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Archive for May, 2011

May 27th, 2011

Nutter Butter Marshmallow Bars

I saw a recipe at Picky Palate (who coincidentally I met during BlogHer Food ’11 because I was a live blogger for their panel session on feeding picky kids) and I knew I had to try it for hubs. If it has peanut butter in it – you can pretty much guarantee it will be tried at our home.

Jenny calls the recipe Chewy No-Bake Nutter Butter Bars – they are a spin-off of her Chewy No-Bake Cookies and Cream Bars.  The recipe was simple enough – just 3 ingredients: Nutter Butter cookies, butter and large marshmallows.  You start by grinding a whole package of the cookies in a food processor, then you heat the butter and marshmallows until they are gooey  and add the cookie grinds.  Mix well and spread in a foil-lined 8×8 pan.  Let cool and cut. However let me be honest with you here – because some days I think we should just avoid the kitchen – I tried to make this recipe 4 times before I got it right.

And even then I had to tweak it a tad and enlist a helper!

The bars were delicious, and I took them to a potluck where they were promptly devoured, but they  were just a lot of work for me and so I’m kind of hesitant to make them anytime soon! But definitely not for a lack of requests!

I had to add about a cup and a half more of marshmallows to get a good marbleization going on and I broke two spatulas in the process of mixing.  But perhaps the toughest thing was they didn’t photograph nearly as beautiful as Jenny’s… but hey, I’m learning and everyone has to start somewhere! So until the next batch appears (don’t hold your breath), these will have to do:

Categoryexperiences with food, food, peanut butter, recipe, sweet | Comment2 Comments »

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May 23rd, 2011

tahitian vanilla poundcake

By far the best thing I brought back from Tahiti (besides my hubs who would have happily stayed there – with me of course) was a bag filled with natural vanilla beans grown right there in French Polynesia.  I’ve made Tahitian Vanilla pancakes and cookies, and added the vanilla seeds almost anytime a recipe calls for vanilla extract. Because in my mind you can never have too much vanilla.

Most recently I decided to make traditional poundcake and so accordingly, I added several scrapings of my Tahitian Vanilla beans into the batter. I love how you can see the black flecks of the dark vanilla against the yellow cake.

The recipe makes two loaves and we ate one and froze the other one for a later date.  The cake was sweet enough to eat on it’s own, though you (not me) could easily eat it with vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of chocolate or caramel as a simple dessert.  I think the pound cake would also be tasty with some glazed strawberries.

I think when we thaw the frozen loaf I’d like to drizzle it with a warm maple glaze and some sliced almonds.

How do you eat pound cake?

Categorybreads, food, recipe, sweet | Comment12 Comments »

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May 15th, 2011

homemade fruit & yogurt popsicles

Let’s kick it old school and make some homemade popsicles.

Remember how mom used to do it back in the day? She’d freeze orange juice in popsicle molds and days later we’d enjoy dripping sweet popsicles?

Well technology has sped up the process, thanks to the Zoku Pop Maker we can now have popsicles in as little as 7 minutes flat. Dude.

My darling husband bought me one for our first Christmas as a married couple. I’m sure it wasn’t because he’s an ice cream lover, but rather because he thought I’d love it. Riiiiiiight.

Well I do love it.

I first tried it out a couple years ago at Holly’s house…that’s when I made these beauty’s:

Martha calls them Firecracker Ice Pops.

I call them delicious.

I had to improvise on ingredients…we were out of strawberries, so I used mangos instead.  If you do have strawberries on hand, these sweets would be perfect for a festive Fourth of July celebration, don’t you think?  You just puree the fruit, add some sugar and then layer the ingredients into an instant popsicle maker, like Zoku, along with the yogurt.

Oh, but we didn’t have plain yogurt at the time, so I used vanilla flavored yogurt. The pops were a bit messy to construct and took a little longer to make than 7 minutes… but I didn’t hear ANY complaints from the peanut gallery.

On the contrary, they were a big hit! Perfect for summertime and for getting the kiddos to eat their fruits. Although this recipe did call for extra sugar, you can definitely skip that since the fruit is pretty sweet on it’s own, as is the yogurt.  However, Martha says the secret to making an ice pop soft and smooth instead of unforgivingly hard like an ice cube is simple: sugar.  Would you make these?

Categoryfood, fruity, recipe, sweet | Comment4 Comments »

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May 11th, 2011

burger king chicken tenders

Recently I was offered a free gift card to try out Burger King’s NEW Chicken Tenders.

Umm, free food you say?

Yes, please!

One day last week when hubs was on his way home from work, he picked up a 20 piece of the new chicken tenders so we could test them out. Burger King has lots of sauce options for the tenders, but hubs kept it simple with sweet BBQ and tangy honey mustard.  Hubs says BK has the best tasting burgers – so with the leftover money on the card he also picked himself up a Whopper.

Dude is always so hungry…

In addition to the new menu item, Burger King also has a neat feature on their website to help with calorie counting. You can choose the item you’re planning on getting and then add any sauces to it and on the right hand side there is a calorie counter to let you know where you are at with the calories!  I think this is kinda genius of them because if you’re someone who’s watching what your caloric intake is, you can easily see what you’re in store for before you even go to the restaurant!

And I don’t know about you, but if I had the calorie info right at my finger tips for every place I ever went out to eat at…well, let’s just say some places could never come even close to offering me options I could consider :)

But I guess that what “cheat days” are for!

Thanks to Mommy’s Wishlist for recommending me to try these new chicken tenders – they were scrumptious!

Oh, and their Cinna-Mini’s are KILLER good too! Hubs brought me some for a “breakfast-in-bed” on Mother’s Day :)

Categoryeating out | Comment1 Comment »

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