Alphabet Soup

Okay, so after my last post you're probably going to be shaking your head when I tell you that I've joined another cooking group.  :)  Brenda of Meal Planning Magic  has revived her  Eating the Alphabet , series, and since it kind of gets back to the "roots" of my own blog, I couldn't really pass it up.  ;) So, while I do complain a bit about Pinterest, I have actually gotten some good ideas from there!  One of the recipes that caught my eye last month was these Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins from Skip to my Lou .  I made them, with some changes, and they were a hit.  While trying to decide what to post for the A or B month, I thought these would be perfect. Hey!  That's Sprout swiping one while I'm trying to take pictures.   Yes, I know, banana chocolate chip muffins are not earth-shattering, but I healthy-fied these, and that made me feel much better about the fact that we were all popping these little bite-sized tasty t...

It's almost amusing to talk about the snow day we had a couple of weeks ago, considering that the temperature the last few days has been in the 70's!  Crazy, I know.  But anyway, we had a snow day at the beginning of the month.  Well, honestly, it was more of a snow-covered-ice with sub-zero windchill day.  The schools closed.  My husband even stayed home from work!  So, of course I wanted to bake.  And bake I did! I was able to cross making challah bread off my learn-to-do list , which was awesome!  My loaf of bread certainly wouldn't win any beauty contests, but it definitely tasted good.  I used this recipe from Red Star Yeast  (which I love by the way!), and I would use it again.  I mixed it up in the bread machine, then shaped it by hand and baked it in the oven.  I must make challah bread more often!! I also tried the Baking Illustrated chocolate chip cookies via Brown Eyed Baker .  I don't know...

You may remember that a while back I made some  baked doughnut bites .  They were good, but upon further review they need some tweaking.  I'm working on that. However, I've been tossing around these chocolate doughnut muffins around in my head for a while.  What does it say about you when you're thinking about recipes and ingredient proportions while you're driving down the highway??  Anyway, these are oh-so-good.  I baked them in mini muffin pans again, to try to get the impression that they are more like doughnut holes.  (By the way, do you prefer "doughnut" or "donut"? and a funny quote about it all.)  They were then dipped in a chocolate glaze.  Do they truly taste like chocolate cake doughnuts?  Not exactly . But the chocolate glaze?  It tastes just like the glaze you would get at a doughnut shop.  For "research" purposes, I even stopped at a doughnut shop and got a chocolate cake doughnut with choc...

So...as I was perusing my cookbook for Tuesdays with Dorie , I came upon a recipe for Chocolate-Chocolate Chunk Muffins on page 19, complete with a giant picture on the opposite page. They just looked and sounded too good to resist. I checked the completed recipes list of TWD, thinking surely someone had picked this recipe to bake in the past...but no, it hasn't come up on the list yet. Well, I just had to make them, and couldn't pass up blogging about them! Now, can someone please explain to me how a recipe that says it yields 12 muffins, actually makes 22 when I make it?? I don't understand it. Do I have a misconception of what "regular" muffin tins are? Surely not. I did not pull out my mini muffin pans, I promise! :) It is possible that I didn't fill my muffin cups up enough, but I really think if I'd used all the batter for just 12 muffins, I would have been facing a huge mess... Who knows. Anyway, I wound up with a lot more than it was supposed t...