Sayonara Summer!

We're still way behind on blogging, but hopefully this post can be our very belated end of summer wrap-up! Between summer activities and now school, I'm cooking and baking faster than I can blog.

My Grammy Marcia and Papa Bill do lots of canning and they send us peaches from the peach trees in their back yard. This year they had so many peaches that the fruit was pulling the trees over! My sister and I love their bread and butter pickles the best, but the peaches are my brother's favorite. They are really good. We ate an entire huge jar of them the day that they came. Then my mom used some on top of waffles. I thought that the peaches added a nice tang. We were debating the right words to describe their flavor because my mom said that she didn't think that peaches were very tangy. But we learned that yellow peaches do have more tartness than white ones, which tend to just be sweet. So I guess that I was right!

The peaches and whipped cream and maple syrup all worked really well together.

Of course our end of summer baking involved some berry breakfasts! We made Blackberry Oatmeal Muffins and these were some of my favorite summer muffins that we made. Stay tuned for some fall favorites next time. These aren't quite as healthy as the muffins my mom makes for school breakfasts and snacks, but they're definitely healthier than some of our quarantine muffins! My brother really liked these, which was a big surprise, because a lot of the time he doesn't like muffins with an oatmeal base.

My mom let me scoop these into the muffin tins.

And this is how they turned out. The oats make these muffins really tender! I highly recommend!!

Another berry breakfast that we made was Raspberry Buttermilk Cake. Chelsea said that this was one of her favorite things that we made because she loved the texture and thought that it was sweet enough to be delicious without being too sugary. We added lemon zest to this batter and sprinkled sliced almonds on top to add some flavor. I loved this cake, but it actually could have gone into our Mistakes & Mishaps post because when we tried to flip it out of the cake pan, it broke. The reviews on the recipe warned that it was fragile and so we let it cool for an extra long time trying to be safe, but it still fell apart.

What I liked about this cake was its soft texture, but I guess that's also why this happened!

But we just sliced the rest right out of the pan and it looked great. Nobody would ever know!

An unusual breakfast that we made was Bacon Cheddar Chive Scones. We almost never have bacon in our house, but my dad used some to make a BLT with some great tomatoes from the farm near our house. So we made this recipe to use up the extra and they were REALLY good. My dad liked them because he likes savory scones. We all thought that these would be really good served as a side with a dinner too.

My sister and I had fun patting out this dough.

You can almost see how flaky these were from the picture!

Something that we made that I loved was a Smoky Eggplant Dip and I learned something really interesting from the recipe. I always thought that this kind of dip was called baba ganoush. My mom thought the same thing and so did Deb Perelman, who runs the blog Smitten Kitchen and whose recipe this is. But it turns out that this kind of dip is actually called, moutabbal!!!!! Did you know that or did you think that it was baba ganoush too? Moutabbal is an eggplant dip with lemon, tahini and garlic, but baba ganoush is an eggplant dip with pomegranate and molasses. But no matter what you call it, this dip was awesome! The recipe has you grill the eggplant and then bake it, but ours was so soft after grilling that we just skipped the baking step.

We served this with vegetables and pita chips. I thought that the platter looked beautiful.

But our eggplant dip platter isn't the only thing that we made that I thought was beautiful. We also made a Spinach and Feta Tarte Soleil and that was incredible! Soleil is the French word for sun and that's exactly what this tart looks like.

We made a spinach and feta filling and put it between two puff pastry rounds. Then we cut wedges and twisted them.

We twisted them all the way around and brushed them with an egg wash.

And this is what it looked like baked. Doesn't it look like a sun?!

One of my absolute favorite beach lunches is mini lobster rolls. We use brioche slider rolls and base our lobster salad off of this recipe. We use all lobster instead of some shrimp, and add way more dill and lemon. Sometimes lobster rolls can be heavy, but these taste light and fresh and summery and delicious!

You can tell that we use a lot of dill!

