Tag Archives: Baking

The breakfast experiment

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Last week, I sought the wisdom of Facebook and asked with other mothers were feeding their kids in the morning. Breakfast is most definitely my least favorite meal and as a result, Sylvi is the only one who actually eats it most days. Periodically, I’ll get in a breakfast-y mood and start making baked goods or couscous… but it never lasts. Anyway, this week it suddenly hit me that since I’m not a big breakfast eater, I tend to just spend my morning handing out snacks to the kids.

My kids love their carbs (like their mama, of course) and so our snacks are often some form of a cracker or another. The more I thought about it, I realized that when I snack on carbs, not only am I hungry about 10 minutes later, I feel crummy and grouchy because I’m hungry again. But, you see… I can communicate this because I’m an adult and I fully understand my hunger cues. My three and half year old? Not so much. So I’ve committed to making a breakfast daily that incorporates protein in an attempt to see how things go and if it makes any impact our days for the next two weeks.

So here we are on day #3 and I had planned to make cinnamon rolls and eggs, but forgot to start the dough last night. We woke up to find that a leprechaun left us green snot for our holiday. Boo. Anyway, I decided on waffles and since there was a left over sweet potato in the fridge, I made this recipe. I have no idea where the original recipe came from, but my notes have lines all over it, as I adapted it significantly. I just have no self control when it comes to making my own creative mark on a meal, I guess.  Even with the addition of the sweet potato, these waffles are your typical golden color, but they are sweet and fluffy.  Sylvi ate two entire waffles and a piece of bacon!

Orange Sweet Potato Waffles

  • 1 sweet potato, mashed (about 1 cup)
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 melted butter
  • 1/2 Tbsp. orange extract
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 Tbsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt

Mix the sweet potato, eggs, brown sugar, butter, orange extract and salt together. I find that a hand mixer is very helpful since the sweet potato makes the batter very thick. Sift together the baking powder and flour and alternate adding it and the milk until all ingredients are incorporated. Put a scoop of the batter into each well of your heated waffle iron and cook until golden brown.

To make these waffles even more tasty, melt 2 Tablespoons of butter with 1/2 cup pure maple syrup and the zest of one orange in a small pan over medium heat. Bring the mixture to a boil, lower the heat and simmer for two minutes, whisking constantly. Then pour the syrup over your warm waffles and listen your family sing your praises! ;)

If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry

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You’re supposed to be reading a well thought out post about my home organization. It was going to be great and I was really excited to share how we are taming the daily beast lately. Considering today, though… I’m thinking I’ve goofed.

Sylvi is back to waking up long before my alarm goes off, so I start my day pretty early. I am feeling pretty calm and collected on a regular basis. It’s nice, you know? This morning, I had all our beds made before Matt even left for work, the kids and I were dressed and I had pancakes on the griddle. At 930, I was shocked to walk into the living room and realize I was supposed to be babysitting and the family was here. Uh huh, I tried to be cool and would have never mentioned this, but it definitely sets the tone for how under the bus I was for the rest of the day.

Morning: manageable. Then, 45 minutes after my extra charges left absolute insanity hit. Thus far, my philosophy on parenting has been to stay one step ahead of the short people. Oh and remember where I set the dirty diaper. For the most part, this goes well for me. And then, I get overconfident and try to bake a cake while the kids are eating lunch, get distracted by Lord knows what, resume the cake baking and get it in the oven only to realize that the house was silent. I went to investigate only to find my children hunkered down behind the 25 year old child-sized rockers in Sylvi’s room. The overwhelming smell of Burt’s Bees baby powder hit me in the hallway from behind the closed bedroom door. They had managed to dump out at least 50%-75% of the bottle on the floor: Liam was scooping it up to “make art” on the walls and Sylvi was scooping it up to eat it.

I called my wisest mom friend who then told me to call poison control. While on the phone with that kind lady, I herded the kids into the bathroom since they were ghost white from all the powder to prepare to bathe them. She asked for the ingredients on the bottle, so I left the room only to hear a loud crash and Sylvi try out her newest word: “oops”. In the corner of the shower/bath, we have a tension rod with baskets on it. It took two adults to install it 2 years ago. However, the two small children who climbed in the empty bathtub who decided they wanted the shark in the lowest basket managed to yank the entire thing down, which then almost took out the shower curtain.

