Jump into 2023 With Me

Hello blog friends!! Welcome to my first post of 2023. We are going to cover everything from fun skiing breakfasts to veggie-forward dinners to desserts ( I'm revealing the secret ingredient from our holiday candy gifts!) to a very special cooking class. I hope that you are excited!!

In honor of my big-little sister's half-birthday we made a Hidden Rainbow Cake. It was very good. One thing that I liked about the cake was that even though part of the cake had food coloring, it still tased the same as the normal cake.

First you make a batter and then take small portions of it to make colors of the rainbow

Then you put the normal batter in the bottom of the pan and add your colors. The way that you add your colors is that you do red as the thickest bottom ring and then you add on slightly thinner rings on top of each other following the order of the rainbow.

This is what the cake looked like baked. Sprinkles make everything better!!

And this is what it looks like cut. Doesn't it look so cute?? My big-little sister loved it!!!

Another rainbow treat that we made was Rainbow Bagels. We got a set to make these as a gift, but you can just use the same technique with any regular bagel recipe.

Similar to the rainbow cake, you divide your bagel dough into equal portions, color them and stack them up.

Then you cut lengths, twist your ropes and form bagels.

This is what they look like raw.

And this is after we boiled and baked them.

I thought they looked really beautiful sliced!

We didn't make this for Christmas, but we tried a recipe called The BEST Christmas Coffee Cake. That is a very confident title for a recipe, but this cake actually lived up to it. It was absolutely AMAZING! We gave some to two repairman at our house and also to Marduche, our UPS driver, and all three of them said it was the best cake they had ever had!!!!!

One feature that makes this cake unique is that the topping is more like granola than a traditional coffee cake crumb. My dad thought that he'd like a traditional crumb better, but the rest of us really liked it this way. And it definitely sets this recipe apart.

Of course the cake also gets drizzled with icing.

There is a cream cheese filling and the cranberries are added into the filling and the topping, rather than the cake itself. I cannot say enough good things about this cake!!!

A delightful breakfast that we made was called Apple Pecan French Toast Cups. This recipe involves a few components, but comes together fairly quickly.

First you cube bread and soak it in a custard mixture.

Then you cook an apple filling on the stove.

You cut parchment paper into five inch squares (we got six per sheet), and shape them over a can to form your cups.

Then you put your liners into a muffin tin and fill them with your bread mixture.

Finally, you add your apple mixture and a maple pecan topping and bake.

Everybody loved these. I thought that they were a great combination of sweet and tart. We used Granny Smith apples and I'd recommend those to balance the sweetness of the topping.

We made New Hampshire Maple-Walnut Scones and my brother said that these were the best scones we had ever made. I like maple nut combinations generally, and so I thought these were great. I thought that most of the maple flavor came from the glaze, but I was glad that it was still a strong flavor. My big-little sister ate these reheated for breakfast one day and said that they are still great.

You can definitely see the flaky layers. We froze and grated our butter and then froze our scones again before baking, which I think helps.

We also tried Apricot Cream Cheese Scones recently. I really loved these. I think that the cream cheese alters the texture a bit and my dad said he prefers the texture of more traditional scones. But the rest of us liked these.

We ate these plain, but they might be really good with apricot preserves.

A mixed verdict dish was Seed, Nut and Fruit Bread. Rather than being a quick bread that uses a plain base with mix-ins, this base is actually seeds, nuts, and dried fruit. We decided to serve ours with jam. Unfortunately, it didn't get particularly high reviews in our house ☹️. My mom and I kind of liked it, but I pretty much like everything!!! It's just very...seedy!

One good thing about this recipe is that it is very adaptable. So if there are particular nuts and dried fruit that you love, you could make it focusing on just those. I think we might have like it more if we'd added coconut and skipped the apricots. Or at least cut them more finely.

A surprise hit was Grapefruit Yogurt Cake. Everyone, including me, was pretty skeptical on this one. I don't like grapefruit and my brother HATES yogurt, but this cake is like magic, because we both totally LOVED it!!!!!!!

An interesting thing about this cake is that you make a grapefruit syrup and pour it over the warm cake to soak in and add flavor.

This cake has grapefruit zest in the cake and grapefruit juice in the syrup and glaze. The glaze had SO much grapefruit flavor and even though I don't like grapefruit, I thought it was delicious.

