Category Archives: baking

Wheaties granola

baking, breakfast, kids, snacks 1 Comment

I should tell you how carefully I planned this recipe.

I should tell you how I planned for substituting Wheaties for half the oats in an effort to enhance the texture, flavor, and nutrition of the recipe.

I should also tell you that the truth is I ran out of oats.

Ahem.

Regardless of how I arrived at this version, I do make it this way on purpose now and I eat it with my lazy yogurt every single morning. And even the Kiddo loves it. That’s kind of a miracle, folks. It’s based on the recipe from Creative Kitchen because she didn’t use seeds in her recipe; she’s speaking my language.

Wheaties granola

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup honey or maple syrup (the real stuff, not “pancake syrup”)
  • 1 stick butter
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 cup wheat germ
  • 2 cups old fashioned rolled oats
  • 2 cups Wheaties cereal
  • 1 cup Craisins or raisins (optional, obviously)

Instructions

  1. Preheat your oven to 350F
  2. Melt butter and honey or maple syrup in a saucepan, then stir in remaining ingredients, making sure everything is well coated with the butter mixture
  3. Spread on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake for 10-15 minutes until the oats are golden brown
  4. Cool in the pan on a cooling rack for 20 minutes, then scrape in long strokes with a spatula to aid clumping. Store in a jar or zip top bag in the fridge

Peanut Butter Surprise Cookies

baking, kids 5 Comments

With just a few weeks to go till baby girl makes her debut I am all about easy recipes and shortcuts right now. When Pillsbury asked if anyone had any simple recipes to share for the holidays I knew this was for me! (Click here to see all the cookie ideas — there are definitely more I want to make!) These cookies have one of my favorite combinations, and the colors can be changed up for any celebration. The fact that Kiddo can easily help me with them makes me love them all the more.

Peanut Butter Surprise Cookies

Ingredients

  • 1 chub Pillsbury peanut butter cookie dough
  • Red and green chocolate candies
  • Colored sugar

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350°
  2. Sprinkle colored sugars onto plates
  3. Scoop up about an ounce of cookie dough and tuck a few chocolate into the middle. Roll the dough between your hands to make a ball with the candies hidden inside; repeat with remaining dough until you have 16 cookies, about 1 1/2” each.
  4. Roll each cookie in colored sugar so all sides are covered. Place 2” apart on parchment lined cookie sheet without flattening dough.
  5. Bake at 350° till golden brown, about 15 minutes. Cool on cookie sheet for two minutes, then move to a wire rack to cool completely.

Tips:

  • This is a great project for kids! They can poke in the candies, roll the dough, and love working with the sugar.
  • Customize the colors of the sugar for any holiday or team! What about taking these to a tailgate?
  • When baking with kids, use a pencil to mark an X on the underside of the parchment paper where each cookie should go; the mark will show through and show kids where to place cookies so they’re well spaced.
  • Colored sugar is found in the grocery store baking aisle, or can be easily made by stirring a couple drops of food coloring into 1/4 cup of white sugar (that’s what we did).

Cherry chocolate cookies

baking, dessert, kids 5 Comments

Are these not the happiest little cookies you’ve seen in a long time?

The Kiddo and I were having lunch with our friend Sarah, and we wanted to send her back to college with some goodies. I hadn’t tried this recipe before, but it looked like something Kiddo could easily help with, so we gave it a shot. Huge success! The original recipe called for chocolate icing over the cherries, but they were so colorful and pretty I didn’t have the heart to cover them up.

Cherry chocolate cookies

Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup butter, softened
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 cup cocoa powder
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp baking soda
  • 1 (10-ounce) jar maraschino cherries

Instructions

  1. Preheat your oven to 350F
  2. Cream together butter and sugar on low speed until light and fluffy; add egg and vanilla and mix well till completely incorporated
  3. Stir together flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and baking soda; add mixture to butter and sugar mixture and stir until combined
  4. Shape dough into 1-inch balls and place on ungreased or parchment-lined cookie sheet. Make a dent in the middle of each cookie with your thumb
  5. Drain the cherries, remove any stems and cut cherries in half; put one half cherry in the middle of each cookie
  6. Bake at 350F for 10 minutes; cool on baking sheet for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely

I used my very smallest cookie scoop to shape these and got 40 cookies. Sarah reports these, with coffee, are the breakfast of champions. 🙂

Pumpkin pie breakfast tarts

baking, breakfast, dessert, kids 5 Comments

Okay, these were meant to be like pop tarts, only with pumpkin pie filling. They turned out to be so much more flaky and tender and decadent than that that I’m not entirely sure what to call them! Other than, ahem, gone.

