Oh’s! in the kitchen usually aren’t a good thing. They happen when you notice a pot boiling over, get splattered with bacon grease, or come home to find that your boyfriend’s dog got into a bag of groceries you forgot to put away and is now covered head to toe in cornstarch and smashed raspberries (yes it happened, and unfortunately I was too pissed off at the time to grab my camera and take a picture because someday I would find the whole thing funny).
There is one kind of Oh! that is good in the kitchen, and it comes by the box.
Oh’s Cereal (Photo credit: vikasiamoto)
I LOVE this cereal. It is my absolute favorite, which kind of sucks because sometimes it can be hard to find. I don’t know why every store don’t carry TONS of this stuff, cause I’d buy it! The sweet, crunchy little circles always hit the spot, so when I saw that my Dollar General had some, I did a little happy dance.
And then I bought some.
And then I made muffins with Oh’s topping.
Oh yeah.
First I made a batch of honey oat muffins with the Oh’s topping. They were okay, but not the flavor I was going for. Then my boyfriend suggested I make a banana muffin. So I turned to my trusty internet to find a good banana muffin recipe and I found what I was looking for on Food.com.
Banana Oatmeal Muffins (click here to view original recipe)
2 cups flour
1 cup quick-cooking oats
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 cups bananas, mashed
2 eggs
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla
Directions:
1 . Preheat oven to 375°F In medium bowl, stir together the flour, oatmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, combine the mashed bananas, eggs, vanilla and butter. Add the banana mixture to the flour mixture, stirring just until the dry ingredients are moistened.
2 . Spoon batter into greased muffin cups. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes (start watching around 12 minutes; oven temperatures vary) or until toothpick inserted into center muffin comes out clean. Let cool in pan on wire rack for 10 minutes. Remove muffins from pan and let cool on wire rack.
Oh’s and Oats Topping
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons oats
1/2 cup Oh’s cereal, crushed
3 tablespoons melted butter
Directions:
Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. After muffins have baked for about 5 minutes, remove muffins from the oven, add topping, then put muffins back in the oven for the remaining bake time.
The muffin has a nice density which balances perfectly with the crunchy topping. They were delicious, but pose one problem – do I have a muffin for breakfast tomorrow, or a bowl of Oh’s?! Decisions, decisions…
* I have to give a quick shout out to Jess at On Sugar Mountain for sharing her tip of using scrapbook paper for picture backgrounds. A wonderfully useful tip AND a recipe for Chocolate Dipped Potato Chip Cookies all in the same spot?! Thanks Jess! As you can see, I grabbed a few packs of scrapbook paper and am already having a blast with it!
I don’t really care about the Oscars. The best picture nominees are usually movies I have never seen (except for the year Inception was a nominee, I LOVE that movie), nor do I have any desire TO see. If it were up to me flicks like Wedding Crashers would be up for best picture, not films (based on musicals based on books) featuring Anne Hathaway with a bad haircut and a snotty nose.
Cover of Wedding Crashers [Blu-ray]In addition to my general non-interest in the nominated movies, by this time of year I have this huge sense of deja vu when it comes to these things.
Golden Globes nominees for best picture: Lincoln, Les Miserables, Django Unchained, Argo, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty.
Oscar nominees for best picture: Lincoln, Les Miserables, Django Unchained, Argo, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty.
SAG Award nominees for male actor: Bradley Cooper, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman.
He is nice to look at though, isn’t he? Belaj Bluaj Okuloj de Bradley Cooper (Photo credit: МОЛОКО)
Oscar nominees for male actor: Bradley Cooper, Daniel Day-Lewis, Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman.
See where I’m going here? There are a few different movies or actors sprinkled in here and there but mostly – Been there, done that! I’ll probably end up watching anyway because Revenge won’t be on and I do enjoy the fashion a bit, but I will most definitely NOT be throwing an Oscar Party.
HOWEVER – I have seen quite a few cool Oscar Party food ideas the past few days, and I thought I’d be nice and share a few… If I were going to throw a shindig, I would totally serve up some Tuxedo Hot Dogs!
I’ve been feeling a bit like Charlie Brown lately; like I have gone out trick-or-treating and ended up with a bag full of rocks. When life hands you rocks, what do you do?
You make pumpkin cranberry bread!!
This is my FAVORITE bread to make. It is soooooooo good that I could eat a whole loaf all by myself. I would be sick afterward, but it’s worth it. It’s a good thing this recipe makes 2 loaves!
The recipe is from Libby’s and you can see the original here.
1 cup sweetened dried, fresh or frozen cranberries
Directions
PREHEAT oven to 350° F. Grease and flour two 9 x 5-inch loaf pans.
