we made 20 and the recipe says 12 muffins. I made smaller muffins that were the perfect size for two year old PGS. The original recipe says that you can shred the apples peel and all, but it was easier to peel the apple and shred it that way.

Recipe Wednesday: Cookies!

Yesterday was my husband's birthday and he had a pot luck event at work, so he asked me to make him some chocolate chip cookies to take in. And by some, that meant approximately 150 cookies! And since I was lacking a share-able recipe for this morning, I thought why not share our cookie recipe?

Our "secret" cookie recipe

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

³/₄ cup brown sugar

¹/₄ cup sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 egg

¹/₂ tsp baking soda

2 cups all purpose flour

12 oz baking chips

Optional Ingredients

1 cup oats

12 oz raisins or dried cranberries

All but the chips

Directions

1. Preheat to 350°F

2. Mix sugars and butter until smooth; mix in vanilla, egg and baking soda

3. Slowly mix in flour (and oats, if desired)

4. Add in baking chips (and/or fruit, if desired)

5. Bake for 10 minutes or until golden brown. Be careful not to overbake!

Fresh outta the oven!

Enjoy!!

We have a 4.5qt KitchenAid stand mixer and I don't remember making a double batch of cookie dough before this Monday when I made the cookies for my husband. Well...once I finished, it looked like it was a little a on the "too much" side for my mixer! lol

Recipe Wednesday: Snickerdoodle Cookies

I think my absolute favorite variety of cookie is the snickerdoodle. But the break and bake refrigerated variety just doesn't cut it. So this past weekend, when I was doing my normal, bi-weekly grocery shopping trip, I specifically bought some cream of tartar solely for making some snickerdoodles. I took to my friend, Chef Google  and searched for a snickerdoodle recipe. I found this one here and decided it was worth a try. Oh em gee! I am in love with these cookies!! 

SNICKERDOODLE COOKIES
Ingredients

¹/₂ cup butter (1 stick), softened

¹/₂ cup sugar

¹/₃ cup brown sugar

1 egg

¹/₂ tsp vanilla

1 ¹/₂ cups flour

¹/₄ tsp salt

¹/₂ tsp baking soda

¹/₄ tsp cream of tartar

3 tbs sugar

1 ¹/₂ tbs cinnamon

Directions

1. In a large bowl, cream the sugars and butter; add the egg and vanilla and beat until smooth.

2. In another bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking soda and cream of tartar.

3. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet and mix well.

4. Refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes. While the dough is chilling, mix together the cinnamon and remaining sugar in a small bowl for rolling.

5. Preheat to 300° F.

6. Roll the dough into approximately 14-18 dough balls. Then roll each ball in the cinnamon sugar mixture and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Press to flatten slightly.

7. Bake the cookies for 12-14 minutes and no longer. Cookies will be soft and chewy in the middle when they've cooled.

Butter and sugars

Combining all ingredients

Chilling the dough

Preheating the oven and the cinnamon sugar

Cookies in progress!

Cookie countdown!

Snickerdoodles! 

I am very happy with the way that this recipe turned out. My two year old was pretty happy, too. I made them Monday night and unfortunately, my 15 cookies did not make it to this morning. That is how much I liked them and so did PGS. (He really did keep asking for cookies, so it wasn't just my pregnant butt eating all of the cookies!)

Leave a comment and share your favorite cookie variety! I'd love to learn more about our readers. 

Recipe Wednesday: 7 Layer Bars [Guest Post from Cherished]

I am not feeling very well this week, so there is a guest post from Alecia over at Cherished Giftables. I know it's not Feature Friday, but I still recommend checking out her shop if you get a chance! I love her galaxy pendants and magnets - and I will get one before the summer is over!

(The recipe is the copy that she sent to me, with minimal editing.)

