Cooking adventures

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.

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.

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.

Happy Pi Day! By request, I made a square banana cream pie. I used a graham cracker crust and then adapted the filling from Joyful Baker. I made my own whipped cream to fold in (a little less than a pint of heavy whipping cream, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar).

And I accidentally didn’t follow certain directions. I ended up folding the cream cheese/condensed milk mixture into the pudding before folding in the whipped cream. But I folded the whipped cream into the pudding/cream cheese/condensed milk mixture. So extra folding.

Still all of it was tasty.