Listen. When the lady from poison control wishes you a “less eventful” afternoon, it’s a sign you’re not a wimp and it’s ok to take a break. So I dressed both kids and informed them we were all taking a quiet time. This of course did not occur until I discovered a missing bottle of body wash in Sylvi’s room. Said bottle of body wash, has a pump on top. I have visions of the kids bouncing up and down on that pump while I wrestled with the tension rod in the bathroom. Regardless of how the soap managed to get on the floor, it got there. I just stood there and laughed. At least my floors are really clean.

I have a terrible headache, can’t stop thinking about chocolate and am counting the moments until back up arrives. But, I now know beyond a shadow of doubt, silence is certainly not golden and tension rods loosen their hold over time. The point of this quite laughable story from my day is really to myself. Had this kind of a day happened 2 or 3 years ago, I’d have called my husband sobbing and begging him to come home because I didn’t trust myself to remain calm. Today, I called him to ask if he’d mind stopping at the Y to pay our membership fee. Considering the day’s mayhem, it’s probably better if I don’t attempt to take my little hooligans out in public. :) Yes, today has been hard. Yes, today is not over. But today, I realized that I needed to stop and take a break. My husband won’t be coming home to a tidy house or children in matching clothes, but that cake that kept me from being attentive to my children’s mischievousness was amazing.

Snickerdoodle spin

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Who loves snickerdoodles? Me!!! And when I’m in a pinch, breakfast becomes cookies. I’ve been adding as many nutritional factors as possible so I feel less guilty when those days do happen. Ahem.

Pumpkin Snickerdoodles

  • 1 cup butter, room temperature soft
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup pumpkin (or butternut squash) puree
  • 1 large egg
  • 2 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 3 cups flour
  • 1 cup wheat germ
  • 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. sea salt
  • 1/2 ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp. ground ginger
  • 1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
With your electric mixer, beat together the eggs, butter and sugar. Beat until the ingredients are light and fluffy. Stir in the vanilla and pumpkin. Sift the flour, wheat germ, baking powder, salt and spices together and then stir into the pumpkin batter.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and butter/line baking sheets. Mix together half a cup of sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. ginger, 1/4 tsp. nutmeg and a pinch of salt. Scoop the dough in equal scoops (ice cream scoop still my favorite method to do this) and then roll the ball in the sugar/spice mixture. On a standard cookie sheet, you should be able to fit 12 cookies evenly spaced apart. With the bottom of a clean glass, press down the cookie so they are slightly flattened. Recoat the tops of the cookies with the sugar mixture if necessary.
Bake for 12-14 minutes. The recipe makes 3 1/2 to 4 dozen cookies.

 

Nutella does it… AGAIN!

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There are some people who don’t think that oatmeal belongs in cookies. I on the other hand, think they make the cookies. This recipe makes almost 4 dozen GIANT cookies, so consider yourself warned. I used dark chocolate chips and mini m&ms because that’s what I had in the cupboard, but you could use any combination of mix-ins you like. Nuts. Chocolate: white, dark, semi-sweet. Heck, you could even make a mixture of dried fruit and chocolate.

I love this recipe because I added Nutella and used both smooth and creamy peanut butters. So the cookie is crispy around the edges, but the center is chewy. They pack well and the batter stores very nicely until you’re ready to use it.

Nutella Monster Cookies

  • 1 stick soft butter
  • 1 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  •  3 large eggs
  • 1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
  • 1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
  • 1/2 cup Nutella
  • 2 tsp. baking soda
  • 2 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 1/2 cup wheat germ
  • 4 cups rolled oats
  • 1 1/2 cups mix-ins: chocolate, candy, dried fruit, nuts
Cream together the butter, sugars and eggs. Then, blend in the peanut butters and nutella. Stir in the rest of the ingredients and mix the candy in as evenly as you can. Scoop the dough onto a lined cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

On cookie baking, chaos and children

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Growing up, cookie baking for the holidays was a big, family event. Mom would put it on the calendar and we’d all gather around the kitchen table rolling, cutting, dusting… whatever needed done. We usually started in November and froze the cookie which were then pulled out and thawed in time to be shared with friends and family. We always made Bethlehem Star Cookies, Sour Cream roll out cookies and Thumbprints.

