Posts Tagged ‘baking’

Apple Crisp

Friday, November 26th, 2010

apple-crisp

I love to make easy, delicious food. A few weeks ago, someone gave us two huge bags of apples. The green ones especially needed to be baked into something, since they were too sour to eat raw. Being tired, I decided to make apple crisp first.

Peel and chop the apples. Grease a baking dish. Throw the chopped apples in and sprinkle with the following ingredients:

1/3 cup margarine stick

1/2 cup oats

1/2 cup flour

2/3 cup brown sugar

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

It doesn’t matter how many apples you chop. I stop whenever I’m tired of chopping. For this picture, I used 10 tiny apples. Other times I’ve used 2 apples, and I just shook a little bit of those ingredients on top. Either you can melt the margarine in the microwave before stirring it all together, or you can cut the cold margarine with a table knife, and just sort of mix it in a bowl with your bare hands. Other times, like I said, I just throw the ingredients on top of the apples without mixing it because it’s one less dish to wash.

apple-crisp-2

If you sit down while you are chopping, you will end up being more cheerful as you chop apples, especially if you don’t particularly like doing it. Don’t watch TV, or you’ll chop your hand off.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Mixed berry crisp is even easier. Defrost the mixed berries the day before. Throw them into a greased dish and put the topping on. Serve with ice cream. (Good enough for company!) Apple crisp is also good with ice cream, I forgot to say.

Cherry crisp is easiest of all. Dump a can of cherry pie filling into a greased dish. Throw the topping on. Yum! This is my favorite. No, wait. Blueberry pie filling is my favorite. Double the recipe for a rectangular dish. Then dig in and enjoy! (Plus, your dessert counts as a serving of fruit. How cool is that?)

Linked to Love Bakes Good Cakes

Maple Leaf Cookies

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

maple-leaf-cookies

I had sugar cookie dough left over from a different project, so I decided to make maple leaf cookies. I found a plastic maple leaf cookie cutter at Hobby Lobby for 75 cents. My five-year-old rolled out the dough, and the kids took turns cutting out their leaves with the cookie cutter.

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After baking and cooling the cookies, I mixed up some autumn-colored frosting. I put lots of yellow food coloring into white frosting to make the burnt orange color. (Use professional food coloring – it’s much brighter than what you dye Easter eggs with.) For the maroon color, I looked at the food coloring and realized I had no red. I used lots of hot pink. My husband walked past, and I asked him what color to add to make the pink color turn into maroon? He said blue. For a minute I thought it was going to turn brown. (I should have just used chocolate frosting then!) But after mixing it some more (and throwing in some cocoa powder), I saw a lovely maroon color. I dusted the cookies with cocoa powder.

icing

This is a great baking activity to do in the autumn, since maple leaf cookies reflect what is happening in nature. I love how these maple leaf cookies turned out!

 

Cake Contest

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Just in case you are throwing a birthday party any time soon, here are some cake ideas from a Cub Scout cake contest we had a few years back. My oldest son Bryan won first place in the non-scouting category for his flying saucer cake. (He baked part of the cake in a glass pyrex bowl to get the rounded effect.)

My son Stephen made a cake that had a lake (blue fruit roll-ups) and a pier (pretzel sticks). My son Nathaniel won second place in the non-scouting category for his fire truck cake. (We found the instructions for that cake in a Family Fun magazine.) I also threw in Stephen’s bathtub cake from last year (also a Family Fun idea). He won second prize last year. (The water in the bathtub is blue Knox blocks covering some goldfish crackers at the bottom! The faucet handles are marshmallows.) Take a look and tell me which is your favorite!

cake-contestcake-contest-2cake-contest-3