I was inspired recently by (what else) Pinterest to make Snickers Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies. I tried a version with Snickers bits mixed in with the cookie batter, but they turned out all leaky and weird when I baked them. The children happily ate my mistake, naturally. Stuffing the cookies with a hunk of Snickers was the only way to do it right. The only reason I put them in the batter along with the chocolate chips in the first place was because the Snickers and Peanut Butter Muffins I make from my Nigella Lawson Domestic Goddess cookbook are uber good. Note to self (and to you, obvy): That shit does not translate to cookies.

Moving along.

I picked my Granny’s standard chocolate chip cookie recipe. It’ll be two years this July since she passed and some days it’s still hard to believe she’s gone. She is very, very much alive in my kitchen though. I try to bake as much of her staples as possible and these cookies are defo one of her staples. I do ‘bastardize’ her recipes (as my mother would say) on the regular, but my Granny was always cool with that. They are very simple chocolate chip cookies, I’ve been making them since I was about 5 or 6 and could push my stool over to the counter to reach the bowls!

Snickers Cookies
1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup chocolate chips

You know the drill, sift the flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl and set aside. Then in the mixer bowl, cream the butter and both sugars together.
Add the egg and vanilla, then slowly add the flour mixture.
Stir in the chocolate chips with a wooden spoon. Voila!
Chop up your Snickers bars and pop one in the middle of a ball of dough. Probably about 2 tablespoons worth. Make sure you mold the dough all the way around the Snickers piece.
Then bake at 375F for about 15 minutes.
These are especially fun if you don’t tell anyone there’s a surprise inside!

I made these as part of a cookie platter for our aunt and uncle who came for a visit to the woods. I love when people drive all the way out here to hang out for lazy afternoons on the back porch. Though I don’t know how lazy it really is when all three kids want to do stuff with everyone who comes over and then Wee One #2 convinces us to play hide and seek for at least a little while. Seriously. She’s gotten grandparents and jaded aunties in their 20s and everyone in between to play hide and seek with her. She’s very convincing!

So back to the cookies. I love the idea of the combo of oatmeal and jam but it’s never really worked out for me until this recipe. Yet another hit from my Great Cookies book! Maybe it’s the choice of jam? This recipe called for blueberry when usually recipes with oats call for strawberry or raspberry? I dunno, but it’s a winning combination and unlike a lot of ‘just ok’ recipes I’ve made, I will be making these again and again for sure!

Oatmeal Almond Jammies via Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets

1 1/2 cups flour
3/4 cup old fashioned oats
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, softened
3 ounces shredded almond paste
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 large egg
2 large egg yolks
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1 1/2 cups sliced almonds
2 large egg whites, lightly beaten with 2 teaspoons water
1/2 cup blueberry preserves

First, process the flour, oatmeal, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt for about 15 seconds. Do this four times until the mixture is ‘cakey’. Then, in a separate bowl, cream the butter and add the almond paste, it’ll take a few minutes until it’s smooth. Add the sugar slowly, then the egg, egg yolks, and extracts and mix, mix, mix! With the mixer on low add the dry ingredients until just blended. Chill it for about 45 minutes. These three bowls are the dough, the almonds and the egg whites with water. Preheat the oven to 350F, line cookie sheets with parchment paper. Roll the dough into 1″ balls, dip in the egg whites and then roll in the almonds.
Then I used the back of a spoon to make ‘thumbprints’ in the dough. Are thumbprint cookies EVER made with actual thumbs? I think not! What a farce! I dropped less than a tablespoon into each ‘thumb’ print and baked for 12 minutes. I think it’s the blueberry that has me smitten, I loved these – and so did everyone I served them to!

Shortbread cookies, of any variation have a very distinct texture and really nothing else will do when you’re craving shortbread. I’ve tried too many types of shortbread to remember but only baked a few. I’ve made a few different recipes of traditional shortbread recipes, and a few with dried fruits in them (cranberries and cherries, natch) and of course these – Chocolate Shortbread. I have to admit I really, really love shortbread that has very finely chopped nuts in them but even against those, I think this is my favorite bastardization of shortbread.

Chocolate Shortbread Cookies via Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 cup rice flour
1/2 cup strained Dutch process cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter
2/3 cup superfine sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon sanding sugar
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1 teaspoon canola oil

To prep, preheat your oven to 350F and line a baking dish with aluminum foil. Then sift togetherthe flours, cocoa and salt. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and the sugar, then add the vanilla and mix again.
This next step is a lot easier if you use a big bowl. Add half the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and combine, then add the rest. Don’t overmix it!
Now dump the mixture out onto your foil-lined dish and press it into it. Try to make it as even all the way around the pan as possible. Bake it for about 45 minutes, turning it twice during baking. Once it’s cooled off a bit, (but not totally cool), cut into bite sized squares. Then melt your chocolate and mix in your oil. Dip the cookie pieces into the chocolate and let dry on parchment paper. Sprinkle with sanding sugar and voila! Cute, yes?

