Peeps Taste Test – Number 2

For this next Peeps taste test, we went for the new filled varieties. I will go ahead and say that I was prepared to not like these at all. A filled Peep? It just sounds kinda gross. However, I was pleasantly surprised.

Now, the girls and I are already fans of the Peeps with the chocolate coating on the bottom. And these two varieties both have that crunchy chocolate part.

The taste? Everyone, including Ryan, liked the Triple Chocolate ones. They are chocolatey but not too chocolatey. And the chocolate filling is actually kind of light.

(please excuse my nails…..I will be repainting them soon…..)

Now, the Vanilla Caramel Brownie ones we were all a little split about. I liked them. I thought that they tasted like some kind of Starbucks Frappuccino that had been solidified into a Peeps shape. Not bad. Big girl liked this one, too. Baby girl and Ryan – not so much.

I don’t really understand the “Brownie” part of the name. But, it’s definitely got a caramel taste and that’s the main taste in the filling.

The verdict? I liked them both. I’m becoming a big fan of the chocolate on the bottom of the Peeps. The crunch is a nice addition to the soft texture of the marshmallow.

So. Much. Candy.

We are having an epidemic in our house. An epidemic of too much candy. We have Christmas candy. We have leftover Halloween candy. And soon, there will be Valentine candy. So. Much. Candy. Now, normally, I would say that that just isn’t a problem. However, there comes a point when it’s just too much and you know it won’t be eaten.

Here’s the bowl of candy. As you can see, there is an abundant amount of candy canes. Like a crazy amount of candy canes. Now, I like candy canes. They are fine. But I won’t sit down and snack on three or four of them at a time. Nope. Just not gonna happen. I will, however, sit down and snack on three or four pieces of peppermint bark…..

And that’s just what I did. Get rid of those candy canes by smashing them and them topping them with white chocolate.

Donut mind if I do

You know how every couple years there is some new food trend? You know how the trend now is donuts? Donuts! Yay! Donuts! One of our local restaurants (that we eat at at least once a week) has donuts on the weekends. Yep. If you want some of Stan’s Donuts you can pick them on on a Saturday even if you aren’t in the city. Yay!

So, because I have a hard time making choices about donuts, I got three and the girls and I had a taste test.  (That’s a lot better than me eating three donuts by myself!)

Our choices: Nutella (the one with an N on it), powdered sugar, and pastry creme filled.

Although, they were all yummy, there was a clear winner for the girls and I……

The pastry cream filled one was delicious! That one was the winner for us. The girls and I also agreed that the powdered sugar one was second place. I really thought that I was going to absolutely love the Nutella filled one but it was really, really, really rich. Probably…..too rich if you are eating other donuts as well……

I Scream. You Scream. We All Scream. Again.

Once more, a few weeks ago, (apparently, this had just been sitting in my drafts – this school year is just exhausting…..) we had ice cream for dinner. I think that “get ice cream” has definitely been taken care of on the checklist. This time, we checked out another ice cream shop that we hadn’t been to before. This time we went to Every Day’s a Sundae. The ice cream was, as you might have guessed, delicious and portion sizes were amazing.

The girls and Ryan each had a scoop in a cup.

Once again, big girl had Superman ice cream and baby girl wanted chocolate and peanut butter. I think that those two girls have discovered their (for now) favorite flavors.

I decided to splurge and get a sundae. Ummmmm…..it was ridiculous.

It was huge! Delicious and messy and huge. The picture on the right shows how much we were all able to finish before leaving the ice cream shop. I put the cup in the freezer when we got home and was able to have ice cream for dinner the next day, too. 🙂

Baking Cookies (the easy way)

One of the last things on the summer checklist is to bake cookies. Now, when we’re not so close to the beginning of the school year, I love flipping through cookbooks and planning and shopping for ingredients and all that. However, when we are close to the beginning of the school year, I basically have no desire to take the time to do anything. I always feel like there is no time to get anything done……so, I knew that we were going to make cookies but I wanted to make it as easy a possible.

So…..I present to you…..super easy cookies!!!!

