Smarties Blond Brownies

I made this recipe a few weeks ago, when I was craving something sweet and comforting... something really satisfying to those taste buds. I love blond brownies, my grandma always used to make them growing up but no matter how hard I tried my brownies would always come out more of a cake texture, rather than a dense brownie... so I thought to myself "well if this happen again I need something to amp up the flavour!" So rummaging through my cupboards I found Smarties, A LOT of them! Perfect.



What you will need: 
1/2 cup of butter (softened)
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups Smarties

Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a large mixing bowl cream together butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, beat well. Gradually add in flour baking powder and salt while beating. Fold in smarties with a spatula until incorporated.

Empty contents in an 9x13 greased baking pan. Spread evenly. Bakes 20-25 mins. Should be golden brown, I like my brownies extra gooey, that's how I get them to refrain from turning into a cake batter, so I take them out a few minutes earlier... 19 to 20 mins.

Hope you enjoy this recipe! Brownies are so flexible when it comes to ingredients... switch it up by adding nuts, chocolate chips, or even peanut butter chips!

POST BY MOMMY OLIVIA

Homemade Donuts

This is so easy! I saw this floating around on Pinterest and had to try it! All you need is Pillsbury biscuit dough, mold the dough together and cut out donut shapes. Then in a deep pan fill about 1/4 the way with vegetable oil and heat on medium-low. Put your donuts in carefully and keep an eye on them so they don't burn! Once they are cooked putting them on a cookie sheet and coat with sugar or whatever topping you like!

POST BY MOMMY OLIVIA

Strawberry-Banana Muffins

I've been experimenting with baking using whole wheat flour recently. With that in mind, I wanted to create something that was not only healthier than typical baked goods, but also yummy. I will say this right off the bat, these muffins are not SUPER healthy; there is a cup of brown sugar and half of the flour is regular all purpose, but there is plenty of fruit and the whole wheat flour so you don't have to feel totally guilty about scarfing one (or two) for breakfast or a snack. 

I noticed a few differences between my standard white flour muffins and these. One, these do not puff up as much. And two, they are considerably denser. This is because of the whole wheat flour. Also, they stick to the liners so if you don't use them, make sure you spray your muffin tins liberally with cooking spray. 

They passed the kids taste test though, so that's good enough for me.

Strawberry-Banana Muffins

(makes 12)

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup all purpose flour

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

Pinch of salt

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 cup apple sauce

1 cup fresh or frozen banana chunks

1 cup fresh or frozen strawberries

The cast of characters:

1. If you're using frozen fruit, you will need to thaw it first. When that's done (or not, if you're using fresh), throw it in a blender and pulse until puréed. Set aside.

2. Preheat oven to 375. Line muffin tins with paper liners or spray tins with cooking spray.

3. Combine flours, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl. 

4. Add eggs, vanilla, sugar, apple sauce and vanilla extract. Mix on low until combined (or hand mix) 

5. Fill muffin tins/liners about 3/4 of the way full, and bake for 20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool completely on a rack.

Mommy Jenn

Pumpkin Bread Pudding

I was invited to an impromptu dinner party this weekend and was asked to bring something along. Since I did not have much time I needed to whip something tasty up. And fast! 

A dessert I am fairly good at making is bread pudding. Its one of the first things I can recall making with my mom. Mostly just ripping bread up but I learned by watching. I believe that cooking with kids is very important and I am so happy that my mom did this with me. I learned through her and she was the one who gave me my cooking skills. Thank you mom! Love you! 

When bread at my house gets too stale to use or is going to go bad, I throw it into the freezer. No point in wasting it. This is a good way to use up all those random bread pieces floating around my freezer.

This bread pudding is loaded with pumpkin flavour and came out having the aroma of 

fresh baked pumpkin pie! 

Pumpkin Bread Pudding


About 5 cups of stale bread ripped into small pieces.
3 eggs
2 cups milk
1 small can of pumpkin puree
3 tsp pumpkin pie spice (more or less)
1 tsp cinnamon (more or less)
dash of salt
dash of vanilla

Place the bread chunks into a large baking dish. Mix the remaining ingredients into a large bowl until well blended. Pour on top of the bread then mix it all around until all the bread is coated. 

I like to use my hands and mush it up to make sure its all nice and even, but you do not have to. 

Bake for around 30-45 minutes or until set. 

