Hot Chocolate Bar - Free Printables

I need to do a better job of getting hand-outs, printables, etc on my blog and in a way that's easy for everyone to use because I keep getting emails that the jpg versions aren't working well.  I'm going to try using Scribd again.  I need to find a host for all my printables and I doubt any site is going to be perfect, but please leave your feedback!

Now for the good stuff....  Hot Chocolate!! 

Last year for Christmas, we did a progressive dinner type thing for our Young Women and one of the things I was in charge of was the hot chocolate bar.  It's a bit time consuming, but not terrible, and most of the goodies can be found at Wal-Mart or other places where you might do your regular grocery shopping.

To make your job a little easier, grab an EK "Real Estate Sign" punch from your local crafting store. If you can find it at a store that takes 40% off coupons, all the better!  I designed my printables for this particular punch but scissors should work great too! Some of the little signs might repeat, but print & use what you want.  I recommend printing these on white card-stock or another heavy paper like photo paper.

Hot Chocolate Bar Labels 1 of 3

Hot Chocolate Bar Labels 2 of 3

Hot Chocolate Bar Labels 3 of 3

Be creative, but here are some of my ideas....

• "Crushed Cookies" = Oreos or the peppermint Trader Joe's version
• "Semi-Sweet" & "White Chocolate" = chocolate chips
• "Caramel" = we used the Kraft Caramel Bits - little round balls of caramel found on the baking aisle
• "English Toffee" = Heath Bar pieces - on the baking aisle
• "Dippers" & "Dunkers" = donut holes, biscotti, Trader Joe's Chocolatey Coated Chocolate Chip Dunkers, Pepperidge Farm Creme Filled Pirouette Rolled Wafers
• "Peppermint" = crushed candy canes
• "Marshmallows" = we found a lady at church that made us homemade marshmallows - WELL WORTH IT!!!  My favorite mix-in!! 

If you're going go through the work of putting all this together, use a really good hot chocolate.  I couldn't find anyone to make me hot chocolate from scratch & I was already feeling a bit overwhelmed with all my jobs, so I had bought the Starbucks hot chocolate mix from Costco {with a rebate/coupon} & had someone bring it ready-to-serve.   Swiss Miss is just not acceptable! ;)

{Matching Mugs from Williams-Sonoma}

  Questions??  Leave me a comment with an email address.

Best Ever Brownies - Tuesdays with Dorie

Ahhh...Tuesdays with Dorie.  What a slacker I've been!  Today's recipe is an onion pizza thing.  I'm going to pass with a big no thank you.  I love pizza! A great pizza is on my top 10 favorite foods ... always has been.  But I wouldn't call today's recipe pizza....

Instead I'm going to blog about a recipe I made back in November and had done on time, but just never got around to doing my post about the recipe ... Best Ever Brownies.  If you know me, I'm into chocolate and I'm always in search of a best ever brownie!

Since it's been so long since I made the recipe, I can't remember all my thoughts & everything that I wanted to say about the recipe, but I do remember enjoying the recipe ... a lot ... and it seems like the brownies didn't dry-out as quickly as some other brownie recipes that I've tried.  The insides were gooey & fudgy, just like I like my brownies. I do remember wishing they had some chocolate chips &/or nuts though.

My camera & I were not seeing eye-to-eye the day I wanted to take photographs of these brownies, so instead you get iPhone photos.

dark chocolate crackles

Welcome to 2013!  I need to blog more this year than I did last year.  It's my way of journaling and a way for family & friends who do not live close to us to stay in touch.

My good friend, Angry Baker, made a request & nearly a month ago, I promised my faithful readers a recipe.   These cookies are yummy & always receive lots of compliments.

Dark Chocolate Crackles by Abigail Johnson Dodge ... 

Nectarine Chiffon Upside Down Cake - Tuesdays with Dorie

Hubby usually mows the grass before work and because he's usually in a hurry, he doesn't have a lot of time to tend to anything else in the yard.  Yesterday he got up and worked for several hours in the yard.  We hope it will cool off 10-20+ degrees soon so that the kids can start enjoying the backyard again!!  While Hubby worked outside, I worked in the kitchen making the Nectarine Chiffon Upside Down Cake.  I planned to served it for a late breakfast but then we were invited to a Labor Day bar-b-q/swim party and our job was to bring the dessert.  I didn't want to spend a rare family day baking, so we decided to skip breakfast and use the cake for party dessert. 

