Showing posts with label candy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label candy. Show all posts

Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bites - it's National Peanut Butter Day!

7:54 AM | Labels: , , , ,


Did you know that today is National Peanut Butter Day? Now that you do, are you surprised that I’m just about bouncing out of my chair to tell you about it? I was talking to L and he commented that it might as well just be called Jess Day, with the amount of peanut butter I consume on a daily basis. I can’t really argue there, though I’d imagine I’m not alone in that boat.

One of my most recent peanut butter creations (the way I worded that made it sound like I developed the recipe – I absolutely did not) was a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bite, which is exactly how it sounds – a miniature peanut butter cup baked in the center of a small brownie. Yeah, it’s also as delicious as it sounds. In this dessert you get the quintessential Reese’s flavor surrounded by a fudgy brownie. I’m pretty sure I wound up eating my weight in them on New Year’s Eve – I’ve already explained how I’m pretty bad at controlling my portions with miniaturized desserts – so I might prefer to next time either make a sheet of brownies studded with the cups and cut my own slice, or put a whole reese’s in a brownie batter-filled jumbo muffin pan (now that sounds dangerous!). I just can’t get over how amazing these brownie bites are – on their own, with vanilla ice cream, really any way at all.

I used whole wheat flour and the stevia MoreFiber blend instead of the white flour and sugar, and for once no one could detect the stevia at all. I think it’s because there was still a decent amount of brown sugar, plus the refined sweetness of the actual peanut butter cups. I figure that Stevia might just need to be an ingredient you use to partially replace something rather than swapping it out completely. It might be a little overwhelming on its own. The only other change I made was to try to decorate the tops with rainbow sprinkles, only to realize that – newsflash! – basically all sprinkles (not the granulated ones, just the jimmy-like ones for ice cream sundaes and whatnot) are made with hydrogenated oils. Go figure. So I got a little bummed, scraped my pretty decorations off, and lamented at how plain the brownie bites wind up looking without any garnish. If I were you, I’d decorate them somehow – some mini m&ms, chopped peanuts, mini chocolate chips, a drizzle of brightly colored royal icing….just something to perk them up a bit. Your taste buds won’t give a hoot, but it’ll make your display look a little more festive. 



One Year Ago: Chickpea Pasta Casserole
Peanut Butter in the Past (blog): Peanut Butter Cookies, Peanut Butter-M&M S’mores, Peanut Butter & Honey Dog Treats, Peanut Ginger Tofu Salad, Thai Chicken Salad  
Peanut Butter in the Past (Facebook): Homemade Peanut Butter “Cheerios,” PB&J Yogurt,  PB&J Oat Pancake, Peanut Butter-Banana Crunch,  Peanut Butter-Banana Smoothie, Peanut Butter Stuffed Banana Bread French Toast,

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Brownie Bites, adapted from Mom’s Cooking Club
Yield: 40 brownie bites
(printable recipe)

The Ingredients
¾ cup salted butter, melted
¾ cup Stevia MoreFiber Baking Blend1
¾ cup light brown sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 eggs
¾ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup cocoa powder
40 miniature Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

The Method
Preheat the oven to 350° Fahrenheit and generously spray 4 mini cupcake pans with nonstick spray.2

Stir together the butter, both sugars, and vanilla in a medium mixing bowl. One at a time, beat in the eggs, then mix in the flour and cocoa powder until just combined. Fill each cupcake well approximately halfway with the batter and place one peanut butter cup in the center of each, press down until it is almost level with the batter. Bake the brownie bites for 15-18 minutes, and cool in the pan for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely (or, you know…not).

Notes:
1Or ¾ cup granulated sugar.
2These were pretty finicky and I found that the amount that I sprayed wasn’t enough to prevent some from falling to pieces when I tried to remove them. I would say either try spraying them even more thoroughly, or just throw in the towel and use liners. Not that broken peanut butter cup brownie bites are a sin, but they certainly don’t look very presentable.





 


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Posted by toni

Mr. Good Cookies, less-affectionately known as Use-Up-That-Leftover-Halloween-Candy Cookies

11:20 AM | Labels: , ,


To help wash the bitter taste from your mouths after yesterday’s post about broccoli rabe, I have a very sweet cookie recipe for you. It’s about time, after all – I’m just about the only food blogger who hasn’t devoted every day from Thanksgiving to New Year’s to dessert, which is shocking based on my relentless sweet tooth.

