Banana Oat Bars

In an attempt to use up more of the banana's I have in my freezer I searched foodgawker this morning for some healthy recipes.  I came across this one, from All Day I Dream About Food.  I changed a few things here and there to make it a little healthier and I am certainly glad I did because I do not really think the changes take away from the overall flavor.  Avocado replaced the butter and some almonds got thrown into the mix, results = delicious and guilt free :)


Banana Oat Bars

1/3 Cup mashed Avocado
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
3 large ripe bananas, mashed
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
2 cups oatmeal
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup raisins
1/3 cup coconut
1/4 cup chopped almonds

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Line an 8x8 pan with parchment paper.  "Cream" the avocado and brown sugar together until well combined.  Add egg and mix thoroughly.  Add mashed banana,salt and cocoa powder.

Creamed avocado and brown sugar

Once combined add remaining ingredients.  Spread evenly in the prepared pan.  Bake in the preheated over for 30 mins.

I added cocoa powder to counter the green color of the avocado.  It did not affect the taste much and I think it would be interesting to see what would happen if I did not include this, I do not know how green it would really look... next time!  I also decided to line the pan with parchment paper since I used avocado in place of the butter/coconut oil.  I think that the bars would have been just as easily removed with a greased pan if you do not have parchment paper.  I just did not want to take chances the first time, I've had too many catastrophies!  There's nothing worse than delicousness you just can't get out of the pan.  A few changes I may make next time is to play around with the mix-ins.  Perhaps some chocolate and peanut butter chips, or butterscotch chips?  Raisins, craisins and nuts for a trail mix bar?  The possibilities are endless!  I also want to try it with no sugar, or perhaps exchanging the brown sugar for maple syrup, agave nectar or honey.  I'll let you know if any of these work :)

I'm enjoying my Sunday fun-day watching football at Bunny's with some friends and then having 'bar' night with Sam.  We tend to not be able to both drink together, as one of us usually has to drive home, so tonight is our night to hit the town and walk/cab home :)  Enjoy your Sunday!

Cranberry Orange Muffins

Winter break as left me with a lot of unoccupied time.  Thankfully this has allowed me to do some baking! I attempted to make homemade pretzels on Saturday, the did not turn out picture worthy... ie HORRIBLE! Needless to say I have a new goal of perfecting pretzels this year.  I've really been in the mood to bake a cake, however I have 3 birthdays to celebrate/bake for in the coming weeks so I've held off on this front.  This has lead to me using up leftovers in my fridge/freezer.  Doolittle's over ordered banana's a while ago so I got the leftovers which ended up being over 30 banana's.  Half of them have been used thus far, and about 5 of them went into Banana Chocolate Chip muffins last week.  Unfortunately I forgot to snap a photo, I promise I'll get better at this.

Last night the cranberries that have been sitting in my fruit drawer went into some Cranberry Orange Muffins.  I modified a recipe from the Betty Crocker Cookbook making some healthier additions and changes.

Cranberry Orange Muffins
adapted from the Betty Crocker Cookbook

1 egg
1/2 cup almond milk
1/4 cup agave nectar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup Whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup All-purpose flour
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tsp Baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp Orange zest
1 cup Cranberries, halved

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.  Beat the egg, then add milk, agave nectar and oil.  Once combine add dry ingredients.  Mix until just combined, should be slightly lumpy.  Add in orange zest and cranberries.  Using a 12 muffin tin, fill 2/3 full.  Bake for 20 mins.

These muffins are best eaten warm!  Though I'm sure they'll taste just as good tomorrow morning for breakfast :)

On a different note, it's garbage day today but both of our garbage cans are frozen to the ground!  Literally I could not get either of them to budge!  Hopefully it'll warm up and I'll be able to move them before garbage day next week, otherwise we may have an overflow.

Old Photos

While updating somethings on my computer I came across these lovely little photos!  Take a look at the progress of Kalyn's wedding cake that I made!

Bottom layer topped with Chocolate Mousse

The Crumb Coat, there's one big layer of Chocolate cake sandwiched between the chocolate mousse and vanilla cake

The almost finished product

Hope you enjoyed!  My goal this year is to take more pictures.  I used to be great at it but over the past few years I've forgotten to document a lot of fun events!  

