But unlike a regular cookie, brownie, or bar, I never really considered the creative possibilities of the Rice Krispy Treat. I have the folks at Special K, makers of the Chocolatey Pretzel bar. I bought these little yummies with a coupon and fell instantly in love. At the same time, I thought to myself, “Hey, I can do this!” And I did. Don’t they look yummy!

Tried & true treat -- part salty, part sweet

Here’s what I used… Dare I even call it a recipe?

3 tbsp unsalted butter
4 cups mini marshmallows
5 cups Rice Krispies
1 cup pretzel sticks, broken into 1/2″ bits
1/2 cup chocolate chips1. Combine Rice Krispies and pretzel bits. Stir together so pretzels are distributed evenly within the Krispies.

2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan.

3. Add the marshmallows & stir to coat with melted butter.

4. Stir marshmallow until fully melted.

5. Once marshmallow is fully melted, add Krispy/pretzel mix and stir to coat with marshmallow.

6. When Krispy/pretzels are mostly coated, add chips and stir to incorporate. Many of the chips will likely melt & this is fine. (If you’d rather they not melt, you might want to try dropping them in when you spread the mixture into your casserole dish.)

7. Spread mixture in a 13×9 casserole dish. Use waxed paper to press even. Let cool. Cut into 12 squares.

Sure, my treats had twice the calories of the Special K variety — but about 180 calories per bar isn’t too shabby as far as tasty bits go. These bars were also pretty substantial and filling. In the next go ’round, I’ll probably trade out another 1/2 cup of Krispies for an extra 1/2 cup of pretzels, but otherwise these were pretty much perfect.

I also suspect that these treats would be great to make with kids, though at 1-1/2 my little one is still too little to really be much help. But for those with slightly older tots (I suspect even kids as young as 2-1/2 or 3) this is pretty engaging for such a simple treat. There’s no hot oven to bother with. You can set the kiddos to breaking up the pretzels while you melt the butter & marshmallows. And once the treats are ready for the pan, their little hands will love the feel of the treats under the wax paper. Yay!

Until this time. I usually prefer a whole wheat bread, but was also in the mood for something with an extra savory kick. So, I took the bread machine book’s “Parmesan-Pepper” recipe and swapped out 1/2 of the regular bread flour with whole wheat. That’s it — hardly even counts as a deviation.

But as the bread reached the ‘baking’ stage of the process, I got totally paranoid. I peered in to see how it was doing, and it seemed unusually lumpy. I know that wheat flour is generally ‘thirstier’ than regular flour, and I wondered if I ought to have added extra water or oil? It was at this point in the process that I consulted the machine’s instructions and found the helpful tip suggesting that you check in during the kneading cycles to see if your dough needs more water or flour. Ooops. I suppose I should have thought of that earlier…

Oh well. I used a wooden spoon to help fit the dough more evenly in the baking pan & let the machine do its thing. The smell was pretty amazing, so I was hopeful that even if my bread was a little dry & lumpy, it would taste darned good.

And I was pretty much right. Here it is.

Still looks pretty good, right?

The peppery cheesey flavor was more subtle than I expected, and the bread was a little wheatier than I expected (which I liked). But with bread, texture has so much to do with the flavor that the dryness and denseness of the bread definitely detracted. It was at that point that the Little Mister pointed out that bread machine bread almost always seems to be dense — at least whenever we’ve had it made by others or our selves.

A quick google search suggests I’m not the only one to have this issue. Some suggest that you need to use bread machine yeast (I was using Fleischmann’s Active Dry Yeast, and I suspected this could have been the culprit) and more water (which I also considered, of course). Others get more complicated, suggesting you add extra gluten. This quick list of common bread machine problems seems pretty helpful, and I expect I may find myself consulting this again if I decide to make bread again this year. Otherwise, I’ll probably just forget all about my problems and wind up eating dense, dry bread again next year — and thinking its great anyway, just because I made it myself.

Chocolatey Oaty Goodness

I used the same recipe (from Baking Illustrated) for these as I used for the Loaded Oatmeal Cookies from last week — with a few obvious and not-so-obvious changes. For one, I used 1-1/2 cups chocolate chips, rather than the nuts, fruits, and veggies that went into the other cookies. I also omited the nutmeg, as suggested by BI. The next time I make them I will probably put the nutmeg back in because I just like the way the nutmeg enhances the flavor of the oats, and I think it might make a more complex, flavorful cookie.  As they turned out, I thought these were good — but more like extra filling, extra chewy chocolate chip cookies.  I felt like the flavor of the oats took a backseat to the chocolate, and I wonder if just that little bit of extra spice might create some more balance.

