Happy Halloween with Rice Krispies

I'm back (I hope)! It's so difficult to maintain a blog as a hobby. The FoodieWeds still love to cook and bake more than ever so I hope to update this with some meals from the past months.

Since Halloween just passed, I wanted to share some goodies I made for the occasion. To go with my Girl Scout costume, I wanted to be able to hand out treats at the Halloween party, so discovered an awesome yet easy recipe to make Candy Corn Rice Krispies in the October edition of Martha Stewart Food. You actually make 3 different batches of rice krispies because of the various colors so it gets repetitive but you become a real pro!

For best results for this specific recipe, you'll want to use a loaf pan. It will help give you a good starting mold to shape the treats into a candy corn shape (I didn't do such a good job with this, as you'll see in the photos below). Also, you'll find it helpful to line the pan with wax paper to the top so it'll be easy to remove once hardened. Once you take it out, it should look a little something like this:

Then take out your serrated bread knife and slice the block into 8-10 even pieces.

Then again, slice those pieces in half. You'll start seeing the shape getting formed.

Finally, you'll start molding the rice krispie with your fingers. As I said, my shape wasn't ideal but people got the idea. I purchased some clear baggies from Michael's and some Halloween stickers, stuck the treats in then handed them out. It was a great success and everyone loved them!! Care to try this for next year?

$3 Apple Pie

$3 for the bag of apples from our neighborhood Farmer's Market.  That's all it took to make apple pie.  Well, plus additional spices and ingredients from the pantry.  I didn't intentionally buy the bag of apples to make the pie, but took advantage of the we're-closing-up-so-here's-a-prepackaged-bag-for-cheap deal and my sweet tooth told me to make some pie.  Everything just pieced together perfectly.

I actually ended up combining two recipes - one for the pie itself and the other for the crumb topping.  I already had a ready pie crust from a previous shopping trip so easily decided to just follow Pillsbury's recipe for the pie.  It was easy enough but then it was time to find a crumb topping recipe.  The final verdict was taking part of the recipe from Baked By Rachel.  It ended up being very simple too, but just a little difficult to stick all the crumb bits onto the pie.  I was finding little holes and crevices to stick the crumbs into and the fact that I used way too many apples and made it too round caused a little challenge but you can see here that it's just part of the process.  The crumbs ended up sticking very nicely and the final product wasn't so bad either.

My last time making real fruit pie was probably Home Economics in high school and I recall the apple pie not turning out like this, which is a good thing.  We devoured this baby so fast, I wanted more.  Don't be discouraged by its looks, I actually think it's a pretty good beginner pie to try out because there's no special pie crust or fruit mixture involved.  The crumbs were a perfect topping that don't require much technique because you know, it's just really fun to stick gooey bits all over your pie.

BEFORE 

AFTER

READY TO SERVE!!

Easy Strawberry Shortcake

So simple yet so delicious. This dessert is really just boxed Angel's Food Cake with strawberries and whipped cream but the secret is that you grill the piece of cake for about 3 minutes each side with butter. Then it's magic!

Halloween Cake Pops

Don't be fooled - cake pops are simple and fun yet very time consuming!  I found some very helpful sites and videos that got me started but I actually had to start the previous night by making the cake, crushing it into tiny bits, mixing it with frosting, then letting it sit in the refrigerator.  On the day of my Halloween festivities, I started out by inserting the lollipop sticks and letting that sit awhile longer.  A few hours later, I melted a bag of white chocolate chips which melted with a layer of liquid on top so it clearly didn't work out too well.  Luckily, I also had my bag of milk chocolate chips that actually let me cover 29 cake pops.  Once dipped, the chocolate didn't turn out as smoothly as I had hoped, but I covered most of them up with sprinkles or cookies & cream bits anyway so it wasn't a big deal.  I do enjoy baking so I would definitely try this again for another fun "holiday" but I would also make the cake pops a little smaller because I actually had 3 pops that dropped from the stick since it was so big!!  I should also note that not only is this a pretty and aesthetically pleasing dessert, it's really yummy too!


Love from the Oven - step by step photos
How to Make Cake Pops - short video

Pudding....Pudding

Everyone knows pudding is a fun word to say, but who knew baking bread pudding could be so easy?  We wanted to make a dessert and bread pudding recently became a favorite so I looked up a recipe and found one with 4.5 stars on Allrecipes.com.  Want to hear another plus?  All the ingredients were already in the house!!  Bread, butter, eggs, sugar, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon!  If you're a baker, you should already have all those ingredients in the house.  Instead of the optional raisins, I decided to chop up some bananas and throw it in there.  Turned out great!!  And to add, we made it healthier by using wheat bread since that's all we ever use here anyway.  Unfortunately, we got too hungry and scarfed down the dessert so I never got an after photo but here it is before I set it in the oven.  Really simple, even Peter could make it without my assistance.