Another favorite summery recipe is something that my mom calls her Pregnancy Pasta Salad. My Grammy Marcia first found the recipe for this and she made it when my mom was pregnant with my brother. My mom loved it and ate it constantly! We don't even have the recipe anymore but you cook farfalle, which is bowtie pasta, and mix it with green beans, grilled corn and equal parts of pesto and ricotta. It's much much better if you make your own pesto, but you can use jarred too. Kelsie said that this tasted like an end of summer celebration in a bowl!

The corn and green beans add really good crunch! I call this kind of pasta bowtini, even though I know that's not the real name!!

Of course we also made lots of good desserts. One thing that we made that I had never had before is White Chocolate Brownies. White chocolate is made with cocoa butter, but it isn't really chocolate because it doesn't contain chocolate solids. If you make this recipe, it is very important to use high quality white chocolate because otherwise it won't taste good. We use Lindt and that tastes really good.

These brownies have a nice chewy texture and I loved the frosting.

One of my mom's favorite treats that we've made is Peanut Butter Fudge. She loves peanut butter and so do I! This fudge is really easy to make and sooooooooo good!!!!!! Once you have a plate of this fudge, you won't want to budge!

This fudge looks simple but has lots of great peanut butter flavor.

We also did a bunch of baking with Reese's Pieces candy. The first thing that we made was a Peanut Butter Skillet Cookie. This was soft and gooey in the middle and I really liked the strong peanut butter flavor. It was excellent with vanilla ice cream.

Like always, we forgot to take a picture of our skillet cookie before we cut it!

Another Reese's Pieces recipe that we made was Colossal Reese's Pieces Chocolate Chip Cookies. These cookies have a super strong peanut butter taste, which I loved. We used large chocolate cooking wafers, which are much bigger than chips, and I liked their size. My dad liked the mix of salty and sweet and said that he doesn't like Reese's Pieces as a candy plain, but that he liked them in a cookie. My mom liked the combination of chocolate and Reese's Pieces and peanut butter chips, because it gave lots of different flavors and textures.

Can you see how the chocolate pieces are extra big?

The salty sweet combination that my dad liked is because we sprinkled this chocolate salt on top.

We bought this salt in Portland, Oregon when we visited my Uncle TaTa and Aunt ShayShay!

We made Peanut Butter Blondies too, which (surprise!) also had Reese's Pieces in them. These were one of my mom's favorite things that we made. They're soft and ooey gooey and VERY peanut buttery.

I liked how these cut so cleanly. Sometimes when we cut bars or blondies, they end up looking messier.

But every dessert wasn't peanut butter!!! We had some leftover buttercream from a cupcake project. We were looking for something to do with it, and decided to make sandwich cookies. This cookie recipe isn't even supposed to be for sandwich cookies, but we used it and these cookies turned out to be AMAZING. The cookies are soft and buttery and were sooooo good with the buttercream. And even though they were just something that we made up so that we didn't have to waste anything, they ended up being Chelsea's favorite cookie that we've made!!!!!!!!

Of course the butter cream was one of my favorite colors!

But we knew that summer was officially over when it was time to make Sugared Spiced Nuts for teacher gifts, because that means that we're going back to school. My mom first made these before we were even born. She gave them out as a favor at my Grandma Linda's 60th birthday surprise party. She wrote on the tags "Sweet and A Little Bit Nutty, Just Like Linda!" I thought that was very funny. But it turns out that this is a great recipe for kids to do because it's really easy. We always make them for teacher gifts. My sister's teacher Eliza, got them for the third time this year, because she used to teach my brother and then me. She loves them!

This is what the nuts look like. And that's the dress that I wore on the first day of school!

We give them out in mason jars, which are good because then people can use them again!

Now I have some exciting breaking news! I have a NEW favorite pancake recipe! And that means that we get to have a NEW Guess My Favorite Pancake Recipe Contest!!! You're not allowed to enter if you ate them with us or I already told you about them. But my cousin Ben really liked guessing last time, so hopefully he'll like getting to guess again. And I'll give you a hint... these pancakes will fit in very nicely with our upcoming fall posts!!!!!