Christmas 2010

So as promised here are some photos of the cookies made by my mother and myself.

Our Sugar Cookies

Clockwise from Top: Chocolate Ginger, Spritz, Pecan Sandies, Orange Chocolate, and Thumbprint

Coconut Macaroons and Lemon Sables

Peanut Butter Nutella Sandwiches, Chocolate Crinkles, Russian Teacakes, Toffee Squares

Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheels, Peanut Butter Logs, Oatmeal Chocolate Chip, Rum Balls

The PB Nutella Sandwiches were a new addition this year, and let me say they were a surprisingly huge hit.  We always make the PB logs but the recipe makes more than enough, so this year we decided to make half the peanut butter dough into regular pb cookies.  I thought that was kind of boring so I suggested we sandwich two cookies with some Nutella.  They passed the taste test with flying colors, and ended up being the first cookies gone on Christmas eve.   If you want any of the recipes for the above cookies I will definitely post them, I just do not particularly want to post all 16 recipes if people won't utilize them!  In addition to the pictures above my mom also made rosette's but I forgot to snap a photo of them :( 

My Christmas was low key in the sense that we did what we always do!  Christmas Eve with my dad's family, this year that meant hosting 21 adults and 5 little kids, then presents in the AM with my brother and parent's followed by an early dinner at my Aunt's House.  All in all it was a great christmas filled with family, great food and great fun.  

After dinner and several hours of playing Kinect on Xbox I headed out to the bars with some friends.  This is something that Sam and I have recruited people to do for the past few Christmas Days and it always leads to a lot of fun.  I really enjoy going out to the bars, but not when it is so packed that you have to wait in line outside in the cold to get in.  If you have the same feelings I highly recommend hitting the bars on Christmas day as they are about 1/3 full as normal!!!  We headed to Stella's pretty late actually, unfortunately so late that we missed 2-4-1's which end at 12 AM :(  Overall fun night, hopefully we can recruit even more people next year!

The rest of the week was spent relaxing :)  Sam starts chiropractic school next week and I just finished my first semester of grad school so we were both ready to do almost nothing!!  This nothing included playing with old toys (McDonald's Hamburger maker and Dr. Dreadful), walks, football, movie marathon (Little Fockers, How do you know?, and the Tourist), sleeping, drinking and cooking.  

I spent New Years Eve over at my friend Brandon's house.  He and my other friend Lindsey had made us steaks and some other goodies, YUM!  We spent the evening eating, drinking cocktails, wine and champagne and playing games.  It was a great night, so great that I fell asleep at approximately 12:05 AM.  At least I made to New Years though right?!?!

I have break for the next two weeks and I plan on spending my time working, working to find a new job, and cooking/baking.  Sam gave me a whole grain bread cookbook so plan on looking for some bread photos soon!!  

Hope everyone had a great holiday and happy New Years!

Cookie Marathon 2010

Every christmas my mother and I make around 15 different types of cookies.  We have our tried and true, approximately 13, and then we have a few that we try out each year.  Most of the time the ones we try out get added to our "tried and true" list.  Crazy how that happens huh?

Unfortunately being a Grad student does not allot me a huge amount of time to devote to the making of these cookies.  I made the dough for several of them and then my mom and I had a cookie marathon last Saturday.  This entailed baking cookies from 10 AM until I left at 4 PM, she continued on into the wee hours of the night... we truly could be labeled mentally insane...

Here are some photos for you to drool over

Toffee squares, which got a little over done, and flour.  The kitchen is small(at least when you're making TONS of cookies) and we have to put everything somewhere!

These are chocolate orange cookies, which get dipped in chocolate after baking.  HOLY YUM!

Quite possibly my favorite cookies of all time!  Chocolate Ginger Cookies.  Think molasses meets ginger meets chocolate all in your mouth.

Buried amongst other cookie tools are the finished cookies, chocolate crinkles, russian teacakes, peanut butter nutella sandwiches, chocolate ginger cookies, and peanut butter logs.  

After work tomorrow night I'm heading back over to my parents to frost our sugar cookies in royal icing.  It's a tradition with my mom and myself, which tends to take us almost 2 hours due to our compulsive perfectionist selves :)  But it's fun and it means christmas to me.  I LOVE it.  

