Recipe: Breakfast Cookies

I recently tried a new recipe, changed it a little to make it a little more me, and I seriously love it. Bonus: My husband and son love these as well! Extra Bonus: They're pretty healthy for you! I was hesitant to call these cookies because they're more reminiscent of muffin tops, but we'll stick with the word cookies because those are more fun to eat! Right?

Ingredients:
1 cup whole-wheat flour
¾ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup Hershey’s special dark cocoa
1 ½ Tbsp instant coffee
1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp kosher salt
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 ripe banana, peeled, microwaved 30 seconds, then mashed
½ cup nonfat plain Greek yogurt
½ cup honey
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups blueberries
¾ cup mini semisweet chocolate chips

Instructions:
1. Heat oven to 350 F. Line 2 large baking sheets with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together flours, cocoa, coffee, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt.

3. In another bowl, whisk together eggs, banana, yogurt, honey, oil, and vanilla until well combined (small lumps of banana are OK).

4. Stir egg mixture into flour mixture, gently stirring until just incorporated. Fold in blueberries and chocolate chips. Do not overmix.

5. Scoop balls of dough, about 1 ½ Tbsp each, onto prepared sheets, about 2 in apart. Flatten cookies slightly by pressing lightly with fingers or back of fork (to keep from sticking, use nonstick spray).

6. Bake until firm around the edges, 12 to 14 minutes. Let cool completely on sheet on wire rack.

Servings: 40
Calories: 73 (When I made these, I used a small scoop and ended up making 46, making them 63 calories a piece.)

I hope that you like these as much as my family does. I put two "cookies" in a snack bag and then put those into a bin. Now, we have an easy 146 calorie breakfast filled with fruit and chocolate that we can just grab in the morning with no extra prep.

It's Christmas! Day 23: Decorating Cookies

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Yesterday, we made our delicious sugar cookies. We also made a half batch of gingerbread cookies. They're my husband's favorite. Now, it’s time to decorate them! So, what kind of topping are we going to use? Icing? Frosting? Well, we’ve decided to go with frosting.

We decided to use this recipe for our frosting. And personally, I think it's delicious. It's just the right amount of sweet and tastes perfect with the sugar cookies I make.

Now, we're going to pipe our decorations on. Since we only have 1 piping tip, they're all going to look similar, but that's okay. Plus, my son has some pretty cool sprinkles to decorate with so we're going to try to make these cookies look awesome! In fact, he decided that I would do the frosting and he would do the sprinkle details. It was so much fun!

Here's how they turned out!

So don’t just make plain cookies, decorate them to really show Santa what you’ve got.

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 22: Baking Cookies

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Today, we are preparing for Santa’s visit in just a few short days by baking some cookies. We’ve decided to go for the traditional sugar cookies (hopefully decorated beautifully!). But, decorations are for tomorrow. Today, we’re just making the cookies. There is a sugar cookie recipe that I have used multiple times that I love. These taste a lot better than other sugar cookies I’ve had. I mean, not to toot my own horn...but toot toot!

So, first thing’s first, let’s get our supplies together. We’ll need cookie sheets, parchment paper, 1 cup measuring cup, 1 teaspoon measuring spoon, a rolling pin, 2 mixing bowls, whisk, and electric beaters.
Then, we’ll get our ingredients together. We’ll need flour, baking powder, unsalted butter, sugar, an egg, and vanilla extract.

First we’re going to whisk together 3 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder.
In a separate bowl, we’re going to beat together 1 cup of unsalted butter and 1 cup of sugar. Then, we’re going to add in an egg and some vanilla and then mix it up again.
Now, we’re going to slowly add in the flour mixture about a cup at a time. We want to mix our dough until it begins to clump together (possibly not using all the flour).
Then, we’re going to gather up our dough and knead it with our hands until it’s nice and smooth. We’re going to roll it into a ball, wrap it with plastic wrap, and place it in the fridge for about half an hour to chill. You want it to be a little firm, but not hard.
It’s time to preheat the oven to 350 degrees, take our dough out of the fridge, and roll it out. We’re going to cut shapes out with cookie cutters and place those on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
Then, we’re going to place these in the freezer for just a couple minutes to make sure they don’t lose their shape while they’re in the oven.
We’re just going to pop these in for about 8 minutes and just check on them from there. Cooking time will depend on the size and thickness of your cookies.

Now that these are done, we’re going to let them cool overnight. Come back tomorrow to decorate them with us! And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 18: Make a neighbor gift basket PLUS Chocolate Snowball Cookies

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

The most important part about Christmas is giving. Whether you’re giving thanks, giving presents to your family, giving money to charity, giving toys to kids in need, or just giving a little Christmas cheer to other people, you’re truly embracing the true meaning of Christmas. In my house, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and talk about being kind and how God has given so much to us. However, whether you live in a religious household or not, giving is such an important lesson to learn.

So, while we do try to do multiple things to give back during the holiday season (like ringing bells for the salvation army or random acts of kindness), today we’re talking about making a gift basket for a couple neighbors. We want to spread some Christmas cheer and make our friends feel special.

There were a couple things we needed to consider.
Will people actually eat cookies if we make them? (You know, due to this whole Covid thing.)
How much do we want to spend?
Who do we want to make gift baskets for?

After we answered these questions, we got to putting our baskets together. We included some homemade chocolate cookies, homemade candy, a jar of homemade hot cocoa mix, some finger puppets, a couple crafts, pencils, sharpeners, erasers, stickers, and notebooks.

Here's how we made the cookies that we ended up including:

Ingredients:
1 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/4 cups + 1/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Steps:
1. Add flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and salt to medium bowl. Mix to combine. Set aside.
2. Add butter and 1 1/4 cups sugar to large bowl. Beat with electric mixer until light and fluffy.
3. Crack eggs into small bowl. Throw away shells and wash your hands.
4. Add eggs and vanilla to butter mixture. Mix until smooth and creamy.
5. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Mix until a soft dough forms.
6. Cover dough and refrigerate 1 hour.
7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
8. Scoop a level tablespoon of dough. Roll into a 1-inch ball. Repeat to use all cookie dough.
9. Add 1/3 cup sugar to one small bowl. Add powdered sugar to another small bowl.
10. Make snowballs! Dip each ball of dough in sugar, then dunk generously in powdered sugar to coat.
11. Set dough on baking sheets.
12. Bake 10 minutes. Cool 10 minutes. Serve.

I think they turned out pretty good! And they taste delicious!

Owen had a blast running up to their houses and putting our little gifts on their front porch!

So do something kind for someone else!

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 3: Building a Gingerbread House

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

We have made a gingerbread house every year for as long as I can remember. We always buy a kit from a store. Sometimes we get something a little different though. One year, we made a gingerbread train. This year, we bought the Gingerbread House Kit from Michaels. We always have so much fun! Seriously, we cranked some Christmas music and sang and danced and laughed. And then afterward, we made some hot cocoa and just sat around, sipping our drinks, watching Christmas movies. We seriously had a good, wholesome Christmasy time. Anyways, sometimes our houses look like big giant disasters. Other years they look great! And you never really know what they’re going to look like until you’re done.

So go out there and get your family a gingerbread house to decorate! I’ve even seen people making them out of pop tarts this year! Or graham crackers! Or, if you’re feeling super adventurous, you can make your own from scratch. No matter what you do, just have fun! One of my son's favorite parts this year was dusting the top with powdered sugar to look like fallen snow!

Now, here’s our finished project this year:

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!