One cookie tray went splat: light butter or oven placement?

Less obvious:  The recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter, and I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to “lighten” up the recipe.  So, I used 1 stick of regular, unsalted butter and one stick of light butter.  The light butter was salted, so I also decreased the amount of salt I added into the cookies by about 1/2.  This was my first time using light butter, and I was surprised by how different it is in texture.  When I tried to soften the butters in my microwave before creaming them, the light butter melted completely while the regular butter merely softened up a bit.  I’m not sure how much this difference affected the final product.  Taste-wise, I don’t think they were any different.

Some of the cookies were more crumbly than my last batch of oatmeal cookies, but I think that may have had more to do with oven placement than anything else. It seems like the cookies that start out on the middle oven rack — further from the heat source — spread and flatten rather than puffing into a voluptuous, full-figured cookie.  I had a very similar problem last time.

I do think all of the cookies, regardless of their flatness or fullness, got very crumbly after a few days (one person called them “trail mix cookies”), and I wonder if this has something to do with the different fat. Maybe next time I will experiment with using light butter exclusively.  We’ll see.

Well, no, in fact I hadn’t.  But I was intrigued.

I started by checking out the recipes for oatmeal cookies in Baking Illustrated, How to Cook Everything, and The Joy of Cooking.  No carrots anywhere.  So, I searched the trusty internet and found several Carrot Raisin Oatmeal or Oatmeal Raisin Carrot or Oatmeal Carrot Raisin, etc. etc. — all of them just different enough, none seeming as fundamentally sound as the BI version (there’s just something about all their testing and explanation that wins me over). So, I decided to make their cookie, with the tiniest substitution — instead of 1-1/2 c. of raisins, I added a 1/2 c. each of raisins, shredded carrots, and chopped walnuts.

These cookies are knobbly & yummy!

The result is a hearty but balanced oatmeal cookie.  Although I normally like my baked goodies pretty bare bones, these cookies felt just right.  I actually think splitting the large helping of raisins into smaller helpings of the three different ingredients insured that no one flavor would overwhelm the cookie or outshine the oats.  I also really like the BI instruction to add nutmeg, rather than cinnamon.  It is, as they suggest, a much more subtle spice than I’ve come to expect from oatmeal cookies.

I may have overcooked them a wee bit, as some of the cookies were a little dry (especially around the edges) and a little less chewy than I would have liked. Honestly, I’m not sure if its timing or my cookie sheets that should be blamed.  On one of my sheets the edges looked brown at the 22 minute mark, so I pulled those immediately and left the other cookies in for a few more minutes, moving them to the lower rack.  After another 2 minutes, I removed the second sheet, even though the edges still didn’t look really “brown” to me. Well, those second cookies — the ones with not-so-brown edges — were much more moist and chewy than the cookies that came off of that first sheet and came out of the over sooner.  Its hard to say whether its the fault of a shoddy cookie sheet (my higher quality cookie sheet gave me the better cookies, even though those were in the oven a little longer) or if maybe being on the bottom rack (as the recipe suggested) was too much.  Next time I make these, I’ll mess around with how long each sheet stays on the bottom or middle to see if it makes any difference.  I have a feeling I might need to suck it up & buy another, nice cookie sheet.

They're gigantic! Each cookie is like a mini-meal.

P.S. Did I mention they’re HUGE.  I mean look at them.  I think it they almost look like scones in this picture.  The Little Mister compared their size to muffin tops.  One cookie is at least the equivalent of two “regular”-sized cookies (whatever that means), and soooo filling!!  I did calculate that each individual cookie has just under a tablespoon of butter (not to mention all the sugar!), but I’d say that’s balanced out by all the good nutrition you get from the carrots, raisins, walnuts, and oats.  I think these cookies are like a well-balanced meal!  I’m pretty sure these are going into my regular repertoire of goodies — I can’t wait to make them again.

A classic blueberry muffin with a little extra zing!

Straight out of Baking Illustrated (my baking bible), these muffins are light & flavorful.  Unlike those banana blueberry muffins, this recipe calls for plenty of dry ingredients (2 c. of flour) so there is a good, firm cake to balance the gushiness of the plump, fresh berries.  The real zing comes from the sour cream, which helps keep the cake light and moist (but not too moist), while adding a little bit of tanginess to complement the berries.  The result is a fluffy muffin with a subtle, yet complex flavor.  I love them.  And they always seem to win.

