Reeses Spreads: Tasty, But It’s No Nutella

Recently I received a jar of Reeses Spreads courtesy of Influenster to devour sample. I. Was. PUMPED. I didn’t even know this was a thing, but they had me and ‘chocolate and peanut butter spread’.

I set up a little spread for myself, the hubs, my daughter (who was beyond thrilled to get to have a treat in the middle of the afternoon), and we invited our neighbor over too, just to gather another opinion. The question was – what does this taste beston??

The options were: Apple slices, graham crackers, and wheat toast. Both my little and myself liked Reeses Spreads on apples the best. I am a HUGE fan of apples and peanut butter, and this is like a dessert version of that. Both my hubs and our neighbor liked it best on the toast.

How’s the flavor? I think this is where I was surprised the most. First off, it doesn’t taste like a Reeses Peanut Butter cup. In fact, when eaten WITH something, I feel like you hardly even taste the chocolate. It’s like a super sweet peanut butter. Good, but definitely not a great chocolate/pb combo in my opinion. We each tried a little spoonful just by itself, and I find that on it’s own it definitely tastes much more like a Reeses.

Overall, this is good, but I would not purchase this over Nutella any day. It has a good taste, but it’s really just like an overly sweet peanut butter. As someone who purchases natural peanut butter (as in, only peanuts – no added sugar) it’s almost sickeningly sweet, and it doesn’t have enough of a chocolate flavor to balance that out. I am quite intrigued how it’ll be to bake with though – I plan on making up some peanut butter cookies using this in place of half the peanut butter – we’ll see how they turn out!

OmNomNom: Gooey Chocolate & Cream Cheese Cupcakes

One of my goals for September was to bake three new recipes! I love baking, but often feel like I fall into the rut of only baking the same few things. I recently did a giant recipe cleanout, and saved only three baking cookbooks (and of course my personal handwritten one!). At the beginning of the week I had my hubby and our neighbor page through them and mark the recipes they’d like me to try. I love having people to make food for!

My first recipe pick was from this book. Our neighbor’s birthday was yesterday so I figured it was fitting to make his choice of cupcake!

He selected Gooey Chocolate & Cream Cheese Cupcakes. It’s kind of hard to go wrong with that title.

They came out great! I am actually not a huge cream cheese fan in baking (something about sweet cheese just rubs me the wrong way), but these were really tasty. The gooey cream cheese topping isn’t too sweet the way some cream cheese frostings can be, and it went really well with the chocolate cupcake. I think the one thing that could have improved them would have been to remove than from the oven five minutes earlier than I did. The recipe called for 20 – 25 minutes, and at 20 minutes I couldn’t tell if they were done (the toothpick maneuver is out for these particular cupcakes as they are supposed to be gooey in the center!), so I stuck them in for five minutes more. I shouldn’t have. They weren’t overdone by any means, but I think they’d have had a better texture without that last five.

The recipe pic is hard to read, so here’s the recipe if you’d like to try it!

Gooey Chocolate & Cream Cheese Cupcakes

Ingredients:

Generous 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
Scant 1/4 cup baking cocoa
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 cup superfine sugar*
4 tbl sunflower oil (I just used veg oil)
3/4 cup water
2 tsp white vinegar
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
2/3 cream cheese (I used neufchatel cheese)
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (dark would be good too)

*You can easily make superfine sugar by putting regular sugar in a food processor for 1 – 2 minutes. That’s how I always make mine.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a muffin tin with liners (the recipe says it makes only twelve, by mine made fourteen so prepare for extra).

Sift the flour, cocoa, and baking soda into a medium bowl. Stir in 3/4 cups of the sugar. Add the oil, water, vinegar, and vanilla, then stir until well combined.

Place the remaining sugar, cream cheese, and egg in large bowl and beat together until well mixed. (Although I usually make things by hand, I definitely recommend using a hand electric mixer for this – beating cream cheese is a pain!) Once well mixed, stir in the chocolate chips.

Spoon the cake batter into paper liners and top each with a spoonful of cream cheese batter (I filled mine very full as these don’t rise a ton). Bake in the preheated oven for 20 – 25 minutes (definitely 20!). Transfer to a wire rack and let cool.

Enjoy!

Definitely deliciously decadent. That gooey topping is just so great, especially with the melted chocolate chips in there. So good warm out of the oven!

Life In Photos #8

What’s that up top? My new spring header! I know spring started two weeks ago on the calendar, but around here it’s just starting to feel like spring now. The snow is mostly gone, the temps are in the forties and up range steadily, so I figured it was a good time to make the switch. I just LOVE it when the lilacs start blooming around here. We have a couple lilac trees in the backyard and my kitchen table always has a vase of blooms! So fragrant, and such a lovely shade of lavender.