These cookies are super simple and super silly! The cookie itself is simple enough, a basic ginger cookie. It’s the little creative addition of button holes and then yarn, yes yarn, threaded through the button holes that make these little cuties so adorable. You’d think having the yarn in them would make eating them a little annoying and that you’d be less likely to stuff your face. Sorry people, no such luck.

Wee One #2 insisted in doing the needlework herself! She has been fallen pretty hard for embroidery and wants to sew every chance she gets.

Ginger Button Cookies via Diamonds for Dessert
1 2/3 cups flour
1 tablespoons ginger
1 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoons cloves
1/2 teaspoons salt
4 tablespoons room temp butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 egg whites

So, as you’d expect, you cream the butter and the sugars together. Then add the egg whites one at a time. Mix the dry ingredients in a different bowl and then mix the dry into the wet and voila! Ginger cookie dough. I totally sped through the actual recipe because I trust that you can handle that part. Now roll the dough into a log and cut off slices!
Shape your slices as well rounded (or not) as you’d like. I used a straw to poke out my button holes.
You’ll have to scour your kitchen to find a small circle shape that you can use as the inner edge of your button. The original recipe used the lid of a water bottle. I happen to have a crazy narrow shot glass – class all the way.
I baked them at 350F for about 15 minutes. Leave them in longer if you like a better crunch. The tops of the button holes didn’t shrink in baking, but the bottoms almost closed up. No biggie, we just used an actual needle and sock yarn!
I packaged some cookies in a mason jar for our next door neighbors. I can’t tell if they think I’m cute or totally crazy. Let’s just say it’s a fine line and I’m at least endearing. Right?! Ha!

I’m participating in Menu Monday at Organizing Junkie

My oven died a few days ago, so this Menu Monday is a creative one! Just as I had finished mopping up my tears over discovering it wasn’t just a fuse issue, my wonderful husband delivered another striking blow – it could take over a month for us to get the part our oven needs. Shake it off, May! It’s ok, there are plenty of stove top, no bake and slow cooker options. Deeeeep yoga breaths. Ok so I think I’m alright.

This Week’s Menu (Feb 13-19)
*In case you’re wondering why I’m making two meals every night, I made some dietary changes that were important to me earlier this year and my family is a little slow to jump in. They usually join me in a healthy breakfast and lunch and I refuse to bicker over dinner.

Sunday – Tacos for the fam, Tofu Nuggets for me (yes again, I’d eat them everyday if I could with homemade BBQ sauce)

I know this recipe is not mentioned at all in my menu for this week but let’s totally ignore that and be thankful for moderately healthy cookies. If you like your Oatmeal Cookies Granny-style, just add a cup of raisins at the very end and mix them in with a wooden spoon. None of us are fans of raisins in baked goods (except maaaaybe cinnamon buns but even then not really), so I didn’t use any.

Grandmother’s Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies – From Good Housekeeping Cook Book (p. 722)

3/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups old fashioned oats, uncooked

As you’d expect, cream the butter and the sugars together first. Then add the egg and vanilla.
Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt in a smallish bowl before you tip that bowl into the wet mixture. Beat till just combined.
Finally, mix in the oats with a wooden spoon (this is where you’d add raisins if you’re so inclined).
Bake for about 15 minutes at 350!

Reeces Pieces are one of those things I cannot possibly just have one handful of. I can usually restrain myself if they are in the room, but if I cave and have one, I will likely just keep noming on them until they are totally gone. I know people who are not so into the combining of peanut butter with other already delicious things (like chocolate), and I’ve decided they are totally insane. Peanut butter and chocolate? How does that pose a problem!?

Anyhoo, moving along. I made these a few months ago – actually a little longer ago than that even, but the recipe is good and the pictures make me want to whip up another batch and go hide in the laundry room to eat them. Ahem.

The peanut butter cookie recipe is straight from the much loved (and much falling apart and really super sad looking) Good Housekeeping cookbook I’ve had since just after I got married. For those of you playing along at home, that was approximately eleventy billion years ago. When you’d normally toss in a cup of chocolate chips at the end of the recipe, I tossed in a cup of Reeces Pieces instead. Mmmmm.