I was worried the cake would taste too breakfast-y, but we were not disappointed.  Everyone tried the cake and had positive reviews ... some even came back for seconds.  I enjoyed the texture but I wanted to taste more of the lemon juice that was added to the batter.  I think if I make the recipe again, I might add a little lemon zest depending on the fruit I choose to go with it.  I'd love to try this recipe with apples and pineapple sometime in the near future.

I made a streusel that went in the middle of the cake and it was used for the crust as well.  I couldn't find ginger in the cupboard, so instead of cinnamon and ginger in my streusel, I used Trader Joe's pumpkin pie spice.  My house smelled so yummy when the streusel was in the oven and one taster commented on how flavorful the streusel was, so the pumpkin pie spice was a hit! This cake went well with vanilla ice cream and it would be a great for a bunch, baby shower, or anytime something sweet is needed.

My only complaint is the time it took to put this cake together because of all the different parts, but I hope that it will go a bit quicker next time now that I've tried it once.

If you'd like to get the recipe, go HERE or HERE.

Blueberry Marscapone {Roulade} Trifle - French Fridays with Dorie

I think I'm a week + a day late on this recipe.  We're busy this summer and it seems like when we have a free day, I just wanna be lazy and not do too many extras.  One of my favorite lazy-day activities, so far, has been watching the Star Wars movies because my kids had never seen any of the movies and 2 of the 6 were new to me too.   I think #2 is my fave, but we still need to watch #5 & #6.

I wanted to try this recipe, but I also wanted to make it as quick & easy (& mess-free) as possible.  Instead of rolling my cake to make a roulade, I just cut my cake into bite-size pieces and turned my dessert into a trifle.  I like raspberries better than blueberries, but I decided to stick to the recipe and try the blueberries ... they were great with the recipe.  I also drizzled a tiny bit of orange juice over my cake pieces which added another flavor to the mix and sweetened the cake a little.  I walked away from my heavy cream while it was whipping, so it got a little well-done.  Kinda ugly looking, but it still tasted good.

Overall I give this recipe 4 out of 5 stars.  I didn't love the cake.  It was good, but I'd probably try this with a different cake recipe next time.

French Strawberry Cake - Tuesdays with Dorie

Don't let the title of this post fool you.  No, this is not a French Fridays recipe, but a French recipe we are baking for Tuesdays with Dorie.  And let's cut to the chase ... I LOVED this recipe!!  I loved our French Friday's recipe for quartre-quarts so much that I've made it a few times and this week's cake recipe was very similar.  WAY better than traditional/American shortcake!!  I love the dense, vanilla-y cake with sweet, juicy berries.

Yesterday I was pooped ... no motivation ... tired.  I keep getting to bed too late at night and things are busy and going at my house by 6am every morning.  I was grumpy & tired and so were my children.  By 4:00 in the afternoon, I was at my wit's end with sassy attitudes, disobedience, being told NO!, etc, etc, etc.  I quickly decided it would be best if we all take a break from each other and rest a bit before Dad got home from work.  The kids were all sent to their rooms ... Penguin read for a while and Peacock kept trying to sneak out of her room but she eventually fell asleep & slept almost FOUR hours!  Turkey had a nap too and I must admit that I fell asleep next to him for about 30 minutes.  After my quick nap, I came down and got busy with my strawberry cake and had some nice, quiet, relaxing time to myself.  For whatever reason I was a bit worried about making this recipe, but once I got into it, it went very quickly.

I think my cake had enough height to make 3 layers, but when I was ready to assemble everything, the cake was just barely cool enough to cut and I didn't trust myself to make the 3 layers.  I was thinking it might be fun to double the cake recipe and do 4 thicker layers sometime. Or use this cake in my English Trifle recipe instead of pound cake.

{working on the first layer}

I chose to not frost the sides of the cake because I liked seeing the insides and thought it was pretty.  I also just dumped the remainder of the strawberries and the juices on top of my cake.  I'm sure I wasn't supposed to do that....

It turned out fun & yummy & the extra juice made the frosting fall down the sides of the cake.  I think I'm gonna go eat some leftovers now for my mid-morning snack.  My children will be jealous.  I might share.

We have two hosts this week who shared the recipe on their blog.

