Texas Brownies

It’s been a cold snowy week here and nothing is more comforting than a nice glass of milk or cup of tea and an ooey gooey brownie, so that’s what we are making this week, brownies. We’re not making just any brownie, we are making Texas brownies. Don’t ask me how they go their name, maybe it’s because “everything is bigger in Texas” and these brownies are bigger and better than most or maybe it’s the buttermilk, I don’t really know.  I do know that this one recipe makes a lot of brownies, so you’ll have brownies to last you a long time!

This receipt was at the bottom of my mom’s recipe box and we never thought to try them before. They were from a co-worker of my dad who used to make them for luncheons and parties, so that’s why it makes so much (feel free to cut down this recipe if you’re not feeding dozens of people).

Texas Brownies

You will need...

2 cups of flour

2 cups of sugar

1 cup butter or margarine

1 cup of strong brewed coffee

¼ cup of unsweetened cocoa

2 tsp. vinegar

½ cup of milk (if you have actual buttermilk then use that instead, but if you don’t you can make your own with the vinegar listed above)

2 eggs

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. vanilla

How to...

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Butter a 17 ½ inch x 11 inch jelly roll pan. You can line the pan with tin foil like we did if you have an older pan that might stick or if you want less cleanup.

Mix the flour, baking soda, and sugar in a large bowl. Set aside.

If you don’t have buttermilk on hand and need to make some, add the vinegar to the milk and let sit for about 5 minutes. If you have buttermilk skip this step and ignore the milk and vinegar ingredients. 

In a heavy saucepan, combine butter, coffee, and cocoa. Stir and mix well. Heat until boiling.

Once the mixture boils, pour over the dry ingredients.

 Add the buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla. Mix well, making sure to get rid of as many lumps as you can and make sure the flour mixture is thoroughly incorporated. 

Pour into the prepared jelly roll pan and spread evenly. 

Bake the brownies for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

While the brownies are baking...you can make the icing.

For the icing you will need, ½ cup of butter or margarine, 2 tbsp. of cocoa, ¼ cup of milk, and 3 ½ cups of icing sugar.

In another heavy saucepan, combine the butter or margarine, cocoa, and milk. Heat until boiling, stirring constantly. Once it comes to a boil, take it off the stove.

Mix in the icing sugar and vanilla and stir until smooth.

Pour the warm frosting over the fresh from the oven brownies and let sit. You can put them in the fridge if you want to speed the process along or you can let them sit out until they get firm and the icing hardens.

Finally, cut them into bars and enjoy. 

Chinese New Year Fan

Today is Chinese New Year. 2018 is the Year of the Dog. The Dog is the eleventh animal in the Chinese zodiac. People who are born under the year of the Dog are often loyal, honest, and reliable; they don’t abandon their family, friends or work and are very popular in social circles. They are good at fixing and finding. However, they can be quite anxious at times even though they don’t show it. Men born under the Year of the Dog sign are energetic, genuine, and straightforward, but they are also quite stubborn and opinionated. Women born under this sign are protective, cautious, and independent, but they can be slow to trust.

To celebrate the day, we are making a Chinese fan that you can use as a fun craft to do with the kids or that you can make for decorations to celebrate the holiday.

The fan that we are making is a take on the fans that you probably made in art class at school. They are super easy and fun to make.

You will need some construction paper. Cardstock is too thick so you won’t want to use that. We have chosen red, but you can go with any colour. Good luck and popular colours for Chinese New Year are gold and red, so we are using red construction paper. 

We folded the paper in half, then unfolded it, then repeatedly folded the edges into the middle to make sure that all of the folds were even, until they were the desired width.

Then after you’ve folded it, you unfold it and then refold in a zigzag pattern.

After it’s all been folded, we decided where we wanted cut outs to be and then we cut in those spots. You don’t have to cut any pieces out, but we thought it was a nice added touch.

After you’ve done the cut outs, you can decorate. We are making it a subtle Year of the Dog fan so we drew paw prints near the top of the fan and then we did gold borders around the cut out spaces. If you want to bring the Year of the Dog even more into your fan you can print, stamp, or draw pictures onto the paper that you fold into your fan.

Lastly, we coloured two small labels gold and we taped them around the bottom of the fan to hold it together. You can also use Scotch Tape to hold it together or a twist tie.

Now you have Chinese New Year, Year of the Dog fan!

Love Potion and Pudding

It’s almost Valentine’s Day! And today we are making some super sweet treats that are very pink and quite festive.

