Easy start

I put some of the Vanilla Sugar cookies on popsicle sticks, some of the Gluten Free Jumbo cookies in mini-muffin tins, and then I baked a bunch the regular old way. Once the oven was preheated, I tossed everything in.

Once everything was baked and cooled, I enlisted the troops (by bribing them with cookie-pops) to help decorate and arrange the basket. I know this is a trial run, but I’m making up some of these baskets for Valentine’s Day. Any great Valentine Baking ideas? Send them along!

Valentine Basket

Vanilla Sugar POP

Happy Monday! Facing a week-long menu of packed lunches can be overwhelming, but I was inspired by an idea from an Immaculate fan last week. Beth wrote:  ”I’ve also made little pockets of peanut butter and jelly. (seal the ends tightly by pinching them) Bake, let them cool a bit and it’s the perfect lunch/snack for my three year old.” What a great idea, so into the kitchen I went.

I took some peanut butter (though you can use cashew, almond or soy butter) and some homemade raspberry jam (again, any kind of jelly or jam will do). I also had an aging banana that would never pass muster in one of the lunchboxes I pack in the morning. Preheat your oven and get some baking sheets.

For the rollups, I used 4 (a half can) of our crescent rolls and unrolled them on the sheet into their flat, triangle shape. Then, I took the other 4 pieces, also unrolled and made one flat piece, pinching the separations together. Next, I gathered my ingredients.

Lay out crescent roll triangles

Gather ingredients for filling

On the triangles, spread a thinnish layer each of PB and jelly. Then ROLL from wide to narrow.

On the rectangular piece, do the same in the center. Then, add some sliced banana. Fold up the four edges.

Roll the PB and Jelly up

Prepare the tart.

Then bake them. I keep an eye on things, and when the dough is golden brown, they are done. They can get a bit messy, but once they cool, everything firms up! The open-faced tart will take a bit longer to bake. Let everything cool. I put them in the refridge overnight, then sliced the tart in the morning, sending the kids with a roll up and a slice.

YUM

When they got home that day, they were effusive and requested that lunch again (and there was more in the refridge for tomorrow!) Plus, the greatest compliment, another parent had heard about the treats and called for the recipe!

Chocolate croissant, anyone?

From right here in Massachusetts, Loredana wrote us with this recipe. Yes, we’re all on diets, and no, there were no leftovers.

An easy enough start

Immaculate Baking Crescent Rolls
Nutella (or the chocolate, hazelnut spread of your dreams)
Slivered almonds
Powdered sugar

Preheat your oven. Unroll the crescent rolls so they are little triangles. Spread 1 tablespoon of nutella over each triangle, top with 1 tablespoon of almonds and roll into the crescent shape (wider end to point).

1 TBSP of nutella

1 TBSP slivered almonds

And rrrrrolllllll.

Bake according to the package and sift a little powdered sugar over each before serving warm.

Just before serving. . .

Here’ what we’re up to this week: baking and gifting. Neither has to take a lot of time or money — just some thought and creative fun.

Here in the Northeast, we usually have a bit of snow by now, but nothing since Halloween. So we decided to bring our snowmen-building impulses in house. We’re getting creative with our Chocolate Peppermint cookie dough. . . .

Snowman family

Here’s what you need:

1 package of Immaculate Baking Chocolate Peppermint cookie dough (or your favorite flavor)

Edible decorating goodies (we used crushed candy canes, butterscotch chunks, and mint chips).

What you'll need

Preheat the oven as directed and take three pods of dough. Leave one alone. Cut one in half and add that half to the third pod. Now, you have three balls of dough in 3 different sizes. Stack them on top of each other on a cookie sheet, so there is about an inch between each (you want them to melt into each other.)

Space and decorate

Then decorate.

The goodies will melt into the snowmen.

I used crushed canes for the bottom, butterscotch chunks for middle buttons, candy cane shards for a nose, and peppermint chips for eyes. One package of dough will make 8 snowmen — a pretty big family! I make 4 on each cookie sheet, pop them in the oven, and watch them closely. Let them cool for a while and arrange as you like.

*************

We’re also baking up Gingerbread and Peppermint cookies and packaging them in pretty cellophane for delicious gifts: teachers, mail carriers, neighbors. If you leave some for the big, bearded man in red, you’ll want to unwrap — he’s not crazy about taking off his gloves . .. .

