Currently Browsing: dessert
Jan 11, 2011
Posted by Jennifer on Jan 11, 2011 in a day in the life of me!, dessert, Muffin of the Week | 9 comments
I love the date today!
Another successful day on my healthy weight loss journey. It’s day 8 already and I did really great eating wise. One thing that I am totally avoiding is food at work. On any given day there are donuts, muffins, candy, etc… and I’ve been able to avoid it so far.
Yesterday I was going to walk home from work, but as the day grew on, and it was super cold out and dark, I decided I was going to take the bus instead. So, I got my stuff together, and I knew I was cutting it close…I missed it by 20 seconds! I thought that was a sign the Universe was telling me to move instead, so I walked 30 minutes home and it wasn’t that bad and I felt happy that I did it!
I haven’t made muffins in a while actually, so I decided to whip up a batch of my Chocolate Zucchini Muffins adapted from 101 Cookbooks.
You can see the whole recipe HERE from a previous post
Chocolate Zucchini Muffins
These muffins are so good!
Don’t forget Biggest Loser is on Tonight, I’ll have a re-cap tomorrow.
I thought American Idol was also starting this week, but sadly, I have to wait another week.
I think its going to still be good with the new judges. I didn’t like Kara so much!
Have a super day!
Dec 14, 2010
Posted by Jennifer on Dec 14, 2010 in a day in the life of me!, dessert, holiday foods | 7 comments
I’ve been making these for many years now, and its one of my favorite things to make during the holidays. The best part is all you need are 3 ingredients: graham crackers, peanut butter, and almond bark in chocolate flavor (a candy coating chocolate).
One tip: Do NOT use an off brand or cheap-o kind of graham crackers, they will fall apart when you try to break them apart and it makes a huge mess and not so pretty bars!
Take a graham cracker sheet and break it into 4 parts. Take 1 part and spread with peanut butter (creamy is best). Top together to make a sandwich. In a microwave safe bowl melt the chocolate in 20 second intervals until it’s smooth. It hardens fast, so you may have to warm it up again before you are done.
The almond bark is found in regular grocery stores, even Walmart and Target with the baking stuff.
Dip the graham crackers in the chocolate:
Dry on waxed paper
These dry in less than a minute. Then you can package them up for teachers or friends or just for your own family!
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I got a SUPER deluxe gift basket from a company who is in the same building as me. I help them out through out the year and I was shocked when my friend from the upstairs company came down with this HUGE basket for me!
It had wine, cheese, a brie baking dish, deluxe cutting board with cheese knives, organic honey, jam, crackers, etc..
My sister Biz loves goat cheese, and I got 2 different kinds!
I guess it pays to be nice to people! What a great gift that was! So excited to break open and taste those cheeses!
Nov 18, 2010
Posted by Jennifer on Nov 18, 2010 in dessert, general ideas, Muffin of the Week, recipe make over, special treats | 8 comments
I have a blogger friend Celine who has a gorgeous Vegan recipe site. (Have cake will travel). She made these amazing looking blondies using of all things, chickpeas! I have no fear using strange ingredients to make things. I’ve added tofu to muffins I’ve made; I’ve used black beans to make brownies, etc…
I wanted to try to make them, but I didn’t have a square pan for baking them in, so I decided to make them into mini muffins. I adapted her recipe just a tad because she used brown rice flour, whereas I used all purpose flour. When I told my kids the ingredients, they were pretty skeptical. I said, “They have a can of chick peas, peanut butter and jelly!” They weren’t excited! Either way they turned out great. And, of course I had to add a few chocolate chips to each one before baking!
1 can (15 oz.) cooked garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup raw sugar ( I just used regular sugar)
1/2 cup strawberry all fruit spread
1/4 cup crunchy natural peanut butter
2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
1/4 cup plus 2TB. flax meal
2 TB. all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
Preheat oven to 350. Lightly coat an 8 inch square baking pan with spray. (or mini muffin tin) In a food processor, combine all the ingredients and blend until perfectly smooth, scraping sides often. (I don’t have a food processor, so I used my blender).Pour the batter into the prepared pan. (Or Mini Muffin tin). Cook for 12-15 minutes (for mini muffins) OR 26 minutes into an 8 inch pan coated with cooking spray. Let cool for at least 5 minutes before attempting to remove them from the pan. I chose not to use paper muffin liners, because I hate when muffins stick to the paper. They didn’t stick to the muffin tin at all. The inside is all gooey and yummy. Just the few chocolate chips gave it another level of yumminess.
