maple

Maple Pecan Rice Krispie Treats

November 8, 2017

Who hasn’t had a Rice Krispie treat? At least here in the States, they were in just about every lunch box (remember those bright blue packages?) and at every bake sale. There is a good reason for that. They are heckin’ delicious!

They are also incredibly addicting. Especially this maple-pecan version I made over the weekend. I told myself I could “try” just one to make sure they turned out well, and next thing I knew I had eaten 4. Even my husband, who is notoriously not a sweets person would grab one every time he walked through the kitchen.

Of course, classic Rice Krispie treats are good all by themselves. How can marshmallows and cereal be so good? (Sorry, dumb question. The answer, of course, is sugar.) But, man, these maple pecan Rice Krispie treats are sooooo much better! It’s not just because of the maple syrup and pecan pieces. But there are a few things I like to add or change from the classic recipe to really step up my RKT game.

The first step in making extra delicious Rice Krispie treats? Brown butter (you have heard me rave about brown butter here and here). Since the first step to making RKTs is melting butter, just take a few extra minutes to let it brown a bit. Browning butter is basically the same thing as forgetting you left butter on the stove. Except don’t totally forget about it. At a certain point, it will just become burned butter. And that probably doesn’t taste very good in RKTs.

The next tweak to the classic recipe is to add a flavoring. If I were making basic RKTs, I would add vanilla. Since I made a maple-pecan flavor, I added maple syrup. Adding vanilla or any other flavoring just classes it up a bit. These treats will taste more like they came from a bakery than made from a recipe off of the side of the box.

The last little change is to add a dash of salt to the melted marshmallows. Unless you are using salted butter, then do not add salt! The salt helps balance out the sweetness, and trust me, there is a lot of sweetness.

For my maple-pecan variety, I also added some pecans. To get that nutty flavor throughout the treats, I processed some of the pecans extra fine then poured them into the melted marshmallows. I also left some bigger chunks of pecans and folded them in with the cereal.

At this point in the process, just about all RKT recipes are the same. Dump the coated cereal into a pan and press it down to fill up the dish.

Because these treats can be extra sticky, I prefer to line my casserole dish with some parchment paper. I know parchment can be a bit of a pain to work with since it never wants to stay in place in a dish that shape, but it will make clean up so much easier!

Like all RKTs, the maple pecan Rice Krispie Treats don’t take very long to set. I recommend letting them sit for about 30 minutes before trying to cut them into pieces. If you know you aren’t going to be eating them right away, cover them with plastic wrap so that they don’t dry out too much.

As I mentioned above, these are addictingly good! And they would make an excellent addition to your Thanksgiving dessert line up. Give that pumpkin pie a run for it’s money!

[yumprint-recipe id=’142′]

Maple Pecan Pumpkin Bread

October 10, 2017

I know everyone is a little pumpkin obsessed these days (present company included), but there is one Fall flavor combination that I think I prefer even more: maple pecan! Even Starbucks is getting on the bandwagon with their maple-pecan latte, which is delicious, btw.

Last Fall I made this maple pecan cake which may just be my favorite cake of all time (it tastes like a giant stack of pancakes). So, this Fall I couldn’t wait to get the gang back together and make some more delicious maple pecan treats. Since it is October after all, I couldn’t leave pumpkin completely out of the mix. Hence, we have maple pecan pumpkin bread!

This recipe is very similar to my glazed pumpkin bread recipe. The only changes I made were to replace some of the sugar with maple syrup to give the bread a subtly sweet maple flavor; it also makes the bread extra moist!

To start, cream together butter, brown sugar, and maple syrup for about a minute, then add in the eggs and pumpkin and mix until the are incorporated. Move that bowl aside and whisk together the flour (in this case I used both AP and whole wheat flour), baking powder, baking soda, and pumpkin spice just until there are no lumps or clumps. Then mix half of the flour mixture into the butter mixture.

The other half of the flour mixture will actually be tossed with the chopped pecans before being mixed in with the rest of the batter. This helps keep the pecans evenly disbursed throughout the bread.

Then, pour the batter into a loaf pan and sprinkle a few extra pecans right on top. Finally, bake the loaf at 350 degrees for almost an hour. Just sit back, clean some dishes, and wait for your kitchen to fill up with the most wonderful maple, pecan, pumpkin spice scent. Seriously, someone should bottle that scent and make it into a candle!

The hardest part of most recipes (for me, at least), is waiting for the baked goods to cool before I dig in. Since this pumpkin bread takes almost an hour to bake, by the time it comes out of the oven the anticipation is killing me. Oh, and the smell. Have I mentioned how good it smells? (Seriously, someone make this a candle! I will buy your first 20.) Yeah, that won’t help either.

But I encourage you to wait as long as possible before slicing into this amazing loaf. It will take at least 20 minutes for it to cool enough to cut into without crumbling into pieces.

The wait will be worth it.

