Easy Monkey Bread

A friend from college posted a recipe on Facebook yesterday.  It is similar to Monkey Bread, but uses syrup in the recipe.  My family actually tried it before, but didn't like the sweet & sticky syrup, we preferred actual Monkey Bread.  So I told my friend this.  And her question was, how would it taste with Monkey Bread sauce.  I just happened to have some biscuits I needed to use up, so I decided to try combining the recipe this morning.  It was a huge hit with my family!  They said it was softer and less messy and they'd prefer it from now on over regular monkey bread.  As an added bonus, it's faster to prepare and cooks in less time.  So here it is:

Easy Monkey Bread

2 Small cans refrigerator buttermilk biscuits or 1 can Pillsbury Grands buttermilk biscuits (I used 1.5 cans of Pillsbury Grands Jr Buttermilk biscuits because I had it on hand)

1 ½ C. Brown Sugar

1 Tbsp. Cinnamon

1 ½ Sticks Butter

Preheat oven to 375.

In a saucepan, melt butter, cinnamon and brown sugar.

Spray a fluted pan with non-stick spray.  Pour about half of the sauce mixture in the bottom of the pan.  Lay the biscuits on the bottom of the pan, overlapping the edges (closely together) to form a ring.

Top with remaining sauce mixture.

Bake at 375 for approximately 20 minutes or until golden brown.  Cool 1 minute in the pan, then invert onto serving platter.

As I served it, I tried to include some extra sauce because I thought the middle might need it (it didn't), but if the sauce was just sitting on our plates it got rather hard.

 My family normally eats the Jr. Grands biscuits, so that is probably what I will always use to make it; I'll just buy one regular 10-count can and a small 5-count can for the future.  Today, I just baked the remaining biscuits in the oven so we'd have something else to eat in case we didn't like it.  But as you can see from the picture; we loved it.

Honey Bun Cake

I got this amazing recipe years ago from my mother-in-law.  It's my go to recipe when taking food to a friend because they can eat it as dessert or save it for breakfast in the morning.  I make it without nuts or raisins because I don't like them and then I also don't have to worry about allergy issues with others.  This cake is delicious both cold or warm.

1 2 Layer Yellow Cake Mix                                       1 Cup Buttermilk

4 Eggs                                                                         ¾ Cup Oil

½ Cup Sugar                                                               ½ Cup Chopped Pecans

¾ Cup Packed Brown Sugar                                      *1/4 Cup Raisins-Optional

4 Teaspoons Cinnamon                                               2 Cups Confectioner’s Sugar

2 Tablespoons Milk                                                     1 Teaspoon Vanilla

Combine cake mix, buttermilk, eggs, oil, and sugar in mixer bowl; beat for 2 minutes.  Spoon into greased 9x13” cake pan.  Mix pecans, brown sugar, raisins, and cinnamon in bowl.  Sprinkle over cake batter.  Cut through with a knife to swirl.  Bake at 350° until cake tests done.  Combine confectioner’s sugar, milk, and vanilla in bowl, mix well (Add more milk to achieve desired icing consistency).  Spread over hot cake.

* May omit raisins or substitute dates.

If you're like me, you don't keep Buttermilk on hand.  I discovered a few years ago that there is a dry buttermilk mix in the baking aisle at the store.  So now I always have buttermilk on hand.  

A few side notes to this recipe...I bake it for 5-10 minutes longer than the cake mix box says.  I'd start with 5 and go from there.  For the icing, I usually end up with about 3 tablespoons of milk.  2 Tablespoons leaves you with very thick icing, you want it to be easy to spread and to sort of spread on it's own with the help of the hot cake, but you don't want it so thin that it's pouring over the sides of the cake.  Hope that makes sense. 

I'm a Slacker...

Yep, I'm a slacker.  Not when it comes to baking, just when it comes to blogging about baking.  I've done quite a bit of baking since Christmas and I've uploaded the pics to Facebook, but I haven't sat down and written about them.  Why, because it's easier to just quickly throw the pictures up on Facebook and call it a day.  So here's all the stuff I've baked (hopefully I don't leave anything out).

