Xapa to the World

Category: Recipes

  • Recipe: Pumpkin and Cream Cheese Sandwich Cookies

    What is happening to me?! I’m becoming a cooking/baking monster! I always loved baking though. And there’s nothing like baking something from scratch. It’s probably my favorite, when I have time for it. And I try to make time for it. With just me and the Huz, it’s not too hard to spend a couple hours in the kitchen, and the end result is normally satisfying.

    I really recommend baking from scratch for two reasons – 1) You know exactly what is going into your food. You know because you put it there. No silly obscure scientific names, just the basics: flour, sugar, milk, egg, vanilla, pumpkin. Yum. And 2) the end result is no longer whatever the recipe says it is. It’s now part of you. Your heart (not literally) went into making that and THAT is fulfilling. I have yet to truly get there with cooking, but I’ve had some successes recently with new recipes, so that is encouraging me a lot.

    I was about to finish up work yesterday with a growing need to making something pumpkinny. Did you know that you can’t always find pumpkin puree throughout the year? Reminds me of Japan with all the seasonal veggies/fruits. And that’s comforting to me. I enjoy using fresh pumpkin myself, but the process can be very messy and time-consuming. It has to be combined with roasting pumpkin seeds too. That’s just a given.

    So, I wanted something sweet and something pumpkinny. I have a Pinterest board exclusively for pumpkin things. It’s delectable. I found the quickest pumpkin dessert recipe on there. The original recipe calls for all things gluten-free. I am not encumbered by the dietary restriction, so I did not use anything specifically GF. If you are, feel free to run over to that website for the alterations. This post, however, will include all the gluten-full and probably not-too-healthy-for-you ingredients necessary. Here you go!

    Pumpkin and Cream Cheese Sandwich Cookies

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    makes 24 individual cookies (12 sandwiches)

    Prep:   30 mins      Total Time: 1:05

    Ingredients:

    Cookie

    2 cups flour
    1 tsp baking soda
    1 tsp pumpkin pie spice**
    1/2 tsp baking powder
    1/2 tsp salt
    1 cup packed brown sugar
    1/2 cup butter softened (unsalted)
    1/2 cup pumpkin (you can refrigerate the remaining pumpkin in the can for about a week)
    1/4 cup milk
    1 egg
    1 tsp vanilla

    Filling

    8-oz package of cream cheese softened
    2 tbs butter softened (unsalted)
    1 tsp ground cinnamon
    1 tsp vanilla
    4 cups powdered sugar

    extra powdered sugar

    Directions

    1. Preheat oven to 350*F

    2. Combine dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, pumpkin pie spice, baking powder, salt) in medium bowl and set aside.

    3. Combine brown sugar and 1/2 cup butter in large bowl and beat at medium-speed until creamy. Add pumpkin, milk, egg, and vanilla. Beat until well-mixed. It will not look very nice, but don’t worry. Add flour mixture and beat at low-speed until well-mixed. Now it looks like batter.

    4. Drop batter onto ungreased cookie sheets with a spoon. I cover my cookies sheets with aluminum foil because I don’t like having to wash my cookie sheets. I’m lazy. I was liberal with the amounts (about a large half-dollar size) and they turned out pretty consistent. Not smooth like the ones on the original website, but they do the job. I had enough batter for 12 cookies each on 2 pans. Bake 9-10 minutes or until until set and lightly brown on the edges. I had to go a little longer to bake all the way through (since mine were thicker). Cool on cookie sheets for about 2 minutes then set on cooling rack. Cool completely.

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    5. Combine all filling ingredients except for powdered sugar in a large mixing bowl. Beat at medium-speed until smooth. You’ll probably have to scrape the bowl a few times to get all the ingredients mixed in. Add powdered sugar to the mix, one cup at a time, mixing completely after each addition. This was my favorite part. Yum!

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    6. Spread a layer of filling between the flat sides of two cookies and press together. You can be very liberal with this. We had a LOT of filling left over after I put a pretty good amount of filling between our cookies. We had so much, in fact, that we cut up a Honey Crisp apple and used half of it for dip and put the rest on the fridge for later use. So good. Sprinkle tops of sandwiches with extra powdered sugar (I forgot this part, but it does make them look cuter).

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    7. This is up to you. Depending on when you are serving the cookies, it is best to pop them into the fridge for about 30 minutes so the filling will thicken a bit. If not, the cookies could slide off each other. We’ve made cookies that we called Gobs for years (chocolate cake cookies with super-rich cream cheese filling AND coated on outside) and this is how we set them up. You can just put them on a cookie sheet to cool, or, if you lack the space, wrap each sandwich in some Saran wrap and squeeze in wherever you can find a space. Makes it easy to pack into lunches for a treat, too, throughout the week. I sent one to work with the Huz so he could enjoy it later.

    Go, my baking friends! Go and bake up some October!

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    **You can also use 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ground ginger, 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg and 1/8 tsp ground cloves.

     

  • Recipe: Savory Autumn Scramble

    While I was sitting at the car shop getting my oil changed, I perused through the Better Homes & Gardens magazine. There are usually some great recipes in there and the October issue did not disappoint. I quickly snapped pictures of each one and am determined to try them out throughout the season. The first attempt was the Savory Egg and Sweet Potato Scramble. The original recipe is here, but if you’re anything like me and my husband, you need a bit more meat to make a dinner meal. I decided to add some good ole Bob Evans sausage, because nothing is more Ohio than Bob Evans. Yum.

