It's all good . . .

Mini Apple Pies

When I was trying to decide what to make for my New Year's Eve party, I had this crazy idea that I wanted to make mini apple pies.  I searched and searched for a recipe, but nothing that I found was even close to the vision I had in my head.  And so, being a little bit crazy, I decided to create my own recipe based on my apple pie recipe. They turned out perfect, and so I thought I would share my recipe :).

First, you will need to gather the following ingredients:

• Premade pie crust (with top and bottom – I used the Pillsbury Brand, which you can find by all the refrigerator biscuits)
• 2-3 apples – Granny Smith preferably
• 2T Flour
• ½ teaspoon cinnamon
• Dash salt

To make the filling, peel and slice the apples, being sure to cut them into very small chunks – much smaller than you would for a normal apple pie. Mix salt, flour, and cinnamon together in a small bowl, and then mix into the apples. Set aside.

Unroll the pie crust, and use a medium biscuit cutter to cut out 24 circles – one for each spot in a mini muffin tin. Press dough into each spot.  I used a little wooden tool I got from Pampered Chef years ago, and was so happy to finally find a use for it :).

Then use a small biscuit cutter and cut out 24 smaller circles, and these should be the perfect size to use for the top of the little pies. (You may have to take all the scraps and roll them out to have enough.)

Fill the crust with the apple filling. The apples will shrink a bit in cooking, so you can fill them a little higher than the sides, but not too much. (If you have leftover filling, just eat it with a spoon – so yummy!) Then take the smaller pieces of dough and cover the top. You won’t be able to make a seal, but make sure to cover all the apples with them.

Cover pan loosely with a large sheet of foil. Bake in a preheated oven at 425 degrees for 40 min. Remove foil, and bake for an additional 5 minutes or until the tops are golden. Immediately remove from the pan, and then set on a cooling rack to cool, or serve right away.

They were delicious, and were the perfect bite size treat for my party :).   Here is the printable version of the recipe:Download Mini Apple Pies  Enjoy!!

 

Attack of the Giant Pumpkin Plant

We have been a lot of afternoon thunderstorms lately, and although they have begun to taper off, we have had a few side effects. One of them is the beautiful rainbows we get along with them, and the other is my garden. It is a little out of control, especially my pumpkin plant.

In fact, it has become so giant, that it is taking over the whole garden! It covered my strawberry plant, it wound it's way through my tomato plants, it began encroaching on my lettuce and peas, and covered up my carrots.

In fact, to save the carrots, I harvested them a month early. Some were pretty skinny, but they still taste great, and since I am the only one that eats them, it it fine.

I also had to harvest 4 bunches of lettuce, and so I gave some of it away. And then, when my peas stopped producing, I quickly tore them out to make room for the pumkin vines.

And yes, there are pumkins within those vines - about 8 of them, maybe more. One is even growing in our neighbor's back yard, because it snuck through the fence. And some are as big as a soccer ball and turning orange already. Crazy!!

Our tomato plants went a little crazy too, especially the grape tomato plant. It sent out crazy vines all over, and is covered in hundreds of tomatoes. They are all starting to get ripe now, which is awesome.

And between the pumpkin and tomato plants, I had to move my basil and rosemary inside the house, as they were getting completely tangled up in vines. Now they are all cute in my kitchen window :).

And my Roma tomato plant is producing as well. Yum!

I love my garden, and I can't even express how awesome it is to make a salad completely out of things I grew myself :). Pretty awesome, especially since this is my first real garden.

Now, if only I can keep those pumpkin plants under control. Next year, I am only planting one, instead of two :).

Key Lime Cheesecake

 
Ever since I first tasted the Tastefully Simple Key Lime Cheese Ball, I knew that I wanted to try and make it into a simple cheesecake.  Last week, I finally got to do my experiment, and it turned out wonderful :).

KEY LIME CHEESECAKE

1 8oz package of cream cheese, softened

1 pkg of Tastefully Simple Key Lime Cheese Ball mix

1 cup powdered sugar

1 pint whipping cream mixed (see directions below)

1 Lime, cut in half

1 graham cracker pie crust

First, beat the cream cheese until smooth and creamy.  Add the key lime mix and beat in until well mixed.  Add powdered sugar and the juice from half of the lime, and mix well.  Set aside.

Mix up whipping cream by beating on high until peaks begin to form.  Add 2 Tbsp of sugar and 1 tsp vanilla and beat a little longer.  (Be careful not to beat too long or it will turn to butter.  The whipped cream should still have a creamy look to it, but be able to form a peak.)

Add whipped cream to cream cheese mixture until blended, but do not beat too long or you will deflate the whipped cream.  Pour into crust, and then decorate with small slices of the extra half of the lime.  Chill for 2 or more hours and then enjoy :).

Easy Chocolate Croissants

*I must preface this post with the fact that these are not even in the same realm as real chocolate croissants, but they can help kill the craving and are much better than nothing :).

Fourteen years ago, when I was living in Israel, I fell in love with chocolate croissants.  My Old Testament teacher used to bring them to us a treat every once in a while, and I was never the same.  They are heavenly. 