We decided to try a drink called “Love Potion” and a pretty simple pink pudding with cookie dough brittle. This is kid friendly so you can get the kids to help out and make it as a treat for them or you can serve it for your sweetie and even make the drink a little more adultish (is that a word? Haha) if you want to.

How to make Love Potion

This drink was very yummy. I’ll admit, I drank mine right down when we tried making it.

Ok, so for this we just roughed it. You can look at the link below to see the actual recipe but we partly just winged a lot of it as we went along. The actual recipe makes six servings but we made four instead.

We used regular short glasses but you can use champagne flutes or wine glasses if you want a fancier drink.

In a bowl we measured a half cup of fresh raspberries along with a tablespoon each of lemon juice and granulated sugar and then we mashed it together with a fork. 

Place a spoonful of this mixture on the bottoms of the glasses. Then on top of that, place a nice heaping scoop of raspberry sorbet. 

We used this Chapman’s rainbow fruit swirl because it’s a Peanut and Nut Free brand, and just scooped around the other two flavours; that's why you see some green in the raspberry sorbet scoop.  Feel free to find a plain raspberry sorbet to use instead or you can even make one if you have an ice cream maker. 

Then the actual recipe says to fill the glass to the brim with sparkling raspberry lemonade. So that’s not a very easy thing to find at all so we used this raspberry lemonade and then mixed in some Club Soda to make it bubbly. It tasted really good, so it’s a fine option to go with if you can’t find the sparling raspberry lemonade like us. 

We just filled half the glass with the raspberry lemonade and the other half with Club Soda.  

This is what the drinks looks like all put together. Very yummy and refreshing. 

https://www.sugarhero.com/love-potion-number-9/

Vanilla Pudding with Cookie Dough Brittle

Let’s just say I have mixed feeling about this one. I’ll explain myself at the end of the recipe.

You’ll want to make the cookie dough brittle first as it needs time to set.

For the brittle you will need:

¼ cup of sugar

¼ cup of butter

2 tbsp. light corn syrup

1/3 cup of flour

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 tbsp. of mini semi-sweet chocolate chips or chopped up semi-sweet bits (it was hard for us to find mini chocolate chips)

Line a cookie sheet with tin foil and lightly grease it.

In a small saucepan, stir together and heat the sugar, butter, and syrup. 

Remove it from the heat and stir in the flour until mixed thoroughly and then stir in the vanilla. 

Spread the mixture you just made on the cookie sheet evenly, not too thick, but not too thin. Don’t worry, it won’t fill the entire sheet. We were kinda worried about that.

 

Bake the brittle in a 350 degrees oven for about 12 minutes. If you see it turning too dark of a brown, then you can remove it early. Once you take it out, let it sit for 5 minutes, then sprinkle with the chocolate chips. Let it cool on the sheet and then place in the fridge to firm everything up. We left it in there for a few hours.

When you feel the brittle is hardened enough, you can take it out of the fridge and break it up into various sized pieces. Put it all aside in a sealed container in the fridge until ready to eat.

For the pudding you will need:

2/3 cup sugar

3 tbsp. cornstarch

¼ tsp. salt

3 cups of milk

1 beaten egg

3 beaten egg yolks

3 tbsp. butter

1 tbsp. vanilla

In a large saucepan mix the sugar, cornstarch, and salt together. Whisk in the milk. 

Cook and stir constantly over medium high heat until it’s thickened and bubbly. Once it get to this point, cook and stir for 2 minutes more. 

Then remove from the heat and stir in half of the thickened milk mixture into your whisked egg and yolks and then pour that into the pan with the other half of the milk mixture. Bring to a gentle boil (this is where we might have gone wrong because we may have heated it too much leading to the mixture getting lumpy), reduce the heat and cook for 2 more minutes.

Stir in the butter and vanilla until all mixed and melted and then if you want to make it festive, this is when you’ll add the red food colouring to make it pinkish. 

Pour it all into a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Make sure to cover the surface of the pudding with the plastic wrap, don’t just let it cover the top of the bowl. 

Chill and then serve with the brittle on top. You can use regular bowls to serve in or fancy glasses or ramekins work too if you’re trying to spruce it up a bit.

Overall, the brittle was really good, but the pudding was a bit lumpy and the pinkness just kinda threw me off a bit, but maybe if it wasn’t lumpy or pink, I might have enjoyed this better. Probably chilling it overnight might be better as well. It was still a tad warm when we ate it.

 

http://www.midwestliving.com/recipe/vanilla-pudding-with-chocolate-chip-cookie-brittle/