Whole Wheat Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Pancakes

Aside from my intense love affair with anything cinnamon sugar, I am a fan of peanut butter. I am also a fan of chocolate. I am also a fan of pancakes. I saw this pin where pancakes, chocolate and peanut butter were ONE. I knew I just had to give it a shot. Here is the picture that drew me in like a fly to honey...

Just, wow.

That peanut butter dripping off the edges, those chocolate chips hanging on for dear life, I could smell it.

The ingredients were normal things that people usually have on hand. However, I did need to buy the almost breeze milk. When I was at the store, ready to check it off my list, I looked at the price and decided that my two week old 2% milk would suffice. 

While mixing everything together, I kept re-reading because I was missing the part where the chocolate chips went into the batter. I read, and read and read and there was no mention of dropping those bad boys in. It wasn't until I kept reading that I realized the chocolate chips are simply a garnish for the top when I first plop down the dough. No. I poured about half the bag into the batter. 

It was time to cook so I poured my first four pancakes. I could smell the peanut butter. I'm not sure if it was the peanut butter from the batter or the mound of peanut butter I was inhaling off of an oversize spoon while cooking the batter. Either way, it smelled delicious. I decided to make a few mini pancakes for my 4 year old while I waited. Those were done quick and I rushed them into my little vacuum and told him to try a bite. He did. He immediately spit it out and said "Ew mommy."

That should have been clue #1. However, I just chalked it up to him being rude. Half the batter was done and I had 8 pancakes. I just couldn't wait for the whole package to try one. I took a huge bite. I took another huge bite. I caught myself staring into space while I was chewing, wondering what the heck kind of nastiness was in my mouth. There was no way. These can't be gross! There is peanut butter! There is chocolate! These are DISGUSTING!

I had a hail mary though. I would top my pile with melted peanut butter like the picture showed. I should have just sprinkled it back and forth but something came over me and I just dumped the whole bowl on top. Here was my final product...

Where are the pancakes, you might ask? Oh, they're there. You can kind of see the outline of the last one. I truly thought that the peanut butter topping would save the taste. Instead, eating this was what I imagine a dog feels like while licking peanut butter.

No joke. That was me. I gave up. I threw my masterpiece away, as well as the other half of the batter and waited until lunch. Kids, don't try this at home. Even WITH adult supervision.

http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/whole-wheat-peanut-butter-chocolate-chip-pancakes-recipe/

Disaster

My latest disaster ended up on the Pinstrosity blog. Here is the link.

Some other disasters I've had end up on Pinstrosity are this, this and this!

My husband texted me the other day and said that my cherry cup disaster was in an MSN article. I was like whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?!?!?!

Sure enough! They did an article on Pinterest fails and my submission to Pinstrosity was featured.

Check it out!

Toasted Pecan Chicken

I'm not a huge fan of pecans, nor am I a huge fan of orange flavoring in warm food. However, I have been on a chicken kick and wanted to try this recipe since I had all the ingredients on hand. The pictures looks tasty...

It just looks smothered in all sorts of creaminess and yummyness. The recipe is pretty straightforward and pretty simple. My only mistake is that I didn't pay attention to the pecan portion. I also didn't pay attention to the half and half portions. I had way too many pecans and not enough half and half...

BUT I MADE IT WORK!

Whoops.

It was actually a pretty tasty dish, one that I would make again. So this will fall under my "keepers".

Enjoy!

http://www.plainchicken.com/2012/11/toasted-pecan-chicken.html

Honey Butter Pork Tenderloin

I made this one so long ago, I'm not quite sure that I remember how it went down. Here is the picture I saw on Pinterest...

Not bad looking, huh? I am not a fan of eating huge, bare chunks of meat (unless it's a steak) so I can only handle a little pork at a time. This recipe was ok but when I compare it to this pork, I would choose the other pork hands down.

I will not be making this pork again. I DO remember that. 

http://bakingwithblondie.blogspot.com/2012/09/honey-butter-pork-tenderloin.html?m=1

Bite-Sized Peanut Butter Pie with Chocolate Crust

When you have a new baby, a 3 year old and are in graduate school, there isn't much time to do things you actually enjoy. Yet, I took time today to make a new recipe and I enjoyed the HECK out of myself! Too bad they kind of tasted like crap.

Let me explain. This is what I was making...

You hear the words "chocolate" and "peanut butter" in the same sentence and think that there can be nothing wrong. But a few things went wrong. By the taste of it, they went super wrong.

#1- I didn't have regular cocoa powder, I just had dark cocoa powder. I guess that makes a big difference.

