Convincing college kids that giving up a few hours of their precious free time is not one of the easiest parts of my job. Most of the time I have to bribe them with some form of a prize or reward. With the semester almost half-way over, it’s time for student staff meetings again and I’m equipped with my fluffy chocolate chip cookies and my new favorite Dreamsicle Delights.

Dreamsicle Delights

1 cup Tang orange drink mix
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1 cup butter
2 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla extract
3 cups white chocolate/vanilla baking chips

-Beat together all ingredients, except the vanilla chips.
-Stir in vanilla chips.
-Drop by Tablespoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheet.
-Bake in a 350 degree oven for 12-14 minutes.

My mom found this recipe years ago in some Americana craft magazine.  It’s become one of my family’s favorites on a hot day, and I can’t help but make it as often as possible for friends. Chocolate base with a hint of orange and fresh berries on top.  So amazin’.

Red, White and Blueberry Pie

Ingredients:

Pastry for Single-Crust Pie:
·    1 1/4 cup flour
·    1/4 tsp salt
·    1/3 cup shortening
·    1 Tb cold water
·    3-4 more Tb cold water

Filling:
·    6 oz. (1 Cup) semisweet chocolate pieces
·    1 Tb margarine
·    8 oz cream cheese, softened
·     2 Tb freshly squeezed orange juice (squeeze after you’ve grated the rind)
·    1/4 c. powdered sugar
·    1 qt. fresh strawberries with stems removed.
·    1 cup fresh blueberries or raspberries
·    2 Tb red currant jelly *(opt.)

Whipped Cream:
·    1/2 cup whipping cream
·    2 Tb powdered sugar
·    1/2 tsp finely shredded orange peel

Click To Continue Reading…

Our 2nd Annual First Day of Summer breakfast for Academic Computing was this morning, and I’m stuffed. Eggs galore, tons of pork fat, potato cakes that were to-die-for, and my homemade pancakes hot off the griddle fed the masses. My pancake recipe is a mixture of three of my favorite recipes. 4 years of monthly pancake breakfasts for my apartment complex has helped to perfect these little circles of goodness. Sugar… nutmeg… cinnamon. Amazing! I promise when you make (and you really gotta) you can eat them without syrup or butter. Just make a batch and freeze them. Pop them in the toaster and instant, yummy breakfast on the go!

Laurel’s Homemade Pancakes

• 1 cup flour
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg

Separate egg white from egg yolk and set white aside. Mix yolk and liquid ingredients. In a separate bowl mix dry ingredients and slowly mix them into wet mixture. When dry and wet ingredients are completely mixed, beat egg white until it forms soft-medium peaks. Fold egg white into batter. Spoon 1/3 cup servings onto hot griddle and flip only when bubbles form, break, and do not fill back in.

I think I have a stalker. Actually, I’m 99.9% sure I have a stalker. Most people might be freaked out to know that they have a neighbor who watches for them to come home from work or wherever they’ve been each day and knows what car they drive and exactly where they live. Surprisingly enough though, I’m not that concerned because I have these gut feeling that my stalker is harmless. It might be the fact that she’s still under 3.5 feet tall or isn’t yet four years old that makes her seem more like a friendly shadow and less like a cloud of doom. There’s just something heartwarming about a lil munchkin who waits for me to come home, so she can come over and jam out to Paramore or create ‘toddler art’. So as I pulled up and parked yesterday after escaping work early, I had to smile as she screamed my name and came running over to check out what I was carrying in my bags. When I told her I was making cookies, she looked up at me with those huge brown eyes giving their best puppy dog expression and asked if she could help. There was no way I could say no.