Oddly, I was texting with my cousin Jenn while I made them and she had made these cookies the day before, that’s a little weird, yes? Or just proof that we are connected on some weird culinary level? You know because Reeces Pieces chocolate chip cookies are such culinarily advanced treats, dontcha know?!

Via Good Housekeeping Cook Book

1 1/14 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup Reeces Pieces

It’s the simplest thing in the world. Well, very close to it anyway. Mix sugars with butter, add the egg and vanilla. Mix the rest in a separate bowl and then tip that bowl into the wet ingredients. Voila!	When it’s all mixed up and you have peanut butter cookie dough, fold in the Reeces Pieces with a wooden spoon (your mixer paddle may crush them) and spoon them onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. About a tablespoon each.
Bake them for 15-20 minutes at 350F.

I’ve been silent for a week because I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about the whole ‘am I a site with a blog, or am I a blog with a site to organize my posts?’ dilemma. I have come to decide that this is in fact a blog, and I will be using the headers up there as a way to organize all the content. So today for example, I’m going to post about Potato Chip Cookies, and after the post is up, I will link to it on the ‘domestic’ page with a little thumbnail for the recipe. Simple. Clean. Organized. Insert contented sigh here. This means though that for a little while I will probably be posting twice a day, because I have so many amazing recipes and crafty tutorials and makeup fun to share!

Potato Chip Cookies are what happen when you tell your 6 year old it’s her turn to pick the cookie recipe. She sat down at my laptop, cracked her knuckles, and Googled this. Not bad. They sound awful and there certaintly are not gourmet, but they’re awful at all. Since I’ve made these, I have discovered potato chip cookies with pecans from My Baking Addiction! It came down to this one from Emeril or Baking Bites. We went with Baking Bites.

Officially, we made these on March 13/11 and they were the 12th cookie of 2011 – Cookie Year.
  

Potato Chip Cookies – Baking Bites 2 cups all purpose flour 1 tsp baking soda 1/4 tsp salt 1 cup butter, room temperature 1 cup sugar 1 large egg 1 – 1 1/4 cups crushed potato chips
Preheat your oven to 350F, line your baking sheet with parchmet paper. Cream together the cream and sugar. Add the egg.	Mix flour, baking soda and salt, then tip into the butter mixture.
Crunch up potato chips.	Stir in potato chips.
Drop one inch balls onto baking sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes.	Voila!
You can drizzle chocolate over them or drop them in chocolate.

Greetings!!!

I’ve been gone far too long, I know. I was doing a little web design, and I was doing a little home child care and you know, that whole ‘life getting in the way’ thing. Things have calmed down a bunch though. I’m not doing home child care anymore and have a much smaller list of web design work to do. The good news is I’ve been cooking and baking as usual – maybe even more than usual lately, so there are heaps and heaps of recipes to add to the site and talk about. With Christmas coming at light speed I’ve been doing a lot of crafting but I’m a little nervous to post much of that until after everyone has already opened their gifts because I know a lot of my friends and family read my blog (thanks guys). You can expect a parade of deliciousness and hopefully some crafty inspiration around here in the weeks leading up to Christmas. I’m also thinking about breaking ‘Domestic’ into ‘Kitchen’ and ‘Cleaning’, because while they’re both domestic maybe someone looking for a homemade cleaning solution recipe doesn’t care about chocolate covered Oreos (but really, who doesn’t care about chocolate covered Oreos – what’s not to love there people?!). I may also add a ‘Kids’ section for the same reason. I don’t love when a site has too many sections but I think these additions make it easier to filter out what you’re not looking for. Yes? Good, I thought you’d agree.

Before I get to changing anything around, here’s a few new additions to the site!

Pink Fudge

PB Stuffed Cookies

Fairy Headbands

I was pretty proud of myself with today’s updates for you. I added some really amazing Rolo Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies to the Domestic section, then wee little Post It Packages from scrapbooking paper (which are really, really cute, I have to say) in the Crafty section and I even managed to get my Deceptively Delicious Banana Bread post up in the Healthy section – all long before my self inflicted deadline. Then I got to the Pretty section, and there are a couple of hair tutorials I was going to post, but I’m not too happy with the photographs so I decided to do a Window Shopping post on Apothica instead. Oh boy. I got sucked in. I adore makeup and shiny things and girly colors (and even matte things and dark colors) and before I knew it, I was almost late to post this!! Ack! Way to be distracted by shiny things, May.

Moving on.

