Peanut Butter Sauce

When I visited Karen in Arizona in March, she fed me Dryers Butterfingers ice cream (a vanilla-based ice cream with chunks of Butterfingers and a peanut butter swirl running through it).  I was in love. Unfortunately, it was harder to find in Salt Lake than it was in Mesa, so I switched to Dryers Slow Churned Reese's peanut butter cup ice cream instead (same base and peanut butter swirl- just switch baby Reese's pb cups for the Butterfingers). Still in love! And maybe even more so because it was slow churned which meant forty fewer calories per serving. Yesterday, my husband broke out a carton of Breyer's Peanut Butter Cup ice cream and it was super yummy too! Breyer's uses a peanut butter flavored based ice cream. I think in my mind it is all about the peanut butter, and the more of it, the more I love it. So I decided to make a peanut butter ice cream sauce to pour over some vanilla ice cream, just in case my supply of specialty ice cream in the freezer disappears.

Peanut Butter Sauce
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/2 cup corn syrup
3/4 cup smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Bring the first three ingredients to a simmer over low heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and add heavy cream and vanilla extract. The sauce will thicken as it cools. Serve warm over ice cream (some kids like it spread on a slice of bread for lunch!).

Maraschino Cherry Cupcakes

Last month two friends of mine had a birthday on the same day. One got cupcakes...

and the other got a cake. 

They both had the same frosting but were different cakes. Today I'm blogging about the cupcakes. The cupcake is adapted from Lizzy Early over at Your Cup of Cake. 

Maraschino Cherry Cupcakes

1 box white cake mix, sifted

3 eggs

1/3 cup oil

3/4 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup sour cream

1 tsp almond emulsion (or extract if you don't have emulsion)

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 small jar (10 oz) maraschino cherries, drained and chopped (reserve the cherry juice for the frosting)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line cupcake pans with wrappers. Mix together the eggs, oil, buttermilk, and emulsion, then add the sifted cake mix and beat for a minute. Fill liners 3/4 full of batter and bake for 17-22 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean. 

Cherry Frosting

1 cup butter, softened

8 oz. cream cheese, softened

1 tsp almond emulsion (or extract)

1 tsp grenadine syrup

1 T maraschino cherry juice

5 cups powdered sugar

Beat butter and cream cheese together for 3-5 minutes. Add almond emulsion, grenadine syrup and cherry juice. Stir to combine. Add powdered sugar, one cup at a time. Beat on medium-low speed for 10 minutes. Frost cooled cupcakes and top with sprinkles and a stemmed cherry if desired. 

I'm going to make these again but next time I will make them chocolate cherry cupcakes by filling them with a chocolate ganache in the center of the cupcake after they are baked. Then I will top them with chocolate curls and a chocolate dipped cherry. Can't wait to see how those turn out! 

*Update-I couldn't wait. I made these today and added chocolate ganache to the center of the cupcake, but didn't have time to add the chocolate curls so I just used some very slim Jimmies and topped it with the chocolate cherry. Lovely! 

The Bread of Life

Laura has asked that we start eating more "from scratch" food, so I whipped out my wheat grinder and my Blendtec mixer and got busy on some bread. I wanted to try a recipe from Six Sisters and I was glad I did! This was really good bread. It doesn't look or taste like what you think of when you hear "whole wheat." This is light and chewy and yummy, and hard to not slice off just one more piece! 

The recipe comes from here.

I changed a couple of things though. I used 12 cups of freshly ground whole wheat flour and then finished it up with about 3 cups of all-purpose flour, mostly because my wheat grinder tops out at 12 cups of flour per cycle and I don't want to have to grind a little more wheat to finish up the dough! I stop adding flour when the dough in the machine pulls away from the sides like they explain over at Six Sisters. If you don't have a machine to knead your dough for you, you want to stop adding flour when the bread is still a little sticky, but not overly sticky. I know that's hard to determine when you haven't done it before, but you are all smart people out there and I am confident you can figure it out! Or go buy a machine, which is what I did after watching a friend of mine make bread a few years ago!

The second thing I changed was I let my dough rise once in the bowl before shaping into loaves and letting them have a second shorter rise in the pans. I use 1 1/2 pounds of dough in my slightly smaller bread pans and 2 pounds of dough in my larger bread pan. It bakes at 350°F for about 30 minutes (or until it reaches 195°F on an instant read thermometer. I haven't made six loaves of bread yet from a single recipe (I've made this recipe twice in two days!) because yesterday we made what we call "Hot Spots" (dough wrapped around ham, cheese, broccoli and sometimes red pepper and bake them for about 20 minutes) and today we made hamburger buns with some of the dough. This is now my favorite bread recipe and I hope you'll try it to see if it will be your favorite one too!