Moving on.

The long and the short of it: to make these I made pie crust from Ruhlman’s Ratio app on my iPhone, and a pretty standard pumpkin pie filling from Libby’s. I cut the pie crust into rectangles, put some cooked pumpkin pie filling on one, then a little egg wash around the edges, then put another rectangle on top and crimped the edges closed with a fork. A little more egg wash and a sprinkle of sugar on top, then baked at 400 for about 10 minutes.

To make these super fast you can absolutely use refrigerated, pre-made pie crust. Heck, you can buy an already-made pumpkin pie (hello, Publix bakery?) and scoop out the filling — see how fast this just got? Life is short; do what it takes. Here’s the longer way around, for those who are game:

Pumpkin pie breakfast tarts

Ingredients

For the pumpkin pie filling:
    • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
    • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
    • 1/2 teaspoon salt
    • 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
    • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
    • 2 large eggs
    • 1 can (15 oz.) pumpkin
    • 1 can (12 fl. oz.) evaporated (not condensed) milk
For the pie crust:
    • 340 grams (2.4 cups) of flour
    • 1/2 tsp salt
    • 2 Tbsp. sugar
    • 227 grams (1 cup) of butter
    • 113 grams (1/2 cup) cold water
For an egg wash:
  • One beaten egg + a little bit of water

Instructions

Make the pie filling:
    1. Mix together sugar, cinnamon, salt, ginger and cloves
    2. In a larger bowl beat eggs, then stir in pumpkin and sugar & spice mix, then slowly stir in milk
    3. Bake in a buttered glass dish at 325 F for about one hour, until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Since this is technically a custard, I set my glass dish in a larger dish, then filled the larger dish with enough water to come about halfway up the sides of the smaller dish (a water bath — aren’t we fancy?)
    4. Leave in the water bath to cool, then move to the fridge after an hour or so
Make the pie crust:
  1. Using a food processor, a pastry blender or a fork, cut the butter into the flour, salt and sugar till the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal, then pulse or cut in water till flour is just moistened (it will not look like pie crust yet)
  2. Shape into a disc, wrap in saran wrap and stash it in the fridge for at least 15 minutes, but up to a day
  3. Retrieve your pumpkin pie filling and make little pies! Go crazy. Use cookie cutter shapes, make rectangles, use biscuit cutters and make half moons — whatever entertains you. For each roughly pop-tart-sized rectangle I made I put in about 2 Tbsp. of chilled filling, but you can kind of eyeball it. The good news is that it’s not runny so it’s not going to go everywhere. Use a little egg wash around the edges before you seal them closed, then put a little more egg wash on the top and sprinkle sugar over it just to be pretty. Poke a couple holes in the top for steam to escape
  4. Bake on parchment-lined cookie sheets at 400F for about 10 minutes, but just keep an eye on them — you want lightly browned

Enjoy with coffee and remind yourself that this is a breakfast pastry containing pumpkin, which is a vegetable; you’re totally not eating pie for breakfast

Cranberry orange muffins

baking, breakfast, kids, snacks 1 Comment

This is based on a muffin recipe by Mark Bittman; I tweaked it to use some orange juice and — shocker — some Crasins. These are so good for breakfast, brunch, or even a snack! The Mickey Mouse muffin pan is not required, but certainly adds some cuteness. It does not, however, convince the Kiddo to eat any; your mileage may vary. Recipe made one dozen Mickey muffins.

Cranberry orange muffins

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 1/2 cup cornmeal
  • 1/2 cup sugar, or to taste
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 egg
  • 3 tablespoons melted butter
  • 1/2 cup orange juice
  • 1/2 cup milk, plus a little more if needed
  • 1 cup Crasins, fresh cranberries or frozen cranberries (no need to defrost first)

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 375F
  2. Mix dry ingredients together, then either mix egg through milk separately or in a well in the middle of the dry ingredients (my preferred method). Add in berries and gently fold everything together till it’s just barely incorporated; lumps are your friends
  3. Bake in a well greased or paper lined muffin pan for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick in the middle comes out clean. Cool in a metal or glass pan pan for 5 minutes before moving to a wire rack, longer for a silicone pan (wait for silicone to be cool to the touch for best results)