Oven Roasted Pumpkin Seeds.. yumminess

Ok it is defiantly that time of year... PUMPKIN season!! Since it is Halloween and we did carve pumpkins.. couldn't let the seeds just waist away! The hunt began.. I went on a search for pumpkin roasting recipes. Well I found 2.. a sweet aaaaand a savory!!

First the Savory...

Fiery Pumpkin Seeds

So in this recipe called for Cumin for which I did not have, so I improvised... no cumin add the next best "smoky" flavor you have.. for me that was paprika. I add a 1/2 teaspoon of paprika and 1/2 teaspoon of garlic. I can not tell you enough how great it tastes!! Even Jeremy who says he hasn't had roasted pumpkin seeds liked it.. score one for me :)

The Recipe:

• Prep: 5 min. Bake: 45 min. + cooling
• Yield: 4 Servings

54550

Ingredients

• 1 cup fresh pumpkin seeds
• 2 teaspoons Louisiana-style hot sauce
• 1 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions

• In a small bowl, toss the pumpkin seeds with hot sauce. Combine the chili powder, salt, cumin, cayenne and pepper; sprinkle over seeds and toss to coat. Spread into a greased foil-lined 15-in. x 10-in. x 1-in. baking pan.
• Bake, uncovered, at 250° for 45-50 minutes or until seeds are lightly browned and dry, stirring occasionally. Cool completely. Store in an airtight container. Yield: 1 cup.

The link.....

http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Fiery-Pumpkin-Seeds

Next I did the sweet

Candied Pumpkin Seeds:

On this one I did not modify at all.. I followed the recipe to the T. Unfortunately I want to classify this one as a fail... sigh, they taste great, but are suppppper sticky. It was very hard to get them off the pan, even using wax paper. 

• Prep: 5 min. Bake: 45 min. + cooling
• Yield: 4 Servings

54550

Ingredients

• 1 cup fresh pumpkin seeds
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions

• In a small bowl, combine all ingredients. Spread into a greased foil-lined 15-in. x 10-in. x 1-in. baking pan.
• Bake, uncovered, at 250° for 45-50 minutes or until seeds are well-glazed, stirring occasionally. Cool completely; break into piece

The site:

http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Candied-Pumpkin-Seeds

Now that I have shared me experience.. go try it yourself, leave comments on how yours turns out!!  

Bake away <3

Cheerio Treats- Failed

Well it looks like I have officially had my first pin-fail.  It was a sad one too cause the original recipe and picture looked so promising. Confession time though.... I have failed every time I have tried to make a rice crispy type treats. I don't even know what I am doing wrong.. so any feed back would be fantastic!!. Ok so with this recipe it called for peanut butter cheerios well I had plain cheerios, since the kiddos wouldn't eat it I felt I should use it. 

So I am not exactly sure where I went wrong. I followed, as best as I could, melting butter and peanut butter in a pot, then adding in about 40 or more marshmallows  I will say based on the pictures from the original website mine looked nothing like it (forgive me, was going to fast to snap a pic). The original site showed a nice creamy mixtures that would mix very nicely with the Cheerios. Mine not so much, more like a small amount or thickened peanut butter. I honestly believe maybe I should have mixed more butter in with the peanut butter like the ratio was way off.

Any-who, I mixed it all together the best I could and in the end not much stuck together, and well I made a very delicious peanut butter flavored, cheerio cereal.  heheheh...

Oh yeah and instead of placing chocolate chips on top I of course changed it.. hahaha I put butterscotch chips on top!!

The Recipe:

Ingredients:
6 cups Peanut Butter Cheerios
2 Tablespoons butter
1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
10 ounces (approx. 40 ) regular sized marshmallows
1 cup chocolate chips

Prep a 9×13 pan with cooking spray or buttered parchment.

In a pan over medium high heat melt the butter and peanut butter. Add in the marshmallows until you get a nice gooey mess.

Add the Peanut Butter Cheerios and stir to combine making sure all of the cereal gets coated.

Press into the prepped pan and while the cereal is still warm, sprinkle the chocolate chips on top so they melt slightly.

Let cool and cut into squares. These taste best if served the same day.

