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No Bake Cookie Dough Fudge

August 2, 2018

One of the things I miss the most since learning I was pregnant is licking the bowl! Since I do a lot of baking, you can only imagine how many cookie dough and cake batter covered bowls I have had to leave behind. It’s taken a lot of will-power but somehow I have made it 5 months.

Finally, I decided to give in to my indulgence! Well, sort of.

Instead of licking the dirty, cookie dough covered bowl, I decided I needed to make my own version of edible cookie dough. Thus we have the no-bake cookie dough fudge!

It’s basically like eating little squares of cookie dough, but with absolutely none of the risk! This way I can have the best of both worlds!

How to Make It

In a small saucepan, stir together flour and sweetened condensed milk. Place it over medium heat and add in butter. As the butter melts, stir it into the flour.

Then add in the brown sugar and vanilla and stir until you have a nice smooth mixture.

The purpose of doing this over the stove instead of just in a bowl is two-fold.

Raw flour can actually pose a risk of salmonella as well, thus you should always heat it up before adding it into a raw mixture like this.
Buy melting all the ingredients together, you ensure that you have a smooth, non-gritty fudge.

Let the mixture cool a bit, then add in your chocolate chips.

Transfer the fudge to a baking dish and pack down to form a nice smooth surface. Cover the surface with plastic wrap, then let it chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

Once it’s chilled you can cover it with a layer of chocolate, or you can just cut it up into pieces and serve immediately!

And a little goes a long way! I bet that just one little square will be enough to satisfy your craving for cookie dough!

Recipe

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:168]

Raspberry Oatmeal Bars

May 1, 2018

I have been looking for a little sweet treat that was both delicious and moderately healthy. I emphasize moderately. Basically, something that I could eat for breakfast and not feel totally guilty.

Well, I think I found just what I was looking for in these raspberry oatmeal bars!

What makes them a tad healthier than your garden variety oatmeal bars is that they are made with almond meal instead of flour and I made my own raspberry jam with chia seeds, so it has absolutely no sugar! I’d say that almost qualifies as a breakfast food.

How to Make Them

These oatmeal bars are very easy to make, even considering you have to make your own jam. Technically, you don’t have to. You can just use a regular raspberry jam. But I like the idea of making my own because I can control the sweetness of it. And it’s much easier to make than you’d think.

In a small sauce pan, bring frozen raspberries, lemon juice, and honey to a simmer. Let simmer for 5-10 minutes until it has thickened slightly. Then remove from the heat and stir in the chia seeds. After about 20 minutes, the mixture will thicken even more, but won’t be quite the consistency of a normal jam.

While the jam thickens, move on to the oatmeal part of the bars.

Combine almond meal, oats, brown sugar, and salt in a large bowl, then add cubes of cold butter.

Use a pastry cutter or your hands to cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it forms a coarse crumble.

To assemble the oatmeal bars, first pat half (or more than half) of the oatmeal mixture into the bottom of a square pan. Then pour some or all of the jam on top. Lastly crumble the rest of the oatmeal mixture on top. You don’t need to form a solid layer, just sprinkle the rest overtop and pat down gently.

Pop the pan in a 350 degree oven for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the oatmeal crumble on top has turned a lovely shade of golden brown.

After they come out of the oven, let them cool on the counter for at least an hour. I would recommend making them at night then leaving them out until the morning. It will ensure that the jam has settled making them easier to cut.

I know it will be hard to leave them be, but it will be worth it, I promise. The jam layer will be slightly more solid and not drip out everywhere, and the crumbs on top will be nice and crunchy.

Your reward will be these perfectly crumbly and sweet raspberry oatmeal bars. I happen to love that the raspberry layer isn’t overly sweet, so it perfectly balances the sweeter and nuttier oatmeal crust. Of course, feel free to substitute your favorite store-bought jam or swap out the raspberries for another favorite berry!

Supplies and Recipe

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Chubby Hubby Brookies

November 9, 2016

Okay, I bet you are asking yourself a couple questions right now. 1) What is a brookie?, and 2) What makes it a Chubby Hubby Brookie?

Both great questions. Let me inform you.

A brookie is a brownie-cookie. In this case, it’s a brownie that is mixed with a cookie dough and baked in a bar form. In some cases it can be brownie mix baked in cookie firm.

A Chubby Hubby brookie is a brownie combined with a peanut butter cookie,and topped with pretzels. Basically all of my favorite foods in one delicious and indulgent bar.

I can’t take credit for the name “Chubby Hubby”, which was coined by the fine folks at Ben and Jerry’s when they created the Chubby Hubby ice cream. Nor can I take credit for having a chubby hubby. My hubby is most certainly not chubby, but I am sure I could get him there if I made these brookies more often.

I started with a layer of peanut butter cookie dough, then topped it with the brownie batter. I would not recommend switching the order of these layers. If you start with the brownie batter, then top with the dough, the dough will just sink to the bottom. I like having the two distinct layers of the cookie and the brownie.
In between the two layers, I popped a couple pretzel pieces, just for some extra crunch! I also added the pretzels to the top of the brookie which get extra crispy in the oven and also add that nice salty bite.

My only gripe about these (and with brownies in general), is that you can’t really dig into them right away! It’s best to let brownies cool completely before cutting them so that they don’t get stuck on your knife. Most of the time I can’t wait that long. It was so hard to have these sitting on the counter, smelling the wafts of sweet chocolate and peanut butter, and not cutting myself off a corner (I am team corner brownie all the way!).

