Cooking Baking Eating

Every once in a while I like to pretend that I’m a master baker or chef and go make something that I’ve never made before except from a boxed mix and expect it to come out perfect! Yeah and we all know how that one can turn out.

Earlier in the year I had a craving for brownies and wanted to make them on my own. Well they didn’t turn out too good, or too bad, they just…were a brownie I guess. It wasn’t anything to write home about but hey, I made them.

This time I decided to look for a richer brownie. After some research I found out there are so many different types of brownies! Ok well not that many. They generally can be broken down into three types: cake, fudgy, and chewy.

I found one brownie recipe that I can’t really remember for the life of me where I found it, but I decided to try it. There was lots of chocolate, butter, and some brown sugar. Now THAT sounds like a winner to me. It didn’t say what type of brownie it was, but it sounded pretty darn tasty from the description.

And they were darn tasty!

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Whenever I think of ice cream lately, I want to run around the house singing a la Eddie Murphy’s Delirious. Especially since I have been on a ice cream kick lately, I’ve had that in my head.

The last batch I’ve made was my Mixed Berry. I like to use frozen berries because they have great flavor but at the same time you don’t have to worry about spending a whole bunch of money on fresh berries.

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Ah summer.

I loathe the heat of summer. Why can’t it just be WARM and not BOILING outside? My poor fair skin needs to hide from the sun and avoid it unless wearing a strong SPF.

But the heat is also the BEST time to make the ice cream. Home made ice cream. Minty fresh ice cream with bits of lovely dark chocolate nestled through it.

Now THAT is summer.
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Thats right. Dark chocolate salted caramel cupcakes. Have you ever heard of anything that just makes your insides just start dancing, anticipating the sugar high that is about to ensue? This causes it.
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I shock my husband. I really do.

Especially when I suddenly bust out things like home made cinnamon rolls randomly.

He’s slowly getting used to the fact that I’ve started learning how to cook. He still won’t take bites of things when I walk up to him with a spoon and say “eat this”. That freaks him out.

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I’m not that big of a chocolate fan, but my husband is. He loves the fact that I like cooking with chocolate, or making candies and he gets most of them.

I got this idea from the peppermint bark that Williams Sonoma sells around Christmas. It’s horribly expensive but so easy to make. I ended up showing a friend how to make it last year and the husband has been bugging me for it ever since. There’s now 2 pounds of bark in the cupboard for him, so he wont complain any longer.

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I have a confession. It’s rather sad but true. I’m really not that big of a chocolate person.

Does that make me less of a woman?

When looking at a dessert or something sweet, I never really went for the chocolate. Sure there was the required Snickers bar in the morning during high school for about a month, or the Peanut Butter Cup that has been warmed in the window on a hot summer day and melted to the point where you have to lick it out of the cup. But beyond that not really a chocolate person.

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Work has really been evil for me lately. My schedule got knocked around majorly, I now have to be at work at 5:00am. Because of my commute I have to leave at 4:20am. I have to wake up by 3:10am to go shower.

Yeah, its early and yeah it sucks. Hopefully it’ll only be temporary.

It feels as though my soul has taken a little beating lately with the stress of a new work schedule and the stress of getting up so flipping early. It almost feels as though my soul needs a hug. Or maybe a band-aid and a bubble bath. Either way I know there is one thing to feed my soul.

Baking.
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Yesterday was spent in the most delightful way. The sun has been shining, it is slowly getting warmer, and things are just looking brighter all around. Money is still tight with the economy, so what can you do when you want a nice treat on a warm spring day?

Make your own ice cream sandwiches!

I’m on a mission to do “Pantry Buster” type of cooking lately, and use things that are in the pantry rather than something new and exciting that needs all sorts of new ingredients that I have to stock up on.

I’ve wanted to do home made ice cream sandwiches for a while since I’ve been craving a delicious Its-It sandwich. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find them here since we moved, so I decided to make them with the help of my lovely assistant and friend who came over.

An Its-It is a large ice cream sandwich made of two oatmeal cookies, filled with vanilla ice cream, and covered in a layer of chocolate. Who couldn’t love that! I mean seriously. But since I can’t find them, I wanted to make them. And if I did I wouldn’t want to spend the money, AND they are huge. Seriously huge. I believe you need two hands to properly eat it. My version is much smaller
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My husband likes to “hint” at things he wants me to try and bake. I know he has an evil scheme to get an idea in my head and to get me to make it a reality. In my head it’s almost a conspiracy, an evil plot to do his bidding in the kitchen.

What can I say? I’m just a sucker for a pretty face.

So he puts in my head something tasty. Brownies. Sometimes it is posed as a curiosity, like “What do you make brownies from that don’t come in a box?” For someone who never bakes I guess that can be a pretty common question. Most people now only know how to bake from a box. Add water and go! Yeah, not me as much anymore.

I went through my pile of cookbooks looking for a good brownie recipe. You wouldn’t believe how many different ones I had to choose from. Some books had 2-3 recipes! Most had things like nuts added to them, but I omitted those (allergy).

I finally decided on a recipe from a cookbook that was actually given to me by my husbands Grandma. She seems to have adopted me and likes giving me her cookbooks, but I think she’s just happy I’m not crazy and I keep the husband happy.

I took the recipe from Better Homes and Gardens new Cook Book circa 1953.
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