The website:

http://justjennrecipes.com/peanut-butter-cheerios-treats/2012/06/10/

Seriously let me know if you guys have success with this, and please let me know where I went wrong.. lol

<3 Tina

Snicker-Doodle Bread a la Tina

I am not sure where to even start.. :) So I had Friday off from work and I really, REALLY wanted to bake something... to Pinterest I went trying to find some yummy recipe's to make, bake and try! I had a hard time deciding on what to make, the world of baking has some many things to do! Cookies, cakes, pies, bread, ect.. But all in all it's all good and I haven't heard any complaints (not even the fake niceness!) Ok so back to this decision. I decided bread was the way to go. I found to recipe's I liked Banana Chocolate Bread and Snicker-doodle Bread. I couldn't narrow it down more then that, so I made both :).

The recipe for the Snicker-doodle bread was pretty easy to follow. I did have a BIG issue not being able to find cinnamon chips. For this I substituted with butterscotch chips and caramel chips.

 The recipe was very easy to follow. I made one loaf, in your typical sized loaf pan. This recipe was meant for 4 mini loaves. The problem I ran in to was it was too much for one normal sized pan to handle.

It was HUGE!!! I will make this again (OMG the reviews were amazing on the bread) next time I will use to normal sized pan splitting the batter in half. and make 2 breads full of yumminess!!! Oh and the cinnamon and sugar topping was like this amazing sweet crust to a very moist and oh so tasty!

Te Recipe:

Snickerdoodle Bread

Course: Dessert Skill Level: Moderate

The bread version of Snickerdoodles and one that everyone will love!! Modified from Barbara Bakes

INGREDIENTS

2 1/2 cups flour

• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 cup butter softened
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 3/4 cup sour cream
• 1 pkg. Hershey's cinnamon chips
• 3 TB sugar
• 3 tsp. cinnamon

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Cream butter, sugar, salt and cinnamon until fluffy. Add eggs and mix well.
2. Add vanilla and sour cream and mix well.
3. Mix flour and baking powder in a separate bowl. Add to wet ingredients and mix until all combined.
4. Add cinnamon chips and stir into batter. Set aside.
5. Spoon batter into 4 mini loaf pans until about 2/3 full.
6. Mix 3 T. sugar and 3 t. cinnamon in a bowl and sprinkle over the batter in each loaf pan.
7. Bake at 350 for 35-38 minutes. Let cool before removing from pan.

Recipe by:

Copyright© www.lilluna.com

Website:

http://lilluna.com/snickerdoodle-bread/

Happy baking my friends!!!

<3

Banana Butterscotch Bread

So originally this recipe started out as Banana Chocolate Chip Bread.. well some little gremmlins in my house ate all chocolate chips we had left.. sigh. Sooo.... I had peanut butter chips, caramel chips and butterscotch chips. Although peanut butter and banana go very well together I wanted something new. So I bounced the idea of the butterscotch chips to my sister-in-law, and with her encouragement went a head with this devilish plan. So I of course modified the origional recipe to fit what I had. Where the recipe calls for 1 cup of chocolate chips I did 3/4 cup butterscotch and.. shhhhh... 1/4 mini reese's pieces cups :). Everything else remained that same.

The batter was very simple to construct it maybe took me 10 minutes give or take a few (kitten under the feet).

I did grease and line my loaf pan with wax paper. I just find it so much easier to remove the bread. Bakes 350 for (like the recipe says) 60-80 min. I checked mine at about 70 minutes in and it still need about 15 minutes more.

Fully baked. This is very delicious... I will say we are not the biggest on banana bread but this will have to be put to use again in the future if the bananas are not eaten fast enough!!

The Recipe:

INGREDIENTS

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 3 bananas, mashed (1 cup mashed banana)
• 1 cup chocolate chips

1 loaf

PREPARATION

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F .

Grease and flour a 8 1/2-inch x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan (or use baking spray, such as Baker's Joy brand).

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda and salt. Mix in the oil, bananas and eggs. Stir in the chocolate chips (do not overmix!) and pour into the prepared pan. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, about 60-80 minutes. Cool the loaf in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out and cool completely, right side up.

Recipe by: Rachael Ray

Website:

http://www.rachaelray.com//recipe.php?recipe_id=2760

Enjoy!