My first Christmas in my own home was far different than I had anticipated and so I baked. Almost 12 dozen cookies. I wasn’t really good at making decisions that year. Over the years, my cookie baking has decreased and one year I even used store bought cookie dough (gasp!). Last year, the cookies I baked were thanks to a cookie exchange with my MOPS table. If not for that exchange, I doubt I would have even tried.

This year, my children are both interested not only in the baking process, but the eating of the cookies. In fact, Sylvi who applies a less-is-more attitude to speaking has been fairly vocal about her love of “kee-kees”. Liam, having a few years experience, is more than happy to help me usher in all the baked goods. In theory, this is the makings of an idyllic Sunday afternoon spent baking with adorable children, holiday music in the background and plenty of photographs to look back on and smile. Note that I said “in theory”.

Perhaps it’s just my kids. Perhaps it’s their age. Perhaps my enormous kitchen isn’t really all that helpful when it comes to holiday baking with the under 4 set. I’m not sure. But the first cookie baking attempt with both children as helpers ended with all three of us in tears and a dozen organic eggs smashed on the floor. Upon scrubbing the floor, I decided we needed a new plan and got to business.

So far, I’ve baked 5 different kinds of cookies. And aside from that first experience, they’ve all been peaceful.  I used one afternoon to whip up several cookie doughs, packed them in tupperware and labeled them with a post-it. Then, I hung all the recipes on the side of the fridge and waited until we needed an activity. This way, the kids are helping me put the cookies on the sheets, but no one is fighting over who gets to do what. It’s also worked out that I’ve baked each batch with the kids separately. And what a blessing that is! It’s been a mini date with Mama every time we bake… Sylvi hasn’t gotten the same amount of one-on-one during the day (believe me though, all those loooong nights she got plenty of mama time, I just like to hang out with her when I’m not struggling to stay awake.) so I was grateful for the time with just her.

Sylvi and her mini-me mixer helping bake

Liam isn’t as into baking this year as he has been in the past… he just wants to eat. But it’s all new to Sylvi, so she’s been my helper far more often than Liam. We have one more batch of cookies to make for the neighbors and our mailman and then I think our sugar fest will take a break. At least until Valentine’s Day anyway.

Cranberries: food of power!!!

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Today, I wrote a food spotlight for the Mommy and Me Fitness Blog on Cranberries… gosh I love them!  So check out the blog and then go make a batch, or two of these muffins.  You’ll thank me, I’m sure of it!

Cranberry-Citrus Power Muffins

  • 3.5 cups flour
  • ¼ cup flax meal
  • ¼ cup wheat germ
  • 2 tsp. Baking powder
  • 1 tsp. Baking soda
  • 1 tsp. Salt
  • 3 cups raw cranberries
  • 4 eggs, lightly beaten
  • 2 cups plain Greek Yogurt
  • 1 cup canola oil
  • 3 tsp. Orange extract
  • zest of half an orange

In a large bowl, combine the wet ingredients and mix well.  Sift together the dry ingredients and stir into the wet ingredients until well mixed.  Pour in the cranberries and stir to combine.  Fill 3 dozen muffin cups with batter about 2/3 full.  Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

The first cookies of the season!

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I have a beautiful cookie jar, but I don’t usually keep anything in it until Christmas comes along. Actually, I have a different cookie jar for Christmas cookies so… I guess I don’t use it. But then, I don’t often make cookies these days. They’re too easy to eat mindlessly.  At least if I bake a cake I have to put forth effort to go get a plate and a fork and hide while I eat it. Yes. I have to hide while I eat cake.  If I don’t, I won’t get any of the cake due to my children’s sudden and intense interest in anything sweet I eat. Occupational hazard, I suppose.

All that said, I may just have to keep this cookie on hand. I never tried butterscotch chips before and they were on sale one day while I was wandering the bulk food store so I bought a bag. Why not, right?  I love how filling this cookie is and the kids gobble them right down, so at least they get plenty of fiber from it too. You can always swap the wheat germ for flour if you don’t have it: the texture and taste of the cookie isn’t impacted at all. I leave it in because in the event that this cookie is a hasty breakfast, I have much less regret.