SEVEN LAYER BARS

Ingredient list:

3/4 cup butter(a stick and a half)

A sleeve and a half graham crackers

2 cup any kind of baking chips (I used 2/3 cup each semi-sweet, white and butterscotch)

1 cup walnuts

2/3 cup coconut flakes

14oz can of condensed milk

13x9 in pan

Well last night I made 7 layer bars for the second time...well to be honest I actually made 8 layer bars this time :) Thought I'd share, the great thing about this recipe is you can change tweak it however you want....you can change the kind of chips to your hearts content :)

I start by preheating the oven to 350

And putting 3/4 c (a stick and a half) of butter in a 13x9 pan and putting the pan in the oven till the butter melts

While the butter is melting I crush a sleeve and a half of graham crackers in a zip bag with my rolling pin

Once the butter is melted add the crushed graham crackers and pat down till its all even

Next I open up my can of condensed milk and drizzle about 1/4 of the can on top of the graham cracker

For the chips I used 3 different kinds, semi-sweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and butterscotch chips

I used about 2/3c of each and just evenly sprinkled each into the pan

Then I used about a cup of walnuts and sprinkled them evenly onto of the chips

Next an almost last:) I sprinkled on maybe 2/3c of coconut flakes onto the chips

Then I drizzled on the rest of the condensed milk

And lastly if you want I sprinkled a small handful of all the chips and a little coconut (I would have sprinkled walnuts too if I had held some put:))

Now you just bake for 30 mins

Let cool for 10-20 mins and cut into 24

I let it cool for a bit more then recut just to make sure it didn't run back into itself

Now this is very important and hard to do!!! Cover it and let it cool all night don't eat it yet it won't taste right until it has sat for awhile. When you're ready to eat it the next day you'll just have to break them apart I usually poke a butter knife in the cuts

Here is a link to the original post Alecia posted on her blog:
http://cherishedgiftables.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/7-layer-bars/

If you have the chance to do so, I recommend checking out her Storenvy and her facebook page.

Thank you to Alecia for sharing this recipe with us!

Recipe Wednesday: Cinnamon Raisin-Cranberry Rolls

Saturday evening, PGS and I made these cinnamon raisin rolls from Betty Crocker. In the suggestions section of the recipe, it suggested subbing dried cranberries for the raisins and since I had both on hand and I know PGS will eat the raisins and cranberries instead of putting them in the bowl, I added both.

CINNAMON RAISIN-CRANBERRY ROLLS

Ingredients

Ingredients assembled

Biscuits

2 ¹/₂ cups Original Bisquick® mix

Raisins and dried cranberries

²/₃ cup milk

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

A generous sprinkling of cinnamon sugar to make up for the lost measured ingredients 

Vanilla Glaze

³/₄ cup powdered sugar

1 tablespoon warm water

¹/₂ teaspoon vanilla

Directions

1. Heat oven to 450°F. In medium bowl, stir all biscuit ingredients just until soft dough forms.

Stir ingredients

2. Place dough on surface generously dusted with Bisquick mix; gently roll in Bisquick mix to coat. Shape into ball; knead 10 times. Roll 1/2 inch thick. Cut with 2 1/2-inch cutter dipped in Bisquick mix. On ungreased cookie sheet, place biscuits 2 inches inches apart.

We used bunny cookie cutters instead of boring, old circles

3. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until golden brown. While biscuits are baking, in small bowl, beat all glaze ingredients with spoon until smooth. Spread glaze over warm biscuits.

Sorry it's upside down, I didn't think about that when I snapped the picture

I measured out the milk,sugar and cinnamon before letting PGS help mix the ingredients, but that didn't really matter because he got excited and missed the bowl for the sugar/cinnamon muffin cup and about half ended up on my counter. I got out the premixed cinnamon sugar shaker in my cabinet and let him shake some into the bowl. I think we ended up with more than the sugar and cinnamon specified in the directions, but oh, well! PGS also insisted that I let him help knead the dough, except that he either misunderstood what "kneading" is or understood that he was supposed to copy what Mommy was doing, but didn't care because when I asked him to knead the dough, he took a bite out of it!  Then he insisted on helping roll the dough out - this task he actually did a really good job of.  As you can see in the picture above, he helped cut out the dough.

In my opinion, they are much better while warm than at room temperature, so if you have any leftovers, I suggest a 10-15 second microwave heat up.

