Chocolate Dipped Fortune Cookies

This fun treat is something we've made a few times before - and even though it doesn't take a lot to make them, they look fantastic and special when they are done.

The other great thing about these treats is that even little hands can help with some of the steps so kids can feel involved. We recently made a batch for Teacher Appreciation Week and the boys loved helping make these sweet treats for their teachers. 

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

The season for pumpkin flavored treats is almost over, as the winter holiday baking season is fast approaching.

But, before it goes I wanted to share one last yummy treat. (Although I have to admit I love these enough to make them all year round.) I was introduced to pumpkin cookies several years ago through our Farm-to-School program. Over the years I've made a few tweaks to settle on this final recipe.

Easy Pool Party Cupcakes & Pool Party Ideas

You may have noticed we've been a little quiet on our posts this month. The school year wrapped up in such a whirlwind it took just about all my energy to keep us moving through it. And while we've been quiet here online, we've actually still been pretty busy as a family. End of school year events, barbecues, a friends' wedding, Father's Day . . .

Despite the busyness, one thing we really wanted to do to kick off summer was to have a small "pool" party in the backyard. While our pool is not officially large (we purchased an Intex Pool 12ft by 30in this spring) the boys are pretty excited about it none the less.

So as promised, on the first Friday of our summer vacation we invited several friends and their parents over, set out snacks and cupcakes, put some other fun toys out in the yard, and kicked off summer in full pool party style. 

These cupcakes turned out so fun, I couldn't help but share them! And make sure you check out our other fun tips for a fun and successful backyard pool party. 

Everybody's Favorite One Bowl Brownies

This is one of our family's all time favorite recipes, and luckily it's one the easiest dessert recipes I know. If we're asked to bring a dessert to a potluck, but we don't have a whole lot of time to be in the kitchen, this is usually my go-to recipe. I used to think of them as my "Book-Club Brownies" as they were perfect to make on a week night and have ready to go the next night when my book club would meet. (Or sometimes I would even make them up the afternoon of the meeting.)

But I should warn you, they are still very much a TREAT recipe. There is nothing low-fat/low calorie/low-sugar about this recipe . . .

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.

Graphing with Easter Candy

One of our favorite things to do with seasonal candy is use it as a math manipulative. In the past we've used candy hearts for math games, counted with pumpkins, and done math play with jelly beans.

So when I saw these SweetTart Easter Candies at the grocery store I knew they would be perfect for math play.

Since the candies were both colorful and different shapes, we decided to graph them! I made up two graphs: a color graph and an animal graph. We want you to be able to play too, so at the end of the post you'll find the link for the graphs!

Chai Spiced Cookies with Egg Nog Glaze

It's that time of the Holiday Season where we focus on baking. We like making treats to share with neighbors, friends, and others. We're always looking for easy and yummy recipes to create with. I'm a big fan of chai teas and I love getting a hot one as a treat while wrapping up holiday shopping.

With that in mind, I tweaked one of our favorite rolled sugar cookie recipes to create these Chai Spiced Cookies with Egg Nog Glaze.

Homemade Strawberry Shortcake

It's strawberry season here in our neck of the woods, which means it's Strawberry Shortcake time. And to me, nothing says summer quite like strawberries.

I've been playing with our recipe a little bit and tweaked our favorite biscuit recipe to make it a sweeter version for shortcake. 

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.  

Easy Blueberry Cobbler

There are a lot of different recipes and opinions out there for how to make a cobbler. Do you put the fruit on the bottom and add the batter on top? Or do you make the batter for the bottom and put the fruit on top? And although we've tried many of them, this quickly became our new favorite go to recipe this summer when we have fresh berries (or cherries) in the house and we want a warm, cobbler treat.

It's fresh blueberry season, which is one of our favorite times of year! We love baking with blueberries,freezing  them for the winter, and of course eat them just in their natural, yummy state. 

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! 

Kids Cook: Chocolate Chip Craisin Oatmeal Cookies

It's been a while since we posted a recipe, and I can't believe we haven't posted this recipe yet. This has been our "go to" cookie recipe for almost a year now.

We love the yummy goodness of the mix of the craisin, chocolate, and oatmeal flavors. They mix together and bake up easily. And they always disappear quickly. 

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. 

Double Chocolate Valentine's Popcorn

Yesterday (January 19) was National Popcorn Day, which inspired Big Brother and I to experiment with a new popcorn recipe ourselves. In order to get ready for Valentine's Day, we decided to try out a new recipe we might want to give some of our own sweet valentines.

We've made white chocolate popcorn before, but decided this time to add in a semi-sweet chocolate element too. 

Peppermint Marshmallow Stir Sticks

I've had so much fun making these a couple of times over the past holiday week I just had to share how easy they are to make. 

Rocky Road Brownies

I discovered an amazing new brownie recipe today. So good, I made them twice. Yes, twice. In one day.

I wanted to give a thank you gift to a friend who loves brownies. And although I've developed a pretty good brownie recipe over the years I wanted to make something special. I was thinking about creating something like a "s'mores brownie" to go along with this coming weekend's theme of kicking off summer when I stumbled across this recipe for Rocky Road Brownies. A few tweaks, some time in the oven, and these brownies looked and smelled amazing. So amazing, that after they'd been delivered I knew I had to make a batch for us to try as well. Hence, two batches in one day. Our batch didn't let us down; this chocolate, gooey, nutty treat is perfect for a rainy day (or really any day.)

I didn't really plan to post the recipe today, so please excuse the lack of "how to" pictures.

Rocky Road Brownies

Ingredients:

1 stick of unsalted butter (plus a little extra for buttering the pan)

1 bag (12 oz.) of semisweet chocolate chips ( I used Ghirardelli chips)

2 large eggs

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

3/4 cup flour

1 cup mini-marshmallows

3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8 x 8 pan and then line with parchment paper, leaving an overhang on the sides. Butter the paper as well. 

2. In a microwave safe bowl melt the stick of unsalted butter and 1 cup of the semisweet chips. (It's easy to burn the chocolate so I recommend melting the butter and chocolate in small increments and then stirring. I melted for 45 seconds, stirred, and then for another 45 seconds.) 

3. After the chocolate is melted add in the eggs and salt, stir until combined. 

4. Stir in the sugars and vanilla. 

5. Add the flour and stir until just combined. Pour into the prepared pan. 

6. Bake on the middle rack for 30 minutes. 

7. Remove the brownies from the oven and immediately sprinkle the remaining chocolate chips onto the top of the brownies. Sprinkle the chopped walnuts and marshmallows on top of the chocolate chips. 

8. Put the brownies back in the oven and bake for another 5 to 7 minutes until the marshmallows begin to toast. 

9. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Carefully use the extra parchment paper to lift the brownies out of the pan and onto the wire rack. Continue to let the brownies cool until the topping seems to hold together when gently touched with a finger. (Probably about another half hour at least.)

10. Cut the brownies up and enjoy!