Bakery Style Gingerbread Muffins were a big hit. My mom thinks these are the best muffins we have ever made, which is definitely a strong endorsement!! It's an easy recipe that comes together quickly.

They bake up to have perfect looking craggy sugary muffin tops. You start baking them at a high temperature for the first eight minutes and then lower it, which I think helps form the texture of the tops.

While we were skiing in December, we made Nutella-Stuffed French Toast Sticks. These were probably the breakfast hit of our ski trip. Our friends all loved them and we ran out with people still asking for more. My big-little sister is still raving about these. To make these you make Nutella sandwiches, slice them into sticks, quickly dip the sticks in French toast batter, cook them on a griddle and then roll them in cinnamon sugar.

This isn't a great picture and we hate that we don't have white plates where we stay skiing, but this gives you the idea.

We served a new kind of hot chocolate one night during game night, and then served the leftovers with the French toast sticks the next morning. It's amazing how much better homemade hot chocolate is than what you get from hot chocolate packets. Usually we make ours with real chocolate, but this recipe was much easier and a little different.

You take a bag of Stuffed Puffs, which are chocolate stuffed marshmallows, and stir them into warm milk on the stove. That's it! It's almost as easy as a hot chocolate packet, but much better.

As the marshmallows melt, the mixture becomes chocolatey. My mom added peppermint schnapps for the grown-ups and they really seemed to like that, but obviously I didn't get to try that version!

We made Carrot Cake Baked Oatmeal as another ski breakfast and modified the recipe a little bit. If you remember from when we made the Pumpkin Cheesecake Baked Oatmeal that we love, that had a mascarpone topping. So based on that, we thought that cream cheese topping would go well on top of the Carrot Cake Baked Oatmeal and we were right! We mixed cream cheese and honey and dolloped it on before baking. I'm sure it would be good with maple syrup too. This was homey and delicious.

You should definitely try this, and if you do, I recommend adding on the cream cheese modification!

If you read this blog much, you know that we love a breakfast casserole that we can make ahead the night before. This is good for holidays, but it's also good for ski mornings and a new one that we tried was French Toast Casserole. This is a typical French toast casserole in that you pour a custard mixture over bread pieces, but then this one has a crumble added on the top. It was very good and everyone liked it.

This isn't a very good picture because we were so focused on getting out the door to ski that we forgot to take it until we were cleaning up!

One recipe that we have an update on is Spinach Artichoke Frittata. This is a recipe that we tried again a different way, just like the baked oatmeal recipes that we had made on ski mornings and liked in the past. We made this twice and based it on the basic recipe linked above, but modified the add-ins. My big-little sister doesn't love artichokes, so first we made a broccoli cheddar and spinach version for her. Then we accidentally got ground sausage that we hadn't ordered delivered with some groceries, but we're trying to be more conscious about not wasting food, and so we decided to make a pepper, onion, and sausage frittata to use it up. What we learned from all of this is that this recipe is endlessly adaptable! So you should try making it and add in whatever you want and let me know how it goes!! Personally, I think that a mushroom version or a smoked salmon version would be awesome. We're skiing again in March, so maybe we'll try one of those then!

The recipe recommends using a cast iron skillet, but we didn't have that skiing, so we used a Le Creuset casserole and that worked great.

Another menu item that is very adaptable for different tastes is Soy Ginger Salmon Rice Bowls. This recipe has you make rice, crispy marinated salmon (you use half of the marinade as a sauce to drizzle on top), marinated cucumbers, and sriracha mayonnaise to make rice bowls and top them with green onions, cilantro, julienned carrots and diced mango. The great thing about this recipe is that people can just leave off any toppings that aren't their favorites. So I skipped the mango and my big-little sister skipped the sriracha mayonnaise. This is a terrific recipe for a group where people have different tastes.

These are all the ingredients assembled and ready to go.

And this is a fully assembled bowl! I thought that they looked beautiful!

A similar recipe that allowed people to choose their own ingredients was Sheet-Pan Bibimbap. Bibimbap is a Korean rice dish with assorted toppings. This version uses sweet potatoes, mushrooms, onions, kale and fried eggs all cooked together on a sheet pan, which is very convenient.

The mushrooms, sweet potato and red onion go into the oven first.

