Caramel Brownie Cheesecakes

There are two food loves of mine that I would classify as cravings: brownies and cheesecake. I’ll take them anytime, of course, but sometimes you’re struck with an urge. It starts as a little voice in the back of your head (“Oh, actually, that sounds really good…”) and just grows and grows until you’re in the kitchen at two in the morning, mixing up brownies. And, yes, I am speaking from personal experience.

If you can’t tell, my cheesecake craving hit me recently. With no graham crackers for a proper crust, I opted for a brownie bottom model. And just for some fun and to indulge my fiance’s favorite sweets at the same time, I incorporated caramel in. Not only are the cheesecakes topped with it, it’s also mixed into the batter. It’s a subtle extra bit of caramel flavor that ties the whole thing together.

Chicken Fajita Pockets

There’s a lot of things in food that I would call myself a fan of, but I’d like to talk a bit about two: fajitas and hot pockets. Let’s start with the latter, since that might require a bit more explaining. I’m not a huge fan of the Actual Hot Pocket that we all know and…know. But I think the concept is pretty genius: take literally anything you feel like eating, put it inside pastry dough, bake it and then eat it. On a small-batch, homemade scale, it makes perfect sense. Which leads us back to fajitas – which I don’t think need justification. Fajitas are delicious.

So basically this is the lovechild of my taste for fajitas and my admiration for the concept of hot pockets. And if you’ve got kids in school, leftovers make for easy lunch the next day.

Baby Pumpkin Cream Puffs

After last week’s disaster with the macarons, I’ll admit I was a bit nervous about trying something with pumpkin again. It doesn’t actually make any sense, because cream puffs aren’t nearly as technically tricky, but I think maybe I had myself convinced that the pumpkin flavor was just cursed. I’m really glad that I didn’t let my subconscious superstitions get the better of me, because I’m pretty proud of these. And my fiance didn’t seem too disappointed either, given that he ate the whole batch up over the course of the next day.

So what exactly do I have going on here? Basic cream puffs with pumpkin spice cream filling, dusted with powdered sugar and pumpkin pie spice. I also added a little bit of chocolate on the tips of the cream puffs to make them look like pumpkin stems. Enough talk and let’s get to some pictures, huh?

Spider (Brownie) Bites

Here’s the thing, I had something entirely different planned for this: pumpkin macarons, decorated to look like jack-o-lanterns. It was going to be adorable. Until none of the cookies turned out. The first batch didn’t even rise and then they stuck to the pan and it just…kept getting more and more frustrating. I finally walked away and took a wider look at it.

The first thing I realized is that this isn’t necessarily the most kid-friendly recipe. Despite being cute as heck (in my head), macarons aren’t anywhere near as popular with the little ones as…brownies.

This is the perfect Halloween treat for the whole family. Barring a dislike of chocolate (impossible) or a crippling fear of spiders, everyone is going to love these, I guarantee it. And everything tastes better when decorated to look like things.

So let’s get on with it, huh? Before we do, credit where credit’s due: I made these based off of this recipe from Cafe Delites. I chose it specifically because it bragged about the fudgy-ness of the brownies and that is perfect for rolling into balls and making into spider bites. And boy howdy, did they deliver. Best brownie recipe ever and definitely getting saved for future applications.

Fall Herb Monkey Bread Muffins

So I found a recipe on Pinterest for savory monkey bread a while ago and it floated back to the front of my mind when I started thinking about recipes that I could work fall herbs into. I like the idea of monkey bread here because the recipe lends itself to showcasing each flavor as part of an ensemble. I went with thyme, rosemary and sage, plus some Parmesan cheese as a flavor that goes with all three to tie it all together.

As for the decision to opt for muffins…I don’t own a Bundt pan that you would usually use for monkey bread. If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know, but I figured I would just get around it by making smaller versions.

On Baking from Scratch

Whatever you think of it, Americans live in a convenience-driven world. It’s what’s contributed the most to the success of McDonald’s and Starbucks, not to mention a host of convenience foods at the grocery. And it doesn’t stop with lunch and coffee, either. Betty Crocker and Nestle-Tollhouse make a pretty penny off of cake mixes and preformed cookie dough.

I’m not here to rant about the American lifestyle and companies making a profit off of products that are actively bad for people. I could, but I won’t. I’d rather use my time and energy talking about the solution – at least for the individual. There’s a whole Broadway production’s worth of problems on the bigger scale that I don’t have the know-how to even talk about fixing; things like socio-economic factors and corporate legislation. All things that go way beyond the scope of this blog. But on the scale of the individual – what you do in your day to day life – it’s easy. Just make it yourself.

There’s a world of benefits here. For starters, everything tastes better when you make it yourself. There’s even a study from Health Psychology about it, for the science-types in the audience. This article from Vice does a good job of giving you the reader’s digest on it. I’m speaking from personal experience, though: it’s satisfying to enjoy the fruits of your own labor. Remember those Candied Bacon Cupcakes? I still grin from ear-to-ear in self-satisfaction every time I pull up those pictures on my phone.

The article there also points out health benefits of making food at home, but I’m not sure that arguing the healthiness of homemade brownies vs. box brownies is really helpful. I love my baked goods, but at the end of the day, a lot of them are not the healthiest choices in the first place.

So why buy a cake mix from a box, when homemade is just better? Okay, realistically, a few things. Like I said, I don’t have the knowledge to write an entire blog about why socio-economic standing affects the choices we make about food, but I do know enough to give a nod to that here. I’m not rich, by any means, but I also won’t sit here and talk about “just making it yourself,” when I know that’s not a financial option for everyone. That said I will offer this insight: most of the ingredients for baked goods are staples and are all far cheaper than box mixes. With those, you’re basically paying more for the 1½ cups of flour that the recipe needs…for Betty Crocker to put it in a box for you, I guess? And you’ll use that flour (and sugar and eggs and milk) for other things. What other meals or desserts are you going to use that box mix for?

