Buttermilk Scones

These would be a nice addition to your Easter brunch - my mom used to make them on special occasions and every once in a while on school mornings just to surprise us. The dried apricots are what put them over the top.

BUTTERMILK SCONES

Ingredients:
3 Cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup butter
1 cup chopped dried apricots
1 cup buttermilk
1 tbsp cream
cinnamon & sugar

1.) Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Mix together the first 5 ingredients. Cut in butter. Stir in dried apricots.

2.) Make a well in center of mixture and add buttermilk. Stir until dough cleans the sides of the bowl.

3.) Roll dough out 1/2 inch thick. Cut into heart shapes (that's what we usually do, but of course you can do circles or triangles...) Place on greased baking sheets. Brush tops of scones with cream then sprinkle with cinnamon/sugar mixture. Bake for 10-12 minutes.


(When I was a kid my mom had me hand write a bunch of her best recipes on her recipe cards. I've since stolen a few of them - I love how this is stained with the ingredients of years of making these scones. Anything that holds a hint of my mom is precious to me.)

Christmas Morning Muffins

My mom made these awesome little muffins every Christmas morning for as long as I can remember - it was the only time she made them and they were always all gone by the time the last present was opened.

This year I made them as the birthday snack Moses took to preschool (yes, he is almost four!) and as one of the goodies for a friend's baby shower I hosted. Definitely a big hit with 3 year olds as well as 30 year olds. Give them a try:

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 beaten egg
3/4 cup milk
1/4 cup cooking oil

Topping:
butter
cinnamon
white sugar

1.) Preheat oven to 400 degrees and line mini muffin pans (seriously, you have to use the minis - big ones just wouldn't be the same) with paper bake cups.

2. ) Combine dry ingredients and mix well. In a separate bowl beat the egg and add the remaining ingredients, mix till smooth.

3.) Add the wet mixture to the dry ingredients and mix just till moistened. This is the critical step - if you over-mix your muffins will be chewy!

4.) Spoon batter into prepared muffin pans and bake about 8 minutes or till golden. (Makes about 36 mini muffins.)

5.) When muffins have cooled, dip the top of each one into melted butter then into a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. They taste best if eaten right away but definitely keep for a few days if you can keep your hands off them long enough! Yum!

These Cookies DO Mean Love

What's that saying... food isn't love? Something like that. Well, in my mind these cookies ARE love. My dear hubby recreated them for me after I was reminiscing about the first time I had them.

I was 8 and my mom was pregnant with her fourth child, my third brother. My mom had TERRIBLE pregnancies. If any of you have known me during my own pregnancies, just picture that, ten times worse, and for nine months straight. She was desperately ill, and I honestly don't remember ever seeing her during that pregnancy except for the one terrible time emblazoned in my mind when she calmly leaned to her left while chopping celery in the kitchen and simultaneously threw up in the kitchen sink, then kept right on chopping as if nothing had happened. I'm sure I saw her other times during that pregnancy, of course. But I really only remember hearing her - my room was across the hall from the bathroom.

In the food arena, those 9 months are a dreary blur of cheerios for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Oreos for lunch, and "Papa's bachelor slop number (choose 1-4, all of which have a macaroni and cheese base)" for dinner. I'm surprised us kids didn't get scurvy from the lack of produce. But then there was that one glorious day when Pam Eaves, my surrogate mother, brought us dinner. Actually, there were a lot of wonderful people who brought us dinner, but this is the one I remember. Not because of the dinner, which I'm sure was delicious, but because of the cookies, each of which had an entire Hershey's kiss in the middle of it. A cookie and candy in one! It was fantastic, and so comforting to be eating food made by a real, non-barfing woman. Ah... love.

Sweet Brettie made me a batch by using a Snickerdoodle recipe and omitting the cinnamon, then sticking a Kiss in the middle of each as soon as they came out of the oven. So so good!

REALLY Easy Christmas Cooking

Everyone likes chocolate covered pretzels, right? Well this super easy "recipe" is a fun Christmas-style twist on that idea. We received a jar of these from my brother's girlfriend a few years ago as a Christmas gift, and this year I remembered to make them. It's a really easy, fast project, and kids love to participate because it involves opening candy!

1.) Preheat oven to 200 degrees.
2.) Place a bunch of mini pretzels on a baking sheet. Unwrap Hershey's Kisses and place one in the middle of each pretzel. Place baking sheet in oven for about 4 minutes - you want the chocolate to be squishy but not melted.
3.) Remove baking sheet from oven and squish one M&M onto each Kiss, squishing the chocolate down. I used the red and green M&M's - you could use any color you like, customizing the candy to the time of year/holiday.
4.) Let the pretzels sit at room temp (or speed up the process in the fridge) until the chocolate hardens up again.
We're giving big jars of these as Christmas gifts this year. Just fill a large Mason jar and tie on a cute Christmas-colored ribbon, and you have a great hostess or teacher's gift. Have fun!

Grandma Marie's Sweet Potatoes

I made these last night (per my dad's request) and they were a huge success! My grandma has always had a way of taking an ordinary dish such as mashed sweet potatoes and turning it gourmet. Here's the recipe - forgive me for the absence of specific amounts of ingredients. This is how my grandma cooks, so you'll just have to wing it like I did. (It's pretty hard to mess up sweet potatoes!)

INGREDIENTS:

Sweet potatoes

Oranges

Butter

Brown sugar

Salt

1.) Cut each orange in half horizontally and juice on a juicer (don't squeeze by hand as you're saving the orange peels to use a potato cups and don't want them to get smashed). Reserve juice. Clean out each orange "cup." I used a grapefruit knife to clean out most of it then scraped out the rest with a spoon. It's ok if there is a bit of orange pulp left over - it adds flavor.

2.) Peel potatoes and cut into chunks. Boil in a large pot until potatoes start to fall apart. Strain. Mash or whip potatoes to desired consistency, adding splashes of reserved orange juice until potatoes are creamy (you won't use all the juice). Add butter, brown sugar, and salt to taste and mix well.

3.) Fill each orange cup with a "mountain" of potato mixture and place on a baking sheet. Bake in a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes or until the potato peaks begin to brown.

4.) Remove and serve. Yum!