Then the eggs and rice get added to the oven at the end.

To eat this, you break the egg and stir around the runny yolk. The only bad part about this recipe for busy families is that because you want the eggs to be runny, everyone needs to eat it at the same time. So our family made this on a weekend when we were all together. During the week, my mom eats with whatever kids are at home and then if my brother or I have later activities, we eat on our own afterwards and sometimes my dad eats with us then, if he's not traveling. So this wouldn't be a good recipe for a night like that.

As part of our effort to consume less meat, we decided to try Roasted Brussels sprouts and Crispy Baked Tofu with Honey-Sesame Glaze. This recipe has you use a special technique to make the tofu super crispy and it definitely works. We used broccolini instead of Brussels sprouts because we're on a broccolini kick but I'm sure Brussels would be good too! My mom and I loved this dish. My big-little sister didn't love the tofu the first night, but we had leftovers the next day and surprisingly, she and I both liked the tofu more on the second day!

The sauce on this is extra delicious! Of course you could use any other protein. I bet it would be great with shrimp, but I'd actually recommend giving tofu a try!

January and February are a good time for soup and a good one that we had recently was Easy Parmesan Chickpea Soup. My brother and big-little sister didn't like this one that much, but my dad and I loved it. This recipe has you cook parmesan rinds with the broth, and then add pasta and spinach and chickpeas.

The parmesan rinds get all gooey cooking and add tons of flavor. My dad said that he loved how flavorful this broth was and that's from the parmesan rinds!

You add extra grated cheese on top which further enhances the parmesan flavor.

One of my brother and my favorite dinners is pasta with ricotta salata. My Grandma Linda used to make a version of this for my mom and Uncle TaTa, but it isn't something that we have an actual recipe for. To make this you just take any variety of high quality canned tomatoes and cook them down a bit with some olive oil and salt and pepper. Then you mix in cubed ricotta salata and basil and pour it all over pasta. It is very simple but VERY delicious.

You can obviously make this with any kind of pasta, but gemelli is one of my very favorites! I like pasta that you stab more than pasta that you twirl!!

A huge hit that we all absolutely loved was Garlic Shrimp Pasta Bake. We will definitely make this one again! It's a new family favorite. To make this you saute garlic and shrimp in a pan and then make a cheese sauce and add it all to pasta and bake it. When we made it we used two pounds of pasta, doubled everything, added extra dill and baked it in a 13x9 pan and it came out perfectly!

This picture looks like of messy, but you can see how the pasta ends up with crispy bits and melty cheese on top. It's really delicious!

A unique recipe that we tried recently was called Anzac Biscuits. These are coconut oat cookies that are apparently very popular in Australia. Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. We learned that these biscuits were popular for wives to send to soldiers in World War I because they keep well. We wouldn't know if they keep well or not because we ate all of ours really quickly! If you want to try this recipe, you'll need to buy golden syrup, which is also called light treacle. It is a thick syrup made from cane sugar. We bought ours from Amazon. These cookies have great flavor, but the dough was a bit dry. Next time we would probably try adding a couple more tablespoons of butter and maple syrup.

First you melt butter and golden syrup together and then you add baking soda mixed with boiling water and the entire mixture bubbles up.

These are what the finished cookies look like. The recipe said to bake for 18-20 minutes, but we only baked ours for ten and I definitely wouldn't have wanted them to bake any longer than that.

Cosmic Brownies are a packaged treat that used to be very popular. None of us have ever had the packaged brownies before, but we made a homemade version of them a couple summers ago and forgot to take a picture. We'll have to make them again and post them for you, but recently we made Fudge Cosmic Brownie Cookies. These are a very dark chocolate and not too sweet, which is similar in flavor profile to the brownies.

You top them with a ganache and rainbow candy coated chocolate chips. I love how pretty and colorful these look.

And an exceptionally easy but good recipe to make if you ever need something quick is Rocky Road. This recipe only has three ingredients: peanut butter, marshmallows and chocolate chips. You just melt the chocolate and peanut butter together and then stir in the marshmallows and let it set. That's it!

My mom couldn't believe how much she liked these, especially because the recipe is so simple! This might be a good recipe to use for holiday gifts next year because we could make a lot of pans of it very quickly.