COMBINE flour, pumpkin pie spice, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Combine sugar, pumpkin, eggs, oil and juice in large mixer bowl; beat until just blended. Add pumpkin mixture to flour mixture; stir just until moistened. Fold in cranberries. Spoon batter into prepared loaf pans.
BAKE for 60 to 65 minutes or until wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks for 10 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.
Recipe makes two loaves.
OR, you can do what I did and make one big loaf, and then a bunch of mini ones. I only baked the minis for 30 minutes. If you put them in little cellophane bags and tie them with ribbons, these make perfect little gifts for the holidays!
Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go start building a fort with my rocks…
Welcome to my first (and hopefully last!) edition of Mystery Food Friday!!! Let’s do a little survey, shall we??
(If you have a write-in answer, please also put it in the Comments section. Apparently no one can see what you write-in!)
If you said scrapple I can see why, but you’d be wrong. If you’re not from the Mid-Atlantic and have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, go here for a little lesson (yes, it’s gross). For comparison purposes, this is a photo of a piece of cooked scrapple:
English: Scrapple, served in a restaurant. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
See the resemblance?
In reality, the scrapple doppleganger was SUPPOSED to be banana pumpkin bread. And I was SUPPOSED to top it off with a lovely glaze and then eat it for breakfast the next few days. Instead, I ended up with something that should definitely be submitted to one of those websites where you post your failed Pinterest projects (you know, I think I might just do that…)
I’m not sure what happened. I’m a pretty good baker. It smelled really good while it was cooking, and it rose nicely. I checked it with a toothpick and kept baking till the toothpick came out clean. However, a few minutes out of the oven and the loaf had shrunk down to about half its previous height. I was afraid something had gone wrong but I wasn’t positive until I cut a slice this morning and discovered that it looked more like some gelatinous hunk of processed meat than a baked good. My only guess for what might have gone wrong (assuming that the photos posted on the blog containing the recipe were not fakes, and who knows these days?) would be that my bananas were VERY ripe. Like almost “Ewww, I need to throw these out before they start turning into a puddle on the top of my refrigerator” ripe.
I’m not sure if it’s edible because I’m afraid to try it.
I’ve had numerous people tell me that the things I bake are all so pretty. Not always.
Today is National Coffee Day, and after a quick Google search I learned that October 4th is National Vodka Day. So I figured to honor both holidays I would mix the two together.
It’s Saturday night, and after a long day of running errands, grocery shopping, cleaning this house that seems to manifest clutter while I am sleeping, and visiting the booth of my fellow blogger Scrapsecrets at the Woodbury Fall Arts Fest (check out her Etsy shop if you are in need of a card for a special occasion – she makes the most adorable cards!), I’m pretty beat. So I went the easy route when making tonight’s drink. I opened a bottle of Starbucks Vanilla Frappuccino, poured it into a glass over ice and then added a shot of my new fall fave – Pinnacle Pumpkin Pie vodka. I admit it, I am obsessed with this stuff. I promise, my next post will involve something else!
Of course, it was good. How could it not be?
In other pumpkin news, I had been thinking of making pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (is there a National Muffin Day??). However, while wandering around Wegmans loading up my cart with all kinds of unnecessary but yummy goodies I saw a bag of Hershey’s cinnamon chips on the shelf. You know where those ended up.
I loved the combo of the cinnamon chip in the pumpkin muffin, and I topped them with cinnamon streusel which was really good too. I just wasn’t a fan of the pumpkin muffin recipe I used. They weren’t moist enough for me. Does anyone have a good pumpkin muffin recipe? I love the ones at Dunkin Donuts but I’m going to bet they wouldn’t be willing to tell me how to make my own.
I like to eat. My ever tightening jeans can attest to that. I follow quite a few blogs that post fabulous looking recipes on a daily basis and I would love to try to make nice dinners with fresh ingredients every night, but I have some issues. Most involve my kitchen.
The previous owner of our house was a big “do it yourself” type who had absolutely no idea what he was doing. Not only that – he also had TERRIBLE taste in decorating. These were the kitchen cabinets when we moved in…
EEEEEK!!!
Yeah. Those would be salmon colored kitchen cabinets. They have since been painted, but unfortunately we are still stuck with the stupid kitchen layout left behind by the DIY Dodo. Wall oven, tiny sliver of counter top, sink, slightly wider bit of counter, ELECTRIC cook-top (I grew up cooking with gas; how to properly bring something to a boil and then simmer on this god awful thing still eludes me), another tiny bit of counter space, wall.
Electric range heating element (Photo credit: Thom Watson) – EVIL
Trying to chop up a bunch of fresh veggies and whip together something on the stove is always a test of my patience. I have no room, and the stupid cook-top is either not hot enough or so hot that whatever I am trying to cooking ends up looking like a lump of charcoal. I HATE trying to make dinner in my kitchen.