My only trouble this time around was some uneven cooking in my 12-muffin, aluminum pan.  I didn’t opt for paper liners this time. So when I inverted my muffin tin some of the muffins popped easily out, nicely brown all around the base, while others needed a little more coaxing and were less golden (although not under-cooked).  I suppose I should have popped the muffin tin back into the oven to give those muffins that didn’t easily slide out a few extra minutes of bake time, but that didn’t occur to me until after I’d spent much effort coaxing them all out.  Even still, the muffin that I tested was one of these less golden, pan lingerers — and it was wonderful.

The next time (or few times) I make these, I might try out some changes to cut calories and/or add some subtle flavors:  using plain yogurt instead of sour cream, trying a whole wheat/white flour blend, and/or adding some orange or lemon zest.  I probably won’t revisit these again for a few weeks, but I’m looking forward to it already.

A moist, bulky breakfast treat, this muffin looks nothing like the recipe publisher's photo.

A few weeks ago, my sister-in-law emailed me this recipe from Self magazine for Banana Blueberry Muffins.  I love bananas. I love blueberries. So I thought these would be yummy. I also thought they’d make a tasty housewarming treat for my other sister-in-law.

Flavorwise, they are tasty — the sweetness of the banana helps balance the tartness of my fresh, plump Jersey blueberries. And the orange zest adds a nice bit of complexity to the flavor. But the texture is all wrong: The predominance of banana & wet ingredients made for overly moist, almost mushy muffins.  A firmer muffin texture would have helped balance the juiciness of the blueberries.  Instead, these muffins are all mush & gush.  The oat bran adds the only bit of “complication” to the texture — a subtle “grittiness” that I enjoy.  (What’s the positive way to say something is “gritty”??)

My major complaint is that the recipe could have done more to guide the baker in what kind of muffin to expect and how to make it the best muffin it could be. First of all, take another look at the muffin they have pictured with the recipe —  now banish that from your thoughts.  My picture above is what these muffins look like.  It’s actually more of a Banana Blueberry Bran Muffin, but I guess that was too long, less sexy of a name???

Secondly, many muffin recipes suggest serving warm, straight out of the oven.  I tried to test these muffins about 30 or so minutes after I pulled them from the oven, and it was a bad scene. Although they had cleanly passed the toothpick test, when I tried to unwrap one from its pretty paper liner (which I used since I was intending them as gifts), I lost about 1/2 my muffin!!  Not cool!  But this morning, the muffins had firmed up and unwrapped from the liners with ease. I’m not sure if cooking them longer or directly in the muffin pan (sans liners) would have helped firm them up for immediate eating, but to be safe I will let them rest several hours before testing them next time.

Another flaw in the recipe is the number of servings.  The recipe says it will make 6 muffins, but doesn’t call for an oversized or special muffin pan. So I used my standard muffin pan, and since it has 12 muffin cups, I doubled the recipe.  Somehow I ended up with 21 muffins! Not a big deal, really, especially when you consider that the 6-muffin recipe claimed to come in at 130 calories per muffin. By my calculations, my “double batch” of 21 muffins have about 75 calories per muffin — and 2 of them were more than filling for breakfast this morning.

At the end of the day, I learned two big, important lessons by making these muffins:  #1) Thoroughly consider your recipe. Alot of the problems I had with these muffins came from putting too much faith in the recipe (or the recipe’s publisher maybe?). Foremost, as I already mentioned, this recipe calls for very little in the way of dry ingredients; and oat bran makes up more than 1/2 of what little dry is called for. That makes for an extra moist muffin, which has its own set of considerations, as well as a very healthy, but somewhat gritty, fiber-filled muffin.  Yummy to some.  Regularity to others.

Which brings me to lesson #2) Consider your audience.  As a writer, my audience is always looming, goading, encouraging, ignoring, whatever. As a baker, I tend to get wrapped up in the challenge of the tasty treat and, at least sometimes, give less forethought to who will be eating those treats and if they will indeed find them to be tasty. Especially if your “treat” includes a full-day’s serving of fiber! As my husband says, Nobody wants a colon blow as a gift. Doh!!