I’m calling these my Mr. Good Cookies, because I used a combination of Mr. Goodbars and Hershey’s Special Dark bars (both leftover from Halloween) in them. The recipe calls for you to use chopped up whatever-you-have-on-hand, so much like the blondie-brownie-candy-pie from a little while back, this is a good base recipe to know about, altered according to what’s in your pantry or what leftovers you may have lying around from the last party or what-have-you that you had.

I slightly reduced the amount of butter by 2 1/3T. Considering there’s still close to 2 ½ sticks in it, I wouldn’t call this a health modification. I realized too late that I was out of butter, my roommate agreed to take me to WaWa (think: glammed up 7Eleven) but not an actual supermarket, and when I got there I was faced with a $3.00 price sticker for half a pound. Now, I’m not a price guru; I really don’t know how much a lot of staple foods cost, though I know I should, but I do know that a pack of butter should not be that much. I just couldn’t justify spending $6.00 for 4 sticks of butter, and I knew that if I got 2 sticks I’d be pretty close to what I needed, so I went with it.

I also used this Stevia product that I recently won on a giveaway instead of the granulated sugar. Again, there’s still a hefty amount of regular brown sugar in the recipe so this isn’t a sugar free product, but it did cut the calories significantly and lowered the glycemic index. The product that I used was called More Fiber by NuNaturals, and it’s the first of many products of theirs that I have tried. I’ll have to test out their plain stevia, extracts, vanilla, etc. at some point, but the nice thing about the More Fiber is that you can use it in a 1:1 ratio to sugar because it’s been bulked up with fiber. I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about NuNaturals or stevia in general. I just have my doubts that it’s really as natural and unprocessed as they say it is, plus it’s wildly expensive (about 7 times the price of regular sugar by weight after taking into account the fact that it weighs less so an equal amount should last longer; just strictly speaking numbers, it’s actually 10 times the price). I’ll have to do more experiments and research before I come to any definite conclusions about which sweetener I’ll wind up using for baking. One of my professors recommended barley malt and rice honey as natural sweeteners, so I definitely want to look more into those, too. In the end there has to be something better than highly processed white sugar!

But ok, you’re not necessarily here to talk sugar or convenience store mark ups. You’re here because I promised you cookies – no, not just cookies, cookies with crushed up candy bars in them. These cookies were big hits in my apartment! They were easy to make, though I definitely recommend digging in with your hands to mix them most efficiently and quickly. They didn’t spread during baking, but as I’ve never made them with granulated sugar, I can’t tell if this is just a side effect of the stevia swap, since sugar is one of the main culprits when it comes to baked goods that spread. Judging by the pictures in the original post, this is definitely what happened. The fact that they retained most of their shape, though, meant that they were soft in the middle, kind of pillowy. They had a comforting, familiar sweetness to them, too.

The only downside that I could discern was that because I chose to use two different candy bars and wasn’t super anal about even distribution, some cookies had more of a dark chocolate edge, while others featured the milk chocolate and peanut combination more prominently, and still others didn’t have much in the way of candy bars at all. Still, I really liked them, my roommates really liked them, and my mom really liked them (though she detected a mildly bitter aftertaste, which can only be a result of the stevia, though the product claims it won’t do that; I didn’t notice the aftertaste even when looking for it, but I might just not be sensitive enough to it).


One Year Ago: Thin & Chewy Gingerbread Cookies

Mr. Good Cookies (aka Candy Bar Cookies), adapted from Cooking During Stolen Moments
Yield: Approximately 4 – 4 ½ dozen
(printable recipe)

The Ingredients
1 cup + 3 tablespoons butter
1 ½ cups sugar1
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
4 cups (white whole wheat) flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
4 full or 20 fun size candy bars2,  chopped
1 cup oats

The Method
Preheat the oven to 350° and lightly grease baking sheets.

Cream the butter and both sugars until light and fluffy, at least five minutes. Add in the eggs one at a time, followed by the vanilla, and mix an additional 2 minutes, until creamy and well incorporated.

Meanwhile, whisk the flour, baking powder, and baking soda together in a different bowl. Slowly add it into the sugar mixture by hand, stirring until just combined. Using your hands, mix in the candy bar pieces and oats quickly, taking care not to over-mix.

