Homemade Pretzels!

How to start this....Who doesn't love pretzels?! No one. These are great, because you can sprinkle anything on them; dip, dunk, slather them in a gazillion different sauces! What is not to like about that!? They were actually requested when we out the other night with another couple and they said "You should make these" (because we ordered pretzels) and I said "Great idea!". And before my other friend, Lisa (hhey, Lisa!), said at one of our Pinterest Parties that they were really easy to make and she makes them all the time, so I knew it would a doable challenge!

1. First you need 1½ cups warm water, 1 tablespoon sugar, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1 envelope dry active yeast. (This is my first time cooking with yeast!!!). Mix everything in the bowl with the warm water and wait 5 minutes while the yeast activates. (Bottom left bowl.). While you wait mix together the other ingredients:  4½ cups flour and 4 tablespoons butter. If you have a mixer use the dough hook, if not it'll be ok but just look ugly like mine.

2. So this is after the kneading. Squish it into a ball. Then get another bowl (or wash the one you were using) and rub vegetable oil on the inside and put the ball of dough back in. Let it sit for 60mins with a cloth over the top. (EDIT: Ok so I just made some more...I know its the NEXT day, but I wanted to try it with Wheat Flour? I think I didnt knead enough this time. Hence the ugly. So just keep kneading until its tacky and not sticky! It should take about 10mins by hand, you're welcome for the work-out!)

3. After 60 minutes you can see its grown! It might not look like much bigger, well mine didn't, but when you go to pick it up you can tell its not dense and more airy now.

4. Divide your dough into 8 equal pieces. Take one piece and roll it out into a snake (thin and about 2 feet long). Curl up on side. Then curl up the other side and have it go over the top of the first curl. There's your pretzel! I rolled out the last two but didn't form a pretzel but I cut them into about 1 in pieces and made pretzel bites! (Actually my cute little hubby did that part for me :) Preheat oven to 450°f. 

5. Get a pot, fill with water, sprinkle in a cup of baking soda (carefully so it doesn't fizz over!), bring to a boil. Then drop the pretzels into the water and let them float for 30 seconds on each side.  Have ready a baking sheet lined with parchment paper to put them on after. - I was super rushed making these towards the end and didn't get a picture of them on the parchment paper, but just lay them out, then mix in a little cup, 1 egg and 1 tablespoon of water, and brush that over them, and sprinkle with salt. They will go into the oven and bake for 14 minutes!

Yum! All done! I didn't have pretzel salt, so you cant see the salt I put on, and I probably didn't use enough salt because I'm very anti-salt. But they turned out so cute!

 ♥ Served with mustard is my favorite! ♥

The bites! This is def one of those recipes that seems difficult and then once you do it, doing it again would be pretty easy! My husband kept saying "wow, they taste pretzels!" yeah, duh babe!



INGREDIENTS: flour, sugar, salt, dry active yeast, butter, veg oil, water, baking soda, egg, pretzel salt

Rainbow Cupcakes

As a treat with the kids, we made some cupcakes and I thought it be really fun to do rainbow ones. Then I found some rainbow candy strips at the store and thought that'd be cute on top. Both ideas I saw on Pinterest, but *I* put the two together ;) These are supposed to be for St. Patrick's Day because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow....get it? A lot of people didn't :( But hey, they turned out SUPER cute so I'm only the tiniest bit bummed!

1. You really just make a white cake, like this one from a box. (It says "White" on that little blue label the Pyrex is covering, cant you see?) It calls for 1⅓ cups water, ⅓ cups veg oil, and 3 egg whites. Mix that all together and then divide by however many bowls to make into different colors for the rainbow. I used 6!

2. For each one I added food coloring. I had my kids helping me so a couple extra drops got added here and there, but they were learning about color mixing so it was worth the educational experience!
(Drops) Red: 4red, Orange: 3yellow 2red, Yellow: 3yellow, Green: 3yellow 2blue, Blue: 3blue, Purple: 3red 2blue
(I'm totally guessing based on how I guessed when I originally mixed these, buts it'll give you an idea, ill write it down next time!)

3. This is the tricky part. I made 24 cupcakes and that really was pushing it. If you want this to be semi-easy I would try for 18 cupcakes. You could probably do a spoonful into each cup. So line your cupcake tins with however many cupcakes you want to make. Then you have scoop each color into the liner, color by color. It takes a while, I'm going to warn you.

4. Bake at 350°f for 18-24minutes. After 18mins mine were done. Just push the tops and make sure they bounce back. They came out surprisingly close to the color they were before baking!

