Hamburger Cookies - A "No Bake" Recipe

It's been a busy summer, and for the most part on our down times we're ready to just unwind with some swimming, playing, and and other summer activities. But occasionally we get inspired to tackle some new projects. 

In the last few weeks we've been invited to several barbecues. I used to make these fun and easy "no bake" cookies with my mom as a kid, and they are the perfect treats to bring to a barbecue! 

Even better, while they are super cute they are also a "No Bake" recipe which means you don't have to run your oven in order to enjoy them. Perfect for hot summer days. 

Kids Cook: Jam Thumbprint Cookies

It's been a while since we shared one of our Kids Cook posts, although the boys still enjoy helping me cook and bake on a regular basis. That's why we're excited to participate in the Summer 2016 A-Z Cooking with Kids Blog Hop hosted by 3 Princess and 1 Dude.

Almost 20 bloggers have come together to share different recipes that kids can either create on their own or create with a bit of grown up help. In fact - there 26 recipes kids can create- one for each letter of the alphabet! 

We had the letter J - which instantly made me think of JAM. And as we love cookies we decided to try our hand at Jam Thumbprint Cookies. 

Banana Split Dippers

For the most part on weeknights we try to have fruit for dessert. But every once in a while we like to switch it up with something a little fun. This quick and easy dessert was still mostly fruit based . . . with some extra yumminess thrown in.

In fact, this dessert had all the makings of a banana split . . .  without the ice cream. Perfect for the fact that "Banana Day" is coming up on April 20th! We're pretty excited that Witty Hoots decided to host a "Quirky and Unusual" Blog Hop to celebrate the upcoming day.

Rainbow Pudding Cups

We love making this yummy treat around this time of year. Somehow it's become a family tradition on St. Patrick's Day (although don't worry, we still make the traditional Corned Beef and Cabbage and Irish Soda Bread too.) But every year it's Rainbow Pudding Cups that Big Brother asks for!

What's great about this fun treat is it's easy enough for kids to make almost totally on their own! 

Oatmeal Maple Raisin Cookies

This month we've loved experimenting with different varieties of oatmeal cookies. We've had a lot of fun playing around with our favorite recipe, adding in and taking away different ingredients.

One of the favorite varieties we've come up with is this Oatmeal Maple Raisin Cookie.

It's a cookie with a classic oatmeal cookie taste, except it has a maple twist. We did use a dry, maple sugar in addition to maple syrup. Sometimes this sugar is called "indian sugar" and can be found in baking stores and some larger grocery stores.  

Shortbread Fossil Cookies

We love tying snacks into our new weekly themes, which led us to create these yummy shortbread fossil cookies. Not only did they fit in with the dinosaur fun we've been having, but they are perfectly delicious too!

I've seen a couple of recipes like this before, but we based ours on a buttery shortbread. For this recipe I did most of the prep work and cooking while Big Brother helped with pressing in the images. This is a very soft dough, and as it was a very warm day that made the rolling and cutting of the dough a little trickier. 

Ingredients:

2 sticks of unsalted butter (softened to room temperature) 

1/2 cup white sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

Pudding Beach Cups

We wrapped up our Ocean themed week over the weekend by making these yummy Pudding Beach Cups. We connected this activity both to our Quick Pick & Projects of the Week and our Kids Cook! posts.

Because we used instant, no cook pudding mix Big Brother could do most of the work himself and was pretty proud of his work at the end. (It also meant they were a little brighter and a little less smoothly assembled than if I had made them, but the point was for him to be hands on with this special treat.) 

Before cooking we read a new find from our library, Beach by Elisha Cooper. The book tells the story of a day at the beach from morning to night through simple watercolors and a variety of little pictures. It reminded us of our day trip to the beach a few weeks before, which is what kicked off ocean week to begin with. 

Red, White, & Blue Oatmeal Cookies

We love experimenting with different ingredients in oatmeal cookies, a few weeks ago we posted our favorite Chocolate Chip Craisin Cookies. We also love holiday recipes, and this week we decided to combine the two with our new recipe for Red, White, and Blue Oatmeal Cookies.

 

The colors come from the add-ins: red craisins, white chocolate chips, and blue dried blueberries. The combination is yummy and creates the three colors with out artificial dyes. 