	These cookies are a lot easier to pull together than they seem but so so so much yummier than photos can possibly get across to you. Imagine. It’s a chocolate chip cookie, which is already pretty great and then BAM, you’re hit with a mouthful of caramel. Right?!
	This is the post that assisted in making me late today. Apothica is now accepting PayPal and for me, that’s cause to celebrate! Lipglosses that are so shiny they rival MAC’s Lipglass and shimmering face powders so pretty they’re right up there with Too Faced’s Candlelight Powder. Color me in love.
	This banana bread tastes just like banana bread! So what? So it’s made with pureed cauliflower! Hello serious vitamin boost with no questions asked!
	This was an end of school year gift for the hard working secretary at my kids’ school. All elementary school secretaries work hard, I have on doubt, but they so often are overlooked when all the teachers get well wishes and mugs!

I would love to get some photos up of my new kitchen, but every time I think to do it there is something more pressing that needs to be done. The whole fridge to sink to oven kitchen work triangle is great in this house – for sure the best and easiest I’ve ever had. My husband has serious issues with clutter so I try to hide most of my kitchen power tools and this kitchen has decently deep cabinets so my blender, food processor, bullet, slow cooker, etc are all tucked away. At first I thought it would be a pain to pull stuff out when I wanted to use it, but as long as all the cabinets are kept tidy (so far, so good) I just grab the gadget I need when I need it. It also frees up space for rolling out dough or cooling things on racks. I’ll put it on my to do to get pictures of the kitchen today so I can have them up tomorrow.

I promised Wee One #2 that today would be a crafty day. At the end of the school year, her report card was as perfect as a report card can be without your child being an alien. So we told her she could choose her ‘passing gift’ (who came up with that phenomenon anyway?!) and she chose a book on learning sewing crafts, Made By Me (See all Children's Crafts & Hobbies Books), a sewing basket with the essentials and fabric. She picked out some from Fabric Closet and tulle in 3 different colors from Fabricland. Her favorite thing so far has been embroidering and today she wants to attack a tshirt for the first time, so far we’ve stuck to plain squares of fabric to practice on. Wish us luck with this little project!

Greetings long lost souls. It’s been two weeks since my last post which, while better than the seven weeks between that and the post before it, is not cool and should be my last disappearance for a while. Things are falling into place around here – all the boxes are unpacked, all the clutter has been tossed or donated and I can finally look around the new house and sigh happily instead of having no idea where my extra food processor blades are (the horror).

Actually, there is one casualty of this move – the nubby thing on the top of my pressure cooker. Insert loud, inconsolable sobbing here. I was positive that I packed it in the pressure cooker. Of course when I took the lid off once it was out of the box, it was not only not inside the pot but not inside the box. Now that everything has been unpacked, I have to give up and order a new one. My dad gave me his (hilariously unused – hilariously because he’s owned it for 30 years and it still had the original recipe book/instruction manual inside) just a few months ago, but I can’t imagine making mashed potatoes without it now! It’s actually good for a lot of otherwise time consuming cooking, I should write an article about that.

So far this week, I have added four articles to the site – one for each section and yes, all from projects or recipes done and photographed months ago. However, they are all good projects and recipes!

	These are Pecan Pie Cookies, they have been officially counted as the 7th cookie of the year, baked back in February. I know, as if I’m only posting them now, but here they are – in all their pecan pie glory. They have all the pecany, brown sugary, buttery (and even slightly creamy) taste and texture of a pecan pie with the portability of a cookie. I know, I know. You’re welcome. Go make some. I’ll wait here.
	This torte was pulled from Smitten Kitchen, and just like everything else I pull from there, it was very, very good. It’s not fussy at all, and while its technically a summer squash, I used a butternut squash and cooked it in the dead of winter!
	Making mineral makeup was so fun!! Everything from knowing what’s actually in the makeup that I put on the biggest organ of my body, to being able to control the exact colours and richness is just amazing. Not to mention you can say you made your own (which is rad enough) and compared to other mineral makeup of the same quality, there is a decent savings there too!
	This hat is really really cool, but it’s also an epic fail if we’re determining success by wearability. Intended as a 31st birthday gift for a man with at least an average size head, it might fit Wee One #1. I decided to write about it anyway though because the pattern is great, and the finished product, while totally useless to the person I had intended it for, turned out better than I expected it to. I really love to do any kind of colourwork, but I usually sequester intarsia work to one room, out of the children’s grasp, so as not to walk into a room with yarn barf all over the place. Anyhoo, these were made in one room and somehow also made pretty quickly, for me anyway.

Tomorrow I’ll add more articles to the site and blog about them here! There are so many fun things I’ve made that I can’t wait to show off. Homemade Tater Tots, anyone??