This is a Banana Cake.  It tastes like banana bread with a touch of cinnamon and is topped off with Cream Cheese icing.  A new favorite in my house.   I buy bananas a lot and normally they are eaten, but we run into times where I end up with several that are going bad and no one is touching them.  Normally I make banana bread or muffins or I freeze them for smoothies.  If I want to be healthy, I should stick with the muffins (it's a Weight Watchers recipe), but it we want super yummy; this is the way to go. 

This next beauty is a yummy white sheet cake.  Another new favorite at my house.  The cake was thin and the icing was delicious. 

Valentine's goodies!  I made plain and chocolate sugar cookies and M&M cookies this year.  The sugar cookies look a lot like last years.

Natalie is becoming quite the decorator.  I flooded the cookies (did the background color) and she asked to get up at 6 a.m. so she could decorate them.

Natalie and I also made cake balls for the Father/Daughter dance at her school.  I bought a cake ball roller at Christmas and we've been dying to try it out.  It did a great job and should really speed things up for us next Christmas.  I'm hoping to start making cake balls more throughout the year, but I've got to find places to take them so my family doesn't go into a diabetic coma eating them.

Natalie's Birthday cake.  She wanted a plain white cake (box mix) with purple icing (homemade buttercream), topped off with polka dots.  She doesn't like fondant, so I'd been keeping my eye out for something else to use.  I found these candy dots at Michael's.  I thought it looked like a circus cake, but Natalie didn't agree.  The sugar dots were cute; but not very tasty.  By the next day they were darkening up and dissolving into the cake.

I got real outgoing on Gerry's birthday; although none of it was baked for his birthday.  He requested a dump cake, but wasn't feeling well, so asked me to wait to make it.  So instead I made another banana cake, some sugar cookies, and tried a new recipe...iced brownies.  They kind of taste like a yummy chocolate cake recipe I have, but do have more of a brownie like consistency.  They were good; but I think I like the cake better. 

Here are the sugar cookies I made.  Andrea was going camping with her Girl Scout troop and I thought campfire cookies would be perfect to send.  They didn't turn out quite like I'd envisioned.  They cutter I found was kind of small, so there wasn't much room to make the fire look right.  And since they were small, I decided to make shamrock cookies to go with them.  Sorry there aren't many to look at.  I remembered to take a picture after I'd already bagged most of them up.

I also made the Dump Cake for Gerry this past weekend and an Alabama Cake for him to take to a friend's house.  Sorry I didn't take pictures of those.  I make the Alabama Cake all the time, so it didn't cross my mind to take a picture.  If you haven't had the Alabama Cake, then you probably have no idea what it is.  We were in Alabama a few years ago for my father-in-law's funeral.  A family friend brought this yummy chocolate cake with white icing over for the family.  It was a big hit.  As we are getting on the interstate to head back to TX Andrea ask "Mom, you didn't forget to get the recipe, did you?"  The urgency in her voice had me worried at first that we had forgotten something and would have to turn around.  Well I didn't have the recipe, but assured her I would get it.  The guy that made it finally gave my mother-in-law the recipe, but said he thought it was right because he'd just thrown it together.  Some of the amounts didn't look right to several baking friends.  So I took that as a challenge.  Based on his recipe, I searched the internet and found the perfect cake and icing recipe.  It is really a Chocolate Buttermilk cake, but my family always calls it Alabama Cake since that is where we first had it and so that I know which chocolate cake they want.

Well that sums up my last 3 months of baking.  Are you hungry now?  I've got to find more people to eat my sweets or bake less because I can't keep eating so much of it.  Don't get my wrong; I'd love to eat all of it; but my jeans just don't fit like they used to.

Merry Christmas

I've been busy the last few weeks (aside from the normal being a mom and wife busy).  So below are pictures of some of the goodies I've made...
First up, Cake Balls and Oreo Truffles

This is only one flavor of Oreo Truffle pictures, but in the end I made three...Regular Oreo, Chocolate Cream Filled, and Mint.  Sorry, I don't have a picture of the cake balls (but they look about the same).  For those the flavors are Red Velvet, Chocolate, Spice, Carrot, Lemon, Strawberry, Cherry, and Holiday Funfetti (White cake mix with sprinkles in the mix).  I think the Funfetti ones are my favorites because the Funfetti icing is green, so you end up with green cake balls.

