Christmas On A Budget: FOOD!

Today’s topic is one of my favorites. I think giving (and recieving!) food is one of the best gifts out there! It’s not too expensive, it’s practical, and pretty much everybody loves a sweet treat. I make my friends and family a gift basket of homemade foods every year!

I happen to love to bake, but I can understand the intimidation of baking. However, I fully believe that if you can read, you can bake. Obviously, some recipes are easier than others, but for the most part following a recipe is super easy! Just take your time, and make sure you read each step. If you’re a really newbie baker, I recommend reading through the whole recipe at least twice before starting so it’s a bit familiar. And don’t forget to double check that you have ALL the ingredients! There is nothing more frustrating than getting halfway through a recipe and realizing you’re missing a key ingredient….not that I’ve done that or anything. *Cough*

Below are some of my favorite baking recipes to give as gifts! These are all links to my personal recipes, a lot of which are old blog posts! Therefore, please ignore all the funky footer stuff going on at the end of some of them, and the poor food photography (with lack of watermarks). 😉

1. Banana Bread. I think this tops my list of gift-giving food. It is a staple of my yearly gift basket.

2. Peanut Butter Buckeyes. A simple, quick, and delicious treat!

3. Molasses Cookies. A bit time intensive, but they are my all time favorite cookie!

4. Zucchini Bread. Less sweet than the above banana, this bread is a savory classic.

5. Pumpkin Spice Cookies. More of a fall treat, but so delicious!

6. Peanut Butter Blossoms. This is my classic Christmas cookie. My mum made them every year growing up, and it doesn’t feel like the holidays without them!

7. Lemon Bar Brownies. This recipe has a bit more to it than the others, but is still pretty easy! And absolutely delicious – I get raves about these.

8. Chocolate Pie. This is one of the richest chocolate mousse pies I’ve ever had, and it’s so simple to make.

Now that you’ve whipped up some yummy goods, lets talk presentation. Packaging up your lovingly homemade goods into a gift basket just adds a punch of holiday cheer! My biggest money saving tip for this? The dollar store. I go there every year to stock up on my food ‘gift wrap’. As I prefer a rustic Christmas look, I always start with a basket but really, pick any container that suits your fancy. I wrap my breads in plastic wrap, place cookies or other treats in cute boxes (or baggies), then add some ribbon or bows around the basket and call it a day! Cheap, easy, and pretty to boot.

Crunched for time, or truly doubting your baking ability? No problem! Make Food In A Jar! To me, this is one the best gifting concepts of all time. I love to give soup jars! Here are some of my faves from around the internet, and they make great last-minute gifts too.

(Click the pic to take you straight to the how-to!)

Cul-de-sac Cool shares five different cookie-in-a-jar recipes, with the free printable label tags to go with!

Our Bower shares this yummy looking Multigrain Chicken Soup in a jar.

The Frugal Girls shares a yummy looking Hot Chocolate in a jar! Be sure to check their French Vanilla Hot Chocolate too! (My hubs may be getting this in his stocking!)

Sassy & Sweet shares this Spice Tea in a jar.

Hope you found a new gift to give someone today. Next week for Christmas On A Budget: From Kids, and For Kids!

Apple Crisp + Mini Apple Crisp Pies

Confession: I am not a big pumpkin spice fan. I think it smells amazing, but I really don’t go nuts for EAT ALL THINGS PUMPKIN SPICE like most of the internet does in fall. For me, it’s all about the apple crisp! I love apples, and the combination of soft baked apples with cinnamon sugar is great on it’s own. But mix that with a topping of oats and brown sugar that is a perfect balance of chewy and crisp – now I’m over the moon. This is the first year where I finally feel like I’ve perfected my apple crisp recipe, so of course I had to share so you can make your own!

Ingredients:

6 apples (this year I used Macintosh and Cortland, but it can be made with whatever is on hand)
roughly 1 tbsp lemon juice
roughly 1/2 tsp cinnamon

For the topping:

1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
1 cup oats
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
3/4 cups butter

*Note: This makes a LOT of topping. The crumble is my favorite part, so this will fully cover your apples with a good layer! If you like less, half the ingredients for the topping section!*

Preheat your oven to 375F. Then start with slicing your apples and removing the skin. I do this by hand, as I broke my all in one corer, peeler, slicer shenanigans, but if you have one of those, use it! So much quicker.

Place your apples in a 9″ pie pan and squirt with lemon juice (I don’t measure that, hence the ‘roughly’ in the ingredients). Then sprinkle on some cinnamon.

In a large bowl, combine the topping ingredients. Cut in the butter with two knives. This can be a very tedious step as it takes a bit of time, but you want it to look like a crumble. I switch between kneading the butter in with my hands for a bit, then resuming the cutting together with knives.

