Thursday, December 25, 2014

What did we bake for Christmas?

We hope you had an amazing Christmas. We certainly did. We saw lots of family that we don't see regularly throughout the year and made sure we spent lots of time hanging out with everyone! After all isn't love what Christmas is all about? It is easy to get wrapped up in all of the giving and receiving that it is easy to forget what Christmas is all about: Jesus's Birthday!


On to what we made for Christmas this year. Every year, we pass out tins full of Christmas goodies. This is what our tins had in them this year (there is a picture of what the inside of a tin looks like at the end) :
 Here we have yummy caramels. We attempted to make these last year and they were extremely hard because we cooked them too long. :( Not this year! :) Our caramels were chewy and delicious. The key is to take your time and not cook the caramels at too high of a temperature. It is very easy to surpass the temperature you want if the heat is too high. 
We went a little crazy with the pictures.......
 But we liked all of these and couldn't leave one out. :)


 Now we have scrumptious granola! We put slivered almonds, coconut, and raisins in our granola this year. We used honey as our liquid sweetener. 
 The great thing about granola is that it is totally customizable. Just choose what you want and toss it in the bowl. We have also made this granola with sunflower seeds instead of almonds. We have also put in ground flax seeds. 


 We thought our delicious pumpkin cookies would be a wonderful addition to out Christmas tin. The frosting on these cookies is a brown sugar frosting and is totally yummy!
This is a picture of a few of the cut out cookies that we made this year. Every year we make a ton of cut-out cookies and decorate each one differently. This is so much fun and a wonderful way to spend time as a family. Plus, the cookies feel that much special because each one is unique. We use royal icing as our frosting, but we have also used butter cream. 

These last two pictures are of a finished tin. Each one is packed full of yummy goodness and love!
Everyone who got a tin also got a loaf of homemade bread.


Merry Christmas and Thank You for reading!!! 
What was your favorite part of Christmas? 
What was your favorite gift?
Let us know in the comments below, tweet us, or let us know on Instagram!!


Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Nestle Toll House Prizes

Well, today, Christmas came early! We got home today to a nice big package waiting for us, and what do you know, it was the prizes that we won in the Nestle Toll House competition on Instagram! If you don't follow us on Instagram, we post pictures of all the delicious things that we bake! Anyway, in the Nestle Toll House competition, we won the third place prizes. Everything is great and we can't wait to use all of it. As soon as we opened it we wanted to use it, but alas we couldn't tonight!



The picture above is of a silicone baking mat. We have always wanted one of these, but we never actually went out and bought one. So, we definitely can't wait to bake cookies with this and test it out.


This is a cake plate for presenting decorated cakes. You can probably use it for any other kind of dessert that you would like. The next time that we make a cake, we are definitely going to be using this!


This is a cupcake corer. This is used to take out the middle of the cupcake so that you can fill it with jams and other yummy goodness.


This amazing tool(AKA a cookie scoop) will give you uniform sized cookies, and we have actually been needing a new one of these, so we are excited about this one!


Silicone Cupcake liners. Re-usable cupcake liners, what?!? We had no idea that these existed, does that make us bad bakers??? They seem pretty awesome to us and we cant wait to test them out and see what they are all about.



A Nestle Toll House towel and apron. Both of these are really cute, and quite frankly, don't need any explanation. :) 


A new cookie sheet. We have also been needing a new one of these, so we are super grateful for this one.  


A brownie pan!! This one is nifty. Have you ever seen a pan like this? You put the brownie batter into the pan and then you put the other piece (we don't know what you would call it) on top and bake it. When the brownies are done, they are already cut and uniform in size! It also came with a lid for easy transporting of your delicious brownies. 

Last, a cake carrier. It came with a piece that had 12 spots for regular sized cupcakes but when flipped over, has 24 spots for mini cupcakes, or you can not use that piece and simply use it to carry a regular cake.

We are so excited to use each and every one of our new baking supplies!!! We are going to be doing a lot of baking in the near future to test out all of these great items!


Monday, December 15, 2014

Red Velvet Cupcakes!!!!

Today, December 15th, is National Cupcake Day!!!! How did you celebrate??? We celebrated by making Red Velvet Cupcakes!! This is the first time that we have ever made them! It takes a lot of red food coloring, and we actually didn't have enough, so we used what we had, which was almost the right amount. The cupcakes turned out great anyway!


We used buttercream frosting instead of the normal cream cheese frosting, and it was still delicious!