Roll the dough into golf ball sized rounds, placing them at least one inch apart on the prepared baking sheets. Place in the oven and bake 11-13 minutes, until light golden brown. Cool for 1 minute on the sheets, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container once cool.

Notes:
1This is where I substituted in equal volumes of the More Fiber Stevia Blend; if you’re using an alternative sweetener that is not cup-for-cup the same as sugar (most are not), you’ll need to cut back on the amount you use.
2For mine, I used 10 Hershey’s Special Dark and 10 Mr. Goodbar fun size bars.



 


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Posted by toni

Blondie Brownie Candy Pie - a mouthful anyway you slice it!

5:57 PM | Labels: , , , ,



Did you know that I have never posted a pie recipe on here before? I have shared cookies, layer cakes, sweet breads, fruit crisps, cupcakes, pastries, and practically every other kind of coma-inducing sugar bomb dessert ever invented. I have even posted one or two savory pies. But not once has a sweet blend of sugar, fruit and/or creamy confection ensconced in a buttery, flaky shell baked to golden-brown perfection made it onto this page. What is, perhaps, even more tragic is the reason that I haven’t shared a recipe for a dessert pie with you is not because I tried a recipe and it flopped, or I forgot to take a picture, or a million and a half other facets of life stepped in and forbade it; no, I haven’t written about pie before because, apparently, I had never made one.

Unless you count the apple pie I made with a friend from the Pillsbury refrigerated crusts back in high school in honor of Pi day.

For the sake of a good story, let’s not.

As it turns out, I think I’ll be attempting a classic pumpkin pie in honor of the big Turkey Day next week, but when I realized this epic culinary oversight on my part, I couldn’t even wait that long to right it. Luckily, I didn’t have to drop everything I was doing and whip up an impromptu dessert, because it just so happens that last week I did, in fact, bake a pie. Kind of. I say kind of because this wasn’t really a pie so much as it was a dessert baked in a pie dish, giving it the iconic shape without really any other overlapping characteristic. Still, pie is in the name, and so I have for you today Floptimism’s Very First Pie.

Does it surprise you that my first pie is actually called a Blondie Brownie Candy Pie, and that it is actually a layer of buttery blondie batter scattered with leftover Halloween candy doused in brownie batter iced with warmed chocolate chips and garnished with miniature m&m’s? No, I didn’t think it would. The chocoholic in me really is making up for all the lost time from when I was a little kid and eschewed all things chocolate unless preceded with the word “white.” I even ate white chocolate peanut butter cups. Yeah, they make them.

But anyway, back to this pie. Blondie. Brownie. Thing. It’s amazing. I mean, really, really good. My stumbling upon the recipe was even more fortuitous than my choosing to bake it just one week before realizing the sad truth of my lack of pie baking experiences. I was trying to find recipes that would use my leftover Halloween candy (how many other people grossly overestimated the amount of trick or treaters they would get? How many other people secretly intentionally did so to have an excuse to have leftovers for yourself? It’s ok, me too.), and I found this bad boy when I wasn’t even sitting down to conduct a formal search. It was just there, waiting for me, saying, “I know that I’m exactly what you’re looking for. You have no excuse.” And so I did the only thing someone in my position could do, really – I baked!

A few notes – I didn’t cut up the butter but as it goes into a pot to be melted, I don’t think that’s much of a problem. I used white whole wheat flour and it did not stop the boys in L’s dorm from devouring it (ok, I absolutely played a heavy hand in that too; I can’t pin it all on the male stomach being a bottomless pit). The blondie batter didn’t fully firm up in the freezer in 10 minutes as the recipe said, so after 12 or 13 I essentially threw in the towel and worked with it, anyway. It wasn’t too difficult. I melted the chocolate chips in the microwave on half power at 30 second intervals , though I tend to encourage avoiding microwaves whenever possible so a double boiler system on the stove would work wonderfully, too. Instead of the snickers bars that the original recipe called for (darn you hydrogenated oils!), I used what I had – a combination of Crunch and Krackle fun bars. I’m sure the pie wound up being less decadent in the end because of that change, but really, when you have something called a “Blondie Brownie Candy Pie” do you need the candy in it to be the most ridiculous thing in the world? It was plenty rich, and I really liked the crunch that the nougat gave. Just use whatever leftover candy you have on hand. You can’t go wrong.