Recipe Wednesday: Homemade Brownies

Recipe Wednesday is finally including the help of two year old PGS! The last couple of weeks when I've tried to get him interested in making stuff, he just didn't want to help. This week, he saw chocolate chips and wanted to help. Go figure! Let me warn you, if you like brownies and choose to make this recipe, it's amazing and you will want to eat the whole pan of brownies in one sitting! 

I originally found this recipe on Pinterest, but here is the link to the blog post it came from.

BROWNIES (I have renamed them: To Die For )

Ingredients

4 eggs

1 ¹/₄ cups unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

3 tsp vanilla extract

2 sticks butter

2 ¹/₄ cups sugar

1 ¹/₂ cups all purpose flour

1 ¹/₂ cups chocolate chips (semi sweet) Chocolate syrup

Chocolate chips are on the original ingredients list, chocolate syrup is not

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F and lightly grease a 8"x8" pan. If desired, line bottom of pan with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, add 4 eggs, and beat with cocoa, salt, baking powder and vanilla. Stir until fully combined and smooth.

Combining the ingredients (PGS is keeping his hands on the counter and out of the way)

3. In a medium sized bowl, melt butter in the microwave (or melt in a small sauce pan on the stove). When melted, add sugar, and stir to combine.

Mixing up the melted butter and sugar

4. Add warm butter/sugar mixture to the egg/cocoa mixture, stirring until smooth. Make sure the butter mixture is warm, but not too hot, or it will scramble your eggs.

5. Add the flour and chocolate chips to batter and stir until fully incorporated.

Mixing up all the ingredients until just combined

6. Spread batter into prepared pan, and smooth as needed. Drizzle with chocolate syrup.

I chose to drizzle the chocolate syrup over the batter instead of folding in the chips

7. Bake brownies about 30 minutes. Test for doneness by inserting a toothpick in the center of the brownies and making a little divot so you can see the center a bit. You should find moist crumbs, but no wet batter.

8. Cool pan on wire cooling rack.

Fresh outta the oven!

Recipe Wednesday: Homemade Funfetti Cake

This is the basic yellow cake recipe from my KitchenAid stand mixer's manual/recipe book. I know that store bought Pillsbury original is a white cake mix, but I'm too lazy to separate eggs, so I just use the yellow cake mix. 
My son is a huge fan of Monsters, Inc and Monsters University, so when I saw some sprinkles in the grocery store that made me think of Sully, I asked him if he wanted a Monsters birthday cake. He got excited and nodded excitedly (I think this was just a response to seeing the container of sprinkles though). And then I let him pick some candles, he chose some dinosaur shaped ones. If it isn't obvious yet, he loves to roar.  I then let him help pick out some frosting and he chose the bright blue Pillsbury Funfetti frosting.

Quick Yellow Cake
Ingredients
2 ¹/₄ cup all-purpose flour
1 ¹/₃ cup sugar
3 tsp baking powder
¹/₂ tsp salt
¹/₂ cup shortening
1 cup low-fat milk
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs

Directions (modified from original recipe)
1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Combine dry ingredients; add shortening, milk and vanilla.
2. Mix ingredients until wet and add eggs.
3. Pour batter into cupcake liners. Bake for 15-22 minutes, cupcakes are done when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
4. Cool completely on wire rack; frost if desired.

Dry Ingredients

Sprinkles for a Monsters, Inc inspired cake and wet ingredients

I dumped the whole container of sprinkles into the batter for the Funfetti effect

Ready for baking!

Frosted, sprinkled and candled, ready for partying!

Everyone except for the birthday boy enjoyed the cupcakes. He didn't eat any cake on his first birthday and he only got upset about the frosting on his fingers this year, he refused to even try the cake. Who knows, he may never like cake or he might like it for his third birthday? Although, he did pick out a chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting on it from the Barnes & Noble café for his free Cheesecake Factory cookie or cupcake, so maybe it's just that he was given a white cake for his first birthday and a yellow cake for his second? Because he ate most of his B&N cupcake until his daddy said no more cupcake so that he'd eat his dinner.