But finally, when I was able to give them a taste, I was in heaven! Like I said before, peanut butter and chocolate AND pretzels is pretty much the all my favorite flavors combined, so these were pretty damn near perfection. They not only had all my favorite flavors, but I loved the mix of textures, too. The peanut butter cookie is crumbly, almost like a crust, and the brownie is soft and fudgy (if that’s even a word). Then, with every bite there’s that little pretzel crunch!

Sounds amazing right? Well, I suggest you make these for your chubby (or not so chubby) hubby immediately!

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:95]

Chocolate Dipped Cheesecake Bites

October 7, 2016

Do you have that one recipe that is your “signature” recipe? Like the recipe that you make when you really want to impress people. That recipe that you know by heart because you make it so often.

As someone who makes a lot of recipes, it was actually kind of difficult for me to come up with a signature recipe to make for an office bake-off. Sometimes I tend to bake things that are a little to experimental and not necessarily “bake-off” contenders. Not that they aren’t good, but to win a bake-off, you have to play to the crowd. It’s all about strategy folks!

After thinking about for a while I concluded that while I may not have a signature recipe, my mom does! So I made my mom’s cheesecake recipe (also seen here), which I knew would be a contender, if not the winner!

To make the cheesecake a bit easier to eat, I decided to make them into little bites (of course, I had to do something to make the recipe my own) and dip them in chocolate.

I started by baking the cheesecake in a square baking pan with a graham cracker crust. After the came out of the oven, I let them cool to room temperature, then chill in the refrigerator overnight. It’s always good to let cheesecake cool completely before serving, but this also made it a lot easier to cut into bite-sized pieces.

I then dipped the chilled pieces of cheesecake into melted chocolate, first dipping the tops and letting the chocolate harden, then dipping the bottom half of the cheesecake bite. I tried drizzling the chocolate and some other dipping techniques, but this way worked the best for me. You can do it however you like.

After all the bites were covered in chocolate, I popped them all back in the freezer to harden. I would also recommend dipping the bites in batches, and keeping the un-dipped ones in the freezer until you are ready. They are much easier to handle when they are practically frozen.

Well, I would love to tell you that these cheesecake bites won the bake-off. They actually came in second behind a surprisingly delicious banana cake. Seriously, if a banana cake can beat cheesecake, it’s got to be one damn good cake. Don’t worry, I got the recipe so I will have to make it and share it with you guys.

But second place it’s bad at all! I’ll take it!

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:84]

Soft and Gooey Pumpkin Bars

September 21, 2016

It’s that time of the year. That time when Pumpkin Spice takes over the world. Frankly, its a little early for pumpkin spiced anything for me, but if it makes Fall come faster, then I will play along.

I’m kicking off this pumpkin season with these pumpkin bars. They were inspired by a Williams Sonoma Instagram post. I was hoping to find the recipe on their website, sadly the post was just promoting their pumpkin bar mix. Boo! So instead of giving up, I decided to reverse engineer the recipe from the ingredients in the mix. Which wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. Sure, it gave me the ingredient list, but not the measurements. Turns out, that’s kind of important.

After some trial and error, I think I came up with a pretty great pumpkin bar. It wasn’t exactly what I expected, but it’t like the perfect combination of pumpkin cake and pumpkin pie. Soft on the bottom, gooey on top.

The great thing about this recipe is that, while it is two layers, it is all baked at once. Also, it using a whole can of pumpkin puree. I don’t know about you but I hate it when I use a can of anything, only to have part of it left over.

It’s the little things in life.

I was actually a little disappointed when I first cut into them. I was aiming for a thicker, dryer bottom layer so that it was almost the crust to the pumpkin pie-like topping. But in the end, the bottom layer was a rich pumpkin cake, almost a pound cake, with a creamy pumpkin layer on top. After one bite, I was converted. Like I said above, it turned out to be the best of both a pumpkin cake and pumpkin pie.

To be sure, I brought them to Small Group to taste test. The verdict, two thumbs up! I love that my Small Group has basically become my recipe test group.

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:78]

White Chocolate Brownies

April 18, 2014

These sweet little cake-like bars posed a challenge for me. Not in making them. No, they were really easy to make. In what to name them. Can you call something a brownie if its not brown, but it is made with chocolate? Maybe calling it a white chocolate blondie would have been more appropriate.

Making these brownies was far less complicated. And honestly, they came to me on whim. I wanted to make something using the Easter candy I had picked up at CVS when I should have been buying allergy medicine. After scarfing down half a bag of M&Ms, I knew I had to use up the rest.

I adapted a brownie recipe using white chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate, which worked out surprisingly well. I used a bit less butter and sugar since white chocolate has more fat and is more sweet. But whipping them up was rather fool proof. If I were making them any other time of the year, I probably would have left them plain or added normal chocolate chips. But because Easter is around the corner, and like I said, I had the candy, I decided to throw those in for some color.

I was pleasantly surprised how rich the white chocolate flavor actually was. I thought they may just taste like vanilla cake, but the chocolate flavor really stands out and makes these brownies fudgey-er than cake. Which is how a brownie should be, right?

So, tell me. Should I have called these blondies instead?

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