Yep. I bought the kind where you just grab the cookie dough cubes and toss them on the cookie sheet. But, actually, the kiddos had a lot of fun with these. Big girl liked to position her cookies in a certain pattern. Little girl liked to lick her hands after placing her cookies. (Ew.)

The chocolate chip ones turned out better than the Reese’s pieces ones but I’m kind of blaming my cookie sheet on that one. The newish cookie sheet had the chocolate chip cookies on it. The much older one had the Reese’s pieces ones…..the older cookie sheet might be close to being removed from the cabinet for good. 😦

One of the strangest things that happened for me was the strong desire to have a glass of milk with the cookies when they came out of the oven. Now, for most people, wanting a glass of milk with cookies is just a given. It is simply assumed that you are going to have a glass of milk with cookies. For me, however, that is something that hasn’t happened in a long time. When I was pregnant with big girl, most dairy foods tasted….well….off….for me and it took awhile for me to like eating them again. But milk, well, milk still tastes kinda off for me.

But, let me just say, that glass of milk was sooooooooooo delicious with the cookies!

So, I may have found a way to talk myself into having a glass of milk every day.

I’m just going to have to bake more cookies.

 

Summer checklist thus far:

• Go to the library.
• Go to the pool.
• Make banana pudding.
• Ride the train at the mall.
• Go to the playground.
• Make cookies.
• Go downtown.
• Go on a hike.
• Have a picnic.
• Go to American Girl Place.
• Go to the beach.
• Go to the zoo.
• Eat at Flat Top Grill.
• Read books.
• Eat at Noodles & Company.
• Get ice cream.
• Go to the splash pads downtown.
• Go to the water park.
• Go to a festival.
• Go to the movie theater.
• Play on the McDonalds playground after lunch.
• Go to family fun festival downtown.
• Go to the Art Museum and go to the kids area after looking at paintings.
• Go to the dinosaur museum (Field Museum).
• Go to the space museum (Adler Planetarium).
• Have a pajama day. (Although big girl has now requested that we have 100 pajama days.)

 

Tinkerbell Birthday

Last Friday was baby girls 2nd birthday. Where did those two years go?!?
We had fun celebrating on Saturday with a Tinkerbell themed birthday. The first and easiest thing that I made Saturday morning were the “magic wands.” If you follow this blog, you know that one of my favorite things to make is chocolate covered pretzels because they are delicious and super easy. These are just pretzel rods, covered in melted white chocolate and then covered in blue or green sugar (Tinkerbell colors.)

I like how colorfully they turned out!

magic wands

Stay tuned for more updates about her pixie party!

Simple is best

This school year has been a good one but an incredibly stressful one. Most nights, I have enough energy to get the girls fed and ready for bed…..and that’s pretty much it. So, now that I’m on Christmas break and I have more time to get stuff done, I still want to keep things nice and simple. I actually have time to get stuff done….but I’d much rather use that time getting the girls fed and ready for bed. 🙂

I love Christmas-y snacks and one of my favorite pairings is salty and sweet so, of course, one of my favorite Christmas-y snacks is chocolate covered pretzels.  Not only are they yummy, they are also ridiculously easy. And they are a great way to use up random sprinkles/sugars that you’ve got in the cupboard.

Yummmmmmm

1. Melt chocolate.
2. Dip pretzels. (I tend to just stir a handful of pretzels in the melted chocolate. I do not have the patience to do one at a time.)
3. Sprinkle the top of the pretzels with fun sprinkles or sugars. (Be sure to do this fairly quickly. The chocolate sets up pretty quickly and you want the chocolate to still be melty so that the sprinkles stick.) Adding sprinkles adds a little extra crunch and it’s also a great way to use up any of those sprinkles that you bought specifically for a birthday or to decorate cupcakes. I currently have a ton of sprinkles and decorating sugar so I’m always on the look out for a way to use up some of them.

This batch ended up a bit too chocolatey, if that’s even possible. You can’t really see the openings on the pretzels because every nook and cranny is covered in chocolate. Oops. But, they were still good. I am not sure how too much chocolate could actually be a bad thing.

