I Love Them - Chubby Hubby Bars

Pin It Now!

You know how my husband and I are on a no sugar dealio until Thanksgiving? And we get one cheat treat every 2 weeks? This is what I had. One of these beauts. I tweaked the recipe I found on Cookies and Cups. Here is my version of Chubby Hubby Bars:

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temp

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped pretzels

1 cup of peanut butter chips

1 cup of your favorite kind of chocolate chips (I like dark chocolate and I'm not ashamed.)

(14 oz) bag of caramels,

1 Tbsp water

2 cups semi sweet chocolate chips, melted

1. Preheat oven to 350

2. Spray a 9×13 pan lightly with cooking spray.

3. Beat together your butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Probably about one minute.

4. Add eggs and vanilla, mix until incorporated.

5. On low speed add in your salt, baking soda and flour, mixing until just combined.

6. Slowly add in your 1 cup of peanut butter chips, 1 cup of chocolate chips, and Pretzels. Mix until they are like long lost friends.

7. Spread in your prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes.

8. Let cool completely. Approximately an hour. Stick it in the fridge if you want to speed the process up.

9. When cooled, melt your caramels and 1 Tbsp water in a microwave safe bowl stirring every minute until melted. Or if you don't have a microwave (we don't) then heat in a non-stick pot. Pour that deliciousness over your bars.

10. Chill in fridge (the bars, not you) for 15 minutes to set caramel.

11. Melt your 2 cups of chocolate chips however you see fit and spread over caramel.

12. Put back in the fridge for at least 30 minutes or until chocolate is set.

13. Cut into squares when ready to serve.

Have you had these before? Did you want to marry them?

Pin It Now!

Be a Fan

Latin Chicken in the Crockpot

Pin It Now! This week I am participating in Mel's Crocktober link up. Because Mel is my friend and I like crockpots and October. It's a triple win. And because I speak Pig Latin I thought I would make Slow Cooker Latin Chicken. I tweaked this recipe from allrecipes.com.

Here is my before shot --

See how lifeless and pale and unhappy everything looks? Well, everything but the LOVE mug, but that is not a part of the recipe so please don't throw that in your crockage.

1 tablespoon olive oil
3 pounds skinless chicken thighs
salt and ground black pepper to taste
1/4 cup loosely packed cilantro leaves
2 large sweet potatoes, cut into chunks
1/2 red bell pepper, cut into strips

1/2 yellow bell pepper, cut into strips
2 (15.5 ounce) cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/4 cup loosely packed cilantro leaves
1 cup hot salsa
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
3 large cloves garlic, chopped

1. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet; season the chicken thighs with salt and pepper. Sprinkle 1/4 cup cilantro over the chicken thighs; brown the chicken in the frying pan, 3 to 5 minutes each side. Or however long it takes so that your husband will fear you have undercooked the meat.

2. Arrange the chicken in the bottom of a slow cooker. Place the sweet potatoes, bell peppers, and black beans on top of the chicken. Mix together the chicken broth, 1/4 cup cilantro leaves, salsa, cumin, allspice, and garlic together in a bowl; pour into the slow cooker. Set slow cooker to LOW and cook for 5 hours or until the sweet potatoes are soft. I had to crank it up to high for 30 minutes at the end to get those sweet potatoes to submit.

3. Serve it over whatever you want, but I choose white rice and it worked well. Salt and pepper to taste. Serves about 6 hungry adults.

I am not good at plating and the chipped plate probably doesn't add pizazz to the finished product, but this junk was good. Here is what you need to know:

1. My husband loved it. He put it in his Top 12 of meals. And if you know my husband, that is good. You also know that he has a weird ranking system and rarely commits to a #1. Welcome to my world.

2. My seven-year-old son liked it and my daughter Lydia (5) tolerated it. My three-year-old would rather have died than even tasted it. But she got hungry enough right before bed that she ate some too. It was not very spicy.

3. You can prepare it the day before! This was my favorite part - I got it all ready in the crockpot and put the whole pot in the fridge overnight. The next day around lunch time I pulled it out of the fridge and pressed "Let's Do This" on my crockpot and there she went.

Head over to Mel at The Larson Lingo and check out some of the other Crocktober action!

And if you are not linked out, come back here Saturday to link up with me for Stylin' Saturday. There's a giveaway too!

Pin It Now!

Be a Fan

Chocolate Pudding Fudge Cake Spill

Pin It Now!

With a few days left until school starts I wanted to get one more item off our Summer Bucket List. Bake a chocolate chocolate chip cake. Me and the girls got our aprons on and went at it with this awesome recipe for Chocolate Pudding Fudge Cake. I let Lydia hold the mixer. Jordis refused to wash her hands (because that is so difficult, isn't it?) so she was to merely watch. I turned my back for a few minutes to get the chocolate chips and . . . watch the video for the scoop on who did what. And I have no idea where my girls get their personalities. Don't blame me.