<3

Sweet and Salty Treats

I promised this was coming.. This is a super easy and super fun recipe. I did this with my 3 year old daughter, Emma. We had so much fun! There really isn't much explaining for this however, I had some experiments with it that went bad :(. First thing when you put the pretzels with the Hershey kiss or hug on top of it, leave it in for about 3-5 minutes checking often to see if it is "shinny". I say this cause I took a batch out of the oven to early the chocolate wasn't melted all the way so naturally I put it back in. Well guess what, doing this turns the chocolate in to powder! Guess I over cooked it.. oh well tossed those and did some more :)

Now this is the second batch I made. I used square pretzels, hugs and white chocolate "candy corn" M&M's. The others have the square pretzel, chewy caramel, hug, 2 peanut butter and 2 butterscotch chips on top. They both came out great!!

Ok so in this picture you have the pumpkin chocolate chip bread, previously blogged about. In the other container is the sweet and salty treats. This was made with your classic pretzel, Hershey kiss and fall colored M&M's. No matter how you chose to top these, they are awesome!! I think I have made this 3 times now with plans to make them again in the future. Bonus they make awesome gifts to mail out to your loved ones during the holidays. Come Christmas time you should be able to find the peppermint kisses/hugs put one of those on a pretzel with red, green and white M&M's... OR pretzel with a plain kiss and a gum drop on top.. the possibilities are endless for any holiday!

The Recipe:

Sweet and Salty Halloween Treats
from Baking and Creating with Avril

Ingredients:

Mini Pretzels (I used the snaps, shaped like squares, but you could use the twists too.)

Hershey Kisses Hugs (any kind of kisses would do)

Candy Corn

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper or foil. Place pretzels on cookie sheet, not touching. Unwrap Hershey's Kisses and place on top of pretzels and then place filled cookie sheet in oven. Bake for 3-5 minutes but no longer. You will know they are ready when the Hershey Kisses start to get shiny. Take out of oven and gently place candy corn on top of Hershey Kisses, pushing down ever so gently. Cool and then transfer to serving platter or wrap up as gifts. I actually placed mine in the fridge for a few minutes to speed up the cooling process, and it worked perfectly.



Recipe from:

http://cakeinfo.blogspot.com/2010/10/sweet-treat-tuesday-sweet-and-salty.html


Go crank up that oven and try this out.. seriously it takes more time to heat the oven up then to be creative with these yummy morsels!

<3

French Toast Muffins

So I had a hankering for some muffins and stumbled across this recipe. Of course it came from Pinterest! This seemed super easy and fun. Unfortunately I did not take a whole lot of pictures when making this only the end result. Amazingly enough they actually tasted like french toast. Granted I did make my own modifications :), but isn't that the fun of cooking.. making it your own to fit your taste bud (and you families)!

Now I followed the recipe just as it was written only adding in 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract which I would add vanilla to my french toast anyways.. Try it for your self and see what you think. My family LOVED them and this is defiantly a breakfast we will do again.. besides what kiddo doesn't love dipping stuff. Just let them dip in the melted butter and give them their own bowls of cinnamon and sugar! Have fun...


The Recipe:

French Breakfast Muffins

1/3 c. butter, melted
1/2 c. sugar
1 egg (preferably room temperature)
1 1/2 c. all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 c. milk

Topping (option: cut topping in half*)
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. butter, melted
1 tsp. cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350F.

In a medium-large bowl, sift together all dry ingredients. Add wet ingredients and stir just until combined, but still a bit lumpy. Do NOT over mix; over mixing will ruin the texture of the finished muffins. Also? Don't over mix the batter. Finally, don't over mix. Scoop batter into muffin tins that have sprayed with cooking spray. Using a large ice cream scoop, I got 8 medium-large muffins out of this batter; I think you could get 10-12 muffins by distributing the batter a little less generously. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until they just start to turn a bit golden at the edges.

For the topping, mix sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Place melted butter in another small bowl. Dip the warm muffins in melted butter (you can dip just the top, but it's even tastier to dip the whole muffin!), then dip/roll the muffin in cinnamon sugar. *May have left-over topping; the extra topping can be used for dipping, while eating the muffins (oh my). Another option is to cut the topping ingredients in half. CONSUME, ENJOY, GO CRAZY! 

Recipe by:

Ann @:

http://velvetlava.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-am-now-in-muffin-loop.html

Now go... Go bake something already :)

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread

Ok this one I had a lot of fun with. Granted it was a spur of the moment.... yeah I guess this will work... before I rush of to work, recipe. Yeah did you follow that?!?! Well it was Monday evening and Gage reminded me that I need to bake something for his school's Bingo night.. CRAP!! I had forgotten. Well it was much too late to make it now.  I started digging around on Pinterest and came across this Pumpkin Bread and it sounded pretty easy. I gathered all the ingredient and got under way...

