Mars Bar Brownies

I admit it, my favorite part of Halloween is the cheap minature candy for the days after Oct. 31. This year I hit the stores and came home with a large box of mini mars bars. Why didn’t I get a box that had a few kinds in it? I don’t really know, but that large box of mars bars called to me, it wanted me to bring it home.

So now, rather than just chew my way through the box of 70 chocolate bars in the weekend, I decided maybe I should try and do something with them. The natural and most obvious choice was Brownies.

Mars Bar Brownies:

Ingredients:
½ cup margerine (1 square)
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup cocoa powder
½ cup all purpose flour
about 12 mini mars bars

How to:
1. In a saucepan melt the margerine., remove from heat.
2. Add the brown sugar and stir until smooth. Check to make sure that the mixture is now cool enough that it won’t cook the egg, if it is too warm let it sit for a minute.
3. Add in the egg and vanilla, mixing until smooth.
4. Add the flour and cocoa powder, mixing until just mixed.
5. At this point you could cut up the mars bars and add them in, but I decided to go a more interesting route. I poured just enough batter to cover the bottom of my 8x8 pan, then set the bard in lines in my pan.

I then marked the edges of the bars, and covered them with the remaining batter.


6. Bake at 350F for 20 mintues, they will still be very gooey when removed from the oven, don’t worry about it. Let cool in the pan for 5 -8 mintues them remove to a wire rack (I like the parchment paper for this as you can just grab the sides and pick the brownies out of the pan.).
7. Once the brownies are cool, but at the marked lines. Hopefully the bars didn’t shift and the brownies will look like a fudgy brownie along the cut lines. Then when you bite into the middle, you get a caramel and nugout surprise!

Reviews:
I love these brownies, I hate easily ½ the pan of these in a single sitting. I could not stop myself from picking up a new one everytime I went near the kitchen. O said they were allright, but a little too rich for him as he wasn’t able to sit down and eat a bunch of them all at once.

Thank You Edible Arrangements!

Edible Arrangements is a fun company that make boquets out of fruit. I have been drooling over these arrangements for a while now, but haven't had an excuse to actually order one other than I want to try it. However, after a recent promotion, I managed to get a coupon for a free small box of fruit! Sweet, I can try it now, in a small form - I don't have to get a big arrangement that I might not finish.

Owen was nice enough to pick up my box last week on his way home. I ended up with 2 chocolate dipped apple slices, 2 chocolate dipped orange slices and 2 chocolate dipped strawberries.


The rulings: I love these. I polished off all the fruit quite quickly and the only way that Owen was able to get his hands on any was to sneak it from me as I was doing something else (I don't share fruit well..). I will be ordering from them in the future (even if I just eat it all myself).

Thank you to Edible Arrangements for my free fruit, and if you haven't hear of them you should check it out.

www.ediblearrangements.com

Chocolate Cookies with a Twist - Bulldogs Cookies

Alright, I know these sounds gross and weird. Right now many of you are probably wondering were I left my brain before trying this, but seriously they are great. Trust me, I know my chocolate!

Anyways, over the summer, one of the guys on the Bulldogs had mentioned Chocolate Sauerkraut Cake to me after eating one of my other baked goods with veggies in them (chocolate zucchini loaf and chocolate beet cake). I didn’t think much of it until I was reading Cream Puff Murder by Joanne Fluke, and she had a recipe for “Don’t ask, Don’t tell Cookies”. Upon seeing this, I knew what the bulldogs would be getting for cookies. Off course I made some changes (I really didn’t need 8 dozen cookies).

Chocolate Sauerkraut Cookies

¼ cup soft butter
1 ½ cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ cup cocoa powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ cup soured milk (take regular milk and add ~1tsp lemon juice, leave for a minute)
2 ½ cups flour
1 cup drained sauerkraut

Directions:
1. Place the sauerkraut in a colander and rinse, rinse it very well! You should only have a faint smell if any of the brine left when you are done rinsing. Transfer to a cutting board or food processor and finely chop ( you want this to be a very fine chop or you will find large chunks in your cookies).
2. In a bowl beat the butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the eggs, one a time until well mixed.
3. Mix in the vanilla, cocoa powder and baking soda until well combined.
4. Add ¼ cup of milk and 1 ¼ cups of flour. Allow to mix and add the remaining flour and milk.
5. Measure a packed ½ cup of chopped sauerkraut form step 1 (this should be pretty much all of it) and pat dry with a paper towl (don’t worry about it getting it perfectly dry, you just want to remove some of the water). Add to the chocolate batter and stir.
6. Drop the cookies using teaspoons onto a cookie sheet. (this is a fairly “runny” dough, as far as cookie dough goes). Bake at 350 for about 10-11 minutes. Let cool on the cookie sheet for 1 minute before moving to a wire rack.

These cookies taste pretty much like a cake, and have the same “fluffy” consistency of a cake. O figured they needed a little more flavour, so I added the frosting as suggested by Joanne Fluke (with some modifications).

Mocha Chocolate Frosting
Ingredients:
½ cup chocolate chips
1 cup icing (powdered) sugar
1/6 cup margerine
4 tsp strong coffee

Directions:
1. In a microwave safe bowl melt the chocolate chips with 2 tsp of coffee. (Microwave for 30 seconds, stir, microwave 20 seconds stir, repeat until all chips are melted).
2. Add in the margerine and stir until it is all melted and combined.
3. Add in the icing sugar and stir. This will make a very thick mixture and you may have to add the additional 2 tsp of coffee to thin it out so you can spread it (and it adds a it more of the yummy coffee flavor).
4. Spread on cookies while warm.