Oatmeal Butterscotch cookies

  • 1/2 cup flour
  • 1/4 cup wheat germ
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp. sea salt
  • 1 stick butter, softened
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cup old fashioned oats
  • 1/2 cup. butterscotch chips
Beat together the butter, egg and sugars. Stir in the rest of the ingredients by hand, adding the chips last. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees while you to line/butter your baking sheets. Scoop the dough onto the sheets, I use the medium Pampered Chef scoop, but if you don’t have one you want to use a scoop about equal to 2 Tablespoons. My baking sheets are standard size, so they hold a full dozen cookies. Bake for 12-15 minutes and cool for a few minutes on the baking sheet before removing. Finish cooling on a wire rack.
Cookies will store in an airtight container for 2 weeks or you could freeze them for up to 3 months. They do freeze wonderfully, by the way!

Pin-spiration

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When Pinterest first burst on the scene, I remember reading everyone’s Facebook posts and thinking it was so silly.  Why on Earth did I need another social media site?  And then, the posts of jubilation over the latest craft/recipe/trend switched ones moaning about how they wasted so much time online already and Pinterest was such a vortex for them with all the pretty pictures and ideas and recipes… And yet, somehow, I started an account against the warnings.  Why?  Simple. There are pictures.

Go Reds!!!

On Friday afternoon, it was dreary and chilly and I needed pumpkin.  Badly. During quiet time, I flipped on the computer and started my list. First up, cookies!!

I made of batch of Pumpkin Snickerdoodles and a batch of Oatmeal Butterscotch cookies. Pennies on a Platter, I tip my hat to you. The oatmeal cookies were the perfect amount of sweet and I took the snickerdoodles with us yesterday on a trip to see the Cincinnati Reds play with friends. In an effort to not devour 4 dozen cookies in a weekend, I froze half of each batch.

While I was baking cookies, I threw a pound and a half of raw almonds in the slow cooker with 10 Tbsp melted butter and 2/3 cup powdered sugar. I kept seeing ideas for sugared almonds all over Pinterest, but didn’t want to tie up my oven for hours, so I cooked them in an uncovered slow cooker for about 2 1/2 hours. The kitchen smelled heavenly between the butter and sugar in the slow cooker (bonus: caramel on the bottom of the cooker!) and the cookies in the oven. When I took the almonds out of the slow cooker, I placed them on a lined baking sheet and sprinkled a mix of cinnamon, salt, nutmeg and cloves over top and then mixed them up with my hands. So. Good.

I also made a smaller batch with chili powder, salt, pepper and paprika for Matt. I’m trying to jazz up those packed lunches he gets from home. Do you feel like you pack the most boring lunches? Gosh, I do! I bought Matt a new lunch box and that didn’t even help me feel like my lunch skills were very good yet. Perhaps I should try the Bento box thing?

Today, we started with pumpkin pancakes.  It was supposed to be Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls, but we got home from the game past my bedtime and I couldn’t imagine starting dough at 1030pm… I’ll save it for another day. We ended with meat loaf, fried potatoes and apple pie. It was a great weekend, but starting tomorrow morning, I’ll be at the gym working off all these calories. And then cleaning my house. Amazing how quickly chaos accumulates when Mama is in the kitchen. Amazing.

Happy birthday, happy memory

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Seven years ago, I made a lasagna, salad and fudge marble cake for my mother’s birthday. Sunday night, I made it again. As Liam gets older, he’s started to ask questions about why I don’t have a Mama. Everyone he knows does and it’s really a very fair question, don’t you think? Although I know how to help a child deal with a death, I’m a little intimidated with my own child.

I’ve been aching over how to have a healthy memory of my mother and tell my children stories about her for the past three years. I knew the day was coming when he looked me in the eye asked why I’m alone. I’m not alone, I want to tell him. I want to remind him about “Paca Mike” and tell him for the 1000th time that’s my daddy. But when you’re only three, Mama is your world and the concept of being without one is just beyond you.

This year, instead of spending the week of my mother’s birthday immersed in misery, I decided to celebrate her. If not for my parents, I wouldn’t be alive to have the opportunity to be who I am now. If not for my mother, I wouldn’t have the skills I do to run a house confidently. And if not for my mother, I don’t know that I would love being a mother as much as I do. My mother always made a huge deal out of birthdays, so it seemed fitting to celebrate a life instead of mourn a death.