More pictures to come.  Happy Holidays!  Off to study for my last exam, that Epidemiology test does not know what's coming ;)

Snow Snow Snow

Just when I thought the snow was bad... I saw this

Oh yes this was the mess that I came across this morning when Karen and I went out to shovel.  The stupid snow plow and shoved all this snow/ice mixture into the end of our driveway.  Let's just say it was great fun to shovel this.

The morning started with some homework and a great cup of Starbucks xmas blend coffee.  Then we had to shovel.  I barely was able to squeeze out the door... cuz we were literally snowed in!

There did not even look like there was supposed to be a sidewalk in our yard

Craziness.  Together Karen and I accomplished the driveway in just under an hour.  It was tough but we had to do it so she could get to lacrosse.  Hopefully we don't have to do this for at least a few more days!

In other news the Vikings game had to be rescheduled and moved because the Metrodome Collapsed!!!  This has only happened two other times in the history of the Metrodome, and it was early in it's 'career'.  Who knew a little snow could cause so many problems?

The rest of the day for me is going to be spent making christmas cookies at my parent's house and then going to the Gopher Women's Basketball game with Sam.  That is unless of course Cal Poly does not make it into MN in time for a 7 PM game.  I guess only time will tell!

Happy Sunday :)

Snowzilla '10

Today there was a blizzard.  Unfortunately I didn't capture any pictures of the snow today :(  But the great thing about snow is that it'll all be there tomorrow!  IE check back for photos...

In case you didn't hear, we here in MN got over a foot of snow in less than 24 hours.  This lead to the buses shutting down, along with many other businesses.  It even got so bad that the snow plows stopped working!!!  WHAT?!?!  The Vikings game is even rescheduled to Monday night because the Giants couldn't make it in and because they were nervous that the dome might cave in due to the amount of snow on the Metrodome.  WOWSERS!  Who would've thought a little snow could do so much damage!

This snowstorm did provide in quite a productive day for me though!!!  I slept at Sam's last night and I didn't make it back to my house until after 2 PM and then Karen and I had to shovel the driveway to get her car into the garage.  Thanks to help from Lori, one of the girls who lives above me, it only took us about a half hour to shovel!  Then Karen and I decided to finally defrost our fridge.... which we needed to do about a month ago.  Ooops!

After this I started work on some cinnamon raisin bread.  I've been meaning to make some for a while now, but haven't had enough time to devote to bread.  When I found out I got called off of work tonight I knew that I HAD to make bread.  Here's the final product:

I used a recipe from the Joy of cooking, but I modified it a little bit because I didn't have any butter.  Thus I used 2 Tbsp of butter flavored shortening and then 3 Tbsp of vegetable oil.  I am trying to rid my diet of white flour so I substituted whole wheat and whole wheat pastry flour.  I also decided to use agave nectar instead of sugar to sprinkle on the dough before rolling it up.  In retrospect it definitely didn't turn out the same because you didn't get the buttery sugary goodness that you do when you use real butter and sugar.  I will say that it still was REALLY good, but different.  If I made it again I would use more agave nectar and cinnamon before rolling it up.  It would also be interesting to use stevia or truvia.  I wonder if you'd get the same reaction as sugar if I used this?  Perhaps I'll give it a try on the next snow day ;)

I also used my time today to get some homework done.  I finished a paper and an assignment.  On tomorrow's agenda is proof reading the paper and completing my biostats homework.  

OOO  before I forget I wanted to say that last night I went xmas light house viewing with Sam.  All in all it was fun!  But some of the houses were just not as cool as the others.  This one was my favorite

It had EVERYTHING, santa, the grinch, snowmen, reindeer, snowflakes in the trees, etc.  We ended up driving by this one twice because we liked it so much!  Luckily it didn't start snowing until after we had driven around ;)  We did stop for some beer and apps at Park Tavern.  We were there for just over an hour and by the time we got outside it had snowed nearly an inch!!!  

OK well I'll get outside in the morning tomorrow to snap some photos of the snow.  I somehow don't think that the pictures will do the snow justice, but maybe just maybe...

So excited to go to bed so I can wake up and have some Christmas blend Starbucks coffee :)  I LOVE this stuff!