Do you remember when I posted about how we took an online class with Christina Tosi, who founded Milk Bar? Well we took another one! The class that we took before was called Creative Baking and this was a follow-up class called Snackable Baking. We spent four weeks doing it and I'm so excited to show you our projects! I can't link the recipes that we developed ourselves, but I can send them to anyone who is interested.

The first Milk Bar recipe we made was Birthday Cake Truffles. The class was divided into three sections and this first section was my favorite. I really enjoyed the projects with truffles because I thought that they were the most fun to make.

First we baked a funfetti cake and then broke it into crumbs. Mushing up this entire cake was SO much fun!!!!

Then we mixed our cake crumbs with a vanilla milk to form a dough. It ended up feeling similar to cookie dough.

Then you roll the dough into balls to form your truffles.

And you coat each truffle in melted white chocolate. This recipe uses an interesting technique. Instead of dunking the truffles in chocolate, you use gloves and wipe chocolate on your glove and then roll the truffle in that. It gives you a thinner chocolate coating. And in my opinion, it's the most fun step of the entire project!

Then you roll each truffle in something called Birthday Sand, which is a baked crumb mixture.

This is the finished product. These are different from cake pops because they don't involve frosting (and they're not served on sticks!). We all loved them.

The way that this class works is first Christina teaches you how to make one of her recipes. But then you are expected to use the same techniques to create a recipe that is your own version. We were supposed to choose a person to inspire our truffle creation and so we chose Grazzy. Grazzy loves coconut and so we knew that we wanted our truffle to have strong coconut flavors. We made prototypes as part our recipe development. First we baked a coconut cake and then tried lots of different soaks. Options we tried included melted coconut popsicles, melted coconut ice cream, plain coconut milk mixed with coconut extract, cream of coconut, evaporated coconut milk, and sweetened and condensed coconut milk. We liked the sweetened and condensed coconut milk best, so we went with that. Then we tested out different coconut sands. We tried ground purchased coconut biscuits, ground coconut sugar cookies that we had baked, and ground toasted sweetened coconut.

This shows our prototype testing process mixing ramekins of cake with different soaks.

Then these were the different sand options that we tried.

Our favorite sand was the simplest, just toasted coconut. So these ended up being our final product: Grazzy's Coconut Truffles!

Our next project was making Candy Bar Pie Snaps These were thin crispy chocolate cookie wafers topped with a peanut butter caramel and pretzels and then dipped in chocolate.

We rolled out our cookie dough and cut out the shapes, but then froze our cookie sheets before we pulled the dough scraps off. The cookie dough was very thin and fragile so doing it that way was a good new technique that we learned.

These were our wafers and our peanut butter caramel.

We topped each cookie with the caramel and the pretzels. I really enjoyed making these too.

These cookies were quite large and so dipping them in chocolate was a little bit tricky, but eventually I figured it out.

And these were our finished snaps!

This is what they looked like cut through. I thought that the chocolate overpowered the caramel a bit, but we all still liked these.

We were supposed to use a nostalgic memory to inspire recipe creation for our own snap, so we used the memory of all of us trick-or-treating together looking for peanut butter candy.

We trialed three cookie dough bases. One was plain peanut butter, one had Reese's Pieces in the dough and one had chopped up peanut butter cups in the dough.

This was the peanut butter cup version baked.

Then we made a peanut butter buttercream and a chocolate peanut butter buttercream for our possible spreads and trialed Homemade Butterfingers Candy, salted peanuts and Reese's Pieces for our crunchy toppings. Do you remember the homemade Butterfingers candy?! This was our holiday gift with the secret ingredient! Guesses that we got after our last blog post included soy sauce, pumpkin, butternut squash, curry, and graham cracker, but no one got it! loved hearing everybody's creative guesses though! The secret ingredient was CANDY CORN!!!! Isn't that crazy?! You melt it and add in peanut butter and when it sets it tastes just like Butterfingers!!!!! And we liked that candy so much that we made some more to include in our prototypes.

These were our 18 different prototypes lined up. I loved how neat and organized this looked!