As always Big Brother was eager to help with the creating of the cookies, which included sampling the ingredients. This time he wanted to try mixing the ingredients by hand, but quickly discovered he liked the mixer better! 

"Stuffed Snake" Stromboli (Kids Cook!)

A few years ago we originally made this stromboli for one of our Halloween parties, it quickly became a family favorite for dinner, although we don't always turn it into a snake . . .

As Big Brother has gotten a little older, he can really help with the whole recipe which makes it even more family friendly. 

Kids Cook: Banana Bread

We love getting kids into the kitchen, and this easy banana bread recipe means that everyone can get involved in the making of this treat.

If you've been reading our blog for a while now you know we love making muffins on a regular basis, but banana bread is also a staple in our household. The tips below really can be used with any banana bread recipe, but this just happens to be our favorite. 

Happy Hedgehog No Bake Cookies

This month the Virtual Book Club for Kids author is Marcus Pfister. For our monthly read we enjoyed The Happy Hedgehog. We liked the story of the little hedgehog who tries to figure out what he can accomplish in order to make himself happy, and discovers it's really just being himself that brings the greatest happiness.

We decided to follow up our reading by creating Happy Hedgehog cookies!

I wanted to make sure Big Brother could be involved as much as possible, so we made a "no bake" recipe. 

Applesauce and Yellow Raisin Spiced Muffins

So we made these yummy muffins late Sunday afternoon, and I'm embarrassed to admit they're already gone. All 12 of them, the whole dozen. And we didn't share any with anyone but us. Really, it's just a testament to how yummy they are.

As you know, we love cooking together here, and especially love baking (and eating) muffins. 

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins

There's something about these cool evenings and warm days that instantly make me start craving "fall" food. My aunt had sent me a recipe for pumpkin chocolate chip muffins at the beginning of the summer and I'd been waiting for the right moment to try making them with Big Brother. The cool, crisp, sunny weather today had me convinced it was the right time.

The original recipe came from a Ranger Rick magazine and was one my aunt had enjoyed making with my cousins when they were little.

Triple Raisin Chewy Granola Bars

Big Brother is a fan of granola bars and I'm often on the look out for a good, homemade granola bar recipe. Today we decided to experiment. The primary inspiration came from a recipe my husband spotted on the back of a store brand cereal box. It used yogurt covered raisins but the coating was melted off and used as part of the mixture to hold the bar together. We replaced the cereal with oats and puffed rice and added in more raisins. I swapped out the nuts the original recipe called for and replaced them with sunflower seeds as I wanted these bars to be nut free. Of course, we also had to add a little bit of chocolate.

The recipe does involve some cooking, but no baking (so no oven on these hot days.) And it was a great one to get Big Brother's help with.

In the end, we were pretty pleased with the taste of this new treat! Definitely a sweeter granola bar, more like a dessert, that would make a great treat in a lunch box. (And sadly, we all know summer vacation won't last too much longer.)

The Recipe

Ingredients
2 cups quick cooking oats
1 cup puffed rice cereal
1/2 cup golden yellow raisins
1/2 cup craisins
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1 cup yogurt covered raisins
1 stick (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter
3 tablespoons honey
1/2 cup miniature chocolate chips

Directions
1. Mix the oats, rice cereal, yellow raisins, craisins, and sunflower seeds in a large bowl.

Big Brother helped pour the ingredients into the bowl and then mix them.  Here he's sampling some of the dry ingredients while stirring. 

2. Melt the yogurt raisins, honey, and butter in a small sauce pan over medium to low heat. Melt until the coating has come off the raisins and the butter is fully melted. Stir regularly while melting. (An adult should do this task.)

3. When the yogurt and butter mixture is fully melted add to the dry ingredients (raisins too!) and stir until all the ingredients are dampened.

4. Spoon the mixture into a parchment lined 9x13 pan. Use a spoon or spatula to really press the mixture into the pan, so that the ingredients all stick together. At this point it's still a little warm from the mixture that was melted on the stove so I recommend not trying to press it in with your hand. Sprinkle the chocolate chips on top and gently press again.

5. Let cool for at least 30 minutes. I popped our batch in the fridge as it was pretty warm here today. 

6. Cut and either serve the bars or save them in a sealed container to use throughout the week. 

Really, any kind of dried fruit or nut could replace one of the raisin ingredients. It will be exciting to see what other flavors we can come up with. 