To bake a cookie

Someday I will wield a glittery pink spatula while wearing an apron with frilly white trim that nips my waist in and makes me look like a baking goddess while I effortlessly make (from scratch!) cookies in all sorts of ingenious flavors. Someday…. or, perhaps never now that I have found a prepared cookie dough that tastes like it came from the oven of June Cleaver and is made with all natural ingredients. Joy! After a weekend of work, house chores and general child related chaos, The Hubs and I were ready to relax. It’s almost physically impossible for me to relax without quelling my voracious sweet tooth. Since the oven was still hot from having cooked dinner, I decided to pop a few (ok, eight) little rounds of Triple Chocolate cookie dough by Immaculate Baking Co. How liberating it felt to simply break off however many cookies I wanted to bake, plop them onto a pan and bake for ten minutes. Yum! Considering the speed at which we savored these cookies, they could very well be re-named Vanishing Triple Chocolate. Enjoying a treat without having to clean up a cataclysm of batter and bowls was a divine way to end the weekend. No frilly aprons necessary.

Marissa writes for her personal blog, http://www.sideofsparkle.blogspot.com

Our October snow may have come and gone here in the Northeast, but here are some wintry treats that won’t melt.  We read all manner of Gingerbread themed books here (our very favorite being the Jim Aylesworth version, in case inquiring minds wanted to know).  But be it boy, girl, baby, or family, we are way into these fast moving treats in my house and since I had some leftover dough I decided to try Gingerbread Snow people.  This. Was. So. Easy.

gingerbread pods

You need three unbaked dough pieces of Immaculate Baking Company Gingerbread Cookie Dough for each snow person.  Cut one dough piece in half.  Take one half and one whole piece, roll it into a ball and place on cookie sheet.  Take remaining whole piece and roll into ball and place roughly 3/4 inch away from first piece.  Now roll up the half piece of dough you have leftover and place it about 1/2 inch from the second piece.  Bake at 350 degrees for about 8-10 minutes.

Constructing your people

Unlike his literary counterparts, our Frosty little buddies have no feet so it’s pretty safe to bet they will stay in the kitchen.  About a minute after removing them from the oven, I gave our men eyes in the form of upside down white chocolate chips, but I left them otherwise naked so the kids could have another activity after their houses were finished.  But they looked so tasty laying on the counter, and I was feeling rather fox-like and, well, the kids got whole houses, right?  Maybe I’ll buy another package so they can try some, too.

Leave the decorating for the kids!

‘Tis the season to look on Facebook and see all the cute and crafty things everyone is doing to decorate and celebrate.  After seeing pictures of my friend’s children decorating gorgeous gingerbread houses, I was torn. I wanted to do gingerbread houses with my kids, but after making Thanksgiving dinner a couple of days ago, I didn’t particularly feel like making a bunch of gingerbread, and I am too cheap to buy two of those monstrous kits they sell in the stores.  But upon opening my fridge to fetch snacks, what to my wondering eyes should appear but  a package of Immaculate Baking Company Gingerbread Cookie Dough that I had purchased and forgotten about.  Hooray, time to play!
I like to let my kids eat their houses, and I can’t stand having them linger half eaten on my counter for a week or more, so I wanted them tiny.  I floured a rolling pin and cutting board, grabbed three cookie dough balls and started rolling.  Through trial and error, I found that this is best acheived if you let the dough sit on the counter for about 5 minutes after removing it from the refrigerator.  I used half of a graham cracker as my template and cut two squares out of the rolled dough.  I added two more balls to the leftover scraps and repeated until I had 12 squares.  You need 6 squares for each house – 4 walls and two rooftops, I would recommend an additional square that can be cut in half diagonally to help support the roof, but I didn’t do that.  I baked the squares for 11 minutes on a floured cookie sheet at 350 degrees and checked to make sure they were pretty firm so they wouldn’t collapse in on any gingerbread families.

Squaring the gingerbread.

After the squares cooled, I trimmed the uneven sides, made a basic sugar and water frosting compound and began my short lived gingerbread contractor career.  After some initial mishaps, I succeeded in creating a couple of cottages that only my children could love, and after giving them a good hour so the frosting could dry, we started the task of decorating.  Of course, you can just use whatever you have on hand to beautify your buildings – dregs of the Halloween bowl work nicely and we had a smattering of candy, Annie’s chocolate bunnies, some cereal, chocolate chips and several kinds of sprinkles left over from past baking endeavors.  Due to a mishap involving a dearly departed snowglobe, lots of cursing and my last package of confectioners sugar, we used leftover frosting tubes to glue our goodies onto the houses.

The final product looked good enough to eat (as is generally the rule when one is working with a giant cookie decorated with more cookies, sugar and candy), and our cookie subdivion quickly disappeared faster than a wayward Gingerbread Boy.  And the best part is that I had almost half a package of cookie dough left for more treats… like Gingerbread Snowmen!

Voila! You can build a village. . . .