Tasting all of these prototypes was A LOT! We could only have teeny bites of each and even doing that we all felt kind of sick!! And the flavors definitely started to blur together. But my brother and big-little sister and I all preferred the chocolate peanut butter buttercream to the plain peanut butter buttercream. My brother's favorite was the peanut butter cup cookie with chocolate peanut butter buttercream and the homemade butterfingers topping. Interestingly, my dad and Rachel and Chelsea all preferred versions with the plain peanut butter buttercream! My dad liked the plain peanut butter cookie with peanut butter buttercream and peanuts on top. Rachel liked plain peanut butter cookie with peanut butter buttercream and homemade butterfingers on top. Chelsea liked the Reese's Pieces cookie with peanut butter buttercream and homemade butterfingers on top.

This is me piping on some of the chocolate peanut butter buttercream onto the peanut butter cup cookies. We made A LOT of cookies for this project!

My big-little sister and I liked the Reece's Pieces cookie with the chocolate peanut butter buttercream and the Reese's Pieces topping, so we went with that for our final product! We called these Henry's Halloween Snaps in honor of trick-or-treating with Henry!

This is what they looked like cut through. They were really good!

The final section of our class involved making Cornflake Chocolate Marshmallow Cups. To make these we made a cornflake marshmallow filling and then used melted chocolate in muffin liners to form cups.

The shape ended up being like giant peanut butter cups.

This is what they looked like cut.

The problem with these was that they ended up too large and too rich. If I ever made them again, I would at least use milk chocolate and I would also try to use smaller candy molds.

When it came time to develop our own cups recipe, we decided that we wanted to do something Valentine's Day themed and so we decided on using a strawberry flavor profile. We experimented with different fillings for our prototypes. We thought that Rice Krispie Treats might make a good center, and so we tried making two different kinds of strawberry Rice Krispie Treats. For our first version, we used our standard Rice Krispie Treat recipe (which is definitely the best recipe out there!) but used strawberry marshmallows.

Jet-Puffed are usually the best marshmallows, but these didn't have a strong strawberry flavor.

These looked cute but had a bad texture and didn't taste like strawberry at all. They just tasted artificial.

These also had a funny texture, but they tasted the most like strawberry, so we went with these.

It turns out, that we should have paid more attention to the marshmallow texture because the Rice Krispie Treats that we made with our strawberry marshmallows turned out too crunchy, and they weren't pink and they didn't have a strong strawberry flavor. Basically there wasn't much good about these!

We also tried a real recipe for Strawberry Rice Krispie Treats that used freeze dried strawberries. The texture on these wasn't as good as regular Rice Krispie Treats, but at least these had strong strawberry flavor.

And I liked that these had a pink color!

We also made a Strawberry Curd to try as a filling.

The flavor on the curd turned out to be amazing, but the curd didn't look very pretty. I'd definitely make this again though. It would actually be great in summer yogurt parfaits!

We bought strawberry Pocky and broke it up to try as a crunchy topping.

We also made a Strawberry Shortcake Crumble. This was just a mixture of freeze dried strawberries, golden Oreos and melted butter.

This crumble was fantastic and would be great to incorporate into all kinds of strawberry desserts.

The last potential filling that we made was a Strawberry Buttercream. This incorporated pureed strawberries and was awesome.

The recipe doesn't say that you have to, but we pushed our pureed strawberries through a strainer so that we didn't end up with weird chunks or seeds in our frosting.

Then we started assembling prototypes. We thought that the Rice Krispie Treat filling was going to be a big hit, so we made a bunch of those.

But we actually ended up liking a few of our other options much better.

We thought that white chocolate would complement the strawberry flavor the best.

I used melted chocolate in a squeeze bottle to form the tops of our cups.

The ones filled with strawberry curd were my big-little sister's favorite.

But my mom and brother and I liked the strawberry buttercream combined with the strawberry shortcake crumb the best.

We were surprised to find that the white chocolate ended up overpowering the strawberry flavor. So for our final version, we used different types of chocolate. My mom and I liked the milk chocolate version best.

We used heart molds for our final product. Didn't these turn out beautifully?! I was very proud of them!

We actually used some of our components from our prototypes and class recipes in different treats, so I'll tell you more about how we did that next time. And I'll be sharing a fun Super Bowl recipe that we made tonight and OF COURSE some Valentine's Day recipes. I hope you're enjoying the Super Bowl everyone!!! My parents let me stay up late to finish this because it's already past my bedtime, so I have to go to bed now. But my parents are recording for me and said that I can watch Rihanna in the morning!