I made a huge batch so I was able to give them as a gift and still have a bunch to keep at home.

Surprise: I already ate all of the ones at home.

Puppy Chow + Butterscotch = Yummy

So, after making that initial batch of puppy chow, and seeing how much fun big girl had with it, I decided that we would make another batch fairly quickly. Plus, puppy chow is yummy. A quick search on Pinterest brings up tons of different puppy chow recipes. I thought that this one sounded good.

I love all things butterscotch so I thought for sure that this one was going to be delicious.

I made a quick change to the recipe because I only had one cup of butterscotch chips.  I added in 1/2 cup of semi sweet chips instead. Note to self: buy more butterscotch chips. Another note to self: after you buy more butterscotch chips, do not eat them!

The recipe turned out really nicely. I like the addition of peanuts for a little different in texture.

Yum

A classic snack: puppy chow!

When faced with an abundance of Chex cereal, my mind turns to snacks that we can make with Chex. And one of my faves is puppy chow. This is the first time that big girl and I made puppy chow together. First, I had to explain that it wasn’t for puppies. Seriously, why is it called puppy chow? I’ve seen recipes on Pinterest that call this snack muddy buddies. Honestly, that name makes even less sense to me.

Anyways. I found this recipe and decided to give it a try. I did the melting and mixing. Big girl was in charge of shaking/rolling the bag to coat the powdered sugar. She was so excited to be my “helper big girl.”

At first, I was a bit concerned because there were some small lumps in the chocolate/peanut butter mixture. I used natural peanut butter. Maybe that’s why? Maybe if I had used non-natural peanut butter it would’ve been smoother? But, after the mixture had had enough time to rest and cool down, it did taste pretty good. Although it is not as sweet as the puppy chow that I remember from my childhood. I’m fairly certain that that is because I used the natural peanut butter which tends to be less sweet.

I think that my favorite part of this recipe was how excited big girl was to help and just how easy it was for her to help in a pretty big way.

Mmmmmmmm

Easter Dessert

So, Easter was a few weeks ago…..but I only recently have had anything resembling spare time. So, here’s a post about Easter dessert….almost in May…..

I’ve made these nest cookies before and thought that I had everything ready to go once I was ready to start.  It is important with these cookies to move pretty quickly once you start because the melted chips start to set up pretty quickly.

1) Melt butterscotch chips.

2) Mix melted chips in with a bag of chow mein noodles. (the crunchy ones)

3) Form into nest shapes.

4) Add chocolate eggs or jelly beans.

5) Allow them time to set up. (Or you can just put them in the fridge and hope that they get cold quickly.)

6) Eat and enjoy.

And, that’s how it should go. This should be a simple, no-stress dessert.

Should be.

So, I started melting the chips and realized that one bag was just not going to cut it. Well, that’s fine because I had purchased two more bags earlier in the week. Of course, though, those extra bags were nowhere to be found! Ah!

Problem solving husband to the rescue! Ryan reminded me that we had a partial bag of chocolate chips. Would those work?

Chips, chips, and more chips

The chocolate melted quickly and smelled great with the melted butterscotch. I tossed the newly melted chips in with the already semi-coated noodles.

Here goes nothing….

The chocolate/butterscotch combo smelled great but was sure messy! Far messier than just the butterscotch would be. So, it was hard to get the noodles in a nest shape without being covered in chocolate and butterscotch. As a result, the cookies ended up being a bit….um….huge. But, portion control is not my concern when it comes to dessert.

I decided to top half of the cookies with chocolate eggs and the other half with jelly beans. Big girl helped out by sticking the eggs onto the nests.

Mmmmmmmmm

They ended up being very yummy. On Easter, there were already requests for me to make them next year. The chocolate/butterscotch combo is really tasty but I do miss the taste of just butterscotch. I think that next year, I’ll make a batch with chocolate and butterscotch and another batch with just butterscotch.

 

Oh…and those bags of butterscotch chips that disappeared? We found them the week after Easter.

On the kitchen table.