More Cookies for the College Kids

Remember all those cookies we made for the college kids?
And that messy kitchen after we made all those cookies for the college kids?

Apparently someone has been giving those cookies to people who aren't college kids.
Apparently someone (who is not a college kid) has been eating those cookie.
Apparently there are 3 more college kids who need packages.
Apparently there are no cookies left.
Apparently I am the one who needed to bake more.

Good thing I did, because I found (on Pinterest, of course) the most delicious oatmeal cookie recipe.
It might be the most delicious because it has a cup of butter, a cup of brown sugar, and a cup of white sugar. Hmmm... Here's the original recipe if you want to check it out.

I made one batch of oatmeal chocolate chip and it turned out great. In my second batch, I added white chocolate chips and craisins along with a little shake of cinnamon. They turned out good, too, but if I could only pick one, I would go with the chocolate chip.

Watch out, though, because the original blogger of this recipe says that you will get fat if you make these cookies because you will want to eat them all. True story. I had to (yes, had to) eat quite a bit of the dough. Then I had to (yes, had to) taste the cookies once they came out of the over. Then I had to (yes, had to) put the rest in the freezer so I wouldn't eat the entire batch!

You have been warned: Don't make them if you don't want to get fat!

Frozen yogurt

One of my latest obsessions is frozen yogurt. I am loving those places, like Red Mango, that have the plain/tart yogurt and let you top it with whatever you want. So when I saw this picture...

...along with a recipe to make your own frozen yogurt, I knew I wanted to try it. (FYI, I think they are comparing the frozen yogurt to actual ice cream with the 'save 711 calories' business).

It seemed pretty easy -Step 1: freeze some vanilla greek yogurt (1 container) and banana slices (1 banana) in an ice cube tray.

Step 2: Blend the yogurt and bananas, along with a little bit of peanut butter (2 Tbsp.) and mini chocolate chips (as many as you want!), in a food processor or blender.

This is where it suddenly became not so easy. Turns out my tiny little food processor wasn't quite up to the job of breaking down solid cubes of yogurt. It was just too frozen. So I had the brilliant (?) idea of putting the top part of the blender in the oven, turned on super low. I figured this would help soften it enough to blend.

It worked pretty well, so I added in the peanut butter and chocolate chips and mixed it all together.

Then I scooped it into little bowls and ate it up! At first I didn't love it, but the more I ate, the more I liked it...Good thing it only made a little bit!

Off to College

My little brother is off to college this year. He's actually taking the year off from "real" college and spending the year at a Bible school in England. Yep, that England. As in, across the ocean, 7 hour plane ride, on the other side of the world, England.

The weekend he left, my mom made me promise to spend all weekend distracting her so she wouldn't miss him so much. So what did we decide to do? Make a MOUNTAIN of cookies to send to him and all of his friends who are off to college.

My kitchen was a disaster...

 

...But at the end of the day, we had a bunch of delicious cookies waiting to be mailed off to some hungry college boys!

 

 

And here are the recipes we made:

 

 Chocolate Chip Pudding Cookies (recipe here)

Brownie Cookies (recipe here)

Snickerdoodles (recipe here)

 



A few of my favorite things...

Today I was at a training for our writing program at school. The presenter asked us if we considered ourselves writers. She gave the examples of keeping a journal or writing a blog. I thought to myself, I guess I am a writer. Then I came home and looked at my blog and realized that I haven't posted anything new since August! I revised my thinking to: I guess I am a delinquent writer.

[To be fair, I did recently lose all of the pictures that were on my phone, including some tasty treats that I wanted to blog about. Lucky me, my dad magically found them on my phone tonight, so I guess I have no more excuses.]

Anyway, here I go, trying to be a real writer, instead of a delinquent one...

A few weeks ago, my friends at school organized a favorite things party - you've probably seen it on Pinterest. Everyone brings 4 of their favorite things to the party. When you get there, you put your name in a bowl 4 times and then you pick out 4 names and give those people your favorite thing.

I had a really hard time deciding what to bring for my favorite thing. Then I looked in my cabinets and found out that, apparently, my favorite things are bowls and sprinkles.

See what I mean?

 

I literally have an entire cabinet in my kitchen full of bowls.

 

Plus 2 containers full of sprinkles.

To combine bowls and sprinkles, I bought 4 of my favorite bowls from anthropologie and filled them up with cake balls decorated with lots of different colored sprinkles!

Definitely two of my favorite things!