Promise.
[show_shopthepost_widget id=”2849857″]

[yumprint-recipe id=’137′]

Autumn Wreath Maple Pecan Cake

November 11, 2016

I feel bad for Thanksgiving. As soon as the page has been turned on October and Halloween is over, everyone sets their sights on Christmas. Starbucks already has their red cups out, Christmas decorations are front and center at just about every store, and I have already seen a few people put up their lights and trees.

And even though I love Christmas as much as the next person, lets pump the breaks here folks and give Thanksgiving it’s fair share! And even though Thanksgiving is really all about the food (nothing wrong with that), it should also be a time to reflect on everything that we are thankful for.

One thing I am definitely thankful for is this cake! I know I say everything I make is good (well, not everything, but anything that ends up on the blog), but this cake is AMAZING. And I don’t throw that term around all willy nilly. I mean it!

I started with a basic vanilla cake, but I swapped out some of the sugar for maple syrup and then folded in some toasted pecans. When I tasted the batter, I was actually a little disappointed in the maple flavor. It just wasn’t popping like I thought it would. Then, when I stated a bite after it had baked, that maple flavor really exploded!

The cake by itself tastes like a stack of pancakes that has been drenched in butter and maple syrup. I mean….come on! How could you refuse a slice of that? The pecans not only add a nice crunch, but that deliciously nutty, buttery flavor.

But it’s not just about the cake flavor, its also about the decoration. This is the first time I had really attempted to decorate a cake this elaborately. Just like with cookie decorating, I picked up most of my tricks from watching lots and lots of You Tube videos (you can learn anything on YouTube). One of my favorite channels is How To Cake It! You must watch her videos, she is amazing!

Anyways, I started by leveling all my cakes and removing the caramelized edges. Because I wanted this to be a “naked” cake, I wanted all the edges to look perfect and to be able to see the little pecan pieces through the buttercream.

In between each layer, I spread on a generous portion of Italian meringue buttercream and the scattered on some toasted pecan pieces. Once all the layers had been stacked up, I topped it off with the rest of the buttercream and spread the excess down the sides of the cake. I made sure to fill in any gaps between the layers. Then, with a bench scraper, I scraped off all the excess.

While the cake chilled in the fridge, I made the wreath decorations. The leaves are made out of various colors of fondant rolled together and cut out with some leaf shaped pie crust cutters. The branches are made out of melted chocolate, piped out to fit on top of the cake. And the flowers are piped out with buttercream using some really awesome techniques that were also learned from YouTube.

Once the branches had hardened and the flowers were hard from the freezer, I assembled everything into a wreath! Doesn’t it look pretty!

I think it would be perfect as the center piece for a Thanksgiving or Friendsgiving dinner! Or just make the cake (sans decor) and eat it anytime. Trust me…you won’t regret it.

You can watch how I made the cake in the short video below. I apologize in advance for the poor quality, I am still learning how to work my new camera and the editing software. But I am hoping to do a lot more videos, since that is practically how I learned everything I know. 😉

PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:96]

Maple Bacon Breakfast Rolls

August 29, 2014

Sure, I could tell you that these breakfast rolls were inspired by the maple bacon donut my husband had on his trip to Portland. But do I really need to explain myself? I don’t think so. So I felt like dousing a bacon-filled sweet roll in maple-spiked cream cheese icing. So what? It was delicious!! I regret nothing.

I started with a basic cinnamon roll/sweet roll dough, rolled out to roughly the size of a large baking sheet, then sprinkled with candied bacon bits, brown sugar, and pecans. To make the candied bacon, I cooked up some diced bacon, then added a little maple syrup and brown sugar to form a glaze. I didn’t add any butter to the filling like you might with a cinnamon roll because the bacon has enough fat. As the bacon cooks even more and brown sugar melts, it forms a sweet and salty filling in the rolls.

Please don’t judge my roll organization. I realize that I made two critical mistakes: 1) the pan is too small and 2) the rolls are not placed for optimal baking. But oh well…they all taste the same in my mouth.

Moving on.

After rolling the dough up and cutting into about 2 inch rolls, I placed them in the pan then let them rise until they were pretty much over flowing from the pan (see above).

While the rolls baked, I whipped up a batch of maple icing. I started with a fairly standard cream cheese icing but substituted part of the milk for maple syrup until I reached the optimal maple flavor.

See that bacon peeking out? Yum, right? All these need is that icing….

There we go.

Drooling yet? Just me?

My husband and I wasted no time digging in. Even though he is not a breakfast nor sweets lover, he loved these rolls! I think it was the bacon. Most sweet rolls can be too sweet (for some…definitely not me), but the bacon really rounds out the flavor and adds just enough saltiness to balance out the sweetness.

Ok, I have to stop looking at these pictures because I just can’t handle it anymore. As the kids say these days….I can’t even!

Hope you all have a wonderful National Bacon Day!!

[yumprint-recipe id=’43’]