#2- I didn't have cream cheese and I was NOT about to drive my no makeup, dirty hair, pj wearing, baby spit up self to the store. So I substituted with some greek yogurt. In my defense, the internet said to do it. So it's the internet's fault.

The final product looked pretty but tasted horrible. I give it a 2 out of 10. So sad.

And quite frankly, it's totally unrealistic to get perfect shaped cups like that dude had. Stupid.

http://www.inspiredbycharm.com/2014/02/a-year-of-pie-bite-sized-peanut-butter-pie-with-chocolate-crust.html

Cherry Pie Cookie Cups

I was on a roll one day pinning stuff for the official day of love. I saw these cookie cups and thought that this would be an easy weekend recipe. They look SO good!

The gist of it is to roll sugar cookie dough into balls and put it into a mini muffin pan. I bought pre-cut sugar cookie dough in a 24 pack so it was really easy to get proportions right because it was already done for me. All I had to do was roll.

While I was doing this, my 31 year old husband was running around the kitchen poking me in the belly, back, butt, anywhere he could poke me that I couldn't immediately slap him. Being 8 months pregnant, he knows my reflexes are no longer cat like so as I'm yelling at him to go somewhere else, leave me alone, get a life, he's just standing out of my reach pretending like he's in the wild west with guns that he's spinning on his fingers and blowing out. OMG.

When done, I was supposed to "gently" press down the center of each cookie. I had no idea how much pressure was too much pressure and I was stressing out over what to press down with. There was a bottle of sprinkles on the counter so I just turned that over and started mashing. On to the next step...

Fill each cookie cup with 1 tablespoon of cherry filling. I pop the can and just like expected, here comes the 3 year old. I swear his sense of smell is shark like. Put cookies and cherry filling in front of a 3 year old and tell him he can't have any yet and oh...my...LORD!! I tried to run in the pantry and pull out a snickerdoodle but no. NO! That won't do! The fits my kid can throw are  amazing. We settled on him scooping leftover cherry filling into a cup that went into the fridge for no reason. He doesn't know that though so we both survived without incident.

I put the cookies back into the oven for 5 more minutes and made the icing. After the 5 minutes were up, I let them cool for a bit before removing them from the muffin tin.

Let's just say that I wasn't going to let the icing go to waste...

Yeah. I guess I pressed too hard?

http://www.lemontreedwelling.com/2014/02/cherry-pie-cookie-cups.html

Cinnamon Roll Skillet Cake

As you may or may not know by now, cinnamon sugar is my favorite thing in the world. FAVORITE!

Add biscuits and I'm in heaven. Here is what I attempted...

One thing I hate about biscuits or any kind of item that comes in one of the rolly cans is the POP. Lately, 99.9% of my cans let me unroll them and they don't pop so I get a spoon, shove it in and I know when to expect the pop. I was expecting the same results this time but I started unrolling the first can and that little sucker exploded and once you have already had a baby, it's hard to control things. I'll just say it scared me. Of course for the second can, I spread my feet, bent my knees and prepared myself but it still exploded before I expected. I HATE those things!!

This recipe was so super easy but on the last two recipes I've made involving cinnamon/sugar and melted butter, I've ended up basically quadrupling the amount the recipe calls for. Either their portions are unrealistic to get the DESIRED amount of cinnamon and sugar or I'm just overzealous.

Regardless, these ended up kind of gooey so I probably could have cooked them longer than what the recipe called for but they were still yummy!!!

Normally when I make my cinnamon/sugar biscuits I just take them out of the can, dip them in melted butter, dip them in the cinnamon/sugar and put them in a cake pan and they all sorts of rise up into heavenly dough balls of perfection. So this is a little more complicated/Pinteresty way to do what I normally do so I will probably stick with my old method because it's a million times easier.

http://www.chelseasmessyapron.com/easy-30-minute-cinnamon-roll-skillet-cake/#_a5y_p=1828555

Churro Waffles

I had planned on making my yummy brown sugar, pecan topped cinnamon rolls yesterday morning and upon entering the kitchen, I realized I had left both cans of rolls out overnight. I was super bummed!

Not that bummed though because there was a new recipe I wanted to try that was made of biscuity, cinnamony, sugary goodness. I got in the fridge to get my two cans of biscuits that I had bought for this recipe and they were nowhere to be found. I was getting ticked at this point.

I thought "OOOOOOOOOOOOkay, I guess it's eggs, hashbrowns and toast." so I went ahead and poured two cups of hashbrowns in hot water to be rehydrated. As I got back into the fridge to pull out the eggs.........

NO EGGS.