So you can imagine my excitement when I started seeing all these pins on Pinterest about freezer crock pot meals. A few hours of torture in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon and then you have dinner for the rest of your life! Okay, more like two weeks but that seemed like a good tradeoff to me! So I picked out some recipes, got all the necessary ingredients and enlisted the boyfriend’s help in prepping everything and loading the meals into freezer bags. After about two hours we had ten nights worth of meals (leftovers for lunch were promised too!) stacked neatly in the basement freezer. All I have to do it grab whatever I want the night before so it can thaw in the fridge and then drop it in the crock pot in the morning. I’d need to make some rice or noodles or whatever to go with each meal, but that’s easy. THIS was going to be the solution to all my cooking woes! Right?
a slow cooker Oval Crock Pot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Well, not exactly. I have made three of my meals so far. Each one had the house smelling yummy and tasted pretty good, there was just this minor issue. All these lovely blogs about freezer meals failed to mention that EVERY STINKING MEAL was going to end up under a foot of water by the time it was done cooking. I have cooked plenty of meals in the crock pot (without freezing them first) and have not had this problem. So unless my grocery store is secretly injecting my vegetables with water to up their weight so they can charge me more I think it has something to do with the whole freezing bit. Nobody wants sopping wet beef fajitas. Just saying…
So cooking dinner is STILL annoying and it will be until the day – hopefully in the not so distant future – when we can redo the kitchen.
Making a cocktail, however, is easy no matter how much counter space I have. All I need is a shot glass, a cocktail shaker, ice and some easy to open bottles of booze. The biggest annoyance there is when someone puts the ice cube tray back in the freezer without refilling it. Ahem.
In addition to the ease with which a great cocktail can be created the fact remains that crock pot Chicken Teriyaki could NEVER taste as good as a Kahlua Pumpkin Cheesecake Martini.
That’s right. I said Kahlua Pumpkin Cheesecake Martini. It was a decadent as it sounds! This is definitely a dessert drink. It’s rich and creamy and sweet and…drool.
Kahlua Pumpkin Cheesecake Martini
Ingredients
2 parts Pinnacle Pumpkin Pie vodka
1 part Kahlua
1 1/2 parts half & half
2 teaspoons cheesecake pudding mix
ice
Directions
In a cocktail shaker combine vodka, Kahlua and cheesecake pudding mix. Stir until the mix is dissolved. Then add half & half and ice. Shake, pour, and float away on a creamy, dreamy cocktail cloud.
Apparently today is National Rum Day! I did not know this until an hour ago, yet this afternoon I made Rum and Coke cupcakes. It must have been fate…
A friend wanted me to make these cupcakes for her son’s 21st birthday party. I tried a test batch last month using a recipe I found for Cola Cake, and a rum buttercream frosting. It was good, but it tasted nothing like Rum and Coke to me. Then I discovered the existence of cola extract. The sun burst through the clouds, the cupcake angels were singing… it was good stuff.
I used the cola extract in my frosting, and found a cupcake recipe that had enough rum in it to make a pirate proud. For decoration, I used gummy cola bottles and lime wedges with coffee stirrer “straws”. I used Key Limes – they were the perfect size for the cupcakes. The resulting cupcake tastes SO MUCH like Rum and Coke that (to quote my boyfriend), “It’s kind of freaky.”
So, though it’s almost over, Happy National Rum Day! Thankfully you don’t wait until next year to make these tastes-like-the-real-thing Rum and Coke cupcakes.
1 Box Betty Crocker Supermoist yellow cake mix
1 cup dark rum (I used Meyer’s)
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup canola oil
3 eggs
Heat oven to 325°F. Place paper baking cup in each of 18 regular-size nonstick muffin cups. *I doubled the recipe and ended up with 30 cupcakes total.
In large bowl, mix cake mix, 1 cup rum, the water, oil and eggs with whisk until blended. Divide batter evenly among muffin cups.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. *I ended up baking them for 25-26 minutes. For a moment I was afraid they weren’t going to bake through (and REALLY pissed that I had just potentially wasted two whole cups of perfectly good rum!) but I left them in the oven and tested them with a toothpick every few minutes until they were finally done.* Remove from muffin cups to cooling rack. Cool completely, about 45 minutes.
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup shortening
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 cups confectioners sugar
1/4 cup milk
2 1/4 teaspoons cola extract (I bought mine on Amazon)
For frosting, cream butter and shortening in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Add all other ingredients and beat well.
Banana cupcakes, filled with strawberry preserves, topped with vanilla butter cream, hot fudge, rainbow jimmies (sprinkles if you’re not from around here), with a cherry on top.