Each mini muffin is 72 calories, .25 grams of fat and .25 grams of fiber.
If your kids are younger, just call them “chocolate chip muffins” and they will never know there are garbanzo beans and other healthy stuff in it!
Here is the link to Celine’s original recipe And…of course, her photography is awesome! Here are her blondies if you make them in a pan instead of muffins.
Photo by Celine from Have Cake Will Travel
Nov 12, 2010
Posted by Jennifer on Nov 12, 2010 in a day in the life of me!, dessert, general ideas, holiday foods, kid friendly | 6 comments
The answer is YES! The other night I started to make a batch of cookies for my family when I realized I had no eggs. It was already late and I was already in my jammies, so I quickly googled this question.
There were a lot of sugar cookies, but my family really likes chocolate chip when I came upon this recipe (from www.allrecipes.com) for cookies with no eggs. How did they taste? Awesome! I made them really small, using a melon baller to measure the dough. They were moist and yummy!
Ingredients:
2 sticks butter or margarine (I used margarine)
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1.5 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 cup hot water
2 cups oats
Directions:
In a small bowl, mix the 1/4 hot water and add the baking soda, set aside.
Meanwhile, in a big mixing bowl add the sugars and butter and mix until creamy. Add the rest of the ingredients (including the water) until the dough is mixed well. Place on a cookie sheet – they do not spread out, so I fit 16 cookies per cookie sheet and was fine. Bake at 375 for 10 minutes.
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Now onto Claire’s birthday school snack! My daughter Claire is turning 9 on Sunday. So she gets to bring a snack to school. I asked her what she wanted me to make and she immediately said “Chocolate drizzled pretzels with sprinkles!” I only had white chocolate, and she was fine with that. *Use Almond Bark which is a candy chocolate because it dries really fast. You can buy it right where the chocolate chips are and it looks like this:
On a piece of parchment paper, lay out the pretzels. Melt the chocolate in the microwave in just drizzle over the pretzels and add the sprinkles. I had these cute little boxes I bought at the dollar store (12 boxes for a dollar!) so I placed the pretzels in there and wrapped it with the bows. She was super excited!!
White chocolate drizzled pretzels with sprinkles
Do you get to make treats for your kids at school, or does it have to be store bought?
Happy Friday!!!!
Oct 26, 2010
Posted by Jennifer on Oct 26, 2010 in dessert, fruit, sauces, vegetables | 10 comments
This recipe I got from The Cooking Club of America. To be honest, I didn’t play around with it too much to try to make it less calories, I made it as is, and tried to keep the portion I ate smaller! This bread is delicious and moist. And of course if I had chocolate chips, those would have gone in as well.
After I made this, I did figure out the calories, and if this loaf is 14 slices, then each slice is this, which I didn’t think was that bad!
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1 1/3 cups sugar
1 stick of butter, softened
1 cup canned pumpkin
2 very ripe bananas (optional)
2 eggs
Mix all the ingredients together and put in a 9×5 bread loaf pan coated with Pam Cooking spray. Bake at 350 degrees for 60-65 minutes, or until the edges start to pull away from the pan or a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Mine was more like 70 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.
You can serve as is, or make a glaze with powdered sugar/milk
Glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon milk
1/4 tsp. vanilla
Stir until smooth, then drizzle over the loaf.
Since I had more pumpkin than I needed, I made another batch of these except I made 48 mini muffins!
If you make the mini muffins, bake for about 10 minutes. Here is the nutritional information for that:
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Pretty much every weekend I’ve been making a different version of salsa. This weekend I used 4 tomatoes from my Mom’s garden, 1 big poblano pepper, 1/4 of a white onion, 4 cloves of garlic, pinch of salt and cooked that in a dry large non-stick skillet until it starts to blacken on all sides. One tip, keep the paper on the garlic so it doesn’t get bitter, then before putting it in the blender, take the paper off. Also, before blending, take the top off the poblano pepper and remove the seeds. For the tomatoes, I just added them as is.
Blend that altogether and then add a squeeze of half a lime and a few shakes of Tapatio Picante sauce and blend again until smooth.
I love this stuff!
So damn good!
Now, I need to find something to make with leftover salsa…this made 3/4 of a blender full! Any suggestions??