Place your crumble on top. I press it all down in the nooks and crannies with my fingers as I love the topping. If you halved it, you should have some apples still showing through.

Bake for 30 minutes or until your topping is golden brown! Let cool for about 10 minutes, then serve either plain or with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Now, that is delicious, but I wanted to try something a little different just for fun, and it turned out great! Introducing…..

Mini Apple Crisp Pies!

They are the perfect serving size, either plain or with vanilla ice cream, and you can eat it with your hands (well, maybe not with the ice cream…).

These are so simple to make, with a few minor changes to the original recipe.

First, don’t slice your apples, cut them into 1/2 inch cube(ish) shapes. Mix with lemon juice and cinnamon in a bowl.

Then, take a store bought pie crust (or a homemade one if you’re super ambitious – I was not!) and using a 4″ circle cookie cutter, cut out circles of dough.

Place them in a greased muffin tin, and fill with apples. Top with crumble! A few notes: One (store bought) pie crust makes about seven mini crisp pies. Therefore, I would only use three apples vs. six, and definitely halve the topping ingredients otherwise you will have a ton of apples and crumble left over. Which you could always just make a smaller apple crisp with, so really, it’s up to you!

Anywho, bake these for about 20 -25 minutes at 375F and you have a perfect little handheld treat!

And by treat I mean breakfast. Yum.

Iced Pumpkin Spice Cookies

It’s no secret that baking is one of my favorite fall activities. I love to bake goodies for people. We celebrated my best friend’s birthday this past weekend, and she absolutely loves my pumpkin spice cookies. So of course I had to make a fresh batch! These pumpkin spice cookies are one of my absolute favorite cookies to bake. They bake up soft (the only way to go if you ask me), and have a perfect balance of sweet between the cookie and icing.

These cookies always seem extra special to me as I only make them in the fall. I suppose I could make them any time, but they are just such a perfect fall cookie (especially since pumpkin spice is all the rage!). Whip up a batch with the recipe below!

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups flour (I split mine half white flour, half whole wheat flour)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups sugar (I cut mine down to 1 1/4 cup – it makes a difference with how sweet the icing is!)
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla

• Preheat oven to 350F.
• Mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and salt. Set aside.
• In a larger bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. Beat in egg and vanilla until creamy, then beat in the pumpkin until smooth.
• Add in dry ingredients, and mix thoroughly together.
• Drop tablespoonfuls onto lined cookie sheets (foil or parchment paper). Bake for 15 – 20 min (I find 16 minutes perfect!).
• Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Make sure they cool completely before icing them.

Icing Ingredients:

2 cups confectioner sugar
3 tbsp milk
1 tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla

• Combine all ingredients in a bowl until a semi-thick icing is formed. Add more milk to thin if necessary.
• Once cookies are completely cooled, just smear some on with a knife. The icing will harden some on the outside after a bit, but it never gets crunchy-hard – it’s one of my favorite icings for that reason. The perfect texture!

If you’re not an icing fan, these cookies are just as yummy without icing. I love them plain with a cup of tea. If you are making a plain batch, I highly recommend using the full 1 1/2 cups of sugar so they don’t taste too bland or get a bit overpowered by the spices. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

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!

Apple Fritters

Apple recipe number two!

I have never made apple fritters before, and it is very rare that I fry things since A: it’s not particularly healthy, and B: I’m lazy, and frying is a lot of effort and cleanup I don’t like dealing with! Mostly B. . . But occasionally I’ll tryout a recipe that involves it, and this year it was these fritters.

You can find the recipe here via Use Real Butter (which I think is a fabulous blog name!) This particular recipe is very involved. It was fun to do, and would be great to make for many people, but it is certainly one of those recipes I would make once a year at most. And for this one, I followed the recipe word for word – a rarity in baking for me but this was a foreign territory! I’m not going to rewrite the whole thing here, so if you’d like to give these a shot click the link above and follow the recipe!

First you mix up the batter, which sits aside and sets for awhile.

In the meantime, you prep your apples for frying. I discovered I am terrible at cutting apples with the same thickness! Luckily, it doesn’t affect the outcome terribly. Also, I had some halves because I kept snapping my apple rings – oops! But they fried up just fine.

Then comes the battering and frying, which is actually not hard, just a bit messy on the fingers. Also, I broke my candy thermometer awhile back and never replaced it, so I had to completely guess on my oil temperature!

Once finished, I liberally sprinkled on some confectioner sugar and chowed down! They were a great combo of doughnut-like outside and gooey apple inside. . .YUM!

So as stated above, these are certainly something I wouldn’t make often. It uses so many dishes, is time consuming and isn’t at all toddler-friendly, so it’s just not too conducive to my current lifestyle. But they were tasty, that’s for sure!

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!