Another barrier: kids. I don’t have any and I’m sure that those with children wouldn’t trade them for the world. But I’m also sure that those same people will tell you that kids can be a handful and even more so once you step foot into the kitchen. I might not have any kids, but I remember being one and wreaking havoc while my mom was just trying to get dinner on the table. I cannot imagine her trying to bake and decorate a cake from scratch with my sister and I chasing each other across the living room. I do remember those Betty Crocker box mix cakes, though. Those were manageable to make while still keeping me from throwing another beanie baby at my sister or something similarly disruptive. Speaking of similarly disruptive, pets are just that. While our family Labrador might not have been training for Olympic stuffed-animal-tossing, he had his own ways of getting in trouble and that was just one more thing for mom to have to deal with.

(Quick side note: I’m sorry, mom. I had no idea.)

There’s a way around having to managing your kids while baking a treat for the family and it’s this: get them involved. Baking is an amazing way to introduce all sorts of skills to your kids: math skills, patience, teamwork – all just off the top of my head. Nothing tests your patience like creaming butter without a hand mixer; when you work with your kids to make something delicious, they also get to make it in their own vision and you foster creativity. And everyone is suitably occupied and stays out of trouble.

One more thing on making from-scratch baking easier: prepare. Read your recipe ahead and have everything set aside before you mix anything together. Does the recipe call for two ounces of chopped chocolate? Then chop it and set it aside in a bowl before you start. If you need a couple of eggs, then it’s a good idea to crack them into a separate bowl ahead of time. This applies to the hardware, too. Prep your pans and preheat your oven before you start mixing things together – especially where leaveners are concerned.

Here’s the long and short of it: the pros of baking from scratch outweigh the cons and the biggest obstacles are easy to work around. You’ll spend less money on the ingredients and kids don’t need to even be an obstacle if you get them in on the whole thing. And if you think ahead and have your ingredients prepped, you’ll save yourself time and possibly a headache.

In any case, thanks for reading. As always, be sure to check me out on social media, through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Leave a like and share with your friends!

Cheesy Pinwheels with Rosemary and Salami

When my fiancè and I first moved here, we didn’t have a whole lot. But I still wanted to bake something. So I looked around for recipes for sweets that didn’t require any chocolate, fruit or a whole lot of anything. What I ended up settling on was puff pastry. I found a recipe through some quick Googling and it was perfect. All the recipe called for was flour, butter, salt and water. I made up a batch and threw together some simple pastries with some strawberry jam on them. It wasn’t anything too showy or grand, but it was three things: a tasty treat, super easy and – most importantly – cheap to make.

This recipe that I found through Pinterest calls for store-bought puff pastry, but I knew that it was easy enough to put together myself. Plus, I was not interested in walking to the store at the moment. That said, you’ll need to plan ahead just a bit if you’re going to make your own puff pastry, as it requires 2+ hours of chilling combined.

Homemade Chocolate Sandwich Cookies

Whenever I do my grocery shopping, I find myself staring longingly at the snack food aisle more than I would like to admit. My favorite is the sandwich cookie that shows up in the images when you Google “America’s favorite cookie.” You know the one. The cookie has a million and one iterations these days, but I’m still a sucker for the original (maybe double stuffed). So instead of spending my hard-earned money to have cookies that someone else made, I decided to spend my time making my own at home this week.

I started with a recipe for crispy sugar cookies that I found through allrecipes and made a chocolate version and sandwiched them with a simple cream cheese filling. And dipped the whole thing in white chocolate. If you’re gonna make them yourself, you might as well go out and end up with something you can’t get on the store shelf. That said, the chocolate dip is entirely optional if you don’t want to go through the extra effort. Enjoy these with a nice tall glass of milk, instead.

Pesto Parmesan Gougères

One of the reasons I started blogging was to have a reason to expand my baking repertoire. I could just bake a bunch of things and my fiancè would eat them with just as much enthusiasm. But the best part of baking is sharing your results with people. I come into work every day with new pictures and rejoice in showing everyone. And that all serves as an excellent motivator to bake more and practice my art, as it were.

This recipe was a chance for me to try something new. I’ve never made a pate a choux dough and had never heard of a gougère before I found this recipe on pinterest.  But I was – and continue to be – determined to expand my horizons. And I’m really happy to have this recipe under my belt. I was so worried going into this that I was going to mess this up. Something in my head kept going back to the logic that French recipes would be fussy and delicate and that it would be incredibly easy to slip up and ruin the whole thing.

I’m happy to report that that’s not true at all. These little cream-puffs-gone-savory turned out great! And I think that the pictures say it best. Before we get to those, though, the recipe I used is here from Cooking for Keeps. Be sure to check it out!

Handheld Apple Pies

Well, I couldn’t let the fall season get too far in without doing an apple pie. Or nine.

I have a confession: I’m all about minis. Miniature cheesecake? Yes please. And what is a cupcake but a miniature cake? If it can be made miniature, I will do just that. And I find myself thinking that nearly anything can be baked as a miniature version a lot.

So I made my apple pie and got to scratch my mini itch. And they turned out great! I used an apple pie recipe that I found on Pinterest and it’s almost identical. The only changes are to assembly and cooking time. I’ll go over those with the pictures, but you should just check out the recipe at Lil’ Luna.