Sophia's Sweets

Think, Love, Sleep, Dine

Time & Bakerella's Chocolate Chunk Muffins

#photoadayjune

Everyday on our way home from picking up Penguin from swim team practice, the kids start dreaming up all kinds of things they'd like for breakfast.  Monday they wanted Bushka's homemade granola, Tuesday it was doughnuts, yesterday it was cheesy scrambled eggs, and today they were after muffins. I knew once I got home, I could look at my Pinterest board & find something muffin-y with some chocolate.  A while ago, I pinned Bakerella's Chocolate Chunk Muffins.  Peacock & Turkey helped me make the muffin batter while Penguin went to change out of her wet clothes hide in her room and read a book in hopes that I'd forget about her so she could spend the morning reading.

Bakerella's Muffins were quick & easy.  From the time we got home, gathered ingredients, waited for muffins to bake, etc, we were sitting down to eat in less than hour.  I doubled the recipe and got 24 nice-sized muffins ... more than enough for us, some saved for Dad, a large plateful to a neighbor who recently had a baby, and some to our favorite swim teacher along with a surprise visit at her work along with kid-made thank-you notes.

First we mixed up the dry ingredients:

Then we mixed up the wet ingredients:

Time to mix everything together:

We filled 24 cupcake liners:

TIME for breakfast:

Almond Tilapia Meuniere - French Fridays with Dorie

I've been MIA with my Dorie recipes recently.  My family participated in two concerts here during the month of April which meant lots of extra practicing & rehearsals.  And then I went to California to play in two concerts over there.  The whole family tagged along, so we ended up making a little vacation out of our trip, but that means packing, unpacking, cleaning the car, etc and not a lot of extra's like new recipes this past month.

Wednesday, Hubby had the day off work.  We got the house cleaned up, ran some errands, celebrated my mom's birthday, and had a nice day together as a family.  Thursday he didn't have to leave for work until around 1:00pm, so that gave us the morning to tackle a couple more jobs and then set-out to find some ingredients for this week's FFWD recipe.  We stopped at a couple stores, but didn't find flounder, so we opted for the frozen tilapia at Sam's Club ... I'm more of a tilapia girl anyways, so I was excited.

While hubby played toys with the kids, I made our family a nicer-than-normal lunch ... the kids & I usually eat leftovers. :)

I made some almond flour in my beloved Vitamix ....

Before-

After-

In addition to almond flour, I used a little flour and some lemon zest to coat one side of my tilapia.  Lemon with seafood is one of my favorite combinations.  

I've never used melted butter to cook my fish before, so this was new and it turned out great!! 

We ALL had seconds and I served the fish with steamed broccoli like Dorie suggested.  I will definitely make this again!  Delicious & healthy meal.

Lemon Loaf Cake - Tuesdays with Dorie

Life is very hectic this week, but I had to take a break from violin practicing to make this recipe this afternoon.  The batter was pretty easy & quick to put together.  The hardest part was zesting the lemons, so this is a recipe that anyone can bake.

I sliced into my loaf while it was still a bit warm and the crust was a tad crusty - perfect! In insides were soft and dense like pound cake - perfect, perfect!  Mine turned out just a little bit drier than I'd like, but I was a bit sloppy in measuring my flour and being in AZ, I could reduce my flour a tiny bit next time.  I have lots of strawberries in my fridge, so I think I'll serve my lemon loaf cake with some berries and whipped cream for an after-dinner dessert and I think the berries and cream will add a little moisture to help make the cake seem a little less dry.

Can't wait to see everyone results.  To get the recipe, go HERE or HERE.

Happy Tuesday!!

Pizza Rustica - Tuesdays with Dorie

This recipe was not at all what I expected.  When I hear pizza, I think of a crust (pie crusts do not come to mind), cheese, toppings, maybe some kind of sauce....  This "pizza" was more like a quiche.

First I made the dough.  It came other alright, but I've never made a dough that didn't instruct me to put it in the fridge for a bit before using it.  When I rolled the dough out, it seemed kinda ... wierd.  I could see where it was cracking (not because it was dry though ... maybe mine was too wet??) as I rolled.  I had to do lots of patching after it was transferred to my pie dish and making a lattice with my dough was almost a joke.

Then for the filling.  I'm not a huge fan of ricotta cheese ... it's just OK.  I decided to try something else instead that I love ... cottage cheese.  I'm also not much a meat person, so I added sliced mushrooms & left out the ham.

Everything cooked up fine and in the end, I think it all worked-out.  Honestly, I wasn't a huge fan of the sweet dough/crust with the savory filling.  Some of my family members had a hard time eating one slice and some went back for seconds, so we had mixed reviews at our house. :)  If I were to make this again, I'd add more veggies & use a unsweetened dough for my crust.

