Flashback to Monday of last week...
After making a box of mac n' cheese for dinner (don't worry, I added veggies and a can of tuna to make it just a teensy bit healthier...) I decided that since I already had started a small pile of dishes, I might as well keep baking in the kitchen to make the dishes-washing worthwhile...kinda counter-intuitive huh?
Anyways...
I ended up making a loaf of raisin bread in my bread machine, a pan of scotch-a-roos (just because I had all of the ingredients lying around, recipe to follow) and I also finished my football-shaped cake pops from the weekend previous. Of course, I was so busy trying to find counter space in my kitchen that I never stopped to snap any photos of my goodies! They have all been mostly eaten by now, so I'll just have to post about tonights adventures instead...and maybe a few other photos from like, before Christmas!
Scotch-a-Roo Recipe
- 1 cup light karo syrup
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1 cup creamy peanut butter
- 6 cups rice krispies (or other cereal of choice)
- 3/4 cup butterscotch chips
- 3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly
Remove the pan from heat and stir in peanut butter until smooth
Add rice krispies and stir quickly to coat evenly before it starts to harden
Pour into a greased 9"x13" pan and leave to cool
When cool, turn rice krispie base out of pan and onto a large-ish cutting surface
Melt butterscotch and chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl until smooth (I melt in 30 second intervals with some vigorous stirring inbetween heatings)
Pour chocoloate-butterscotch topping over the rice krispie base and spread over the topLet cool completely (the hardest part in the whole process :P) and cut into squares
ENJOY!
And my pointless story continues...
My mother's favorite cake is Red Velvet, and since her birthday passed by recently, I thought that I would try out some Red Velvet Cake Pops to mail as a belated birthday surprise (see, I've already missed it right!? so she won't be expecting it at all! haha!) And while I was at it, I thought I might like to try making some of these really cute 'Mini Cupcake Poppers' that I found on cuteeverything.com sometime last week.
The idea: (1) Bake mini cupcakes (2) use the tops for Mini Cupcake Poppers that I could take to my knitting get-together tomorrow (3) use the bottoms in Cake Pops that I could mail to my Mum for her birthday
Double-whammy right!?
Unfortunately, I've been having some difficulty with my mini-muffin pan lately and the results have been fairly mixed...
With some of my earliest recipes, I thought that just greasing the muffin cups with shortening would do the trick (it seemed to be working just fine with all of my larger batch-sizes...) but after a disasterous episode with mini-pumpkin pies, I ended up with a scratched up muffin pan that just made me angry every time I uncovered it from my pile of baking pans :(
So next I tried using paper muffin cups (*smack to the forehead* why didn't I do this in the first place!?) I made a batch of 'The Best Fudge Brownies Ever' (recipe found on a King Arthur's Flour Bag ages ago...) and just halved the cooking time.
Look! Aren't they cute!?
This recipe has always been AWESOME in a larger pan, but the mini versions were dry and hardened out really quickly *SAD FACE* To top it all off, they were really difficult to remove from their wrappers without tearing the paper or taking some of the brownie with it...
Thank you to everyone who ate these, so that I could get over this train-wreck and move on to my next baking adventure!
With the paper cups tucked away in hiding for a while, I decided to return to the grease idea for tonight's experiment...maybe I just wasn't using the proper TYPE of grease! A cake cottage that I attended last November introduced me to this recipe for 'Pan Grease': equal parts vegetable oil, shortening and all-purpose flour, mixed until smooth and applied with a pastry brush. I gave it a shot...and the cupcakes popped out of the pan just fine! YAY!
Here is a few photos of the minis while cooling down for a bit...
And a close up to show how I over-filled the pans...
And a look at the little buggers after being set free! Yippee!
They are upside down because the sides of my muffin pan are kinda angled...combine that with the over-filling and I have an easy-to-topple potential cupcake disaster! I think I'll use these mini ones for the cake pops...
And save the fun decorating for these regular-sized cupcakes that I made out of the same boxed mix! :P
Yummy yummy! I think I'm going to snack on a few of these before bed tonight...
-M-
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