UGH!! I was saying ugly words in my head by now and my poor hashbrowns were going to be wasted. I asked Husband if hashbrowns and toast sounded ok and he wasn't thrilled so HE got in the pantry and pulled out the bisquick and said "Just make pancakes.". Ok, sounds good. We found out that bisquick requires eggs. I was officially mad at this point. Husband said I should make waffles and I rudely informed him that I had never seen a waffle iron in the house so that was a dumb idea. He pulled one out.

I got on Pinterest to see if there was a waffle recipe that was yummy. I found these churro waffles. They looked super tasty!

They only required eggs. By now we remembered that Husband's sister lives about 200 yards away so we asked if she had eggs and by golly she did so her husband brought some eggs down for me. This was almost an hour after I first stepped foot in the kitchen that morning.

Here is how this recipe went down...

#1- In the recipe, it says the churro topping is cinnamon, sugar, and melted butter. It doesn't say that the cinnamon and sugar need to be together and the melted butter on the side. So I stirred all of them together to make a cinnamon sugar paste. I didn't know how this could work but I made the topping out of the ingredients it said to!

#2- I have never used a waffle iron before so I didn't really know how much batter to put in or how long to let it cook. I overfilled it with batter so it spewed out the sides, I touched all the wrong parts therefore burning the crap out of most of my fingers, and my first batch of waffles were all soggy.

#3- The recipe only calls for 1/3 c. of melted butter to coat ALL the waffles this batch makes. Please. There is no way on this Earth that 1/3 of a cup could cover all those waffles enough so the cinnamon sugar sticks to them. This is the point where I realized the melted butter was for pouring over the waffles so they can be dipped in DRY cinnamon/sugar. I wasted a lot of ingredients on that redo.
I ended up probably using about 2 cups of butter to coat all the waffles.

#4- My second batch came out much much stiffer yet after being coated in butter, they became like limp noodles. Bleh.

#5- For YEARS, my husband has talked about wanting to buy real maple syrup. The only problem is that it is $27 and for years, I have refused to let him buy it. Why? Because it's $27. Yet I decided to get it for him for his birthday. Is it worth $27? Yes :(

#6- My final product came out rather tasty but the kitchen was a MESS. Butter, batter, sugar, crumbs, EVERYWHERE. It was worth it though....look at this yumminess...

http://chicachocolatina.blogspot.com/2013/01/churro-waffles.html

Pumpkin Spice Pecan Mini Bundt

After 4.5 months of pregnancy, I FINALLY had energy today to do some baking!

I started out making Ninja Turtle cookies for a coworker and you can see those here.

Then I decided to get creative and take two recipes I've made and kind of tweak it a bit to make my own "thing". I named this "thing" a pumpkin spice pecan mini bundt. That's the best I could come up with.

I was originally going to make my pumpkin spice cookies (I tried those here) but decided that I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted to see if they would bake good in little mini bundt form. All I had to do was mix a box of spice cake mix and a can of pumpkin. I baked them at 375 for about 17 minutes and they turned out perfect.

Then I thought I should top them off with my yummy cream cheese cinnamon frosting. Here is what I used:

4 oz. cream cheese
4 oz. softened butter
2 c. powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tbsp. cinnamon

After I pulled the cakes out of the oven, I put the frosting into a smaller bowl and warmed it up for 15 seconds. I spooned it over the top, letting it drizzle all pretty like over the edges, then added nuts and a pinch of cinnamon.

These are pretty darn tasty and a perfect fall treat! If you try them, I hope you like them!

Grilled Chicken Tacos with Spiced Mayo and Avocado Salsa

As of late (as in the past 3 1/2 months), my diet has consisted of not much. "Not much" as in this baby in my belly hates just about EVERYTHING I eat.

It can't handle meat.
It can't handle sugar.
It can't handle soda (nooooooooooooooooo).
It can't handle this.
It can't handle that.

But baby #2 has slowly come around after some very stern talking to. I decided I would try a new recipe that required chunks of chicken which up until recently, have been off limits.

Doesn't that look delicious?! That's what I thought. 

I was already starting to get a little hungry before I started making this and from experience, hungry = hangry. Hangry = not feeling so well. 

hungry:need to eat as hangry:need to kill someone.

To keep my cool, I munched on some sweet tarts to keep the baby's rage from surfacing. It worked. 

As I was making the avocado salsa, it was smelling really good and even though I was squirting lime juice everywhere and it was burning some cuts on my fingers, I was getting really excited about this meal. You know who else got excited? The gnats in the kitchen. Lubbock has a gnat problem (not just us, we're not dirty you see) and it's annoying. I was picking gnats out left and right. I'm sure one got in there permanently but as long as Husband doesn't know that, we're all good.