A Father's Day Gift: Spicy BBQ Rub

My Dad loves to grill. In fact he continues to grill year round even when there is several feet of snow on the ground. So I was pretty excited when I saw these personalized grill utensils at Pick Your Plum a few weeks ago. (I'm new to Pick Your Plum, and I love seeing their daily deal arrive in my inbox each day. This was my first order and I was pleased with the ordering and delivery process.)

I knew I wanted something else to go with the utensils, so I decided we could create a BBQ rub. We gave BBQ rubs as part of our food baskets at Christmas. They are easy to create and keep, and there are lots of flavor options and ideas to play with. I combined several recipes I found on the internet to create our "Spicy BBQ Rub" recipe. 

The Recipe:

(I actually used double these quantities and made a little too much, so I'm writing up smaller amounts here. Be prepared to package up around 3 pints with these amounts. Half pint containers make a nice gift size.)

1/2 cup salt

1/2 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup ground cumin

1/2 cup chili powder

1/4 cup ground black pepper

1/4 cup red cayenne pepper

1/2 cup dried minced onion

1/4 cup smoked paprika

3/4 cup paprika

Ingredient note: One of our local stores sells spices in these convenient, large containers. I would also recommend finding them at a bulk store like BJ's or Costco when making a large recipe like this. Using the small containers usually found at a grocery store would add up in cost.

Big Brother was able to help with this recipe. We measured the ingredients into a large mixing bowl. 

Next we mixed the ingredients with a wire whisk. The rub smelled pretty spicy at this point, both our noses were tingling. We did test it out at dinner by using it on some pork we grilled. It didn't taste as spicy after it had been cooked. 

We used a measuring scoop to put the rub into mason jars.

  We had a couple of other people we wanted to present the gift to besides my Dad, so we packaged up several jars of the rub and saved some for ourselves. 

I again created some labels using our word processing program and some free clip art. 

We added a little ribbon . . .

 . . . and we had the perfect complement to our utensils. 

Raspberry Muffins

The other morning both Big Brother and I were in the mood for muffins, and as we're in the stages of emptying out the freezer to prepare for the coming of our summer CSA, I knew we had some frozen raspberries to use up. In the past I've enjoyed using this recipe from Eating Well. I had to tweak the recipe a little as I didn't have all the ingredients so my adapted recipe is below.

Hearty Raspberry Muffins

Ingredients:

zest of one orange
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup milk (with 1 tsp lemon juice)**
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups frozen raspberries
2 tbsp of Swedish Sugar (optional: a coarse, white sugar)
**(The original recipe called for buttermilk, but gave the tip that if you didn't have buttermilk you can mix 1 tsp of lemon juice into regular milk. Great to know!) 

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Coat 12 large muffin cups with cooking spray or line with paper liners.
2. Use a peeler or zester to remove the zest from the orange. Combine the zest and the sugar in a large bowl and mix until the zest is evenly mixed into the sugar. Add the milk, oil, egg and vanilla and mix until blended.
3. Add the whole-wheat flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into the mixing bowl. Mix until just blended.
4. Gently fold in the raspberries. Divide the batter among the muffin cups. Sprinkle each top with a small amount of Swedish Sugar.
5. Bake the muffins until the edges and tops are lightly browned. Let cool in pan for 5 minutes before removing onto a wire rack.

Cooking with Kids

There are so many benefits to cooking with kids. The math lessons that kids can gather from cooking and baking are endless; from practicing the early stages of counting, to understanding measurements, and a hands on approach to learning fractions. Cooking with kids also helps them to understand what goes into food so they can think about healthy choices. Kids are also more likely to try something they've helped make and they take pride in the finished product.

The challenge can be to find tasks which are developmentally appropriate yet still make the child feel involved in the process. And, when cooking with kids it will definitely take longer and definitely be messier. But, it will be fun.

Counting the liners as he puts them into the muffin pan. 

I measured the sugar, he poured it in. 

Oops! Accidents will happen. 

Adding the frozen raspberries. (We had picked two kinds this summer, a red raspberry and a golden variety.) 

Sprinkling on the Swedish Sugar. 

Are they done yet? 

We ate the muffins still warm with bananas and yogurt for a great morning snack! Yum!