I used this recipe from Betty Crocker (minus the chocolate chips, plus one box instant banana pudding) for the banana cupcake batter. I had my handy dandy cupcake plunger to make room for the strawberry preserves, and I used my small scoop from Pampered Chef to make the icing look like scoops of ice cream.
If you’re looking for a butter cream icing recipe this is my go-to.
If you’re looking for one of these cupcakes you’re out of luck. We ate them all.
I prefer jeans and sneakers to skirts and high heels. I have never (nor will I ever) worn a pair of stilettos. Your feet really aren’t meant to do that.
I would rather watch hockey than Dancing With the Stars. I was going to make NHL jersey cookies during the Stanley Cup playoffs this year. I had the cookies baked and everything, but I was too busy watching hockey to decorate them.
Me with Lord Stanley, many moons ago…
I’m not a fan of pink. I don’t scream at the sight of mice or spiders. I don’t get manicures unless I’m a bridesmaid in a wedding. I don’t spaz out when people bring their babies in to work.
I wasn’t even very girly when I was a little girl. Take my Barbie dolls for example. Yes, I had Barbies. No, they did not go shopping or go to fancy dances or get married to the perfectly coiffed Ken dolls. Barbie drowned in the Barbie pool. She hung herself from the second story of the Barbie house. Barbie fell to her death out the third story window of my actual house.
Barbie muerta (Photo credit: nicoventurelli)
Remember the Heart Family (Mommy, Daddy and two little toddlers – one boy, one girl) and the Heart Family car? They didn’t go for leisurely rides to the zoo. The Heart Family car was a plastic deathtrap on wheels hurtling down the stairs from my attic bedroom, smashing into the wall at the landing and sending Mr. and Mrs. Heart and their progeny flying in all directions.
The Heart Family – Kisses & Cuddles (Photo credit: Freddycat1)
I did have a heart shaped pillow with a picture of Dylan from 90210 (the ORIGINAL!!) on it and I like my cocktails sweet and fruity, so the girly-girl is somewhere there inside me – she just doesn’t come out that often.
I Love Dylan (Photo credit: emilydickinsonridesabmx)
Given all this, you can see why I would be amused by the fact that I have made not one, not two, but THREE girly baked treats in the past four days.
First up… Wedding Cake Cookies! A coworker’s daughter is getting married next weekend and she asked that I make cookies to put in the gift baskets she is making for their out of town guests.
Next, I attempted to make some hydrangea cupcakes I saw on Pinterest. For a tutorial on how to make these yourself, go here! These were to celebrate the birthday of one of my friends at work on Monday. They came out pretty good. When I was taking the photos my camera was choosing the flower macro setting, so at least I had Canon fooled.
Last but not least are the teapot cookies I made for my friend’s daughter’s Princess Tea Party 6th birthday shindig this weekend.
Okay, I’m gonna go blow up a Barbie doll or something…
Sometimes you have an idea about a certain cupcake flavor in your head but it can be difficult to find the right recipe. I don’t yet consider myself good enough to just completely whip something up on my own like the contestants on Cupcake Wars. Once, when I was a teenager I wanted to make microwave brownies but I didn’t have the cocoa called for in the recipe. I (mistakenly) thought I could use hot cocoa mix instead. Instead of gooey, chocolaty brownies I created the most foul-smelling thing to have ever come out of a microwave. So you can see why I don’t quite trust myself to just wing it.
A friend has asked that I make Rum and Coke cupcakes for her son’s 21st birthday coming up later in the month. Having never made them before, I wanted research some recipes and do a test batch. I found this recipe for Cola Cake, direct from the makers of Coca Cola themselves. I figured that would be a good place to start. I followed the recipe exactly, and then topped the cupcakes with a basic vanilla butter cream icing that I spiked with some Gosling’s Bermuda Black Rum.
I got to have some science experiment type fun, dissolving the baking soda in the buttermilk and watching it fizz up, and I ended up with a very tasty, slightly chewy around the edges cupcake that tasted NOTHING like Coke. : / The icing did taste like rum at least, but I was definitely not getting the Rum and Coke vibe. Back to the drawing board…
I found a recipe on Betty Crocker‘s website for rum cupcakes which I think I will try, and then I purchase a bottle of cola extract online which I will try to incorporate into the icing. I have never used cola extract before so if anyone has some experience with it and can offer some advice, I’m all ears!
As you can see, in the meantime I got my Rum and Non-Coke cupcakes all gussied up for the upcoming holiday! I hope everyone has a fun and safe 4th of July! And here’s just a little bit of humor for the road…
![Cover of "Wedding Crashers [Blu-ray]"](https://i0.wp.com/ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51e3%2BFuuhlL._SL300_.jpg "Cover of \"Wedding Crashers [Blu-ray]\"")
Shake Bake and Party 