I’VE MOVED!

Now that I have Andrew the IPad in my life I needed a new, more IPad friendly site! I love WordPress, I just had to switch to a grown-up site! Check it out:

http://www.craftybakeoven.com

Everything is there. All the old stuff came with me!

Love Story For My IPad

I got a new IPad.  I’m in love.  Plus, I’m getting a new site!  It’ll take about a week and then I’ll update everyone.  Its gonna be fun.  These letters are called Thickers and I am also in love with them!  I stamped the heart in red, then covered it in glue and Mini Beads from the Stampin Up! Red Bead duo.  It was really easy and quick and entirely for my IPad.  I think I’ll call him Andrew.  My IPad that is.  Meet Andrew.

Hot Chocolate Chip Cookies

OH MY GOSH these are SOOO good!  I made em up myself!  They really do taste like hot chocolate!  Make them!  Here is the recipe:

Hot Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 sticks butter at room temperature

1 cup Baker’s sugar

2/3 cup packed brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

3 and 1/4 cups all purpose flour

4 packets of hot chocolate mix…. don’t use sugar free…. just because 

1/2 cup each white chips, milk chocolate chips, and semi-sweet chips

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Cream butter and sugars until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla until combined. In a separate bowl, combine flour, hot chocolate mix, salt and baking soda. Add to wet ingredients in 3 to 4 parts, making sure all is incorporated.  Fold in chips. Chill the dough for an hour or so.  Use a 1/4 cup as a scoop to scoop dough onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper.   Bake for 9-11 minutes or until edges are golden brown. Let cool for 5 minutes before removing from pan.

Anyone Can Make These: Plain Peanut Butter

Now for the plain version of the easiest peanut butter cookies ever.  They are a little boring if you just subtract out the chocolate chips so you have to alter them a little.  Do everything as before, make your tablespoon-sized doughballs and then what I do is squish it with a buttered, sugared glass and then do my criss crosses with the fork.  You don’thave to do both, I just like the graininess of the sugar on the outside and I like the nostalgia of the criss crosses.  My mom used to let me do that part 🙂  Take a flat bottomed glass and rub your stick of butter on it, pour some sugar in a bowl, and then dip the glass in the sugar before squishing each cookie. 

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 large egg
1 cup sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat over to 325 degrees.  Mix egg, sugar, vanilla, and peanut butter until well blended.  Cover and refrigerate 1 hour.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.  Remove from fridge and roll into tablespoon size balls.  Place on cookie sheet a couple inches apart from each other.  Flatten with the bottom of a sugared glass cup and make fork hatches if desired .  Bake 17 to 19 minutes until slightly brown and yummy looking.  Cool on sheet for a few minutes before removing to a wire rack.  Enjoy!

Blast From the Past Blog Hop: July

Its that time again!  Have I mentioned lately that I am IN LOVE with my Taylored Expressions Key Ingredients kits?  Well, I am.  I’ll be honest.  I don’t own a lot of Taylored Expressions stamps.  To tell the utter truth though, I don’t own a lot of stamps at any given time.  I tend to gravitate more towards sentiment stamps and less towards image stamps.  I am working on this.  I own Copics… See?  I colored today.  SO I used Home Sweet Home again.  There was a sketch this time, but I just couldn’t make it work.  I wanted so badly to use my new Key Ingredients kit and I wanted there to be a big orange bow… it just couldn’t ALL work itself out.  I am constantly giving things away and could use 1000 of these cards.  Really.  So I went this route.  Did I mention I love my Key Ingredients?  I do.  Here is my contribution to the hop (chock full glitzy Key Ingredient goodness!):

To see everyone elses creations, you can either start back at the Taylored Expressions Blog or just “hop” around these great links!

Here are the entries from the Taylored Expressions Blast from the Past blog hop! Click here to find out how you can join the next customer blog hop!

1.	Taylor VanBruggen	23.	Libby Hickson
2.	Monika Davis	24.	Jodi Collins
3.	Candace Mitchell	25.	Lisa Silver
4.	Harriet Skelly	26.	Lea Lawson
5.	Karen Motz	27.	Sankari Wegman
6.	Melissa Cooper	28.	Ashley Nguyen Newell
7.	Lisa Hjulberg	29.	Corinne Reyes
8.	Carolina Buchting	30.	Tina Whitted
9.	Jen Tapler	31.	Kristie
10.	Tanis Palmer	32.	Shelby Goolsby
11.	Laura Jean Nygaard	33.	Sarah-Jane Kale
12.	Cassie Trask	34.	Donna Baker
13.	Tracy Clemente	35.	Radha Thijm
14.	Carole Rinear Chesser	36.	Chris Loritsch
15.	Bonnie Ratzloff	37.	JoAnn Valderama
16.	Tanja Hartmann	38.	Angela Bear
17.	Joan Ervin	39.	Stacey Schafer
18.	Tangii Crain	40.	Michelle Lane
19.	Banu Honnavara	41.	Alex Maldonado
20.	Lori McAree	42.	Rosie Hughes
21.	Danni Bindel	43.	Karen Giron
22.	Alison Anderson

S’more Please

OK, I have been working on getting my own brownie recipe down for awhile now and I think I’ve figured it out… so now its time to try and play around with it and see how much I can mess it up 🙂  I saw a picture of a toasted marshmallow somewhere on the internet and I thought smores sounded darn tasty.  I am not a super huge graham cracker person so I needed a sub- vanilla wafers!  Lots of people do it… the Pioneer Woman uses nuts in hers, other folks use sugar in theirs- mine is basic.  SO I didn’t want to top the brownies with the cookies cuz it would be right, so we ended up with a crust, brownies, and toasty marshmallows on top.  AWESOME.  If you are really into smores authenticity you can sub out the vanilla wafers with graham crackers.  When I read this post back it seems a little hyperactive…..