Optional Glaze:
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1/4 cup icing sugar
a little water
Mix above with a little bit of water to make a thin glaze. Pour over bread pudding after it has baked.
Maple syrup is also great on here. Or, heck! Why not just use both like we did!

This part if a personal preference. I like to cut the entire thing into small squares then put on the glaze/syrup and then serve it. Others just scoop or cut a piece. Cutting it into small squares lets the glaze and/or maple syrup cover more, not just the top. It looks nicer on your plate too!

Do you have a recipe to share with us? Let us know on our Facebook Group!

By Mommy Melissa

Chopped Challenge Round 2 Results From You!

With our last weeks Chopped Challenge, we received a few photos from our Facebook Group members showing us their creativity using the mystery ingredients up front and center! 

Check out these tasty creations!

Pineapple Basil Bread Pudding

By Jennifer P.

"Bread pudding. Break up bread into small pieces. Mix small can of pineapple bits, condensed milk, 3 eggs, cinnamon, a few chopped basil leaves and a little milk! Place chopped bread in a buttered casserole dish. Pour mixture on top. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes."

Pineapple Basil Lasagna in a Creamy Pineapple Sauce 

Served with Pineapple Basil Baguette

By Debbie S.

"First cook the ground chicken in a pan with some pineapple. Add some bacon. sauce is made with flour butter condensed milk and regular milk. Chop some fresh basil and add to the sauce. To make the pasta I used 2 eggs, 2 cups of flour and 1 tablespoon pineapple juice. Mix until a ball is formed. Cut in four and roll on floured board. Cut in lasagna sized pieces. Cook for approx 5 mins Drain. In a pan add a layer of noodles then meat and sauce, repeat. sprinkle parm and a little more basil on top. bake in oven til heated through. serve with sliced baguette topped with melted butter pineapple juice and some basil"

Sweet and Spicy Balls

By James C.

"to make my meatballs mix all the following
ground beef, about 2 pounds
jalapeno pepper, chopped
bread crumbs made from a fresh baguette (cut it up and threw in the oven)
fresh basil leaves chopped up
crushed pineapple
2 eggs
pepper
Worcestershire
garlic salt
Blair's After Death Sauce

for the sauce mix all the following then cooked to just a boil
condensed milk
corn starch
pineapple juice from the crushed pineapple
white vinegar
soy sauce
Worcestershire sauce 
the remaining crushed pineapple
Blair's after death sauce 

Roll the meatballs and place in a casserole dish. Pour the sauce on top and bake for an hour on 350. It would have been better on rice."

Thank you all so much for participating! 

We hope to have even more to share with you with our next round!

What will YOU make with : 

Eggs, Sugar, Bananas, and Coffee!

Join our Facebook Group to keep up to date with us!

Fresh Strawberry Muffins

My kids have been on a muffin craze the last few weeks. They love to eat foods they can pick up and without forks or spoons involved. I guess it faster to get the food into their mouths and floor, chew, swallow, then get back to causing havoc!! They are good at that. 

This yummy recipe was a shared link on Facebook that popped up one day on my news feed. It looked too good to pass and I just had to try and make them myself. 

The mix of sweet strawberry and the spice from the cinnamon are the perfect match to an afternoon tea. 

Right out of the oven!

Fresh Strawberry Muffins

1/2 cup butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

1 egg

2 cups of flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 cups chopped strawberries

3 tsp sugar

1/2 tsp cinnamon

Cream butter and sugar. Add egg and mix well.

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl. Add flour mixture and milk alternately to butter mixture. Add vanilla. Gently stir in strawberries.

Spoon batter into muffin pans.

Combine sugar and cinnamon and sprinkle over muffins.

Bake at 375º for 20-25 minutes.

Makes one dozen muffins.

Do you have a good muffin tin recipe you would like to share? Let us know on Facebook and it can be featured on our blog!

By Mommy Melissa

Rockets Frosted Cookies

Halloween passed a few months ago and there is still a large bag of candy in a drawer in my room. In that bag there were rolls of Rockets candy. Seemed like it must have been on sale in this area at the time because there were a lot. And I mean A LOT! 

I decided that they would be made into something else, not just plain ol' candy to crunch on. But what? Then it hit me. If icing sugar is used in making icing, then what if I transformed the Rockets back into a powder format and replaced the icing sugar with it? It was worth a shot!