The smell in the kitchen was already heavenly and then I threw the marinated chicken and onions in the skillet and the smell was equivalent to maybe what it was like at Woodstock?!

It took about an hour since it was my first time making it but I don't foresee it taking that long next time. 

This would be the part where I would post a picture of my masterpiece. BUT...the baby gave me the choice of either eating immediately and satisfying it or I could take a pretty picture of the food and it would raise hell in my belly and make me vomit. 

I chose to eat immediately. Trust me when I say that you want to make this. Husband was flabbergasted that I actually made a home cooked meal since I haven't really cooked in months and he was very pleasantly surprised.

I paired the burritos with dry, overcooked mexican rice. 

Enjoy!

http://www.seededatthetable.com/2014/06/13/grilled-chicken-tacos-with-spiced-mayo-and-avocado-salsa/

Sweet Chili Cream Cheese Dip

I went to a get together last year and this was served along with other amazing finger foods.

BUT...

This one was my favorite! When she went out of town, I had my friend who hosted the party buy me two bottles of the sweet chili sauce because nobody in town sold it. This was a serious matter, I needed the stuff. They have been sitting on my shelf, gathering dust, waiting for the right moment to be popped open.

Tonight was the night. And oh what a glorious night it was.

I take such pretty pictures.

Crockpot Parmesan Ranch Mushrooms

May 17th was my last post. WOW. Talk about falling off the wagon. My cookie business has (thankfully) been keeping me busy but I still have been trying new recipes.

This one is a few months old but let me tell you, it was a HIT! Normally at our family gatherings, my mother in law will put mushrooms in boiling water with butter and some garlic salt. They are delicious every time. Yet, I wanted to try this new recipe since I love ranch AND parmesan.

The original picture was sooooooooooo "try me"...

Good gracious, who wouldn't want to try that? I did and it is going into my "Tried it, KEEPER" board. Great twist on a dinner classic!!

http://www.food.com/recipe/crockpot-parmesan-ranch-mushrooms-500090

A New Venture

Noticed I haven't been posting lately? Two reasons:

#1- It's towards the end of school so life is crazy!!

#2- I started a cookie business! Totally random.

It's a long story but basically, I am now selling cookies. Here are some samples of batches I've done.

I have a facebook page you can go to HERE and I'm slowly working on a blog you can check out HERE.

Since summer is soon upon me, I will still be trying out new recipes and posting since I will have much more free time. Until then, go like my facebook page!!!

Apple Nachos

I think I pinned this one before baby was born, which was 2 1/2 years ago! Just now getting to it. Kind of.

I went my own direction with this but got the general idea from this pin...

This calls for peanut butter. That is the yumminess you see drizzled on there. Well, I had just made apple cider caramel sauce that I found in a Southern Living Magazine. I didn't know what I was going to use it for but I made it anyway. It looked tasty!!

After stewing on it a bit, I realized that I could make apple nachos since I thought I had everything in the picture. I had the apples, coconut flakes, chocolate chips, pecans (chopped) and instead of peanut butter, I drizzled my caramel sauce over them. I had a blast putting this together! I was expecting fireworks in my mouth!! Take a look at the final product...

They LOOK good, right?! Meh. Instead of fireworks, I had a big fat "pffffff". Totally lame. Two bites and they went in the trash. I am sure the original recipe is 10x better than this pile of junk.

http://www.allysonkramer.com/2011/10/apple-nachos/

White Chocolate Cinnamon Pretzels

I was in a making mood today.

So far, I have made...

1. Apple cider caramel sauce
2. Apple nachos
3. Trix treats
4. These yummy things!!

Don't these look tasty?

As I think I've mentioned before, cinnamon is my favorite thing in the world. This calls for sugar, cinnamon and best of all, CINNAMON SUGAR!! It took probably a total of 10 minutes to make with no baking. The thing that took the longest was melting the white chocolate on the stove. Other than that, this was ridiculously easy.

I made these about an hour ago and they're almost half gone. SOOOO good!!!

Look at that deliciousness

http://www.yourcupofcake.com/2011/02/white-chocolate-cinnamon-pretzels.html

Potato Topped Mini Meatloaf

I follow a Pinterest board from Kraft and have recently pinned a lot of recipes from them. I tried this one out a couple of weeks ago.

I was hesitant to try it out only because I know Husband's fondness for real mashed potatoes over instant mashed potatoes but I told myself that if he didn't know they were instant, maybe he wouldn't notice.