So, when it comes to gifting, go with a solid, steady favorite — an all-around winner.  Not an experiment!  Not a recipe you’ve never looked at or with ingredients (oat bran, in this case) you’ve never used.  As it turns out, we’ll be keeping these for ourselves, and I’ll be making a batch of nice, classic blueberry muffins for my sister-in-law. I’ve made them before & they’re wonderful. A real crowd pleaser.

To complement the pooch-covered plates, napkins and balloons, I decided to make the Boys very first cake in the shape of a puppy.  I had never before done much cake decorating other than writing “Happy Birthday” — and I have to admit I was never really steady at that.

Well, here’s what I came up with:

The Boy's 1st Birthday Cake

I think it turned out pretty good. Both the cake and frosting (all homemade) were entirely eggless since the Boy is allergic. Unfortunately, he was not very into the cake at all.  He took a little taste of the chocolate frosting, but wasn’t interested in eating the cake.  Disappointing, yes.  But not entirely surprising when you consider it took him weeks to accept any bread.  And though his favorite foods are bananas and sweet potatos, he’s not exactly accustomed to *real* sweets.  Eh, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

In case you’re interested, there’s more about the cake & my process after the jump….

The Boy’s aversion may also have had something to do with the cake being very dry. I used a great recipe for eggless cake, which I tested a few weeks ago. That time, it turned out wonderful — but then I made it as cupcakes, rather than cake.  And I think I may have overcooked it a little this time around.  I also cut the butter by 1/4 cup, based on some of the comments I read, but I think the next time I make it I’ll use the full amount called for in the recipe.  Lastly, I made the cakes Thursday, decorated Friday & served Saturday.  Although a lot of what I read about cake making suggested this would be okay, I think the wait didn’t help the already dry cake.

The frostings were really good — and really simple — recipes (with slight modifications) from Baking Illustrated, my absolute favorite baking book. I made a vanilla butter frosting, which is just butter, confectioners sugar, and vanilla.  It’s very fluffy and very yummy!  The chocolate was just as simple — melted chocolate, heavy cream, and about a tablespoon or so of confectioners sugar (which wasn’t called for in my recipe, but which I added to help cut the bitterness of the chocolate & sweeten it up every so slightly).

4 layers of eggless cakey goodness

To make the dog, I used two round pans (I think mine are 9 inches rather than 8 inches, which would have been better), and a heart shaped pan to get the ears.  For the ears, I put my layers on top of each other (not iced), then cut the heart in half, cut out a triangle in the middle, and rounded off the cuts to make it less angular, more floppy looking.  They kind of looked like big commas, but it worked.  To get the snout, I just cut a circle out of some of the excess cake material I had after leveling off the layers and iced it as I would have a third layer.

I made a double batch of vanilla and used that to frost between all the layers (ears & face) and to frost the entire face.  I made only one batch’s worth of chocolate and reserved that for the ears and the patch around the eye.  I used a 15 inch spreader spatula for most of the frosting and a 9 inch tapered, angled spreader for the ears and any detail work.  I’m sure you could also get by with a regular spatula and/or dinner knife and/or small, angled butter knife.

Ears... or commas or apostrophes... whatev

I decorated the face with decorator icing from Michael’s.  (Since this was my first time, I had no idea you couldn’t just get that stuff at the grocery store.  So, many thanks to Jess for the tip!)  I did a practice run on my cutting board before going near the cake.  I was happy with the face, especially since I was never very good at drawing much of anything.

The silver sheet the cake is sitting on is a disposable oven pan, intended for catching drippings, which I bought at the grocery store. Later on, someone suggested I use an extra large cutting board, which I will definitely do next time.  The pan was the only thing I could find with enough surface area for the whole cake.  But it was pretty flimsy, and there’s no way I would have been able to move the cake on just that pan — it would have totally bent under the weight. So I propped it on my broiler pan to move the cake around.  It worked out fine; but a sturdy, huge cutting board would be much easier.

All in all, the cake got rave reviews — everyone at the party seemed love it.  They thought it was cute and, despite the dryness, they ate it up.  I can’t wait to try it again.  And since the Boy isn’t allowed eggs till he’s at least 2, I think we’ll be having this cake at least a few more times over the next year.   And, well, if he still doesn’t like it… I guess that means more cake for me!

For more pictures of the cake in process, check out my Flickr page.

The Little Mister's Birthday Treats

For the Little Mister, I made Barefoot Contessa’s Lemon Yogurt Cake.  The cake is a great balance of sweet & tart, is extremely moist thanks to the post-baking lemon juice soak, and is pretty easy to make (I juiced & zested my lemons the night before, and was able to prep & bake during the Boy’s afternoon nap).  It is topped with a lemon juice-confetioner sugar glaze (you can’t really see it all that well in the picture), which may not be necessary but is very nice nonetheless.

