Semi-sweet chocolate chip cookies – I could make them in my sleep. I know the recipe on the bag by heart. So of course, I go looking for something different. New. Better. Well, this time that quest took me to Australia. Well AllRecipes.com.au.
Try these – they’re sort of a cross between a pecan sandie (without the pecan) and a milk chocolate chip cookie. They’re a litte chewy, a little crunchy, a lot delicious. Get the recipe here.
So I have spent a lot of time being disappointed by the way my blueberry muffins look. It seemed no matter what I did, they were always not super brown on top, and flat. Flat, flat, flat.
I did some Googling and found some ideas about how to make muffins that look like they came from a bakery with high, domed crunchy tops. Here are my tips, and a great recipe for blueberry muffins.
Muffin batter is a little thicker than other types, and it needs a little extra oomph to rise. The recipe I used to make these ended up with 4 t of baking powder in it. I couldn’t taste it and they popped up nicely.
Add a little slippery stuff to the top side of your muffin tin, not just the cups. As your muffins rise, they’ll spread around the openings of the muffin tin and adding some grease will make them easier to slip out when they’re done. If you forget, just use a butter knife and slowly and carefully release the edges of your muffins as soon as they come out of the oven.
Most recipes tell you to fill the muffin cups 3/4 full. You’ll get a little dome, but nothing that looks like it came from the bakery. Don’t be afraid to fill those cups all the way up with batter.
Reserve a few blueberries per muffin to drop into the top. That way you can be fairly certain you’ll still have some visible after they bake.
For the first five minutes of baking, crank up the temperature to 425 degrees. Yes I know it sounds crazy but you’ll give your muffins a head start on rising, and they’ll brown better. Then just turn down the temp to your recipe’s temperature for the remainder of the baking time.
Add a little crunch and shine to your muffins by using sanding sugar on top. Just sprinkle in about 1/2 to a teaspoon per muffin – the larger grains of sugar will remain on top and will be crunchy and sparkly when your muffins come out of the oven piping hot and looking picture perfect.
Give these tips a try and make Best of the Best Blueberry Muffins from AllRecipes.com
Tonight I’m writing thanks to my friend Punkin Muffin (you know who you are!). I went on a “faceless recipe” adventure on AllRecipes.com. Basically here’s how it works:
Sometimes I find gems. Sometimes I understand why no one has posted a photo. I mean there are a lot of delicious recipes that just don’t love the camera. Fortunately this time, I got lucky. I made three recipes this weekend and all of them turned out well and they turned out to not be too hard on the eyes.
So here is the first – Judy’s Pumpkin Muffins. This one sounded good so I took a chance – it only had one review before me, so it could have gone either way. But I think they turned out pretty and tasty. Very moist, the right amount of spice. The only thing I’d change next time would be to add a little vanilla and maybe a bit more cinnamon. They’re easy to make and tasty – highly recommended for you and/or your punkin muffin!
You can find the other very photogenic recipes I made this weekend by visiting my Facebook page.
It’s easy to tell which recipes are my favorites by how weathered the cards are. This one is my most trusty recipe – everyone loves it and it’s very easy to make. It’s delicious with pecans or without. With cream cheese frosting or without. There are a few keys to a great banana bread.
One of the things I love best about recipes, even in baking, they become your own. No one’s banana bread comes out quite like mine (for better or worse!), even when I share the recipe.
There’s just something in the amount of time or speed at which it’s mixed, the ingredients that get measured slightly differently. The way it’s panned, de-panned. When it’s sliced. The love that goes into it.
So, I hope you enjoy my banana bread recipe, and I hope you’ll make a loaf or more. Just by making it, you make it your own.
I’ve never made caramel corn before. I assumed that whatever I worked and slaved to make could never touch the perfection that is Garrett’s popcorn. And boiling sugar scares me a little if I’m being honest. So why try? Well, this month for our AllRecipes challenge, we had Karo recipes and caramel corn is one of them. And even though I think it’s worth every penny, I don’t have $30 laying around for a bucket of Garrett’s. So I figured it was worth a shot.
o.m.g.
This was pretty easy to make – pop popcorn, boil sugar, butter and Karo (I used the dark Karo for this), pour it on the popcorn and bake the goo for 45 minutes. To make things easier I used a disposable roasting pan and just let it cool in there also. The recipe calls for 4 quarts of popcorn but to make it extra caramelly I used about 3 quarts (1/3 cup of unpopped kernels). It made the house smell a-mazing and it is definitely on par with the $30 tub. Now if I can figure out how to make the cheese part of my beloved Chicago mix, I won’t have to venture downtown on a caramel corn pilgrimage anytime soon.