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    Here’s the updated recipe:

    Start to Finish: 35 mins

    Ingredients:

    8 eggs
    1 lb package of sausage
    1/3 cup milk
    1/2 tsp cumin
    1/4 tsp salt
    1/4 tsp ground black pepper
    1 tbsp butter
    2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled, quartered lengthwise, and thinly sliced
    2 green onions, sliced
    2 cups baby spinach
    bottled hot pepper sauce (optional)

    Directions:

    1.  Cook and crumble sausage in a skillet for 10-15 minutes until thoroughly cooked. Set aside.

    2.  In a medium bowl whisk together eggs, milk, cumin, salt, and pepper. Set aside.

    3.  Melt butter over medium heat in a large skillet. Toss in sweet potato and green onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until potatoes are almost tender, about 8 minutes.  Add spinach. Cook until slightly wilted, about 1 minute.

    It is amazing how big spinach is until it’s cooked for a while. Unreal!

    4.  Mix sausage into the skillet. Pour egg mixture over potatoes. Let the egg cook and seep down to the bottom of the pan. At this point, I raised the heat to medium-high because the egg just wasn’t cooking fast enough. After the initial cook, begin mixing the cooked egg portion into the rest of the scramble, letting the uncooked part go to the bottom and cook. Continue this method until all egg is thoroughly cooked but still moist. This will take about 2-3 minutes. Remove from the heat and serve right away. Makes 4-5 servings. Add hot sauce if desired. This will reheat (like for lunch the next day) but I wouldn’t recommend more than three days.

    And there you are. It was a pretty easy meal. We really liked it with the sausage added in. Hope you enjoy it as well!

  • Lately

    There has been a lot going on of late. I would like to expound on each thing, but for now, I’ll just give you a quick overview.

    I have started going to a chiropractor. I would venture that probably half of my church back home is going to this chiropractor. I went when I was a kid and Mom worked for one, but it has been a very long time. I had some discomfort in my left shoulder that gradually got more intense and into regular pain. So, I decided to hop on the bandwagon and check them out. I’m committed for a year (call me crazy!) and hopefully will see the good results my friends and church-family have been seeing. I’ll share more on this later, definitely. For now, you can just go check out their website.

    Last Thursday (two Thursdays ago, I guess, since Sunday starts a new week), friends of mine gave offered us tickets to the Cincinnati Tennis event, ATP/WTA Western and Southern Open. I loooove professional tennis. It’s a lot of fun. Matt had never been to a game so that makes it even more fun for me. We were able to get tickets for Thursday night and watched Rafael Nadal play and then Serena Williams. They both won their matches. We even had box seats since the tickets were from someone who works with Rookwood Pottery – that’s an iconic Cincinnati pottery business and they make the trophies given out at the tournament. Very fun. This was our view for the evening:

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    Nadal had a wedgie the entire tournament and Matt commented on it every time he picked at it…well, maybe not every time. It felt like every time because he picked out his wedgie just about every play. I’m not a huge Nadal fan anyway, so it was annoying. But he’s one of the best in tennis history, so it’s still a good watch…unless he’s picking his wedgie. Dude, get some different undies.

    Last Sunday, a man at Matt’s church was giving away from homegrown veggies. I grabbed up a zucchini and then sat around trying to figure out what to do with it. I also have some apples sitting around. Nice, plump, juicy apples. I got the big idea to add some apple to a zucchini bread. Sounds yummy, huh? Oh it was! But a word of warning – it might be a better idea to dry out the apple bits before adding them to your zucchini bread recipe. As it was, my recipe made either 24 muffins or 2 loaves of bread. I just have one pan for each, so I made 12 muffins and 1 loaf. Everything took probably twice as long to bake. I was up very late. I am wondering if the muffin recipe I have just makes really dense breads. I have yet to figure out how to make nice, fluffy breads. I’m guessing it is just something to learn. Regardless, they WERE very yummy! It’s almost all gone between Matt and I. Very dense. I would share the recipe with you, but I’m not really sure it worked the way it was supposed to. So, you can go to http://allrecipes.com and look up “apple zucchini” recipes. There are a bunch of things on there. I’m so glad.

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    Lastly, We were getting kind of low on our laundry detergent. I pinned more than a year ago this recipe for making your own. Claims to get 9 months of use out of $22+ of ingredients. That sounds fabulous! We haven’t had to buy detergent yet, so I thought it might be time to go ahead and make our own.

    Here is the website with the original recipe:

    It smelled so good while I was mixing it all together, and all the ingredients are supposed to be gentle for sensitive skin. I used it for my laundry last night and everything smells great! Only 1-2 tablespoons for each load. It’s just the two of us (as opposed to the blogger’s 5-member family) so I’m hoping it lasts us way longer than 9 months.

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    Oh and all of our ingredients cost $22.10. Woot! Matt’s mother saw my pin and made this over a year ago. She has awful water to work with at their house and this is the only stuff that seems to work and actually get their clothes looking, feeling, smelling clean. When I posted pictures of the finished product, people came out of the woodwork on Facebook commenting about how they have been making their own and love it or asking questions about how to go about doing it themselves. As you can see, we have an HE washer, but it doesn’t seem to have any problem with the detergent. I put the date on some freezer tape and stuck it to the side of the box so I can see how long this batch lasts. I’m pretty pumped.

    Have a great week everyone! Hopefully, I can check in with you before another week and a half rolls by.

    Oh, and our sunflowers are kickin’ it!

    sunflowers