The first cake I ever baked my husband was a marble cake. I used boxed mix and because I wanted to make it a double layer cake, I bought 2 mixes, made them separately and poured them into 2 cake pans to bake. Did you figure out my mistake yet? For those of you who don’t read directions before you do something, 1 box of cake mix = 2 layers of cake. Incidentally, 4 layers of cake do not fit into 2 cake pans. There was a fire. And then I panicked a made another cake. It also was a disaster. Mom asked me to make her a marble cake for that last birthday and I also made it from a boxed mix. That cake was gorgeous, perfectly swirled and 100% gluten free.

This cake, however, is loaded with gluten and not from a box. This is a recipe from the Joy of Cooking, but I do not use melted chocolate as it is written. I prefer to use about half a cup of cocoa powder. This makes the chocolate portion set more solidly on the white batter and makes a cleaner swirl. I iced my cake with a cream cheese icing and mixed in a handful of melted chocolate chips so it had a little bit of a fudge-like flavor, too.

Chocolate Marble Cake

  • 3 1/2 c. all purpose flour
  • 1 Tbsp. + 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1 c. whole milk
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 2 sticks softened butter
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 1/2 c. sugar
  • 1/2 c. dark cocoa powder
Preheat the oven to 375. Cream together the butter, vanilla and sugar. Add in the eggs, one at a time. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and then add to the creamed mixture.  Your batter will be very stiff at this point, so start streaming in the milk until all the batter is eventually mixed and smooth. Remove about 1 cup of the cake batter and whisk in the cocoa powder.  Split the batter between 2 buttered 9-inch round cake pans.  Drop the chocolate batter by the spoonfuls on to the top of the vanilla batter and then using a clean butter knife swirl the chocolate batter through the vanilla. Don’t over-mix so the colors stay clear. Bake the cakes for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.
I love the recipe from Pinch My Salt for cream cheese icing and I use it almost exclusively. I made a full batch and stirred in the melted chocolate chips. (I used about 1/3 cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips.)
So the reason for this post that is absurdly long and perhaps the most uplifting is to tell you that in the case of a loss, you don’t have to spend the passing birthdays in misery. I will always miss the fact that I won’t get to share moments of my life with my mom. And I will probably always wish at least a dozen times a day that I could call her to tell her something the kids did, or ask for advice or share a new recipe. By celebrating her life with my kids I get to remember her as the woman who taught me to celebrate every birthday as though it were your only one.

Diapers, bananas and soup

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Well, hello!  It’s Monday and in this house, it’s laundry day for our diapers.  I don’t have many to wash and I’m hoping this is the beginning of the end of 2 kiddos in diapers.  We’ve already had a potty victory today and also a defeat.  Oh well.  Sometimes, the learning curve is just that: a curve.  Do you have any potty learning advice for me?

I wrote this post today about how our life is changing.  Parenting was something I always wanted to do.  I love being a parent and I really love having a little boy, but life doesn’t always fit into the neat little cubbies we plan for the moments.  In light of that, it’s going to be an interesting journey to see what we learn along the way.

In between countless trips to the potty today, I made these banana cream cheese muffins.  Wow.  Just Wow.  I am using all my willpower right now to not go back into the kitchen and eat… more.  This week, I think I’m going to make this Chicken Florentine Pasta from The Pioneer Woman.  Haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since I saw it this afternoon.  Yum.

Supper tonight was Taco soup.  Our house shook from the strong winds blowing all day today and soup was all we needed!  Taco soup is one of the easiest meals I make.  1 pound of ground beef, 1 pint of my home canned corn, 1 pint of my home canned diced tomatoes, 1 quart of my home canned tomato puree and 1 recipe of taco spice.

Homemade Taco Seasoning:

  • 1 Tbsp. Chili Powder
  • 1/2 tsp. garlic powder
  • 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes
  • 1/4 tsp. oregano
  • 1/2 tsp. paprika
  • 1 tsp. cumin
  • 1 tsp. kosher or sea salt
Even though it’s only a pound of meat, one pot of soup stretches very nicely for the week.  And, it freezes great!  I’ve been slacking on my freezer cooking lately, so it’s nice to have something extra on hand again.  I made a double batch of the banana cupcakes with the plan to freeze half… although the number to freeze is dwindling.  :)