Smore’s Brownies

Crust

1 box Vanilla Wafers

1 stick butter, melted (doesn’t matter if its salted or not)

1 teaspoon Vanilla

Brownies

3/4 cup butter

4 (1 ounce) squares unsweetened baking chocolate

2 cups white sugar (I like bakers sugar)

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup flour

1 cup chocolate chips

Topping: Just mini marshmallows! 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Make the crust: grind the wafers in a food processor until they are fairly finely ground and then dump them into a 13 X 9 in glass baking dish… add the melted butter and vanilla and stir it all together until its moistened.  Press the crust all the way to the edges (here you can thin it out and up the sides if you want). 

Make the brownies: Melt the butter and chocolate together in a glass bowl (either in the microwave or over a put of water on the stove- I prefer the second way but remove from the stove/pot before continuing).  Stir in the sugar, then mix in the eggs and vanilla.  Stir in the flour and then fold in the chocolate chips.  Pour into your prepared crust.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes and then sprinkle the marshmallows A LA sweet potato caserole style and return to the oven.  DO  NOT LEAVE YOUR POST.  Stand there and keep an eye on them until they are brown (about 5 and 1/2 minutes) and remove.  The marshmallows can burn quickly and unless you are one of those wierdos that jams your marshmallow directly into the middle of the camfire, you don’t want this.  This is the point where you will get a little worried because the marshmallows will all puff up and look like they are exploding out of your dish… just keep going till they are brown.  It’s OK.  Take them out of the oven and set them on the stove and walk away.  Give 10 to 15 minutes and the marshmallows will all shrink up and sink down.  I learned the hard way that cutting these bad boys is a bit of a challenge.  To avoid the stickiness, spray a sharp knife with cooking spray and dissect as usual.  YUM!

I Think My Tastes Are Changing

I used to LOVE pink and black together…. granted I was a teenager and thought these colors were elegant together.  You might think this card looks fairly rudimentary and simple to make…. and you are right. but I spent AT LEAST an hour coming up with the combination.  I like the card overall, but it exhausted my brain and I decided that I am not meant to use light pink anymore,  Vibrant colors…. thats what I need.

Anyone Can Make These

OK- peanut butter cookies are not for everyone, I know this.  People love them or hate them.  Same with M&M cookies.  Some people just don’t like them.  I love ’em both though.  My friends mom used to make these peanut butter cookies and I loved them.  I’ve seen other people on the internets use this recipe,, but nobody add the best part (which is mini chocolate chips by the way)!  Its hard to believe but you need 4 (FOUR) ingredients.  Just trust me and try it.

Here it is:

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 large egg
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 12oz bag mini chocolate chips

Preheat over to 325 degrees.  Mix egg, sugar, and peanut butter until well blended- fold in chocolate chips.  Cover and refrigerate 1 hour.  Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.  Remove from fridge and roll into tablespoon size balls.  Place on cookie sheet a couple inches apart from each other.  Flatten with you hand or the bottom of a glass cup.  Bake 17 to 19 minutes until slightly brown and yummy looking.  Cool on sheet for a few minutes before removing to a wire rack.  Enjoy!

I Made Pencils

Card Creations: Favorite Occasions is coming out in the Fall (Nov. 16 in case you wanna camp out at Barnes and Noble) and I’m going to have 2 cards in it!  Its so exciting!  This is one of the ones that didn’t make it… Poor little guy.  So cute and no love 😦   Just kidding!  They get tons of submissions and and I am HONORED to have 2 cards selected!  I do love love love this little guy though.  My latest love is October Afternoon cardstock and this one is from the Report Card collection.  I used my Labels 2 Nesties to make the centerpiece with some Very Vanilla Bazzill and Garnet cardstock.  Then I made my little guy pencils using my Word Window punch from Stampin Up!  I definitely wanna make more of them for more projects in the future!  I just cut three windows of each color and used paper snips to make the parts and layer them up.  Enjoy!

Birthday Bling

I found this fantastic sticker at my scrapbook store (I love you The Scrapbook Store!).  That whole thing around my center sentiment is a green sparkly encrusted sticker.  Isn’t it great?  Its from Making Memories and I think I’ll have to go we what else they have like this.  I used my favorite paper for the moment called Mr and Mrs from Teresa Collins and I have managed to strech one sheet of this pretty dang far!  I’ve also used almost the last of my precious Kiwi Kiss…. I should go check and see if thats one of the returning old In Colors at Stampin Up…. my brain knows its not true but I’m gonna pretend I can’t remember.  If I give you this card for your birthday, act surprised ok?