If you are interested in the recipe, please go HERE or HERE.

Martha's Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Last weekend, our church had a Sunday evening birthday party to celebrate the organization of our ward.  We had cake, ice cream, and fun socializing to celebrate.  I had a bunch of freshly-picked lemons, so my family decided to try Martha Stewart's lemon meringue cupcakes.  FYI: If you are working quickly & have good help, plan on at least 2 hours for this project ... cupcakes, lemon curd, frosting, & browning ... and lots of mess!!  Martha's recipe yields 24 regular-sized cupcakes, but we did the mini size and I think we got at least 50 ... maybe quite a few more ... out of the batch.

Martha's Cupcake Recipe

Martha's Lemon Curd Recipe

Martha's Seven-Minute Frosting

quatre-quarts {again} - French Fridays with Dorie

This week I went back & made an oldie, but goodie rather than doing the assigned recipe.  I needed a treat to take to a little social & I needed to use up from strawberries, so I decided to make Dorie's quatre-quarts again.  

This time around I doubled the recipe, baked it in a 13x9-inch pan, and then cut the cake up into 2-inch squares.  I made a little fresh whipped cream and stuck a strawberry slice on top of each little piece of cake and it was a hit.

Cocoa Sables - French Fridays with Dorie

Yum! I just finished snarfing down my homemade ice cream sandwich!

I made my dough around 11pm last night.  Quick & easy. FYI: I used mini chocolate chips as an add-in cause I was too tired to start chopping chocolate last night.

This morning I got the dough out of the fridge & gathered up my collection of Easter and spring time cookie cutters hoping the kids could have fun cutting & decorating some chocolate cookies, but the dough for this recipe was way too dry and crumbly.  I did my best to roll the dough into logs like I should've done in the first place if I had followed directions.  We did roll the logs in Easter sprinkles to make up for the lack of cute shapes.

After the cookies baked and cooled, I sneaked a bite.  I love a dry, buttery cookie and I knew I had to try Dorie's idea of turning some of the cookies into ice cream sandwiches ... it was our after-lunch dessert and I'll make more tonight when Hubby gets home from work cause cookies & ice cream are two of his favorite treats.

For next time: I might like to try some sliced, toasted almonds as an additional add-in.

Irish Soda Bread - Tuesdays with Dorie

In all the cooking and baking experimenting that I do, I hardly share my food with anyone outside of my immediate household.  I'm not sure why, but that's just how things have happened.  This week I had the perfect opportunity to share one of my Dorie recipes.  

It seems like every year we celebrate my father-in-law's birthday with a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner ... corned beef, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, etc.  I asked if I could test this week's Dorie recipe on the family because our assigned Irish soda bread sounded like the perfect compliment to our dinner.  And since it was the first time I'd be making soda bread, I could easily blame bad results on Dorie, or Julia, or ???

About 90 minutes before we were supposed to sit down for dinner, I stirred up my flour, baking soda, and salt with a fork.  Then I added buttermilk and stirred a little more with my handy-dandy fork.  When the dough was somewhat mixed together, I poured it out onto my counter and combined everything a bit better with my hands.  I doubled the recipe since I'd have to have enough for a crowd, so I divided my dough in half, shaped the dough into large rounds, put the dough into pie dishes, cut an "X" across the top of both loaves, and threw it in the oven for about 50 minutes.

I was a bit worried about this recipe (probably cause I knew I'd be sharing it with family).  I wasn't really sure when to take it out of the oven so I just had to trust my gut and take it out when it looked done.  It also didn't look very pretty when it was done ... lumpy & bumpy with huge, open X's on top.  As soon as it came out of the oven, we jumped in the car and made it to dinner about 5 minutes late.  I had to quickly take photos in my mom-in-law's kitchen and then set it out to serve without sampling it ... hoping that I wasn't going to kill everyone with this not-so-pretty bread ... although the insides were much prettier ... I love dense bread.

Almost immediately, everyone started talking about how good it was.  I made my plate of food, sat down & took a bite of the bread.  I ate it plain and it tasted too floury to me, but everyone else was still saying they liked it.  Towards the end of dinner, one of my sis-in-law's suggested honey with the bread, so I grabbed some and I LOVED it on this bread.  I noticed as the night went on & the bread cooled more, I couldn't taste that strong flour taste anymore and I became a bigger fan.