Anywho, despite my lack of blog preparation this week, I did take some time on my kiddo-free day yesterday to throw together a fun new layout in PS for my Life In Photos series. I like this better as it I can post bigger pictures, yay! So without further mumbo jumbo. . .

Om nom nom! One of my favorite spring/summer desserts. Dip, eat, repeat.

My little was so excited to paint her own new pots. There’ll be a bigger post about our planting day soon!

Preschool homeschool has been going well. Last week was animal week, and here she is assembling her ‘Z for Zebra’ craft. We learned things about zebras while putting it together – she loved it!

Planting her flowers and radishes in her newly painted pots.

Edgar is very protective of the tomato plants. . .or he just likes lounging in the sun!

I’ve been plowing away with art as well – more portraits done for the Blogger Portrait series mainly. I’m so ready to do some new fan art though. Since Captain America: Winter Soldier entirely blew my mind with awesomeness this past weekend, I think some of that may be in order!

– Kayly

Last Week We. . .

• Built ye olde blanket fort in the living room.

• Baked some chocolate chip cookies.

• Did some serious Playdough playing.

    

• Worked on lots of artwork.

• Had my little girl’s second gymnastics class. It was Beam Week at the academy, so she got to walk on all the balance beams (holding my hands for the tall ones of course), and practice balance exercises. So fun!

• And lastly, my most favorite thing we did was make some homemade chocolate syrup. We got the recipe from Tanya over at Mystic Eyed Rambler – click here for the recipe post! I was super happy about this as chocolate milk is one of my missy’s favorite treats, but the store-bought stuff is just jam packed with High Fructose Corn Syrup. So now, we have an HFCS-free option, that is just as delicious as the junky kind. Thanks, Tanya!

Until next time,

Connect With Me

C is for Cookie. . .

. . .that’s good enough for me! You’re welcome for getting the Cookie Monster song stuck in your head. 🙂

I love to bake. I thank my grandmother for instilling that in me – one of my absolute favorite memories with her is being probably four, standing on my stool up at her counter and making homemade bread with her. She still makes it by hand to this day. Nowadays, my baking tends to be more dessert focused than hers ever was! In the summer baking is usually a rarity for me – it’s just too hot and humid. I got my fill of summer baking last year when I was doing a weekly farmers market selling my baked goods – every Friday was spent in my kitchen for a ten hour baking day in 90+ degree heat. I definitely don’t miss that part of it!

Lately, despite the week and a half straight of rain up here, it has still been a hot humid mess. However, it finally cooled off enough that I didn’t mind running the oven. My little miss requested chocolate chip cookies and I was happy to oblige.

I’m not a mum who minds mess. I love to include my little girl in as much as possible in the kitchen – even if it means added mess. I make the biggest mess ever baking anyway, so really she can’t add much more mess than I already do. Case in point – she didn’t spill a single thing while helping me make these cookies whereas I accidentally ripped the flour bag and poured flour all over myself and the kitchen floor.
Mommy – 0. Toddler – 1.

The recipe I use is a modified version of one I saw on Pinterest. I’ve tried many a chocolate chip cookie recipe, but this one is definitely my new favorite (at least when I’m using my modifications).

Ingredients:

3/4 cup butter (or spread) I use Country Crock Spread, which isn’t real butter and it works perfectly.
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup white flour
1 cup wheat flour (I always split my flour in cookies and breads between white and wheat. Sometimes I use entirely wheat flour. It certainly doesn’t make them healthy, but it’s slightly better! And there is no discernible taste difference.)
2 tsp cornstarch
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

First, preheat your oven to 350F.

Combine your butter and sugars.

Stir until they are a smooth creamy consistency.

Add in your egg and vanilla, and mix together.

Then add in all the dry ingredients.

And stir it all up into a dough!

Then pour in your chocolate chips and mix ’em up.

And don’t forget to eat a few chips. . .

And of course a spoonful of cookie dough!! Yeah, we eat raw cookie dough in this household.

Scoop onto tinfoil (or parchment paper if you prefer) lined cookie sheets. I never used to see the point in a dough scoop until I did the farmers market. They were the easiest way to get uniform-size cookies and things! And now that I have one, I use it every time I make cookies.
Anywho, pop them in the oven for NO MORE than 12 minutes. They WILL look undercooked on top, but trust me, they aren’t! You end up with a soft chewy delicious cookie, that will stay chewy for days! I’d eat them within a week though. This recipe yields a minimum of 24 cookies – I usually end up with 28 – 30. Enjoy!