It had been a month since I’d had time to spend time in the kitchen for fun, and I was looking forward to a marathon baking session. As always, I was not planning to make a dozen or so cookies and be done. Nope, I was counting on making at least 150 cookies to deliver to a friend’s workplace for their birthday today, neighbors including my helper’s family, a box of goodies I needed to mail to a friend, and my twenty-eight student workers for our staff meetings the next two nights. After insisting that we both put our aprons on before we began, my personal baking helper and I started to gather the needed ingredients for cookies. I had considered tackling a more extravagant cookie recipe like Dreamsicle cookies or Snickerdoodles but decided that there really was nothing better than simple, homemade chocolate chip cookies, and I had just the recipe. I’m not sure about you but when I think of the perfect chocolate chip cookie I think about soft, chewy cookies that are more likely to melt in your mouth than break your teeth. This recipe creates the most amazing, perfect cookies that will have people asking if you bought them from a bakery or the store. My only recommendation to you if you do decide to trust me and try this recipe is don’t enlist a three year-old to be your sous chef. They might look adorable in your apron, but they really just want to spend the whole time tasting the dough.

Fluffy, Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ingredients:

• 4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 cups unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 small boxes of instant vanilla pudding mix
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 18 oz. mini semisweet chocolate chips

Fluffy, Amazing Chocolate Chip Cookie Directions:
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and allow butter to soften.

2) In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Beat in the instant pudding mix until blended. Stir in the eggs and vanilla.

3) Sift together the flour and baking soda. Slowly, add flour mixture into creamed mixture until well-mixed. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips.

4) Drop cookies by rounded spoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. (I use my small cookie scoop for cookie uniformity.)

5) Bake for 10 to 12 minutes in the preheated oven. Edges should be golden brown.

6 ) Once you remove the cookie sheets from the oven, bang the sheet on a hard surface causing the cookies to deflate. This will remove all of the air from the cookies and all them to stay soft longer. Place on cooling rack until firm enough to stack in air-tight container. This should make between 80-100 cookies depending on size.

Since I began as a CaresTeam, we have scheduled at least one large free food gathering per month for our apartment complex. From summer pool-side BBQs to Thanksgiving dinners, I’ve learned in the past four years to cook for a crowd on a small budget in a tiny kitchen. One of my favorite monthly events we host is Taco Tuesday/Thursday. Growing up in ‘North Mexico’, my standard of good Mexican food is pretty high, so I must warn you this is not the most authentic taco recipe ever. However, to their benefit, they take very little effort and taste amazing. Plus, if you’re into cooking once or twice a week for the rest of the week, you can make as little or much as you need of this recipe and reuse the leftover meat for countless dishes.

Spicy Chicken Taco Meat:
The morning before you plan on serving the tacos, place the chicken cut of your choice in a crockpot. I prefer to use boneless, skinless chicken breasts when I can find them on-sale, but have used skinless, split-breasts (removing the bones before I served the meat) and boneless chicken thighs, too. Over the chicken,
I pour the miraculous El Pato sauce in a ratio of one small can to 2-3 lbs of chicken. (El Pato is a hot tomato sauce made with fresh chiles, tomatoes, onions, cilantro and garlic. I use it for everything!) Just remember, the more
El Pato… the spicier the chicken. Whether to cook the chicken on high or low depends on the size of your crockpot, amount of chicken you’re cooking, and time you have to cook it. Usually, I place the chicken in on low for 6-8 hours or high for 4-5 hours. Make sure to keep the lid on and add water if needed to keep the mixture from drying out. The chicken should literally shred itself as it cooks. Click To Continue Reading…

Imagine soft, wonderful peanut butter cookies with a Hershey’s kiss on top. Made like 87 today. Now you can, too!

1/2 c. margarine, softened
1/2 c. peanut butter
1/2 c. brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 egg
2 T milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 3/4 c. flour
1 tsp. soda
1/2 tsp. salt
Bag of Hershey’s kisses

Mix together everything but kisses. Make teaspoon of dough into a ball. Roll in granulated sugar. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes. After removing from oven immediately press an unwrapped Hershey kiss into each cookie.

Every year one of my favorite moments of the holiday season is getting to slow down and spend time baking and creating delicious (my opinion, of course) goodies for my family and friends. This year my goody boxes included peanut butter fudge, fudge with walnuts, mint fudge, peppermint bark, Andes mint brownies, peanut butter blossom cookies, and my all-time favorite… raspberry thumbprint cookies. I thought I’d post the recipe today for raspberry thumbprints in case you’d like to try them. Maybe they’ll wind up as one of your traditional Christmas-time cookies.