This icing is a very fudgy icing, and the way I made it, it hardened on top kind of like a royal icing which allowed me to easily stack the cookies without worrying much about the icing.

Reviews:
The combination of the chocolate cake like cookies and the mild coffee in the icing was great. No one guessed there was sauerkraut in the cookies, and some people didn’t believe it when told. All in all they were a big hit.

The Game Score:
Now for the important bit – they Bulldogs won the game 4-2! (O even managed to score a goal) Way to go Bulldogs.

The Bulldogs next game is November 13th (yes, that is Friday the 13th folks). So look for an update next weekend.

Bulldogs and Cookies

Owen loves hockey - he watches hockey and he plays hockey, on two teams. There is a lot of hockey in our house. One of the teams he plays on is the Bulldogs. This team has somehow gotten it into their heads that they need cookies before the game to win (really I think this is a big excuse to eat cookies). I figured I would get it out of their heads and sent cookies during a losing streak, well they won and have continued to win as I continue to send cookies - this is just a coincidence right?

Well, as I am now sending cookies almost weekly, they have graciously become my guinea pigs for new recipes. This actually works out well, as now I don't have to try and find something to do with a bunch of cookies so I can bake something new, after sending them to hockey I usually only have about a dozen left in the house for the week - perfect.

The reason I am telling all of you this? I am going to start a weekly (or there abouts) update on the cookies I make for the dogs and how they are doing. Should be an interesting season for us all!

I hope you enjoy at least some of the recipes - the guys really are good sports about what I send.

Upcoming Bulldogs update: Chocolate surprise cookies.

Slow Cooker Chili

My husband loves beans, and he is a fan of a good chili on a cold day. I love doing it in the slow cooker, It doesn’t require a lot of work on my part, and the flavors have lots of time to mix together and become something delicious. This is approximations, as when I cook chili there is a lot of tossing in random vegetables out of the fridge, tasting and adding spices depending on my mood that day.

Ingredients:
1 onion
2 stalks celery
1 lb ground meat (I used ½ lb beef and ½ lb venison as they were the first things I grabbed)
1 can crushed tomatoes
1 can tomato sauce
2-3 cans beans (I used all kidney this time, but sometimes I add navy beans as well)
peppers (doesn’t really matter what kind, use what you like best)
2-3 small hot peppers
grated carrots
1 can corn nibblets
2 tbsp chili pepper
2tbsp cup cumin
1 tbsp Italiano seasoning
garlic, salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
1. Brown meat with the celery and onions. Rinse off the beans.
2. Combine everything in the crockpot and cook on low for 8-10 hours. I always taste it when I get home and add any extra spices I think may help (more cumin, more chill powder, more tomato sauce ect) and then let it finish cooking – this works well as I get home around the 8.5 hour mark.

This is also fantastic as a vegetarian meal – just don’t add the meat. It has gone of really well with both meat eaters and vegetarians alike. Owens favorite serving method is in a bread bowl (well he likes most things in a bread bowl). The bread bowls here are from the Italian bread bowls My Kitchen Café.

Halloween 09

Well, Halloween has over for another year, all that is left is some finger cookies and the disassembled pieces of our costumes. I let Owen pick the costumes this year, and he decided to go with a couples costume. He found a picture and we got to work making them. It only took 1 black sheet, 1 pillow case, a cardboard box, shelf paper, duct tape and some iron on hemming.


The costume was a hit at the party we went through, and it was one of my favorite costumes to wear of all time! It was so very comfortable!

I did end up doing doing a small pumpkin for my apartment in my window, and the kids playing on the lawn loved it! They were all coming up to the window to check it out. I did this one freehand, so it isn't as fancy as the dog I did at my parent's.

In the window:


Up Close:


Hope you all had a great Halloween!

Peanut Butter Fingers

I love cookies that look like fingers for halloween, however O isn't a big fan of vanilla cookies. I decided to try them with peanut butter cookies instead, with the added bonus that pb cookies are close the skin colored if you use the right recipe.

The first time I tried, I used the same recipe as the Jack-o-lanterns. They looked fantastic before they went in the oven, but when they game out, the had flattened and ruined my pretty fingers.

I went searching and found a recipe for this purpose, Count Dracula Fingers! As I already had 3 batches of cookies in the house, and I didn't know if it would work I did a smaller batch and ended up with about 20 cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup + 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/3 teaspoon(s) baking powder
1/6 teaspoon(s) baking soda
dash salt
1/4 cup(s) unsalted butter, softened
1/4 cup(s) creamy peanut butter
1/3 cup(s) + 2 tbsp confectioners' sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon(s) vanilla extract
Egg white from 1 large egg, for brushing
Whole Almonds

Directions:
1. Cream together the butter and peanut butter. Once it is smooth and the sugar, vanilla and the egg, beating until well mixed.
2. In another bowl mix together the dry ingredients and slowly add to the butter and sugar mixture until well mixed.
3. Wrap the dough in cling wrap and place in the fridge for 30 minutes.
4. Take 1 tbsp of dough and roll into a 5 inch rope. Place on the cookie sheet and press an almond on the end for the nail. Using a knife press lines for the knuckles. Repeat until the cookie sheet is full. Brush the cookies with the egg white.
5. Bake at 325F for 18 minutes, let cool on cookie sheet for 5 minutes.
Enjoy.

Reviews:
This cookie recipe isn't as tasty as the jack-o-lantern recipe (there isn't as much peanut butter in it), however the cookies look good and creepy! I love the way they turned out. The only caution is that the nails tend to fall off if they are jolted to hard, so I am planning on "glueing' them with a little icing or melted chocolate.

This is what happens if you use the jack-o-lantern recipe to make the fingers: