Peanut Butter Fudge

I MADE FUDGE AND IT LOOKS LIKE FUDGE AND SMELLS LIKE FUDGE AND I THINK IT MIGHT BE EDIBLE! I thought making peanut butter fudge was going to be difficult, it’s not. These are the ingredients:

Peanut Butter Fudge
1 cup (256 g) smooth no-stir peanut butter (the kind that doesn’t separate in the jar)
12 ounces sweetened condensed milk
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups (173 g) confectioners’ sugar

Note that I made a complete mess, as usual. At least this time it was all in about a three foot radius.

The directions as paraphrased by me: melt this shit, stir this shit, put this shit in a wax lined pan.

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Red Velvet Sugar Cookies

I made red velvet sugar cookies with a cream cheese frosting (recipe from Cookingclassy.com) Wednesday, it was so incredibly easy and enjoyable. This post is going to be short because it’s super similar to my red velvet gooey butter cookies. This was fun, I didn’t make a huge mess, and they were different enough from the gooey butter cookies that people could notice. The vote was all for the gooey butter cookies, but not by a landslide, it was more of a 45:55 ratio. I don’t care if there is a smaller ratio that I can use for that, I wanted it to add up to 100. 

This recipe is super similar to the gooey butter cookies, main difference? In the sugar cookies you use cake flour. The best part of this recipe was the fact that I didn’t feel like I was going to break my mixer! Very excited about that. After mixing up these cuties you let them sit in the refrigerator for a minimum of two hours, I may have let them sit for about 8 hours, but they still came out as cookies. Win, win!

Red Velvet Gooey Butter Cookies

Let’s just start with that name, how wonderful do these cookies sound? I am not only a lover of eggnog, as noted in my post from yesterday, I am also a lover of red velvet anything. I have learned that a few of my friends fall into this category as well, so they’ll be partaking in these cookies as soon as they’re done. (I am writing this post while I wait for the two hour refrigeration part of the recipe is over, it’ll make more sense when I explain the recipe and post pictures, all of the fun stuff!). Moral of this paragraph: red velvet is wonderful and you’ll be seeing quite a few posts involving the name. This recipe comes from recipegirl.com’s delicious Red Velvet Gooey Butter Cookies post.

The only ingredient I didn’t have for this recipe was red food coloring, picked some up and voila here we are! I thank food coloring for the blood like stain that is now covering my thumb. To start off, there are two bowls: dry ingredients in one, wet ingredients in the other. The wet ingredients bowl was fun, the recipe calls for 4 tablespoons of butter, which I have! Except that I only had one tablespoons worth defrosted. I keep butter in my freezer like everyone else because the price of butter is just as ridiculous as the price of gas, and as an amateur baker I have found that you use a lot of butter in the kitchen. With this new found information, I took the butter out of my freezer and let it sit out on my counter for about a half hour. After that everything went perfectly! You mix 8 ounces of cream cheese with 4 tablespoons of butter until it’s smooth, I assume that smooth meant until they were completely combined and looked like whipped cream cheese. If I’m wrong, oh well, the cookies are still mixed. Once those two ingredients are a smooth consistency it’s time to add 1 large egg and 1 tablespoon of red food coloring. I wasn’t expecting the mix to turn red so quickly, it made me really happy. I mixed these together for about, I have no idea – everything was mixed though.

No-bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Cookies

I made this dessert as soon as I got up this morning. I woke up in a wonderful mood and felt the need to jump into the kitchen! I am so happy that I did because making these was very fun. I am also happy to report that I am fully caught up on my back tracking of recipes, every dessert that I have made has a blog post up. In other baking news, everyone adored the chocolate covered pretzels from yesterday! They went very quickly, absolutely none left. Having people enjoy my desserts is one of the best feelings I’ve ever had, this is truly making me happy. I get to wake up and know there will always be something that will be calming and fun during my day.

Today was No-bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Cookies. I get most of my recipes from Tumblr blogs I follow – I had apparently not emailed this recipe to myself when I found it this morning and just ended up having to search through my Tumblr feed for abour ten minutes to find it again. The time it took to find it gave me a little bit of anxiety due to doubting I would find it again. That thought is silly though since it would be weird for someone to take down their post, especially a dessert post! The search was worth it though, not posting a link to this wonderful recipe would have been 1. wrong on my end and 2. unfortunate for you guys because it’s obvious that everyone needs these cookies in their life. It also helps to have the recipe in front of me when explaining what the hell it is that I did in my kitchen.