The cake is topped with two scoops of home-made eggless vanilla ice cream, compliments of the Little Mister’s fake-out present, the Kitchen Aid ice cream maker attachment.  The Boy does not tolerate eggs, and it hardly seems fair to make ice cream at home & not let him have even the smallest taste.  Even without the eggs, this recipe was great!  Simple & delicious.  As the LM said, It’s like when you let the ice cream sit out on the counter & get soft around the edges — but all of the ice cream tastes like that.  Next time, I’d like to try to get my hands on a vanilla bean (mostly for the aesthetic value… there’s just something about vanilla beans in vanilla ice cream), but otherwise it was great.

…Now to work on the Boy’s cake.

At least that’s how I remember it.  And I have tried since then to apply that general practice throughout my life.  Now, I was raised Catholic, so I’m way better at guilt than I am at being.  Unfortunately, I don’t practice meditation as often as I would like to. And I struggle to just be with my writing — and not get caught up in the conversations going on around me or chide myself for not writing more or constantly self-censor because everything I write is just crap.  But I’ve found the practice comes easiest, and seems to have the greatest impact on my mood, when I’m doing droll domestic tasks:  washing the dishes, vacuuming, making baby food, cleaning the poop out of cloth diapers.  There is something very peaceful about just doing what I have to do — getting lost in the soap suds and flowing water, taking satisfaction in the imperfection of a homemade puree.

There are those that would consider this some sort of concession — a betrayal of my feminist foremothers — a denial of my intellectual, professional, and personal capacities.  In the days of Betty Friedan & the Feminine Mystique (which I have not yet read, but have read alot of reference to lately), housework was considered the shackles that contained a woman in her domestic prison.   I even read an article in the Atlantic recently claiming that breastfeeding is the new vacuum:  the unreasonable demands of feeding your baby without bottle or formula are now chaining women to the home and denying them equality.  I’m not gonna go there now, except to say that if you don’t want to breastfeed or vacuum, don’t.  There are very satisfactory options that free women from those domestic tasks they find most onerous or entrapping.

I will say, however, that I see a connection between breastfeeding & housecleaning — I just see it differently.  When I breastfeed my son (usually) I am very content with the fact that’s where I am at the moment, that’s where I have to be, and there’s no rushing it.  The boy needs to eat.  If I don’t watch the clock, that time spent breastfeeding is often when I can just think, reflect, maybe plan or dream.  I also get to cuddle & snuggle my son, which is otherwise rare since he’s a super energetic boy.  Other than the cuddling part, I feel the same way about housework.  Often, doing dishes or vacuuming is one of the few times I have to just zone out and be with my own thoughts, without my son or husband, just on my own.  I can listen to a favorite CD or radio program, start dreaming up lines to a new poem, or not really think about anything at all.  That’s not to say there aren’t days when I begrudge my domestic duties, but in general that time is valuable in so many ways.  Maybe that makes me less of a feminist.  But getting into that mindset also makes me more peaceful and content, so I’m okay with it.

I started hearing about BPA while I was pregnant and did alot of looking to find BPA-free bottles, teethers, and other plastics.  This stuff is scary.  Lots of people like to say “We’ve been using it for years…” or “We were all raised on plastics, and we’re doing fine.”  But I think its far too early to actually know if we’re all “fine.”  And I mean, okay, maybe there aren’t Erin Brokovich-esque repercussions… or maybe there are… either way, I’m much more comfortable making sure that me and my wee one aren’t consuming extra hormones.

I’ve found two web pages that have been really helpful in sorting through the vast field of baby things in search of BPA-free products:

• This one has reviews for nearly all baby product manufacturers:  ZRecs
• And this one is a good reference for bpa-free teethers & pacifiers: NatureMoms.com

Thankfully, lots of manufacturers are now labelling their products with “BPA free” stickers.  So, even some of the manufacturers with negative reviews from ZRecs have good usable products that aren’t mentioned in the ZRecs profiles.  For instance, my lactation consultant recommended Playtex NaturalLatch nipples for their most boob-like quality — and although I couldn’t find anything about that particular product on ZRecs, most of the Playtex things were labelled (or not).  So there are LOTS of BPA-free options, and you shouldn’t have to go for something that’s potentially poisonous.