This bread was SO quick & easy for me and I usually have buttermilk on hand, so I'll definitely be making this again to go with soups and other dinners.  This time around I followed the recipe exactly because of the family gathering & the type of dinner that was being served.  I don't think I'll be jumping in on the dried fruit variations any time soon, but someone suggested cheese and I think that would be fun.  Or just "plain" again served with a favorite jam or honey.

Happy 60th Birthday!!

If you'd like to get the recipe for this very traditional Irish Soda Bread, go HERE or HERE.

And finally here is the video of Julia making this bread on her PBS TV show ... the Irish Soda bread is the first 3 minutes of the video:

Rugelach - Tuesdays with Dorie

Tuesdays are a good day for me to do some baking & extra cooking, but that means I usually won't get around to posting my Tuesday with Dorie results until late Tuesday evenings.

This morning I made my dough and put it in the fridge to chill because I had a few things I needed to pick up for dinner.  The kids & I ended up having a bit of a detour because we ended up at park near the Gilbert, AZ LDS Temple and having a picnic lunch before we even started our errands.  We ate our lunch, walked around, and enjoyed the sunshine, ducks, and turtles.  It also just so happened that Penguin's school had planned a St. Patrick's Day craft at this same park today and they were just starting the craft around the time we were finishing our walk, so we stopped to make our St. Patty's rainbows.

When we got home, my kids were ready to help finish up our rugelach (roo-ga-la).  They helped me roll out the dough and then we decorated our first batch with raspberry preserves, sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, toasted pecans, and mini chocolate chips.  Our 2nd batch of dough was decorated with Nutella, raspberry preserves, toasted pecans, cinnamon, sugar, brown sugar, and mini chocolate chips.

My helpers then rolled lots of pretty little crescent-shaped cookies.

We let our cookies chill again in the fridge for about an hour and before baking them, we brushed them with an egg wash & dusted them with more cinnamon, sugar, & brown sugar. 

Our finished rugelach with Nutella:

Consensus ... I definitely liked the rugelach with the Nutella better then the ones without.  Dorie recommended filling the rugelach with apricot preserves, nuts, and dried fruit like raisins.  Raisins & I are not always the greatest of friends in desserts.  I'm SO glad I went with berry flavors and chocolate.  I also baked the Nutella rugelach a little longer than my first batch and I liked the more flaky/crispy outcome of it being baked a little longer.

Note to self: DO NOT bake these on wax paper again!  Just chill and bake them on parchment paper if I'm looking to save a few pennies by not using both kinds of paper.  I'd also like to try a little vanilla in the dough next time.

If you'd like to try this recipe, go HERE to get it!

Chocolate Truffle Tartlets - Tuesdays with Dorie

As I'm sitting here starting this post, I just glanced at the clock and it's already 11:23pm.  Geepers.  Where does the day go?  School work with 3 kids, cleaning 3 bathrooms, grooming 4 people, lunch at Sonic, trip to a vacuum store, errands at Wal-Mart, baking tartlets, trip to Grandma & Grandpa's house, trying a new recipe for dinner which took longer than expected, trip to Walgreen's for medicine, vacuuming, some serious kitchen cleaning after all our cooking & baking, piano practicing, laundry, and the list goes on!  Let's hope I can put together a quick post for my Tuesday with Dorie baking project for this week and hit the hay soon!

I made my dough yesterday.  It felt a little dry so I added almost an extra Tablespoon of ice water.  Today when I got my dough out, it was still feeling pretty dry, so I dunked my fingertips into a cup of water to moisten things up while I was rolling out the dough.  It helped.  The dough was a bit fussy, but easy to mend & I ended up making eight 4-3/4" tart shells (I think I could've made a 9th).  I was happy with how they turned out.

The fillings was easier to put together.  I almost always use Trader Joe's chocolate, but I decided to try a different kind this time around:

I'm not gonna make a special trip to buy this chocolate again.  It almost smelled a little bit like vinegar after it was melted.  Weird.   Since I now I have two empty tart shells on my counter and I think my six filled tarts could've been more full, next time I think I'll double the filling recipe.  For add-in's, I used white chocolate chips, semi-sweet chocolate chips, Oreos (in 3 tarts), and Trader Joe's Dunkers (in the other 3 tarts).

I was happy with how the tarts tasted, but the filling was definitely better than the crust. :)  The filling reminded me a little of a very dense brownie or flour-less cake.  My family enjoyed our tarts with a little Breyers vanilla ice cream.

Happy Tuesday!

For videos & the recipe, go HERE or HERE.