Mini Peppermint Pies

This is a late post – I made these on the 7th. I took this idea/complete dessert from Butter, with a side of bread’s ‘Easy mini peppermint pies’ recipe. I made this dessert with two other people in my kitchen, one being my mother and the other being Patryk (who makes sure this blog doesn’t crumble down from the IT side). I was so in the zone when I started making this dessert that I had gotten to having the Oreo crust done and halfway through mixing the peppermint/whipped topping together when Patryk pointed out I hadn’t taken a single picture of what I was making. So you guys will have to bare with me and just believe that I crushed up an entire package of Oreos into dirt, combined them with 3 tablespoons of butter, then packed them into cupcake tins (which is what the directions are), and this is what those tins looked like:

 

Sugar Free Chocolate/Vanilla Parfait

In truth this is a: Sugar free, fat free, gluten free chocolate and vanilla parfait.

This recipe is from my mother! Apparently my mother made this parfait last year for her work holiday party, and everyone adored it so much that they asked her to make it again! Since that seems awesome to me, I decided I should share the recipe with you guys! This little concoction is fast, simple, and looks very yummy, my mother makes quite a mean parfait, to my surprise! I don’t know how I never noticed she made it last year, I would have thought she’d say something about people raving about her dessert. I could have honestly not been paying any attention to it though, we all know how daughters are.

So, here it is! I hope you enjoy how it looks, how it’s made, and how awesome it is that I’ll actually have a family recipe on this blog. Even if that family recipe is ridiculously easy and not amazing like an Italian super secret pasta sauce that has been passed down for three generations. Oh well, this still counts!

Ingredients

• 2 packages sugar free/fat free chocolate pudding
• 2 packages sugar free/fat free vanilla pudding
• 4 cups of 1% milk
• 32 ounces of fat free whipped topping
• 2 packages of lady fingers or sugar free angel food cake

Mini Snickerdoodle Muffins

I woke up today and it was horribly cold, icy, and bleh outside. I stayed in bed as late as I possibly could, finally dragging my butt out into the world of my kitchen, and thumbing through all of the recipes I have emailed myself over the past week. Recipe girl’s Snickerdoodle Muffins seemed so fitting for today! Fast forward to the final step of this recipe, rolling the snickerdoodles in the cinnamon sugar topping, I had a wonderful realization that Ikea always smells like snickerdoodles! I have finally identified the aroma of that wonderful store. I feel accomplished.

Back to the beginning! I chose this recipe because it seemed simple, but because I had all of the ingredients and I was positive everyone would love a nice warm snickerdoodle muffin when they got home from work, today’s weather is pretty gross. Since I like making people happy, I had the supplies, and I needed to blog, this is what I chose! This recipe is really simple and adorable! The first step is to heat up the oven and spray down a mini muffin tin, which made me incredibly happy – I LOVE making mini things, but when I make mini cupcakes it’s always a pain in the butt to frost them, so only having to roll these little guys in cinnamon sugar was perfect! After the delight of mini muffins, you mix together your wet mix (butter, sugar, egg, milk, vanilla) with your dry mix (flour, baking powder, cream of tartar, salt, cinnamon) using a hand held mixer. I wasn’t expecting it to get so brown and speckly and wonderful looking, but the cinnamon definitely warms up the color. It was a nice surprise, it definitely started to look more like what I expected something with the word snickerdoodle in it should. Side note: I have never had a snickerdoodle before, so snickerdoodle muffins were even more alien to me. I wish I had known how amazing they smelled before, I would have made them way earlier!

‘Instant’ Chocolate Mousse

First off – I apologize for not posting for two days, birthday parties, holiday shopping, and cleaning have had me a little crazy and tied up. I started writing this post and just never finished it. Here it is though!

Today I thought I would enjoy myself after the unfortunate event that is titled, ‘Milton Gingerbread House.’ For that enjoyment I chose to whip up some chocolate mousse! It was said to be “instant,” that was a lie. It took me about fourty-five minutes but my mother loved it and I am pretty sure she will finish it before my dad gets home and tries any (I was wrong in that assumption, she left some and my dad fell in love with it). The recipe called for only a few items: 9.35 ounces of 70% cocoa, a cup of water, and an oven. Pretty simple! It really was simple, the most time consuming thing was melting the chocolate because I was afraid of burning it.

The first thing in this recipe is to chop up the dark chocolate and add in a cup of water. I am obviously impatient and just broke up the chocolate with my hands, because why not? With the chocolate and water combined you just put it on the oven and let it do its thing, stirring it occationally to ensure that it isn’t completely awful. While it was melting it looked completely awful.