Recipes – Taking on Today

Easter Breakfast – Cinnamon Roll Bunnies

April 2, 2013 by Kelley

I wanted to make a quick post to share the fun Easter morning breakfast that we tried this year. I found this post on Pinterest for making “Cinnabunny” Rolls out of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. We love Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for the occassional weekend breakfast treat, so I thought it would be a fun surprise for my daughter on Easter. They were a hit, but I made mine a little different than the original post for a few reasons.

From http://www.bettycrocker.com/tips/tipslibrary/baking-tips/cinnabunnies

First of all, I bought a different variety of cinnamon rolls as used in the original post. She used the ones with Cream Cheese icing, which I’ve never tried, but if her recipe is correct, must be *quite* different than the ones I bought. The original post clears shows the cinnamon rolls being un-rolled to make the folded over ears, but the kind I bought are not rolled up at all – they just have cinnamon mixed into the dough and don’t have any sort of layers that can be unrolled.

Since I couldn’t un-roll mine, I just cut 4 of the cinnamon rolls in half and then shaped each half into an ear that pointed straight up, instead of the folded over ears that were shown in the original recipe. I still think they made cute bunny ears though.

Here they are about to go into the oven. By the way, if you don’t have a Silpat for non-stick baking, you should go get one. Now. They are so amazing, and MUCH better than cheaper varieties of silicon non-stick liners I’ve tried over the years.

And I didn’t think raisins and almonds would go over very well in our family so I just left them plain and then iced the whole thing after they came out of the oven. I thought about adding a little red food coloring to the icing to make them pink bunnies, but I was in too much of a hurry. We go to the early service at church, so we are always a little pressed for time on Sunday mornings. Good news is that we all loved our Easter bunny cinnamon rolls, and it was fun to do something a little different for Easter breakfast. I think we’ll make this an Easter Sunday tradition. (Although I’ll probably find a variety that actually rolls up next time to try the folded-over ears.)

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Shredded Chicken Tacos

March 23, 2013 by Kelley

As I promised yesterday, I’m sharing my recipe for Shredded Chicken Tacos. We make this once a month or two, and I freeze the leftovers so we can have it once or twice in between making it fresh. It’s super easy to thaw and re-heat for a delicious leftover meal that tastes exactly like the first time around.

Shredded Chicken Taco Meat

Place 3-4 boneless chicken breasts in a crock pot. Cover with water.
Add packet of taco seasoning (I always buy McCormick brand, which is labeled “no MSG”, for what it’s worth).
Cook on high 3-4 hours or low for 6-8 hours, then shred chicken with forks.

Cooking/Serving Suggestions:

I serve the shredded chicken on soft taco shells for myself, and put it into a quesadilla for my daughter. When she was a baby, I would just serve her the shredded chicken by itself and she could eat it as a finger food. As she got a little older, I would add some shredded cheese on top.
Variations call for adding green peppers, onion, and/or salsa in the crock-pot, but we never do this, because we don’t like all that stuff in my tacos. Some people even substitute the salsa for the taco seasoning all together.
Some recommended sides are black beans (I get the low-sodium variety for my daughter), corn, Mexican rice, and guacamole.

And a teaser for tomorrow… This afternoon, I got it in my head that I would finally tackle a project that I had been wanting to do – re-purpose a table that was not working in my office / craft room – and I did that, but that got me started on rearranging the rest of my room. Since we moved last year, my office has been a complete disaster, and it needs a lot of attention, but I’m making some headway. My husband went out with a friend tonight and I’m going to stay up late working in here and hopefully I’ll have some progress photos tomorrow and an update on this undertaking! (I’ll also share about my re-purposed table project.)

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

Teacher Appreciation Cookies

March 19, 2013March 19, 2013 by Kelley

This week is Teacher Appreciation Week at my daughter’s school. Monday, everyone brought flowers for the teachers to put together into a flower arrangement, so we picked out some flowers over the weekend for Andrea to bring in. Today, students were asked to bring in a snack or sweet treat for their teachers. I talked to Andrea and she wanted to make chocolate chip cookies for her teachers. I suggested we put them in some Ball jars. We went to made a double batch of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (BEST-EVER Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies). They really are the best-ever chocolate chip cookies, and definitely chewy, which I love.

I bought a cookie scoop to use for the first time ever, and I *loved* it. I will never go back to scooping cookie dough with a spoon. The scoop I bought is slightly larger than the standard size I think – it holds about 1 1/2 tablespoons. It was sold as a “small” scoop at my grocery store, but from what I can tell, the standard size for a cookie scoop is 1 tablespoon. As a result, my cookies were a little bigger than the original recipe, but perfectly round and pretty consistent in size between the cookies. I overfilled the scoop in the first couple of batches, so those cookies were a bit bigger, but I found out they were slightly too big to fit even in the wide-mouth Ball jars I bought. I was able to fix that by just barely filling the cookie scoop for the remainder of the batches, and those cookies fit just fine in the jars.

I used two different types of chocolate chips – Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and Nestle milk chocolate chips. I’ve used Nestle semi-sweet before, but I thought they were too sweet for the recipe, so I was curious how the other types would taste. I definitely preferred the taste of bittersweet chocolate chips that the recipe calls for, even though I’m not normally a fan of bittersweet chocolate, it seemed to match the cookie best. The only downside was that the Ghirardelli chips were a little wider and flatter than the Nestle chips, so the cookies with the Nestle chips turned out a little prettier with beautiful lumps from the chocolate chips.

Here are picture of a few of the cookies so you can see how beautiful they were and the difference made by the two different shaped chocolate chips. (The two lumpier ones in the front are the Nestle ones, and the two in the back are the Ghirardelli ones.)

For the jars, I traced the flat metal lid on white cardstock, and then had Andrea draw a picture for each of her teachers and write her name on each one. Then I cut them out and glued them on to the lids. (TIP: I found I needed to cut out a smaller circle of cardboard to glue between the lid and the cardstock to fill the gap from the raised edge on the lid.) I made little labels for the each jar that had the teacher’s name and said, “Thanks for making me one smart ‘cookie’!” I designed the labels in Microsoft Word, printed them on cardstock, and then cut out and hole punched the tags. Then I tied the tags on with some cute ribbon I picked up in the Target Dollar Spot a while back.

And here’s the final result! Andrea was so excited to bring them in to school this morning.

I’m linking this up to the weekly One Project at a Time link party hosted by A Bowl Full of Lemons!

Thanks for reading my blog. Time to take on the rest of my day!

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