Hey all,

I’m moving all the posts from this blog over to my new blog: Crafting and Cooking

Follow all my posts there!

Nutella Cookies from Tasty Kitchen. Really simple cookies, really simple recipe. It’s 4 ingredients, although I cut one out. So it’s Nutella, flour, sugar and an egg. I cut out the sugar. Nutella is pretty sweet to begin with, that’s why I nixed the sugar.

However, the mixture is extremely crumbly. I added a bit of water, but it didn’t help too much. If I had added the sugar, it would have probably been worse.

They aren’t the prettiest cookies, but the taste is pretty good. And I think if you’d want something quick and chocolatey, these would totally be a go to thing.

Greek yogurt and honey popsicles! I found a cheap popsicle mold and just had to make myself a treat. Basically, I mixed honey and Greek yogurt and put it in the molds. I froze them over night before attempting to eat them.

Next time, I’ll mix extra honey into the yogurt mixture because it was more tangy than sweet. I tried putting layers into the popsicles by putting honey in between spoonfuls of yogurt, but the honey by itself didn’t really freeze.

But this was really good. Soo yummy. I won’t lie, I also had one for breakfast.

Cinnamon Sugar Pull Apart Muffins from Wendy See Wendy Do.

So this pin was very enticing on Pinterest. (Follow me here!) It’s a pretty easy recipe. They’re pretty and tasty. But I don’t know if I’ll do it again. It’s a bit of work for 6-8 muffins. I probably could have eeked out another muffin by short-stacking another. I kept the piles to 4 slices of the dough to get 8 muffins. Slicing the dough was pretty difficult cause I kept smushing my original cut marks.

Cake pops, adapted from Bakerella. I joined in the cake pop craze when they started popping up. They can be time consuming, but, oh so tasty.

Here are a few tips for what always works for me:

- I always use a box cake mix that is super moist, usually a white cake. The recipe on the back will mention just using the egg whites, but I use the whole egg and follow those directions.

- Let the cake completely cool before going to crumble it, otherwise it’ll start melting the frosting when you add it.

- I only use buttercream frosting. It holds the best. For the mixture, 3/4ths of a can gives the correct texture.

- Use a scooper when making the cake balls, so that they are pretty uniform.

- Don’t just stick the lollipop sticks into the cake balls. Make sure you first dip them in the melting chips so that they’re a bit more stable.

- I stick them in the fridge overnight and never coat them before that.

- When I’m ready to coat them, I work about 5 or 6 at a time, leaving the others in the fridge.

- I use a teacup or small coffee cup for the coating chips. I’ve learned anything larger, and it’s easier to burn the coating and then you have to throw it out.

- If you want to decorate the pops further it needs to be as soon as your done shaking the excess off. The coating will still be wet and then decorations like sprinkles will still stick.

- Use styrofoam bricks to dry your pops. And have the holes already pressed in or you’ll jostle the pop as you try to fit it into the foam.

- You can get individual baggies at craft stores if you want people to be able to take them home nicely. Or if you’re serving right away, just use a large serving bowl and place them inside gently.

If you have questions, you can tweet me @angelich.

Lasagna rollups! Pretty good. Make sure to season the filling otherwise it might be a bit bland, as I experienced. You might also try putting a little bit of sauce in the middle of the rollup. This is meatless, but I would definitely try making it with Italian sausage or ground beef or turkey browned then added to the sauce that was set aside to pour over the top.

Ingredients:
- 8-9 lasagna noodles
- 1 jar of spaghetti sauce
- 16 oz ricotta cheese
- A couple handfuls of mozzarella cheese
- 1 egg, beaten

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Make the noodles to a ply-able tenderness and let them cool or you’ll burn your fingers. Pour about half the jar of spaghetti in to the bottom of a 9x13 dish. Put more water into the jar and then shake it, set it aside.

Mix together cheeses and the beaten egg. Season with salt and pepper, perhaps some onion or garlic powder. I put out a sheet of parchment paper and worked with three noodles at a time. Slather the noodles with the cheese mixture, then roll them up and place them in the baking dish on top of the sauce. Continue the steps until you have a baking dish full of rollups. Pour the rest of the sauce on top and then sprinkle more cheese on top.

Cover the dish and put it in the oven for 40 minutes. Then uncovered and bake for 10 more. The cheese on top should be melty.

Pasta salad! I love it. It’s so versatile. I grab a bottle of Italian salad dressing, some kind of noodles and then a variety of veggies. This was grape tomatoes, black olives and steamed snap peas. Plus lots of Parmesan cheese. I think goat cheese would be good too.

Coconut Chicken with Apricot Sauce from Pennies on a Platter. This was pretty tasty. I was able to cook three large chicken breasts from this recipe. I cooked on a baking sheet with aluminum foil, which next time I’ll use pyrex or something. The breading stuck to the foil when I pulled it from the oven. It wasn’t coconut-y enough for me. Not sure how to fix that without adding more coconut. The sauce was just ok for me, but was good for my dining partner.

Prosciutto, Asparagus and Parmesan Spaghetti from ValSoCal. This was sooo good. I didn’t include the mushrooms and replaced the onions with onion powder. Next time I think I’ll use thicker asparagus, my grocery story only had pencil thin ones. And I’ll probably make more sauce. I had enough to coat the pasta, but I like a saucy plate. I wish I had leftovers of this, but nope. Everything got devoured.

What to do with leftover Easter ham? Why, make fried rice. Yum. I fry up the ham in butter and brown sugar before frying up the rice with butter and garlic and the peas. Or, when I’m not making rice and just making ham, I microwave it with butter and brown sugar. hehe.

Grapes covered in goat cheese and walnuts from A Daily Something. Simple appetizer for Easter lunch. I think the hardest part was getting the goat cheese to cover the grapes fully. But it was like a sweet, tangy, crunchy bite.

Pizza crescent rolls! I had a tube of crescent rolls approaching their expiration date and I needed dinner. I had pepperoni and mozzarella string cheese. Each crescent roll got three pepperonis and a small piece of the string cheese. Baked and then served with a side of pizza sauce. Yum and fast.

“Crack Potatoes” from Plain Chicken. These were pretty good. I ate a bowl for dinner with a salad. The parts on the side where they were a bit crispy were the best part. There were still some potatoes that had a bit more bite to them which I wasn’t a big fan of. Maybe use fewer potatoes so they cook longer? I did bake the dish for 60 minutes.

Salted Caramel Butter Bars from Cookies & Cups, which is becoming one of my favorite food blogs. Delicious. Seriously. One bite caused my bf to call me a goddess.

It wasn’t really salted caramel, I didn’t have coarse salt. I had a salt grinder, and I didn’t want to go overboard. Unwrapping the caramels had to be the hardest, most time-consuming part of this recipe. I ended up with a lot more dough than I needed. Or I was supposed to do half and half for the crust and the topping.

Bunny cake. Isn’t it cute? Full recipe with step-by-step instructions, click here.