Sunday, October 4, 2009

A Twist on the Chocolate Chip Cookie

I always turn on the oven and set it for 350 before starting.

1 cup of butter, softened
1 1/4 c. brown sugar
3/4 c. granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 1/4 tsp. vanilla (I prefer double vanilla)
1 c. oats (ground in a food processor until a powder)
1 c. Rice Chex (ground in a food processor with the oatmeal until a powder)
2 1/4 c. flour (maybe a little less)
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. Kosher salt
about 2 cups of chocolate chips

Combine all dry ingredients into a bowl and set aside. Cream butter and both brown and granulated sugar until smooth. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well. Pour all of the dry ingredients including the chocolate chips into the wet mixture at once. Mix just until combined. Do not overmix!! Place dough by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake for about 10 minutes and tadah!! Let the cookies sit on the cookie sheet for about 5 minutes while they cool and then transfer to a cooling rack. :) Tasty morsels.

Award Winning Pumpkin Goodness Bread

Last weekend the town that I live in held it's annual Harvest Festival. I saw that they were having a baking contest and wasn't going to be left out. I decided to stay up until 3am the night before making my delicious recipes. I picked one recipe for the season which qualified for a specific catergory...Pumpkin Bread. To my surprise, I won 2nd place! I was pleasantly surprised and won a $25.00 gift certificate along with having my recipe published in next year's cookbook.

Buffy's "Pumpkin Goodness" Bread

3 1/2 c. flour
3 c. sugar
4 eggs
1 c. oil
1 large can of 100% pure pumpkin
1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. fresh nutmeg
1 tsp. cloves
1 tsp. Kosher salt

Cream Cheese Frosting
(to be drizzled over the top of the loaves of bread)
(divide the frosting recipe into 1/3's for bread loaves)

6 oz. cream cheese
1/2 c. butter
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
4 c. powdered sugar

Grease and lightly flour 2 bread pans
Mix sugar, eggs and oil. Blend in pumpkin and then add remaining dry ingredients. Bake 1 hour @325 degrees. Use a toothpick to make sure the bread is completely done in the middle. The toothpick should come out pretty clean. Let the loaves cool some before drizzling the cream cheese mixture. :)