Make your own (because I’m not sharing!): Caramel Corn Treat Bags
Peppermint bark is traditionally a holiday treat, but it sounded good so I decided to just make a quick batch. A whopping two ingredients and a few seconds in the microwave and this is ready to chill in the fridge.
No candy canes leftover from Christmas? Just use some starlight mints. It’s fun to smash the pieces up, and it’s a nice refreshing treat. Grab the ultra-complicated recipe at AllRecipes.com and make a little batch of your own.
It’s that time of year – I have a window unit air conditioner, so it is officially too hot to bake. That doesn’t mean I won’t try, but on a regular basis it’s just not practical.
But I love cookies, so what’s a girl to do? Enter Sara Snacker, the very next best thing to homemade cookies.
Sara Snacker has some really unique flavors, including summery goodies like Lemonade, salty sweet Chipnetzel – with and without chocolate! They were kind enough to send me an assortment to try out, and even nicer to offer some to give away to a lucky reader!
The cookies are made from ingredients I can pronounce, all natural, and I like the fact that they aren’t all “perfect.” The lemonade cookies were all a little differently shaped, just the way mine come out of the oven. So if I wanted to (not that I would ever do such a thing mind you), I could pass them off as something that came out of my kitchen. If I put them on a plate, they did technically come out of my kitchen, right?
It’s tough to pick a favorite, but since I like salty/sweet/chocolate, it’s probably the Dark Chocolate Chipnetzel. But a very close second is the very lemony Lemonade, which tastes like lemon meringue pie to me. Or the S’mores, which are a perfectly sweet bite of goodie that reminds me of sitting around the campfire. Or Vanilla Milkshake. Or the regular Chipnetzel. Oh…ok that was all of them! So I guess I just won’t pick favorites and say try them, you’ll like them. They’re like you’d make, but you don’t have to heat up your kitchen on a hot summer day.
way – Beat the Heat & Enjoy Something Sweet!Enter to win a bag of both Lemonade and Vanilla Milkshake (which taste great together with a tall glass of milk, by the way). Just click a button in the contest below to do one of the following to win:
Winner will be chosen at random – enter below by the end of June 8, 2012 for your chance to win!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Image from GoBoldWithButter.com - I've made this twice and haven't stopped to photograph it either time. So you know it's good!
For me, nothing compares to the taste of warm (not melted, not firm, but just warm and spreadable), creamy, fresh salted butter. The way it melts into the crevasses of a crunchy toasted English muffin, the way it fills all the spaces in the grid of a warm waffle under a cascade of maple syrup. The way it slides across a stack of pancakes. What’s not to love about butter?
Ok, there’s fat. But fat is flavor, and to me, it makes much more sense to use a little butter than to use a lot of something synthetic. Margarine will never be butter. It really shouldn’t try. There’s no substitute for the natural, creamy goodness of melty butter. It makes everything better.
My newest favorite recipe containing butter is from the fine folks at GoBoldWithButter.com. French Toast with Honey Butter. I can’t even describe how mouth-watering this is. As if the french toast isn’t enough (it’s really pain perdu with brandy…divine!) the honey butter is the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s mixed with honey, vanilla bean, and some powdered sugar and a little salt to create a butter so perfectly sweet and salty it’s great on everything. And easy – don’t miss it.
Have you ever had a craving for s’mores but you want to skip that whole “sleeping on the damp, cold, hard ground in a tent” thing? Try this quick idea.
Here’s all you need:
Just thread the marshmallow onto the skewer, and rotate it slowly over the flame, but keep it moving so that it doesn’t flambé. When it’s done, assemble the s’more as usual, sandwiching the marshmallow and candy bar between the graham crackers and enjoy the messy goodness.
For added sweetness, thread a caramel on top of the marshmallow on the skewer before you start roasting it, and then pull the toasted marshmallow up over the caramel and sandwich between the grahams with the chocolate.
Thanks to AllRecipes.com’s Shudderuppers recipe for the caramel idea!
To me, graham crackers aren’t complete unless there’s some frosting between them. Dunked in a glass of milk, they’re delicious and super simple.
Next time you make cupcakes, cake…anything that uses frosting, you will invariably have some left over. Just spread it between the graham crackers and put them in the fridge to set up a bit. Delicious!
But, if you are impatient and want to make frosting specifically for your graham crackers, here’s a recipe. I fancied them up by just pushing the edges into some sprinkles before the frosting set. Enjoy!