I was worried that I had over-baked it, since I checked after 25 minutes and my toothpick was already clean as a whistle. Still, the pie turned out to be really soft and not overdone at all, so don’t get too concerned if you find the same thing happens to you (but if I were you, I’d check it a little earlier – maybe around 22 minutes – just to be sure). The blondie part on its own was a little bland and certainly won’t be my go-to stand alone blondie recipe, but taken with the rest of the dessert, I just about died and went to heaven. Add a little scoop of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream or pour a shot of Godiva white chocolate liqueur on top, and you’ll have me wrapped around your little finger. It was…phenomenal. And although I can’t really see myself running out and buying candy to use in this recipe again and again, it’s absolutely something I will be coming back to when I find myself with a bowl of leftover candy too big for even me to eat all of it on its own…and on my own. 



Blondie Brownie Candy Pie, adapted from Kitchen Daily
Yield: 1 pie (6-8 generous servings)
(printable recipe)

The Ingredients
½ cup (1 stick) butter
½ cup light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup white whole wheat flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
13 fun-size candy bars
additional candy, nuts, sprinkles, etc. for garnish1

The Method
Grease a 9-inch glass pie plate with cooking spray and set aside.

Melt the butter and brown sugar together over medium heat, bringing the mixture to a bubble. Remove from the heat to cool for 10 minutes.

Add 1 egg and the vanilla to the pan and, using a non-metal utensil, mix well. Stir in the flour and baking powder until the batter smooths out. Measure out ¾ cup of the batter and scrape it onto the pie plate without spreading it out. Place in the freezer for 10-15 minutes, until firm.

Just before the reserved batter is ready to come out of the freezer, preheat the oven to 350° and melt ½ cup of the chocolate chips. Add the melted chips, remaining egg, and cocoa powder into the batter that was not placed in the freezer. Set aside.

Once the freezer batter is firm, press it into an even layer across the entire plate and halfway up the sides. It’s ok if the layer is extremely thin; as long as no bits of glass show through, it’s enough. Top with your candy bars of choice, and then pour the brownie batter over all of it. Smooth out with a spatula before placing in the oven to bake 24-27 minutes, or until a toothpick or cake tester comes out with moist crumbs from the center.

Remove from the oven, sprinkle with the remaining chocolate chips, and let it sit for 5 minutes, or until the chocolate chips have softened to a spreadable consistency. Spread the melted chocolate over the pie and top with any desired garnishes. Allow the pie to cool completely before slicing.

Notes:
1I used 2 fun-size packs of m&ms for the garnish and liked the added color, but feel free to be creative with your pie!

I should probably divulge how I became aware of the fact that I had yet to post a recipe about pies. Well, it all came about when I saw a giveaway that involved sharing a pie recipe. Naturally, I went back into my archives to find one, and was shocked and amazed to realize that there wasn’t a single sweet dessert pie in sight! I still wanted to join in on the fun, and with this beauty of a recipe in my to-share file, I knew it had to make it onto these pages over the next week or so. So, here it is, and there you have it!  

Come join me at Love the Pie with TidyMom,  sponsored by Cherokee USA, Le Creuset, Wilton, Bags by Bloom and  Harvard Common Press - either check some of the other wonderful pie recipes people are sharing – or, if you’re so inclined, share one too!

 







 


















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Posted by toni

Assorted Candy Bark (including Mint-Chocolate and Caramel-Butterscotch)

7:11 PM | Labels: , , , , , ,

Tonight, I actually finished my to-do list before midnight, and so I'm finally back to talk to you about some of the cool things I've been cooking up lately. With all of the holiday parties coming up, I figured it would be a good time to share with you a "recipe" for candy bark - which is really just code for assorted candies pressed into freshly melted chocolate and allowed to reharden. I brought it to an induction ceremony this past week, and it got rave reviews. Unfortunately, I can't actually eat the bark (though I did try it) because of the lovely hydrogenated oils in some of the ingredients (more on that in a bit). The beauty of this is that it's kind of the edible trash can of the recipe world - any desserty/snacky ingredient you have on hand works. Pretzels? M&Ms? Candy Canes? Anything! So this really isn't so much a recipe as it is a suggestion for letting your creative juices flow. The original poster used Christmas candy corn and things like that to make a fully Christmas themed bark, while I made 2 batches - 1 with mints pressed in for a mint-chocolate variety, and 1 with butterscotch chips and caramel-filled hershey kisses - so it can be as plain or themed/festive as you want.

