Bullseye? Buckeye!

Every year, my friend Ruthie throw an ice cream sundae birthday party, where she provides the ice cream and the guests compete to win the best topping award. This year, however, was Ruthie's last New York party, because she is moving to Ohio-- the Buckeye State. For those of you who are interested, the buckeye is a nut, but it is also a delicious chocolate peanut butter candy. Ruthie, in honor of her impending move, held two contests this year, one for the best topping and one for the best interpretation of a buckeye. Naturally, being a Baking Sister and generally ridiculously competitive about things that don't matter, I planned to not only enter, but also to win.

And I am happy to report, dear readers, that I did just that by inventing a delicious chocolate peanut butter pretzel caramel concoction. The perfect decadent combination of salty and sweet. Just a warning-- when you add the caramel to the chocolate, it gets very sticky and does not want to attach to the peanut butter balls. So patience is a virtue. Dip, wait, and enjoy!

Peanut butter pretzel balls:
1 cup of butter, softened (not melted)
1 1/2 cups of smooth peanut butter
6 cups confectioners sugar
3/4 pound of pretzels, broken into small pieces but not ground

Blend the butter, sugar and peanut butter in a stand mixer slowly, until well blended. Add the pretzels and mix slowly until the mixture is just blended. Roll up the mixture into 1 inch balls. Stick a toothpick into each ball and put them in the freezer until complete hard.

Melt 1 bag of chocolate chips in a double boiler. Mix it with 4 oz caramel sauce. Keeping the mixture on low heat, dip the balls in by the toothpick until about half of the ball is coated. Repeat until all of the peanut butter balls have been dipped in chocolate. Remove the toothpicks and place in the fridge to cool, until you are ready to eat them.

BAKED Sunday Mornings: Buckeyes

I have never made candy before, so I was a little nervous to make this week's recipe.  In fact, it almost didn't happen because I was afraid it might be too much work.  However, these buckeyes were easy-peasy.  The only complicated part of these is dipping them in the chocolate and even that wasn't so hard once I had some patience.


As my husband points out, these are a candy, named after a nut, named after an animal's eye.  However strange their origen/name, they were delicious.  If you like the combination of chocolate and peanut butter, you will enjoy these.  And if you are a candy making novice like me, start with these.  They might give you the confidence to move onto more complicated candy (and looking at the upcoming Baked Sunday Mornings recipes, I think I'm going to need that boost).


I made half the recipe and got 26 pieces.  Check out the other bakers over at the Baked Sunday Mornings website.


In other exciting news...2 of the three baking sisters will be reunited today when Rachel comes out to LA.  Hopefully we'll get to bake something fun together.

Bring Your Cookie to Work Day

Hello, long lost friends. I apologize for my lengthy absence-- unfortunately, going to school full time, working a job 20 hours a week, and doing other miscellaneous jobs is not so conducive to baking very much. However, school is now over, so I only have to go to all of the jobs, which means I'm back in the kitchen!

In honor of my newfound free time (kind of) and of the lovely people who work with me, I decided that I would bring them some cookies in honor of my first full week at work-- peanut butter m&m cookies, to be exact. Who doesn't love a good cookie, after all, and who doesn't love peanut butter m&ms? I was a little nervous, though, having never baked for this group before, that they would not like my offering.

As it turned out, I needn't have worried. The cookies were demolished, and despite some complaints about ruining people's diets because they were so good (I work with a lot of women), they were received and consumed with much enthusiasm.

I was a little concerned about the cookie to candy ratio because peanut butter m&ms are so much bigger than the regular ones, but these worked out great. I just made the cookies a little bigger than usual and watched them carefully in the oven. Delicious!

Peanut Butter M&M Cookies:
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 medium (11.4 oz) bag of peanut butter M&Ms

Preheat the oven to 375.

Blend the butter, vanilla, both types of sugar, and eggs until smooth. Add the dry ingredients and mix. Once the ingredients have formed a smooth dough, add the M&Ms. Mix by hand until the candy is evenly distributed throughout the dough.

On an ungreased cookie sheet, lay out tablespoon-sized balls. Make sure to leave space in between, as the cookies will grow.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until golden brown.

Melts in Your Mouth... M&M Cookies

Recently, our friend Brooke, of previous blogging fame, came to my neighborhood with her husband and daughter for Shabbat. My roommate and I were put in charge of making a dairy dessert, with no limitations other than the fact that Brooke prefers cookies to cake, and that there were going to be five of us at lunch.

Well, let's just say that I followed the first part of the directions better than the second part. I ended up making cookies two ways-- the other recipe can be found here, as previously blogged about-- and consequently, we had 100 cookies for five people. Better too much than too little, right? And now there are snacks in the freezer...

Anyway, I had made these M&M cookies a number of years ago, and Brooke really liked them then, so I thought I would make them again. But when I went to the store to buy the mini baking M&Ms, they were nowhere to be found. I had once tried making the mini recipe with regular sized candy, but I hadn't liked them because they turned out kind of mealy, so it was back to the drawing board.

I decided to take a recipe that I knew that I liked-- the standard Nestle Tollhouse cookie recipe and tweak it a little to make it hospitable to the M&Ms. As usual, I halved the butter, which was especially important in this recipe because the color of the candy runs if the batter is too wet. Other than that, I left out the nuts and replaced the chocolate chips with a medium bag of M&Ms. The results: delicious!

What to do with Leftover Halloween Candy

So, this year we had no tick or treaters. Not one. We live in an apartment complex, so we figured we would get some and bought a bunch of candy. And then no one came to our door. Since we are not going to eat a whole bunch of candy by ourselves, I was trying to figure out what to do with it. I remembered last year seeing a leftover Halloween candy bundt cake on Baking Bites, and I decided to go for it.

This cake was really easy to make -- put a bunch of ingredients together, fold in the candy and you are good to go. We used Milk Duds, Whoppers, and Kit Kats because that is what we had, but I imagine you could use anything. I also didn't have a bundt pan (no idea where it went), so I made it it a tube pan and it came out fine. You can see the candy swirled into the cake, although a bunch of it did melt into the cake. It was good, although nothing totally amazing.

I was also glad I could make this because one of the blogs that I follow, the Food Librarian, is making 30 bundts in 30 days to celebrate national bundt day, so I thought I would bake along too. My pictures of the whole cake didn't come out that well, but in case you want to see the finished cake, here it is:

You can find the recipe for the cake here, from Baking Bites.