I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, so I figured I would do so today… and show off my pepperoni and cheese appetizer platter, inspired by a post on Facebook! Of course, the problem with making things pretty is that then no one wants to eat them! We had a lot of leftover pepperoni and cheese.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend, and the quiet time before the holiday rush begins!
So I’ve been in a bit of a baking rut lately…luckily, Halloween and the fall in general lends itself to awesome pumpkin recipes. Last year, I fell in LOVE with Southern Tier’s Pumking Ale. So when my husband showed me this recipe for monkey bread, I knew that if I only baked one thing this fall, it would be this. It’s from a blog called Pennies, Pints, Pittsburgh, and it is all recipes with beer. Pretty amazing if you ask me.
I call this “monkey cake” because instead of little balls that you pull apart, mine came out more like a cake. So we sliced it when serving, and instead of dipping in the sauce, we drizzled it on top of each slice. And yes, there are candy eyes on the cake. I had them leftover from when I helped a friend make this dinosaur cake and thought it would be perfect for Halloween.
Before diving into the recipe, let me first say that for the past two recipes I posted, I’ve used a different yeast, and I think it’s pretty fantastic. The dough had a nice, high rise and I’ve never gotten this before with the other yeast I was using. Here it is:
For those of you who bake a lot of bread, you can get it in a 48 pack on Amazon.
And now, here is the recipe that will totally change your life. Okay, maybe not…but it really is so damn good!
Every year, my in-laws have a themed BBQ in August to celebrate my husband and father-in-law’s birthdays. Last year, the theme was tiki, and I made these tropical tiki cupcakes. This year, the theme was Oktoberfest, so I thought soft pretzels would be perfect.
I have never found a pretzel recipe that I really loved, and especially one that tastes good the next day. But, I found this recipe online from one of my favorite blogs, Brown Eyed Baker, and I figured I would test it out. I have to say, these are the best tasting pretzels I have ever made, and they were still great the next day. I just put them on a foil-lined cookie sheet and warmed them up in the oven for 15 minutes at 375.
I’ve also never found a pretzel recipe that browned as beautifully as these did!
This recipe comes out so puffy and golden, it’s amazing how big they get after being boiled. I thought I would have these tiny pretzels, but they ended up being a great size.
The dough was also great to work with. Just make sure to really flour your hands before rolling the dough.
It really did double in size after waiting an hour. I never had that happen before. Usually the dough rises, but not all that much.
I will definitely be making these again. They went like hotcakes! I made 4 batches, or 32 pretzels. Every single pretzel was gone within a few hours.
So here’s the recipe! The real Oktoberfest is next month, so this is a great way to celebrate.
A few years ago (wow, I can’t believe it’s been that long!) I made cake pops displayed on a wedding cake for my sister-in-law’s bridal shower. Well, she hired me to make the same thing for her sister’s shower, which was this past weekend. This was a fun project, so I was happy to do it again, and play with different colors and decorations.
Her main color was teal, so I tried to go for an ombre effect, with different shades of teal. I found this great sequin flower trim at M&J Trimming in the city (this store is crazy fun if you like crafts), and cut the flowers out individually to glue them on the Styrofoam cake. They really tied in all the colors.
I made the same flavors as last time, except that I substituted the vanilla flavor with my new favorite, sugar cookie. Each tier was a different flavor.
One other great thing I recently found in my travels is clear crystal sugar. My new favorite cake store, The Chocolate Duck, has all different colors and textures of sugar in little baggies. They were quite reasonably priced, which prompted me to experiment a bit. The crystal sugar still lets the color of the pop show through, and the texture and sweetness is perfect, especially for the sugar cookie flavored pop. And they look so pretty!
Everyone needs more cake pops in their life, don’t you think? 😉
Hello there! Hope everyone is having a great summer. It’s been a bit slow for me on the baking front, but I have a project coming up next month that I can’t wait to do. To prepare, I needed to test out some new flavors, so I made these cupcakes for my friend’s birthday gathering. I wanted something other than garden variety vanilla, so I went on Pinterest and found cookie dough frosting. I must be behind in the times, because apparently it’s a thing, and I had no idea. The genius part is that you actually put flour in the dough to make it the right consistency. Paired with sugar cookie cupcakes made with half and half, the combination is to die for!
