Chocolate Covered Pretzels

CHOCOLATE COVERED PRETZELS ARE REALLY FUN TO MAKE. There it is. The truth comes out. I felt like a master artist while making these! I based this Chocolate Covered Pretzel recipe very, very losely off of Food.com’s recipe. When I say losely I mean that they say to use wax paper to put your just dipped pretzels onto as you let them cool. I didn’t use bittersweet chocolate like they use, and I didn’t measure any of the chocolate out. The amount of pretzels that were made isn’t even known. After making these I brought them down to the church my dad works at, they have a ‘pasta supper’ on Wednesday night after their service for the homeless and others who need a good meal! I was very happy to take these down to them, included were a few cupcakes that hadn’t left my kitchen yet. I liked making these pretzels a lot and I’m glad that they came out so well!

I used some random ingredients for these though:

• Sourdough jumbo pretzels
• Left over cinnamon sugar
• Left over peppermint/Oreo crumble
• Milk Chocolate
• 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate
• Marshmallow bits
• Red and Green sprinkles
• White chocolate candy melts
• Oreo chunks

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Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

First off, this post is going to have A LOT of pictures. I took a bunch because I thought it was important to document how cool this recipe was in every stage. On top of that idea though, I don’t really have any pictures of combining the dry and wet mixes.

For this post I made CookingClassy’s Cookies and Cream Cupcakes! This post is also late – I baked these on the 8th and am now just posting this, sorry guys! I would say it was worth the wait because the people who have tried have loved it. Apparently one is still talking about how good they were. Were being the important word there, they went fast. I don’t blame my taste testers though, if I ate any of my desserts this would be the one I would pound down. These cupcakes, like everything else I’ve made, smelled better than anything in the world.

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.

Milton Gingerbread House

If you have ever thought, “Gosh, that seems like a wonderful idea!” And been completely wrong about that mere thought – you will probably enjoy this post. Story time! I was at A.C. Moore buying a sentimental gift for my brother and his boyfriend when I came across a prepackaged gingerbread house. “How cute would that post be? Ginger making a gingerbread house.” NO. This is not an adorable story of how clever I truly am, this is an awful story about the fact that I should have actually baked a delicious dessert instead of spending 35 minutes putting the crappiest icing I have ever come in contact with onto a roof. A ROOF. A Christmas themed roof. You know what, I take that back, it is not Christmas themed at all, you’ll see, there was not one red candy or icing or anything in this gingerbread house. The only Christmas-like item is the fact that it’s supposed to be snowy, or a house, or I don’t have any clue to be honest. This was a mistake. I should have thought it out before I frivolously bought a $5.99 gingerbread house from an arts and crafts store.

I am going to start this second paragraph off with this simple fact: Milton icing is glue. It took me 35 minutes to make the roof look like it was snowing and trust me, that wasn’t the plan. The plan was that the roof would be a nice smooth white with candies beautifully arranged on it. NOPE. Now that I am looking at it again, it looks like stucco. At this point, I feel bad for even making you guys look at this disaster, but I also find it hilarious that I made a gingerbread house because I thought I was clever. The best thing about this project/recipe is that the house pieces come plastic wrapped. At least they weren’t broken – that happened last year. Oh yeah, I make a gingerbread house every year. I have never actually tried to make a house though, I usually open it up and my brother and I end up breaking it and eating all of the candies and never opening the icing because it is obviously poison – which I now know is accurate.

Mini Cheese Quiche

It might be too early in this baking adventure to start savory meals/crazyness, oh well. This morning I had the wonderful surprise that I had about 90% of the ingredients I need for the desserts I wanted to make, but they were all missing an ingerdient – forcing me to rack my brain for something, anything to bake. I came to the conclusion that quiche is baked, and I had everything that I needed. I didn’t want to make a buttload of them only because I had no idea what the hell went into a quiche. Side note: I wanted to make mini bacon, egg, and cheese quiches, sadly I had no bacon. 90% of all ingredients! I based this recipe off of Pillsbury’s bacon cheese quiche, the recipe makes a full pie, so I faked it and made mini ones with half of everything it calls for. The recipe I ended up with was:

Ingredients – Nothing measured correctly

• 1 Stop & Shop refrigerated pie crust, softened as directed on box
• 1/2 cup half-and-half
• 2 eggs, slightly beaten
• Sprinkle of salt
• Sprinkle of pepper
• Handful of 4 state shredded cheese (I have no idea why it’s called 4 state, whatever)
• A tiny bit of chopped onion

Dark Chocolate Peppermint Bark

Okay – this recipe was insanely fun to make, and I guessed on most of it. Basing my end result off of Martha Stewart’s ‘Basic Bark’ recipe. I am a complete idiot, having not realized there were links on that page to the exact recipes of items such as, peppermint bark and toasted-coconut bark. This being said, I had nothing to base my measurements off of except pure luck. Getting to the recipe I ‘used,’ there is grocery store Aldi that is close to my house, this is where I got the chocolate that I used in the bark.

I used 13 squares of this chocolate, about 12 oz of it. The most important thing to add in here is that I started with only using 9 oz and it didn’t seem to be enough, so I melted some more chocolate to add in. Seriousy guys, I guessed on this recipe immensely.  In good news though, when melting the chocolate, I did not burn my house down, for some reason there is a huge stigma that melting chocolate is incredibly difficult and it always burns to the sides of the pans you use – nope. First try and everything went smoothly!

Homemade Apple Pie

For my first baked good, I chose the all-American classic: Apple Pie! I had never made a pie before, and I’ll admit, I cheated and used a Stop & Shop premade pie crust. I figured taking baby steps was best for my first attempt at baking. I used two different recipes for my end result. First, allrecipes.com Apple Pie by Grandma Ople, fantastic reviews from both their website and from the friends and family I graciously forced my dessert on.

To start off, obviously you have to peel a bunch of apples, allrecipes.com said eight – so for some reason I decided twelve was what I should go to. The worry about the apples cooking down and the pie not being big enough was intense.