Despite the loss of some batter the cake was amazing. Like "Get This Out of My House Before I Eat it All" amazing. Kinda like the cake balls. Dang, I gotta stick with the moldy fruit and get away from baking all this delicious junk.

Pin It Now!

Be a Fan

Realistic Cake Pop Recipe

Pin It Now!
For Jordis's third birthday party I decided to make cupcakes and cake pops. Because I wanted to eat one or twenty. So I browsed recipes and got some tips from my Tweeps.

Here is the best of what I learned about cake poppin'.

But just know that to make picture-perfect cake pops like the ones you might see on a crazy baker web site or over at Crazy Crafty Christina's blog you will need a strong Type-A personality, special tools, the perfect dipping chocolate, and a fancy camera. I have none of those items, but I did borrow my sister-in-law's nice camera for the party.

So my recipe, if you will, is for . . .

Realistic Cake Pops

Good-Enough Cake Pops

Not-Necessarily-Perfectly-Round-or-Smooth Cake Pops

Most-Likely-To-Not-Be-Featured-on-Bakerella.com Cake Pops

Cake Pops for the Craftily Challenged

Here you go:

1. Make and bake a cake. Preferably not in an Easy-Bake Oven. Let your kids stir up the mix a bit cuz they will remember it fondly when they grow up.

2. Let it cool.

3. Take the cake out of the pan, bash it up, and put it in a large mixing bowl, not a fish bowl.

I did one batch of chocolate cake and vanilla frosting and one batch of yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Both of them were delicious and overly consumed by moi.

4. Add at least 1/2 of the tub of artery clogging, artificial everything frosting to the bashed up cake.

Special Tip #1 - Probably best to add a little more than 1/2 the tub of frosting. It makes for some good glue to hold the ball together and if you don't put enough in, they get a little cracky.

5. Mix the cake and frosting with a fork until you are bored. Then use your hands until it is thoroughly mixed and begging to be shaped into balls.

6. Roll that mixture into balls with your hands.

Let your kids help you with this, but don't expect the balls to be perfectly bally. But who cares? It's for a three-year-old's birthday party, not a magazine cover. Unless it's for a magazine cover - in that case just go buy the cake pops. Make the balls not too big, not too small. Maybe about the size of a walnut. Unless walnuts greatly vary in size (do they?). If that's the case, I don't know what to tell you.

7. Put the balls on a cookie/baking sheet lined with wax or parchment paper and put in your refrigerator for at least an hour.

Some internet peeps said to freeze, others said that freezing them was lame. Don't leave the balls in there for more than 24 hours or they begin to dry out.

8. Get some melting chocolates and put them on the stove in a non-stick pot to melt.

Special Tip #2: Don't use a stainless steel pot like I did with my first batch of purple melting junk. Because well, it just doesn't work and I had to toss it.

9. Dip the tip of fancy sticks you bought from a craft store or ones you collected from the tootsie pops your kids just ate, into the melted chocolate and then stick it about half way into the ball.

10. Stick all the balls (now with sticks in them) back in the fridge so that chocolate, (which acts like glue, but won't get you high), will harden.

10. After a few minutes, take out one pop at a time and begin the arduous dipping process. And by dipping I mean DON'T DIP!

Use a spoon to drip the chocolate onto the ball. Get it all over that bad boy. I am sure the unrealistic cake pop recipes have a fancy way of doing this so the chocolate goes on perfectly smooth. But I am sure that is more time consuming and stressful so just get the surface of the ball covered and move on with your life.

11. After the ball is unevenly lathered with the melting chocolate then shake on your sprinkles, chocolate chips, shards of glass, or whatever else you think would make a great topping for your pops.

12. Stick the pops in a flat piece of styrofoam.

We always throw away styrofoam when it comes in packaging because our cats eat it and then puke it up. (Who says styrofoam is not recyclable? Tell that to my cats.) Therefore, I had to buy a piece of styrofoam at the craft store . . . perhaps the most painful part of my cake-pop journey.

I made a cake-pop bouquet with some of the cake pops (on an $8 styrofoam ball!) and covered others with treat bags and ribbon as party favors.

Special Tip #3 If you make your balls too big or they won't fit into the treat bags and you will have to eat them right there on the spot.

The birthday girl loved the cake pops = success!

The birthday girl's mom loved the cake pops = cake pop booty.

The cake pops were time consuming to make, but if you follow my special tips and don't expect perfection then they are not difficult to make. My goal is to never to make them again simply because they tasted incredible and I ate too many and I don't want to get fat and have health issues.

Pin It Now!

Be a Fan