Candy Bark, courtesy of Gingerbread Bagels
Yield: Maybe 15-20 pieces? I doubled it to do the 2 different versions, and I had a whole lot.
The Ingredients
8-12 ounces semi sweet chocolate chips
4-8 ounces milk chocolate, butterscotch, or peanut butter chips (this + the semi sweet should equal 16oz.)
10oz. of candy melts (both Gingerbread Bagels and I used green and red for Christmas)

The following are just suggestions - feel free to add in whatever you have handy/want:
1/2C oreos (optional - Christmas oreos, but I used plain), quartered
1/4C m&ms (any version you want)
1/4C candy corn or those cadbury Christmas chocolate balls
1/4C hershey kisses (candy cane, caramel filled, whatever!) or crushed mints

The Method
1. Melt the chocolate chips in the microwave, being careful not to burn them. You could also do this in a double-boiler.
2. Spread the chocolate onto a piece of wax or parchment paper in the rough shape of a rectangle. It should be maybe 1/4" thick, but I really just went with whatever looked right.
3. Melt the candy melts (in separate bowls for each color) and drop spoonfuls sporadically on top of the chocolate rectangle.
4. Use a knife to swirl the candy melts into the chocolate.
5. Press the candy into the chocolate (really do this well - I just kind pressed it a little and a lot of the candy fell off when I broke the bark into pieces) and set aside for at least 3 hours to harden.
6. Break up the bark and enjoy!

I'd say something about how good this is, but first of all - how can it not be good? It's your choice of candy pressed into your choice of chocolate/misc. baking chips. Second of all, though, I didn't really eat much of it, especially once I found out the ingredients of some of my choices. I should have known better - of course candy melts and butterscotch chips have hydrogenated oils in them. How else would manufacturers get them to take that shape? I should have known, but for some reason I didn't think to read the ingredient lists until I stuck the butterscotch chips into the microwave along with the chocolate and, lo and behold, they didn't melt. I found that odd, and then I thought about it, and had an aha! moment. Yes, one of the first ingredients is "partially hydrogenated oil."

For those of you who don't know my bizarre eating quirks, I avoid any trans fats that I can - shortening, hydrogenated oils, etc. It isn't just because of the implications they have on heart health, though that is a huge deciding factor. It's also this very fact that the butterscotch chips don't melt (okay, as an example). There's just something so unnatural about items with hydrogenated oils and shortening. I mean, take crisco itself - that stuff can sit at room temperature for a century and not go bad. McDonald's has been known to sit at room temperature for a year and not grow mold. Things like this just aren't natural, and yet we consume these chemicals and additives all the time. I'm not trying to convert anyone, honestly. It's just something that I feel very passionately about. I eat a lot of butter and I eat a lot of dessert - I'm no junk food phobe. But I care a lot about the ingredients that go into those desserts and foods, because I firmly believe that we need to be eating food and not edible non-food items (or so Michael Pollan says in his book that I just started reading - how convenient - In Defense of Food). Eating healthily is about limiting fat and refined sugars and eating a plethora of fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean proteins, you've heard that spiel. Yes. I'm not railing against my own future profession. But it's also about knowing your food - where it comes from, how it's made...heck, how to pronounce all of the ingredients. You can make great strides in maintaining a healthy diet if you just rule out the foods with stuff in it you can't pronounce. But that's just my opinion.

That's it, that's my soapbox for the day. Again, if you go and make this candy bark and share it with people and you enjoy it immensely - even if you make it and eat the whole batch by yourself - I won't think you're a sinner or you don't know how to eat well. My idiosyncratic eating habits are just that - little quirks that I've picked up. We all have them. But this right here, it's just a little food for thought. I will definitely make this bark again, but likely without the candy melts (maybe some dyed white chocolate instead?) and butterscotch chips. When you get right down to it, this recipe is a crowd pleaser - trans fats or not - and it's one of the easiest and most versatile desserts out there. And isn't that what really counts?

P.S. I apologize for not having a picture - I forgot to take one and am a little too comfy in my chair (it's been a long week) to get up and take one. I'll try to remember to take one tomorrow to post on here. But for now, you can head on over to Gingerbread Bagels to see the absolutely magnificent pictures she took. If those don't make you run into your kitchen and whip up a batch right this second...but I digress.

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