I was able to knock all these out in about 4 days time thanks to the help of my wonderful family.  In the past, I've gotten help here and there from Gerry or the girls.  But this year, the girls were a tremendous help.  They crumbled up all of the cakes and helped roll them into balls.  They also helped put the sprinkles on, which is usually the only thing they do.  Gerry helped roll the Oreo Truffles and helped with sprinkles on those.

After I filled my fridge with Tupperware containers full of cake balls and truffles, I moved on to fudge

 and Zebra Nipples.

Then Saturday night I decided to make M&M cookies.  I bought way too many bags of Christmas M&M's at CVS and decided to try to use some of them up.  ( I think I still have 4 or 5 bags left...don't tell Gerry).  We took most of these to church with us on Sunday, so there are only a few left.

 After that, I decided to make Sugar Cookies.  I may have made a few too many.  My original plan had been to have some of those ready to go to church with us Sunday night for friends, but that didn't happen.  So we have 2 batches of regular Sugar Cookies and 2 batches of Chocolate Sugar Cookies sitting around the house tempting us.  I'm slowly finding homes for all of them (no, I'm not eating all of them; I've actually only had one so far...ok, ok, it was a big one, but it was just one).

The girls were a big help again, and cut out almost all of the regular sugar cookies.  Below is a sampling of some of the finished cookies.

And last, here are my beautiful girls with the cookies they decorated.  I think they did an awesome job.

 

These two were Natalie's favorite; she asked me to get a pic of her holding them....The one with the S is the one she made for Santa.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas! 

Another Cookie Night

Yep, that's right, I made cookies two nights in a row.  Why, you might be wondering.  Simply because I had leftover icing from yesterday's batch.  Normally I save it with the intention of making more cookies in the next day or so, but it never happens.  Well I was determined to make more this time, and I did it.  I made chocolate sugar cookies today.  I stuck with the Halloween theme because the icing was already colored to coordinate with those.  So here they are:

I made a few others; but these were the cutest from both batches of cookies.  And I'm really excited about the cookie in the middle.  I made it with my new cookie cutter from Karen's Cookies:  http://www.karenscookies.net/Karens-Cookies-Exclusives_c_112.html.  I used the large rectangular, although I bought one of each size.  (glad I did too, she sold out very quickly)

I'm Back

After a long hiatus, I'm back to cookie making.  We moved this summer, which didn't leave time or the place to make cookies.  Then I had to put my craft room back together so I could find all my hair bows for craft shows.  My last show was last week, so it's cookie making time!!!

I had helpers both with mixing/baking and with the icing.  Sadly, I'm a little rusty and the girls weren't much better, but we enjoyed bonding while we created.

While making these, I realized that I first started making cookies this time last year.  Unfortunately, they didn't turn out so well.  Oddly enough, I didn't give it.  The mess actually encouraged me to find a better recipe and to learn how to decorate them.  I've definitely come a long way in a year, and still have a very long way to go.  But the best part is that I get to eat cookies while I learn.
(I was going to post pictures of my cookies from last year, but they were so bad, I don't think I even took any).

More Baking

I've spent my afternoon baking.  Here is the cookie cake....

It got a little messed up because I decided to try to cool it on the cooling racks instead of the way I normally do it.  So it now has a crack in the middle, but it will still taste yummy.

Up next...M&M cookies....

It just wasn't my day for cooking.  I ran out of white flour, so I mixed white and wheat...not too big of a deal.  Then I used the wrong size scoop and ended up with gigantic cookies.  Which would have been fine, but I needed 36 cookies and the gigantic size only made 30.  So I had to mix up another batch.  The second time I used the correct scoop and they turned out great.  So now I have an abundance of cookies.

And last, just for fun, here's my wonderful husband being a good sport at the soccer game today...

He sported the sunglasses for the entire game, but would only wear the antenna during half time.  Originally he was going to wear yellow zebra socks like the girls wear with their uniform, but someone else needed the extra pair.  So we came up with this idea instead.  Too bad it didn't help the girls get a win.