First I had to do the grueling task of unrolling all of the packets and placing them into a bowl. Once they were all having a colourful rainbow party in the bowl, they needed to be sorted into batches by colour/flavour. Be sure to taste as many as you would like at this point! My favourite was the orange!

Once the batches were sorted I broke out my Magic Bullet Blender and threw a single colour, starting with white to darkest, in at a time and blended it into a super fine powder. Then repeated it with the remaining colours, knocking off any remaining powder from the last batch.

(I used a simple sugar dough recipe from a cook book. Similar to this one here )

To make the frosting, I used a simple icing sugar frosting replacing the sugar with the powdered Rockets. 

(1 cup powdered sugar, 1 tbs melted butter, 1 tbs milk)

Mix all the ingredients together flavour by flavour. The icing is super sweet. Very, very sweet! 

Now ice you cookies with your new rockets flavoured icing and enjoy!

I cannot stress enough about how sweet these cookies are. You may get cavities after eating just one! 

Good Luck :)

By Mommy Melissa

Icy Fruit Pops

Its winter, freezing cold and what do my kids keep on asking me for? Fee-zees! Every day, over and over again. I stock piled them from the summer but there are none left. How can you explain to a one year old and a two year old that they are not in season and mommy has no idea where to find freezies in the middle of winter?! You cant. I tried!

Since popsicles are about the same thing. I dug out my icepop molds and was going to just use juice when an idea came to me. I had a few cans of peaches in the pantry. What if I pureed them and froze that instead? 

It worked well. They loved it! They still ask for Fee-zees but they are pleased with these icy fruit pops. Especially the star shaped ones.

Do your kids ask you for out of season products? What solutions have you come up with?

By Mommy Melissa

Homemade Oreos - Pinterest Challenge

Here is a perfect cookie to make loved ones this Valentines day! 

They are quite easy and incredibly tasty. This was a pin from the great website MyKitchenAddiction. This lady is insanely talented! 

Now lets talk cookies. Oeros are one of my favourite cookies, ever! So when this popped up, I knew it would be in the works soon. James even helped me make them (thats a big deal!)

The original recipe called for dutch cocoa powder. what the heck? there are more than one kind?! After a little research online, it turns out the difference between dutch and regular cocoa powder is the acidity between the two. Regular is more acidic and dutch is more alkaline. Dutch also has a more mellow taste and darker colour. I used regular and threw in a little baking soda to neutralize the acidity. Worked out fine.

Homemade Oreos 

(original pin here)

The Cookies!

Gather it up!

1 cup of unsalted butter, softened (I used margarine)

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla 

2 cups flour

3/4 cup of Dutch cocoa powder (or regular and a little baking soda)

1.5 tsp baking power

1 tsp salt

Work it!

Beat the butter and sugar on medium speed until its nice and fluffy. Then add the egg and vanilla until its all getting along together. 

In a separate bowl, add the flour, cocoa powder (baking soda if using), baking powder and salt. Using a whisk, mix it all together to make sure there are no more lumps (especially the cocoa powder) 

Cup by cup, add the flour mix to the wet ingredients and mix on lowest speed until there is no longer any flour mix left. 

Divide the dough into two and wrap in plastic wrap. Throw it in the fridge for at least an hour. This step is very important not to skip. The dough is very soft and needs to firm up a little. 

Line you cookie sheets with parchment paper and preheat oven to 350.

Once the dough has been cooled. Roll it out on a floured surface to about 1/4 inch thick. I found it very sticky and needed to use more flour than usual. To make them look more like real Oreos, use a circle cutter but that is boring! I used a heart for Valentines day aww sweet eh!? 

Place cookies on a cookie sheet. Since the cookies do not spread much you can put many on at one time just not too close. 

Bake them for about 12 minutes if you want them softer, 14 for a more crisp one. 

Cool them before icing. 

The Icing

Gather it up again!

1/2 cup butter, softened (margarine worked fine)

2 tbs half and half (who even has this? I used milk!)

1 tsp vanilla 

3-3.5 cups icing sugar 

Work it...again!

Mix the first three ingredients together until mixed. Then add the icing sugar about a half cup at a time (or you will be wearing more then you have in the bowl!)

Put in a piping bag, or if you are classy like me, a zipper seal bag with a hole cut in the corner, and pipe the icing onto a cookie. Place a second cookie on top and repeat with the rest of them.

Get a nice glass of milk and eat one, or four! Enjoy!

I loved these cookies and so did the kids and James too. These are added to my cookie recipe book and will be making them again soon with a new idea in mind. 