I had some cream cheese frosting in the back of my pantry which went perfectly! Then I topped it with the rainbow candy I bought! (I've never looked for this specific candy before but I bought them at the gas station in case you're wondering)♥

Eat up!...

...and get more!


INGREDIENTS: box of white cake mix, cream cheese frosting, rainbow candy strips, food coloring, water, veg oil, eggs

 

♥ Happy St. Patrick's Day ♥

Boston Cream Pie

So, this is the recipe for the picture of the Boston Cream Pie I posted on Instagram a couple weeks ago. I was actually house sitting for my mother in law, so it was all made in her kitchen. We are still on the house hunt and I'm stuck in my tiny, natural light-less kitchen for now. But this recipe came about because someone had bought one of these for our Bible Study and I loved it. Like fell in love with it. I honestly cant remember actually ever eating Boston Cream Pie before, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention the name and just enjoyed the dessert!

(I kinda want to preface this recipe with, if you think this is like a cake or pie where you make the filling pour into a mold or crust and bake at 350°f for 15-20mins, this is NOT one of those recipes. This was really hard, and I would almost say no worth it to make yourself. Which sounds really bad, but I like to enjoy when I am bake something and this recipe was so stressful. I'm gonna have to say that next time my sweet tooth is calling out for Boston Cream Pie I'm probably driving 3 minutes down the street to Safeway and saving myself the agony of making one of these again.)

1. I am glad that I got this step done first, because the kitchen got messy! (Sorry Linda!!) You need two pie pans about 9inches or so, just make sure they are the same size. Take some butter and make sure they are really greased up, then sprinkle flour over and move the pans around so the butter part gets covered in flour!

2. Next, you're going to cream 6 tablespoons of butter and 3/4 cup of sugar till its fluffy. Then one by one, mix in 2 eggs, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Preheat oven to 375°f.

3. In a separate bowl mix together 2 tablespoons flour, 1 ½ cups cake flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ¼ teaspoon salt. Then slowly add that to butter/sugar bowl, between adding the flour, mix in ½ cup of milk. Beat it until its a smooth texture between adding the flour and milk.

4. Pour half of the mix into one pie pan and the other half in the other pan. And into the oven they go for 15mins. If you press on the top of the cake, it should bounce back, then you know its done baking.

5. For the custard. In a pot pour in ½ cup light cream (I couldn't find any so I used half and half) and ¼ cup milk. Cook this on medium until little bubble starts coming up on the edges. Quickly add in 3/4 cup of sugar and stir it until it dissolves.

6. Now you'll whisk together ¼ cup of milk with 4 teaspoon of cornstarch, make sure there are no lumps.

7. Whisk in two eggs.

8. Whisking constantly, mix together the eggs/milk, with the hot milk/sugar and return to heat.

9. Once on the heat, slowly heat it up and stir, stir, STIR! I'm going to be totally and admit I had to throw this all out and redo it because it burnt! Once it starts clumping up, it just heated too fast and burnt on the bottom, and I was really stirring. So the next time I let it heat up a little slower and once it started boiling then I stirred it really fast and concentrated on NOT letting it burn. This is a little part of why I disliked this recipe :P Once its clumpy, add in 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and remove from heat.

10. Probably by now your timer for your cakes has gone off, unless you're really super fast with the custard part! So just let me cool, while you let the custard cool too. This would be a great time to get started on a chocolate frosting if you wanted to make one. You can see in the progression of the recipe, its gone from natural light outside to very dark night time, in total this whole recipe took me about 2 hrs!

11. Once everything has cooled down, take your pies/cake (whatever they are!) out of the pans and lay one down and cover it with the custard.

12. Take the other one and sandwich it! (I really smushed mine together after this)

13. Tah-dah! I wanted to get a nice shot of it sliced up and on a plate, but that is when my camera, of course, died. But there she is, the final product! Yum!!  ( I btw used a jar of chocolate fudge frosting I bought at the store hehe)

Homemade Aioli

To go along with the Roasted Chicken Wings I made a dipping sauce. Whenever we are out at restaurant and theres anything on the menu with aioli sauce, my husband orders it. Its much be good if its served with aiolo! So I made some with dinner tonight.

1. In a blender add in one egg yolk and slowly add in ½ cup of olive oil, the once that is mixed in add in ½ cup canola oil.

2. The color will lighten up and you can add in 2 minced garlic cloves, S&P, and juice from half of a lemon. Mix that until its pretty smooth.

3. And serve! How easy is that, like seriously, I always imagined aioli sauce being a very laborious specialty thing to make.


INGREDIENTS: olive oil, canola oil, egg, salt, pepper and lemon juice.

♥ For all the sauce addicts ♥