Recipe: Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Bars

I'm a very bad blogger. It has been 2 months since my last post. Never fear, I'm perfectly fine. Obligations with family and our PTO swamped me this fall. Which means not only did I not blog, I didn't read. Which is a travesty I'm correcting.

What I did manage to do was find my new favorite treat to bring to events on the spur of the moment. I know this isn't new to many of you, but for me, these were a revelation.

I've made homemade Rice Krispie Bars for forever. It's not difficult, after all. And the store bought ones suck. Ew. I even knew about various additions or flavors, although I was too lazy or uninterested to try them. Then one day, my husband calls me. He drives across the country for a living, and I figured he'd found a new favorite regional food. He had. It was these. He sent me two links to two recipes, figuring one of them had to work. They sounded ok—peanut butter and chocolate nearly always work for me—but kind of mundane.

Oh. My. God. It's always the simplest things that blow you away with their glory, but these are truly the best things I've had in forever. They are chewy, crunchy, salty, sweet...They hit every one of the perfect snack requirements...and they take 10 minutes or less and produce a 13 x 9 pan of the little darlings.

In the last 2 months, I've made 4 pans of them. I've taken them to my aforementioned PTO meetings where they were devoured. I made them for Oldest to sell at a Family Movie Night event for Student Council.  They sold out before the movie even started. I dropped some off for a friend having a not-so-good day, and she thanked me for saving the crappiest day ever because THEY ARE THAT GOOD.

The only modifications I made to the recipe were peanut butter amounts and subbing in butter for margarine. Butter is always better.

Recipe: Orange Cardamom Loaves

Guess what time it is?! It's Fall Baking Time. Yes, those vanity capitals are on purpose. I love it when the chill in the air "forces" me to start baking. It's too warm for a fire in the wood stove, but too cold to not want it warmed up just a little bit.

Plus the plethora of fall baking ingredients: fresh pears, pumpkin and all of the other "fall" stand-bys. I picked up a baking magazine the other day, an overpriced one that cost about the same as a trade paperback book *winces*, because I wanted to make just about every recipe in it.

The first recipe I attempted was Orange Cardamom Bread for a bake sale fundraiser. The recipe makes 2 loaves: one for me, one for the sale ;) While I liked it a lot, I could not taste the cardamom. So I fiddled with the levels a bit and found a balance between spicy and orange-y. The real sneaky part about this bread is that because cardamom enhances the orange flavor, you really aren't going to get much straight flavor except as an end note. 

Recipes: Gourmet Popcorn Party

For an entire week this month (the last week of school), I became obsessed with gourmet popcorn recipes. I bought myself an air popper like this one, and then I scoured the internet looking for recipes. The results were taken to my sons' elementary school and left in the teachers' break room. Partly because the teachers were getting summer-itis too, and partly so I wouldn't eat all of that popcorn. I'm definitely going to do this again and probably tie it in with Staff Appreciation Week.

To no one's surprise, the sweet popcorn recipes were by far the favorite, but there were some other good ones, too! None of these take more than 40 minutes to throw together (including curing time for the caramel corn), although there's some that require time to set up and/or cool. The cinnamon one was my favorite.

The Savory:

Italian Breadstick Popcorn

Chili Lime Popcorn

The Sweet:

Salted Chocolate Caramel Popcorn

 












Cinnamon Bun Popcorn

S'mores Popcorn