They are also very hard to find at the bakeries everywhere I have lived since.  I did find them at the bakery in France at Epcot Center in Florida, and I had a few on my mission while in Spain, but here in the US, there is a severe lack of these delicious treats.

And so one day, as I was lamenting this problem with a friend, she told me what she does to fake it.  It was such an easy recipe, that I had to try it, and she was right!  Although not as good as the real thing, it helped to kill my craving for this amazing pastry.

Yesterday, I was in the mood for them, and so I gathered the ingredients: Nutella and Pillsbury Cresent Rolls.

 
All you have to do is assemble them.  Unroll the dough and seperate into the precut triangles.  Then spoon a dollop of Nutella onto the center of each one.

 
Then roll them up like you normally would, but be careful to seal in the chocolate, so that it doesn't ooze out during the cooking.

 
Then bake at 375 degrees for 11-13 minutes, and ta-dah! You have "chocolate croissants" :).

 
They are best fresh out of the oven.  So yummy!

Oops!

I was looking through some of the recipes I have posted on here in the past, and I realized that last year when I posted my apple crisp recipe, I made a HUGE typo.  I said to put in a teaspoon of salt instead of the teaspoon of cinnamon the recipe actually calls for.  I thought I had better fix it and let you know, so that you don't end up with very salty apple crisp :). Go here for the corrected recipe.  Enjoy - for real this time!

Best Cookies Ever!!

I knew something was up the other day when I found Kevin searching recipe websites.  It turned out that he had eaten some lemon Girl Scout cookies at work, and was determined to recreate them.  We decided on using a cake mix to make the cookies (great choice on our part) and Kevin found the best lemon cream cheese frosting recipe. 

I baked the cookies and made the frosting, and then Kevin frosted them and cleaned up the mess.  Together we definitely created something divine.  I must warn you though, I cannot stop eating them, they are dangerous!  And I have to say, that my husband has the best ideas, even if this one is not the best thing for my figure :).

Lemon Cookies 

 Ingredients: 

1 Lemon Cake mix 

2 eggs  

½ cup oil 

 

Directions: Mix ingredients together until well blended and makes a soft dough.  Shape into balls and put on ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes (or until tops start to look cracked and edges just barely golden). 

 

Cool completely and then frost with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting.

 

 

Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting 

 

Ingredients: 

1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese, softened

1/4 cup butter, softened

2 tablespoons lemon juice (I used the juice from the lemon I got the zest from.)

2 teaspoons lemon zest

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4-5 cups powdered sugar

Directions: Beat cream cheese, butter, lemon juice, lemon rind, and vanilla together until smooth and fluffy. Add powdered sugar in 2 additions. Beat until creamy. Add more icing sugar or juice as needed for easy spreading. Makes about 3 2/3 cups

*This makes enough frosting that you could probably frost 2 batches of cookies, but instead, we just put EXTRA frosting on each cookie – so good!!

 

Printer Friendly Version: Download Lemon Cookies

  

Turkey Dinner, Turkey Dinner

Turkey Dinner, Turkey Dinner

Gather 'round, gather 'round

Who will get the drumstick?

Yummy yummy yumstick

All sit down, all sit down

Cornbread Muffin, Chestnut stuffing

Pudding Pie, one foot high

All of us were thinner

Until we came to dinner

Me, oh my, me oh, my

Song Lily performed with her first grade class this year

I love Thanksgiving, and although the food preparations are not nearly as fun without my mom or sisters here to help me cook, I still have a lot of fun with it.  Last year, inspired by my mother-in-law, I wrote out my Thanksgiving shopping list, recipes, and even an agenda for when I needed to cook what.  It sure made this year earlier just to pull out my Thanksgiving directions :). 

sung to the tune of "Are you Sleeping"

 

As I started cooking, I decided to document it all in pictures, so here goes:

Wednesday - Baking Day

I always make my pies the day before, because it makes things so much easier.  This year I cut back on my pie making, only making lemon and apple and leaving out the pumpkin roll and pumpkin pie.  (We have 6 pumpkin pies still in our freezer.)

Here is the pie crust - I thank my sister Cheryl for teaching me how to make pies, and my sister Wendy for giving me my crust recipe - so flaky and light!

Then there are the fillings, first apple . . .

Then the lemon pie (and you can see the finished apple pie in the background) . . .

I also make the finger jello the day before - this year the kids picked orange :).

Usually I make the roll dough the night before too and refrigerate it overnight, but this year I saved it for . . .

Thursday - or actual Thanksgiving

So I made the roll dough in the morning, and then I always have the rolls ready to go in the oven as soon as the turkey comes out.  I have so many great roll recipes, and this year I made Cousin Pat's recipe - yum!

Then it was time to take care of the turkey.  This year instead of just rubbing it with butter, I mixed some herbs in with the butter.  It tasted really yummy, but Lily was highly suspect of the green stuff on the turkey.  (And another funny thing, I bought a turkey breast again this year, instead of a whole turkey, but when I opened it up, it was a whole turkey, just missing the legs - I guess I should have payed attention to whether it was boneless.  The leglessness made it rather tricky to carve, but it's all good.)

