Living in a Cereal World

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, or whatever you celebrate, and good food. Including breakfast! I finally have time today to squeeze in this review. I opened my box of Cinnamon Star Crunch almost two weeks ago, but, you know, priorities. If your local grocery or big-box store is still trying to get rid of these, it wouldn't hurt to pick one up. Just be warned, they're not just star-shaped Cinnamon Toast Crunch, like I hoped. In fact, they are teensy little puffy stars, like someone took the stars out of Chicken and Stars soup, dehydrated them, and added cinnamon. Now I'm not complaining about the flavor. Just the size. It's not something to fill a bowl. I'm a slow eater, so I'd end up with little bits of mush about halfway through. So I'll probably be sprinkling it on various other cereals for the next month. In fact, this might be a fun cereal for granolas or cookie recipes. There's an idea.

So my brother comes home, tries all the cookies, and then says, "I forgot I don't like ginger." WHAT? This family. smh. Oh, well, more gingersnaps for me. Anyway, here's my three cookies: First I made Maple-Oatmeal Cookies . I wanted to make an oatmeal cookie recipe that was totally different from anything I'd made before. This is very simple, no stir-ins, but it spreads very thin. I should've followed the directions with regards to measuring. They're very sweet and you don't need more than one. Next came the Soft Gingersnap Cookies . It's the holiday season, I want gingerbread, I want ginger cookies, I basically want ginger everything. And I wanted a soft cookie. The only thing about these is that I could've used more ginger (or maybe molasses). The spices called for trick your taste buds/brain into thinking they're a soft pumpkin cookie instead. Finally, it wouldn't be a cookie tin without something from Sally

I think I'm in the midst of a ginger kick. First I made cookies (to be shared later), next week I'll be making granola, and this past weekend I made this Gingerbread Banana Oatmeal Bread . I was looking for a gingerbread I could eat for breakfast and then realized I also had a banana in the freezer, so I had to find a recipe that combined the two. It certainly didn't hurt that this one also called for oats--I don't know about you but I need all the fiber I can get this time of year. The oats also helped to make the batter really thick and the bread very dense. It's about as "bread-y" as a quick bread can get. Of course this means you don't need to eat as much in one sitting and can stretch it a little further... I would've liked more of a ginger-y flavor, but like I said, I'm on a ginger kick right now. I thought the banana was stronger in this recipe. I also like to eat the browner (almost burnt) end pieces, and they tasted almost coffee-lik

I like to keep my biscotti seasonal: last month was pumpkin so I thought this month I'd do cranberry. Actually I combined two recipes: White Chocolate Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti  from Sally's Baking Addiction and Cranberry, Orange, and White Chocolate Biscotti from Giant's Savory magazine. They looked like this but obviously not blurry: I'm not the best drizzler but people love the (white) chocolate anyway. These are the kind of biscotti I'm used to: thick batter (and thick-sliced), so dense you can only eat just one. I followed Sally's base recipe but subbed almonds because I have no idea if I can eat pistachios and this time of year just isn't right for my stomach to be experimenting. I also didn't want to fully dunk in white chocolate so I drizzled melted white chocolate chips from the other recipe. If you try these make sure to get a bite with everything; the flavors are meant to work together.

I didn't want to call it a throwback because we're only going as far as two Sundays ago--to our end-of-the-Thanksgiving holiday Sunday breakfast. I wanted to do something new, simple, and sweet, so I chose this Blueberry Stuffed French Toast . There's a lot of blueberry cream cheese stuffed French toast recipes on the Internet; I'm glad I wasn't aware of them last month. This was all I needed. And did I mention it was easy? I have a frying pan large enough to handle all four sandwiches at once. That's what it is, essentially--a blueberry sandwich. First you cook down the frozen blueberries, which takes hardly any time at all, then you spoon some on four slices of bread, cover with four more slices, dip in the batter and fry. Seriously easy. And it looks pretty (and pretty appetizing) topped with the rest of the blueberries and a dusting of powdered sugar. Yeah, that would have been a good one to get a shot of for the blog. I'll try to do better with the co

Or as I like to think of it, BIRTHDAY CAAAAKE (cue the flailing Muppet arms). I'm going to have to wing this entry because I didn't take notes. Like I said before, things were crazy that weekend. I came across this recipe for Applesauce-Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake  back in the summer and made up my mind right there and then that this would be my birthday cake. No changing my mind. Even if I found something better, or with pumpkin. I was looking for something different and cakes with chocolate chips are definitely different for me. I also was all for a cake made with applesauce. All the spices involved were a bonus. And the pepper (you can't really taste the pepper). I didn't get a chance to take a picture--you'll just have to believe that my slices looked just like the ones in the recipe. The cake really does get that dark; I guess it's from the spices. So it's basically a chocolate-chip spice cake; for my birthday I had a little bit with some apple pie ic

Now it's time to catch up on my birthday plans. I had planned to do birthday breakfast, dinner, and dessert all in one day but you know how plans go. The refrigerator broke so I had to swap dinners; I managed to get breakfast and the cake in the oven before figuring out what was going on. But the day started out great with breakfast. Let me start by saying I love omelets. If I go out to eat and get breakfast for dinner, it's usually an omelet. So when I found this recipe for Cheesy Italian Breakfast Bowl  I thought, hey, this is basically one big omelet inside a bread bowl. I'm doing this. I love Italian Turkey Sausage and red bell peppers, and am willing to eat red onion as long as it's not raw, and of course you need cheese in there, so...what's not to love? Ok, I admit, I'm actually not a big fan of sourdough bread. It has a weird aftertaste. Or during-taste. But brushing it with olive oil really helped. I would eat that as garlic bread for dinner. I coul