My first problem that I encountered was finding the stuffing mix. I searched the whole store twice then finally caved and asked someone (I have a slight phobia of talking to strangers). She pointed me to the bottom corner of an aisle and there were about 40,000 choices for stuffing. The recipe just says "stove top stuffing mix" and there was not ONE box that said simply that. It was either herbed up, for pork, for chicken, with this flavor and that flavor so I just got the stuffing mix for cornbread.

Unfortunately, Husband noticed the empty bags of instant potatoes and made a comment. I had a two word reply for him.

I tried to get the final product to look as close to the original as possible. The meatloaf held up pretty well considering I have no clue if I got the correct stuffing mix or not.

Mine could almost pass for the original!! When we all sat down and ate, I asked Husband how he liked it. The first comment out of his mouth was "I wish they were real potatoes". After my backlash, he had nothing but nice things to say so this recipe is a keeper and the next time I make it, I will still be using instant mashed potatoes :)

http://thepinningpirate.blogspot.com/2014/03/potato-topped-mini-meatloaf.html

Vegan Banana Ice Cream

Vegan or not, this looks GOOD!!

Let me start by saying that this is attempt #2. Ummmmm, attempt #2 because although I am quite book smart, I have a common sense deficit.

The recipe calls for 5 ripe (yellow with brown spots) bananas and those are totally ew so I used 5 semi green bananas. I read over the recipe extremely quick (b/c that's how I get to do things with a needy toddler; extremely quick) and I remember it said to freeze the bananas. So I did. I plopped them in the freezer. I proudly announced to everyone that I was going to be making banana ice cream later!!

That night, I got the frozen bananas out and pulled up the directions. I learned I was supposed to peel and cut the bananas before putting them in the freezer. So I had fully frozen, fully unpeeled, fully uncut bananas sitting on the counter. My husband laughed at me and said "Really?"

A week later, I had new bananas. They got peeled, cut, and placed in the freezer last night. I pulled them out this morning, ready to make some yummy ice cream. The recipe said to put the bananas in, the vanilla in, then to start with 1 c. of the vanilla milk. Everything finally got blended together after about 10 minutes of shoving a fork into the blender to move stuff around.

The final product?

Slush. WHERE IS THE ICE CREAM PART OF THIS, YO?!

Back into the freezer it went. After about 2 hours, I scraped the top with my fingernail and it was nice and hard, ready to be scooped into beautiful, solid balls of ice cream.

I got the scoop.....


dug in.....


scraped for about 1 second......


then......


The top collapsed in on the gooey center and smoothie remnants shot out of the bowl at super banana speed!! A few choice words spewed out as well  BUT I was able to form balls with the hard ice cream I had.

Too bad it kinda tasted like crap.

http://berryripe.com/recipes/vegan-banana-ice-cream-recipe/

One Pot Mexican Skillet Pasta

How good was this?

Well...

'Nuff said.

http://flavorofjoy.com/one-pot-mexican-skillet-pasta/

Brown Sugar Chicken Wings with Roasted Red Pepper

Although I have my favorite wing recipe, which I wrote about here, I'm always down to see if there is a recipe out there that can trump it. I believe this is my second attempt at something new. The original picture looks extremely tasty... (you will notice I am now too lazy to do my pictures side by side)

The sauce is what really perked my eyes up because it looks yummy and it is made from red peppers, which I love. LOVE. I also wanted to try this because unlike the wings I always make, these can just be put in the oven and you're done with it. With mine, after they bake, I put them in a skillet with extra seasoning stuff and top them off. But that's totally worth it because they're delicious.

Anyway, on to the results.

Once I got all the seasoning in the bowl, it was time to throw the wings in to coat them. I started out with trying to mix it all with a spoon but I gave up and just got down and dirty with my hands. For some reason, it was exhilarating tossing around raw chicken in a bowl of goodness!! It looked and smelled heavenly. Yet I found myself in a predicament when baby was adamant that I hold him so he started tugging on me and about pulled my pants down which would have rendered me helpless since my hands were filthy.

I stuck them in the oven and on to the sauce I went. This was extremely easy to make. I cut up the peppers, put them in a skillet to brown them up then put everything in the food processor and mixed it up. It didn't have NEAR as much flavor as I would have thought. It was actually kind of boring.

Wings were done, sauce was done, aaaaaaaaaaaaaand??

There was nothing fantastic about it. They were just ok. We agreed that they are not worth making again and I will just stick to my other wings. But of course, if you haven't had amazing wings (like mine), then these might be good to you but since I've had better, these didn't make the cut *insert scissor gesture here*

http://damndelicious.net/2012/05/29/baked-brown-sugar-chicken-wings-with-roasted-red-pepper/