I make the gravy once the turkey comes out, which is also when I put on the potatoes to boil.  I realized that I never got a picture of the fluffy finished potatoes - oh well - trust me, they were so good.  I even indulged and mixed in cream when I whipped them instead of milk - yum!

 And then, after all that work, dinner is ready.  Yum!! 

 All that great food, and my favorite part of the meal was playing the ABC's thankful game.  We started at "A" and had to take turns coming up with things we were grateful for each letter of the alphabet.   The kids were so sweet and cute, and reminded me that I have more things to be grateful for than I can count :).   

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving feast as well!

PS.  If you want a copy of my Thanksgiving plans, you can download them: Download Thanksgiving recipes

Sweet Success

My sister Holly has been working hard trying to put together a recipe book for our family.  You know, one of those books that has each families favorites and is so handy because everything you make is now in one book.  Well, because of this, for the last year, I have been scouring my recipe books to find any and every one of my favorites, and then furiously typing up my recipes so they could be included. 

I wanted to make sure this would be a great book for Lily and Derek to have - one that not only had family favorites, but also included basic recipes, like how to cook hamburgers or make mashed potatoes.  Something they could take to college or on their mission and be really set.  But I also wanted it to have some really fun things too, which really brings me to my story . . .

You see, I am a collector of recipes I would LOVE to try, but with my picky family and limited time, I rarely end up doing it.  And so, my list of untried recipes grows.  Well, with the deadline for getting my recipes to my sister looming, I looked at that stack and just knew there would be a diamond or two hidden in it that I would really want in that book. 

Because of that, I started experimenting.  I usually saved it for days when Kevin was in the field, but sometimes he got to try them too.  I had a few great winners, like the cheesy broccoli soup and the yummy cornbread, but I also had some sad failures - like the macaroni and cheese that was okay, but not at all worth all the work I put into, not to mention all that cheese that went, literally, down the drain. 

Soon I found myself down to a few days left and one last recipe - chocolate mousse.  I had found this Tyler Florence recipe one day when I was playing around on FoodNetwork.com, and it looked so good!  And, let me tell you, it was :).  It was definitely a sweet success, and worth the extra steps to have such a fun and yummy dessert.  And there were a lot of steps - melting chocolate, whipping meringue, whipping cream, and folding it together.

But it was totally worth it!  What a yummy reward :).  I am so glad I didn't give up on this final recipe.  (It was especially a favorite of Lily, who ate four servings of it - he he!)

BYU Brownies!!

If you went to BYU, you had to have tried these so very delicious chocolate mint brownies.  They have been around forever, and are served at every dance and event there.  The other day I found myself really wanting them, and decided that there had to be a recipe on the internet.  I found a few - one was the original recipe, created almost 50 years ago, and the other was the more modern one.  I decided to merge the two (frosting from the original, and brownies from the modern version), and found a very delicious result.  Enjoy!!

BYU Mint Brownies

 

Brownies

1 c. margarine or butter
1/2 c. cocoa
2 Tbsp. honey
4 eggs
2 c. sugar
1 3/4 c. flour
1/2 Tbsp. baking powder (Reduce somewhat if you live at a high altitude, or the brownies rise too much.)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. chopped walnuts 

 

Melt butter and mix in cocoa. Allow to cool. In a separate bowl, beat eggs and sugar until fluffy.  Add honey.  Sift flour, baking powder, and salt, and add to egg mixture. Mix well. Mix in cocoa/butter mixture.  Add nuts. Pour batter into a greased 9-by-13 baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Cool. 

 

Frosting

 2½ cups powdered sugar

 ½ cup butter

 1-2 teaspoons milk

 1 teaspoon mint flavoring

 Green food coloring

 2 squares unsweetened chocolate (melted)

 Stir powdered sugar, butter and milk together and divide frosting into ¹⁄₃ and ²⁄₃ amounts. Add 1 teaspoon mint flavoring and few drops green food coloring to ¹⁄₃ and frost brownies. Refrigerate until frosting has set. Add chocolate, melted, to the ²⁄₃ amount of frosting – you will probably need to add an extra teaspoon or so of milk. Spread over mint frosted layer after it has set.

For a printable version: Download BYU Chocolate Mint Brownies

Keeping Warm with Good Food

Last week the weather here in North Carolina turned colder.  It immediately put me in the mood for warm comfort food, like bacon chowder and apple crisp - yum!   I have always loved my mom's crisp recipe, and it had been forever since I made it.  So glad I did.  I hope you enjoy it as well and that it helps keep you warm on these chilly Autumn nights :).

Apple Crisp 

Filling

¼ c. flour

1 c. sugar

Dash salt

1 t. cinnamon

4-5 cups of peeled and sliced Granny Smith apples

 

Mix together the dry ingredients and stir into apples.  Pour into greased 8x8x2 pan and set aside.

  

Topping

Mix together:

½ c. sugar

1 ½ c. Bisquick

½ t. cinnamon

  

Add 1 beaten egg and stir into dry mixture.  Pour evenly over the top of the apples. Drizzle ¼ c. melted butter over the top.  Bake uncovered at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or until top is golden and cooked.

Download Apple Crisp- For a printable version of the recipe :).