 I got ambitious on one of them and instead of putting chocolate chips on top I did fall colored M&M's :).  Now the recipe says to bake it for 55-60 minutes but you will find on her website she does comment in the bottom times may need to be adjusted as wells the amount on oil. So after an hour and 15 minutes my bread was done!!

 YAY!!! I then "packaged" it up, including the recipe, for the bingo night shin-dig and even made some Sweet and Salty bites to go with it (will blog on that one later :) ) and headed off to drop it off 1 hour before I was due at work. whew, its got done :)

 Now, I did not actually get to try any of the first 3 breads, as I gave them away as gifts. So it just meant I HAD to make some more. SO I made 2 more loaves to have here at the house.. WOW!! That's all we could say! absolutely AMAZING!! I will definitely be making this again and again during the fall holidays!!


The recipe:

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 1 hour

Yield: 1 loaf of bread

Ingredients

·         1 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie mix)

·         1 tsp vanilla

·         3 eggs

·         1/4 cup sour cream

·         3/4 cup vegetable oil

·         1 2/3 cup flour

·         1 cup sugar

·         1/2 tsp salt

·         1/2 tsp baking powder

·         1/2 tsp baking soda

·         1 cup + 1/4 cup chocolate chips, divided

·         powdered sugar, to garnish

Instructions

1.    Preheat oven to 350 F degrees. Grease & flour loaf pan. (I also lined mine with parchment paper.)

2.    In large bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt TWICE.

3.    In a medium bowl, combine the pumpkin, eggs, oil, vanilla and sour cream until smooth.

4.    Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in the wet ingredients. Whisk together until smooth.

5.    Fold in 1 cup of chocolate chips.

6.    Pour into prepared loaf pan. Sprinkle 1/4 cup chocolate chips on top.

7.    Bake 55-60 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

8.    Cool in pan on a wire rack 20 minutes before removing to wire rack to cool completely.

9.    Dust top with powdered sugar to garnish.

Recipe from:

http://javacupcake.com/2012/09/pumpkin-chocolate-chip-bread/

By: Betsy

Until later.....

Enjoy Baking <3

The begining

Well Hey there!

Quick introductions, my name is Tina. I am Engaged to my best friend and soul mate, Jeremy. Together we have a total of 8 kiddos. I have 5 and he has 3, that's 7 boys and 1 little girl. Tripp is 13, Gage is 11, Justin is 8, Aidan is 6, Tristan is 6, Hayden is 4 (about to turn 5), Emma is 3 and Collin is 3. NO there are no twins. Aidan is 7 months older the Tristan and Emma is 4 months older then Collin. Confused yet?!?! Well don't be, You will hear their names in this blog as to their thoughts on some of the recipes and sometimes just what we did that day so on and so on.

Now, I decided to start a blog due to my love of baking and cooking. I love trying new recipes and have become addicted to Pinterest. But now a days who hasn't! If you haven't yet heard of Pinterest PLEASE go check it out! You will fall instantly in LOVE with it, like or it will just not be for you (click on the link above to check it out)! Since I have been on Pintrest I have tried a few of the recipes, and thought "Hey, I could make recipes and blog about them" ..lol genius huh?!?!? Then I thought well if I do this I will just blog about the good ones and include where to find them on the interweb, crediting the person from whom "introduced" me to the recipe. But I think I will just make whatever I see that our family may like, good or bad. It's just my/our opinion. So there for I am not wrong, right?

This is a picture of our crew (minus Justin) last Christmas, Oh yeah I am the one taking the pictures..

Oh there I am, giving instructions on how to decorate the tree.. Basically it is Come to me I hand you the next ornament the kiddo can put it anywhere on the tree they want! :)

We did get brave one day, back when we were still living in Georgia. We took 6 of our kids to Stone Mountain and climber all the way to the top of the mountain and all the way down.. whew that was an all day event... lol

 Well I hope you have enjoyed my first blog.. our introduction.. 

Keep an eye out cause on my days off from my "part time" job (now that's another story) I will be baking and cooking trying out all the recipes I can find out there..... whether it is from Pinterest, the web, a cook book, a friend or a magazine. Off too bake something now....