We decided to make the frosting green since it's almost Christmas and we thought that it would be a really cute combination! We got really picture happy, so there are a lot of pictures here, but we had fun! so, here are some more pictures of the cupcakes:





I don't know if you noticed what the cupcakes are sitting on, but they are on a cutting board. We just got it and we thought that it would make a cute place for the cupcakes to sit on for their mini photo shoot :)

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Morning Glory Muffins!!!

These muffins are absolutely delicious! We have been juicing a lot lately and didn't want to waste the pulp that was left over, so we decided to mix it into a muffin (Muffins are one of our favorite breakfast foods). Of course, all of the butter and sugar in baked goods aren't the healthiest so we decided to "healthify" these muffins a little bit. 
 We started with a Morning Glory Muffin recipe from our King Arthur Cookbook. The first modification we made was to replace half of the all-purpose with oat flour( we made our own by grinding old-fashioned oats in a food-processor until it was fine like flour). We replaced the carrot called for in the recipe with the pulp from the juicer. We then decided to replace the vegetable oil with healthier fats. We replaced half of the oil with peanut butter and the other half with coconut oil(I am sure all peanut butter would work and would be scrumptious).  When I went to add the eggs, we realized that we were short by one, so we searched the web and found that 1/4 cup of applesauce would replace one egg. It worked wonders.

These muffins really hit the spot! They have so much flavor and are filling, too!We hope you try them and love them.
Recipe adapted from Morning Glory Muffins from King Arthur All-Purpose Baking Cookbook.
Ingredients:

  • 1 cup oat flour
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp ground ginger
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 2 cups grated carrot(or left-over pulp from juicing)
  • 1/2 cup sunflower seeds (ours turned green after baking for some reason but still taste the same....) 
  • 2 large eggs 
  • 1/4 cup applesauce
  • 1/3 cup coconut oil, melted
  • 1/3 cup peanut butter
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
Directions:
     Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk together both flours, sugar, baking soda, spices, and salt. Add the carrots(or pulp), sunflower seeds. In a different bowl, beat eggs, applesauce, coconut oil, peanut butter, and vanilla extract. Add to flour mixture and stir just until evenly combined. Scoop into muffin cups, and bake for 20 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes, then take out of the pans to cool the rest of the way.

Check out our You Tube video here




Sunday, December 7, 2014

Christmas Cut-Out Cookies

Who's ready for Christmas? We are! We had our first Christmas party of the season this weekend. It was a potluck Christmas party, so everyone brought a side dish or a dessert. Of course we took a dessert: cookies!
We thought that since it was a Christmas party, why not take Christmas tree and candy cane cut-out cookies. They were fun to make and also really cute.

Here are just some pictures of the cookies that we decorated:




We used royal icing because it hardens and becomes smooth. We were going to put decorations on the Christmas trees, but we ran out of time, unfortunately. So, show us how your Christmas cookies come out, especially your Christmas trees!


S'more Brownies

 One of our favorite things about the fall is being able to sit around a campfire with some toasted marshmallows, and of course s'mores. You can't have a campfire without at least having one s'more! Now that it's winter, it's too cold outside to be having a campfire, so indoor s'mores are the next best thing, right? 
Well, we saw a picture of s'more brownies, and we thought: we have to try this! What could make a brownie better? Adding marshmallows of course! We didn't have a recipe so we kind of just made one up as we went along.



The first thing to do is to make a graham cracker crust. You can use your favorite recipe, or buy one from the store and make it like a brownie s'more pie. If you make one homemade, you can crush your graham crackers in a storage bag with a rolling pin, or you can simply use a food processor(which is what we did). Then, put the crust into whatever size pan that you are going to use. We baked our graham cracker crust before putting the brownie batter onto it, but next time we make these we are going to try making them without baking the crust first. If you try it without baking the graham cracker crust first, let us know how it turns out!


Our favorite type of brownies are fudgy brownies, so that is the kind of brownie that we made, but you can use whatever type of brownie that you prefer. Then you bake the brownies until they are almost done. 



Before the brownies are completely done, add the mini marshmallows to the top of them. The marshmallows will take about 5-10 minutes to get the golden-brown color on the top. If you are worried about your brownies being overdone, a kitchen torch can be used to brown the marshmallows.


These are just some pictures of how the brownies looked when we were all done! We hope you enjoy these brownies as much as we did!


***Note: Be sure to cut these brownies before they are completely cooled, so that the marshmallows are easier to cut through. Also, make sure to use a non-stick spray on your knife or else the marshmallows will stick to your knife and it will be a pain in the butt to cut all of your brownies.