What if the filling was skipped. Add a little mint extract to the dough and dipped them in chocolate? Sounds like a Girl Guide Mint Cookie to me!

Do you have a favourite cookie recipe for us to try and feature on the blog? 

let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page or even the group! 

By Mommy Melissa

Make a Treat. Make a Difference!

This season Kellogg's has come out with this great idea for donating money to The Salvation Army this Christmas. The Make a Treat. Make a Difference is a fun and interactive way to have quality time with your family and help a less fortunate child at the same time. 

The way it works is you sculpt a 'toy' using Rice Krispie Treats. Take a photo of it, then upload it to RiceKrispies.ca. For each original photo uploaded, a new toy will be donated to The Salvation Army who will deliver it to a child in need! How wonderful!

While at my sisters house I noticed this on the box of cereal on the counter. Out came the marshmallows and butter and we got to work! I used the original Rice Krispies recipe found on the inside of the box, (click here to see it on their site) but also added about 1/2 cup of Spice cake mix (just the powder not the other called for ingredients). It gave them an extra seasonal taste that was totally delicious! Once it cooled a little, we buttered up our hands (so it doesn't stick to them) and got to work! Since my kids were at home with Daddy, it was just my sister, my nieces Annabelle and Madison, and myself doing this activity. My nephew was even gone out with his Daddy for a ride. A total girls activity!

It was so much fun watching them create their little masterpieces and decorating them with all the sprinkles and candy! Even my sister created something! If you know her then you know that's something!! 

(kidding Jennifer if you are reading this!!)  

Here are our Treat Works of Art!

Lalaloopsy By Madison and me

Caterpillar By Madison

Candy Cane by Annabelle

Christmas Tree by Madison

Snowman By Jennifer

Sleepy Kitty By Me

So now I am asking you to do the same. It wont take too long to do and plus, it gives a child a gift this Christmas! You even get to eat it after it has its photo shoot! Nice! 

Lets get to it everyone! Make those Rice Krispie works of art and share them on their webpage. Then a child will get a toy and that makes everyone happy! 

By Mommy Melissa

Drip-Free Jell-O Popsicle!

My children LOVE frozen treats! Freezies, icecream cones, popsicles anything frozen. I on the other hand can't stand the mess they leave behind. I wanted to find something that would freeze well but not make such a mess to clean up afterwards. 

My brilliant thought? To freeze Jell-O in ice pop moulds

to make a

All I did was make the Jell-O as directed then poured the mix into the ice pop containers. Froze them over night and voila! Orange flavoured Drip-Free Popsicles!

              

Yummy Orange!!

Look Mommy, No drips!

They were a hit with the kids the next day. Some ended up on the floor and couch, and kids but it fell like a clump of jelly. Not the usual pool of sticky liquid all over everything and everyone!

Quick clean up with a paper towel.


Don't forget to check back tomorrow for the November Giveaway!

By Mommy Melissa

Apple Carrot Cake with Pumpkin Spice Cream Cheese Frosting

Here is a quick cake idea I had come up with. Using the idea from a pineapple dump cake recipe, I decided to give it a shot! The end result was really tasty and perfect to finish off a meal in the fall. It has the flavours of autumn in it.

First I started by grating four large peeled apples. Then I poured a carrot cake mixture on top. Just the box of mix, not the other ingredients it called for. Once it was all mixed up I baked it for 40 minutes at 350.

While it was baking, I prepared the pumpkin spice cream cheese icing. (it tastes as good as it sounds!)

Mix them all together in a mixer and whip it until it is nice and fluffy. If you want to give it an extra pumpkin boost, pumpkin puree added would be amazing. I wanted to but there was none to be found that day.
Once the cake is out of the oven and cooled, ice it with the frosting then sprinkle with a little cinnamon for some pizzazz!

Here is the full recipe
1 box carrot cake mix
4 grated large apples, peeled
1 block of cream cheese, softened
3 cups icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 tbsp pumpkin puree (optional)
cinnamon to sprinkle on top

1. Mix the grated apples with the cake mix. Pour into baking dish.
2. Bake at 350 for around 30-40 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.
3. Whip the remaining ingredients in a mixer until light and fluffy.
4. Spread the frosting over cooled cake. Sprinkle cinnamon on top.

Be sure to stay tuned for another giveaway coming soon! 

By Mommy Melissa