As I get closer and closer to my due date (only 3 weeks away – woo hoo), I’ve been trying to find recipes and make dinners that are fast, easy, and don’t require a lot of ingredients. I had some Immaculate crescent rolls and chicken calling my name in the refrigerator, so I knew those were going to be my bases for the dinner. After searching around online, I found a good chicken crescent roll recipe that seemed easy and really tasty.

Prep

Since it’s just the two of us and I like to get two nights worth of dinner out of each meal, I knew this recipe would work really well for us. All I needed was a pound of chicken, a package of crescent rolls, shredded cheddar cheese, milk, and cream of chicken soup. I’m not a big fan of using condensed soups and since I had a cream cheese based garlic flavored cooking cream I decided to use that instead. If you don’t love garlic like we do, I would suggest using the plain cooking cream or using cream of chicken soup as this does give it a really good garlic flavor.

Half way through my chicken cooking (350 degrees for 25-30 minutes) I started to prep the rest of dinner. I threw some potatoes in the oven, washed my broccoli, and started on the rest of the chicken dinner. I unrolled my crescent rolls, got my casserole dish greased, and started to cook the cooking cream. I warmed up the cooking cream with a ½ cup of milk so it would have more of a soupy consistency, but still have a little thickness to it. I also decided to add some thyme and onion powder for a little bit of extra flavor. When the chicken was finished, I cut it into bite size pieces and put around 4 pieces on each roll – basically just enough to fill out the wider part of the roll. I then sprinkled on the cheddar cheese, using about 1 tbsp. per roll.

Chicken and cheese on crescent rolls.

The tricky part is getting them to close nicely. They don’t exactly roll so much as you just have to get them closed. I pulled the pointy triangle tip over the chicken part and basically pulled up and down on the edges to get them to close. It’s not going to look pretty necessarily, but you want to close it so none of the cheesy goodness leaks out. After closing them, I put them in the casserole dish and poured the cooking cream/milk mixture over top.

Close them up.

Add sauce.

I let them cook for 30 minutes and they came out perfectly. The creamy mixture kept everything nice and moist and the crescent rolls were nice and fluffy. My husband loved this dinner and asked me to add it to our usual repertoire of dinners. I really enjoyed how great this tasted and how easy it was. I figured how could you go wrong with some sort of meat and cheese inside of a flaky crescent roll? This will be a perfect meal to make once our little Nugget arrives.

Dinner!

Marissa is an entrepreneur, blogger and mother of two sweet baby girls. Between diaper changes and designing fashion jewelry, Marissa finds the time to make a monumental mess in the kitchen as she pursues her love of cooking, baking and all things food related. She writes about her adventures in motherhood and business and shares her musings on her personal blog. From Boston to New York to Albuquerque, she now lives in New England at the edge of a salt marsh with her family.

Rustic apple tart!

I made this rustic apple tart last week with some *superb* pie dough from Immaculate Baking Co. my local market (i love you, Market Basket) just started carrying. I stopped buying ready-made pie dough last year after I realized what nasty stuff is in most brands. So, I tried my hand at making my own. Pate brisee, as it is formally known, is not complicated to make, but it’s messy and takes a good chunk of time to prepare (well, most of the time is spent cleaning up). Alas, our pie consumption dwindled and in a tearful nostalgia I thought about apple tarts, chicken pot pie, strawberry rhubarb pie… until that beautiful autumn morning when I saw something new. An artsy, quirky box of pie dough in the refrigerator case; Immaculate Baking Co. “No artificial ingredients…all natural,” the box read. Hmmm, thought I as I flipped it over to read the ingredients. To think, it was true! I was in pie dough nirvana. My mind flooded with possibilities – I stashed two boxes in my shopping cart and giddily slipped into the checkout lane. That night I put the dough to the taste-test and made chicken pot and a rustic apple tart. The crust was practically glowing when I drew the pies from the oven (the perfect golden brown) and the flavor was outstanding. You might even say the whole experience was immaculate.

RECIPE (this is for one medium-sized tart)

1 tablespoon butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 1/2 cups sliced red delicious apples

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

pinch ground nutmeg

1/2 package Immaculate Baking Co. pie crust

1 teaspoon granulated sugar

ice water

Preheat oven to 425° and set oven rack in the middle of the oven. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium-high heat. Add brown sugar, stir in apples and spices. Cook for about five minutes to slightly soften the apples. Allow to cool. Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface into  ten inch circle. Place the dough on a piece of parchment paper on top of a baking sheet. Arrange cooled apples in center of dough, leaving a 2-inch border. Fold the edges of dough toward center, pressing gently. Brush dough with 1 teaspoon ice water and sprinkle evenly with 1 teaspoon granulated sugar. Place the tart in the refrigerator for 10 minutes (this chills the fat in the dough to ensure a flaky crust). Bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown.