Do-It-Yourself Donuts

These are homeade donuts we made as a family this weekend.  

Thanks to my friend, Christa, and her DELICIOUS recipe for do it yourself donuts, we changed up our Friday morning breakfast routine and enjoyed some dang good donuts.   (Check out her blog for step by step instructions).  

I followed her directions, but wasn't sure if I had the right biscuits or even what size hole to cut out of the middle so that aspect was an experiment for us.  I tried a few different things with one batch, cooked them to see what worked best, then held off the second batch until we knew what worked best.  

I learned that biscuits do expand when you cook them.  If you have a little one, they don't mind eating small donut holes (what you see in the pan). It's better to not punch out too big of a hole in the center because then the biscuit seems to have too much "crispy-ness" to it versus actual donut.  Check out the picture with the dough, that size hole worked great! 

 These donuts are really good with powdered sugar on them, too.   We shook the donuts in a brown paper bag like Christa suggested.  We also covered a few with regular sugar.  They were good too, but we dusted a lot of the sugar off, it was just a little too much sweetness for us.    

If you're looking for a new weekend breakfast idea, you've got to try this one!  You and your family will LOVE IT!  I promise!  I'm willing to pay $7.00 each for cans of biscuits over here.. so go pick up a few $1.75 cans- you won't regret it!!  

 

 

 

Enjoy!

We did a little baking....

We have been enjoying the past few days leading up to Christmas and spent some time baking in the kitchen and decorating with sweets!  

My mom brought one of those Gingerbread House Kits with her from the states to be a fun little project for Gavin to get to do this Christmas season.  Brooks took a few days off of work and he decided he wanted to be the one to make the house with Gavin.  They set up shop on the kitchen table and went to town.  Gavin loved it!  I read online a few weeks ago a really GOOD TIP when making Gingerbread houses--- use a hot glue gun to glue the actual house together instead of icing so that it will be more sturdy to decorate and place candies on without falling or breaking apart.  The idea worked.  Decorating the house was simple and since we usually don't eat the gingerbread cookie part anyways, it didn't affect anything.  The candy is delicious enough and Gavin had no problem eating three times as many pieces of candy as what he was putting on the house.  What a fun memory they made!   Gavin was REALLY proud of his gingerbread house and took his decorating job seriously!  We're starting to see aspects of an engineer's mind in his everyday routines.     

The morning that my parents were coming in, I couldn't sleep out of pure excitement and was up at the crack of dawn.  I decided to do a little baking and went semi overboard.  I baked a cake, made two dozen sugar cookies, and when Gavin woke up, we decided to try a recipe I had been meaning to fix for quite some time.

Now, first let me say, I love baking and enjoy decorating even more.  I used a new cookie recipe that I found here and followed ALL the tips that many of the people contributed on the site and really liked the way the cookies turned out.  A few days later, the cookies still needed to be decorated and this is where the fun began.  I tried making the icing (which is NOT buttercream icing that I'm use to) and ran into many issues.  I was calling my sister in law for help back home, who makes and decorates GORGEOUS cookies and has even started selling them, and 5 hours later all I had to show was maybe 15 cookies.  The cookies tasted great and I was pleased with the way they did turn out, but geez--- I could have decorated a 3 tier cake in less time.  Brooks kept encouraging me throughout the morning that I had nothing else to be doing and I should just enjoy decorating the cookies, so that's what I tried to do.

Speaking of cake..... one of our traditions that we've started is to make a birthday cake for Jesus since that is the real reason we celebrate Christmas.  I waited until Christmas day to decorate the cake and we had it as a dessert for dinner with some friends of ours who came over for gumbo that night!

I mentioned earlier I had found a recipe for Baked Sugar Doughnuts that I had been wanting to make for breakfast with Gavin and hadn't done it until this week.

Here's what you need:
- 1 can of biscuits (it says to use country style, but I didn't after the way our snowmen turned out last week)
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 3 tbs melted butter

Here's what you do:
- roll out the biscuits to 2 1/2 inches (I didn't necessarily "roll" rather I squashed them until they were semi flat).... don't let my roller in the picture fool you-- or the flour.  I put them both out, but didn't really need them
- use some kind of small round cutter to punch a hole out through the middle and set the center pieces aside
- submerge the biscuits and "holes" into the butter then dip into the sugar
- place onto a greased cookie sheet and bake in the oven for 12 minutes at 375 degrees.

*** I made sure to watch the biscuits cooking in the oven because I really didn't want these to burn.  I will say, the butter and sugar that coats the biscuits made it hard for me to determine if the biscuits were undercooked so I checked them by poking a toothpick through the middle.  They came out great and tasted delicious!  Next time, I'm going to cook them for even less time so they have a softer center, and not as hard of a "shell".  Did I mention that Gavin helped me with this recipe?  He literally did all the coating and dipping!  I didn't do any of it, unless there were parts of the biscuit that still needed some sugar!  Try it out, you may be surprised how much you like it-- although, we don't exactly have the option to get up early in the am and go to the local donut shop so this met that need.  I'm also scared of our deep fryer, even though last Christmas I got one that has a basket in it and everything... so that's my next goal is to make donuts the "real" way!  Enjoy!

Snowmen in the Desert

Isn't this snowman so cute?  

 I found this idea from a blog called Cute as a Fox Creations and if you want to see how her Snowman Biscuits turned out, click here.   If you clicked on the website, you are bound to notice our snowman looked a little different then hers---- I guess since we live in the desert, our snowmen have a tan and her's don't (I only cooked them for 6 minutes-- HONEST!)  

Unlike my last project, these ingredients were a little easier to find and required less effort to substitute and the best part-- it was easy.  Gavin loved getting to help me and we had some great laughs while making them.    

Here's what you need: 

- can of biscuits

- pretzel sticks, broken in half

- mini chocolate chips - for the eyes and mouth.  I had to use regular sized ones, but just cut them up

- candy corns for the nose- (we used orange mini m&m's)

- raisins for the buttons

- fruit roll up OR pull apart red licorice for the scarf

Step 1: Spray your pan with Pam. Preheat oven to 450 degrees- maybe that was our problem.

 -Arrange biscuits where they are touching- make sure to press them together so they don't fall apart

Step 2: Insert pretzel sticks into 2nd biscuit for the arms

Step 3: Hand over the raisins to your child and let em place them on the body.  Leave room under the "neck" to place your scarf once the biscuits cook.  

Step 4: Put the chocolate chips on the top biscuit for the eyes, then arrange 4-5 chocolate chips for the mouth.  Make sure to leave room for your nose.

Step 5: Ignore the fact that your child is eating all the chocolate chips you have strategically cut up and grouped according to sizes.  Then, pour yourself a handful and pop in your mouth- they are delicious!

Step 6: Ready to bake!  Leave the nose and scarf off until after you bake these.  Bake for 6 minutes.

Step 7: Place on baking rack until complexity cool.  Insert nose and place scarf on accordingly.

Step 8: Hand over to your child to eat for breakfast and enjoy!!!

                              

More Reindeer Fun

Gavin and I had some more fun this week working on a little Christmas activity.  I found another really cute project at The Idea Room for making Reindeer Pop Treats and figured it would be an easy task for us since the ingredients were pretty basic.  Haha- boy, was I wrong.  We did prevail and created these delicious treats that turned out cute and Gavin got to deliver them to his friends along with the Magic Reindeer Food we made!  If you want to make these pop treats you can simply click on the link above and get step by step specific instructions, however, if you wanted to know how we made them "Saudi" style-- keep reading.   I also wanted to point out before I go any furthur that this project was intended to be something for Gavin to get to do and make with a little assistance from me.  However, two days later, and only 8 cookies were made, it ended up being a project Brooks and I had to finish before going to a Christmas party.  Gavin did enjoy eating all the peanut butter I put in his bowl and then would crush the cookies up into the bowl.  

In order to make these pop treats- you need nutter butters and popsicle sticks.  I went to 3 stores and couldn't find them, figures.  I also couldn't find any popsicle sticks in my stash of crafts and they aren't sold in any of the local stores around here so I had to improvise on both parts.  First, I purchased some kind of "sweet biscuit cookies" that somewhat resembled the shape of a nutter butter and used coffee stirrers from Starbucks that I picked up a while back to use for cake decorating.  I smeared peanut butter on 2 sides of cookies and placed them together, with the stirrer in between, then placed in the fridge for a  few minutes to let the "stick" set.  I opened a few bags of M&M's in search for red M&M's to use for the reindeer's nose and then picked up a container of mini M&M's for brown M&M's to use as the eyes-- the actual recipe calls for MINI chocolate chips, but I couldn't find MINI cc.  It also called for white chocolate ships to use as the backdrop for the eyes, however, you can't find those in any stores around here either.  Therefore, I ended up melting a little bit of white chocolate that I managed to find in a store.  

 

Of course, I needed pretzels that were "shaped" but all we had were pretzel sticks- I think that would have made our reindeer's look a little weird.  Therefore, I went out to ANOTHER store and found a bag of miniature shaped pretzels and attempted to break them where they looked somewhat like antlers.  I had plenty of chocolate bars to melt so that was the easy part.

 

Now- a lot of stuff happened between the melted chocolate above and the reindeer pops below.  I would suggest that you have all your materials out, prepped, and ready because you really have to work fast to ensure all your ingredients will stick to the chocolate before it melts.  Aren't they cute?

*We dipped the ends of the pretzels into the chocolate, then placed them onto the top part of the cookie, and used the edge of the cookie sheet to hold them up so they wouldn't fall off.  That really seemed to help!  Oh yea, I forgot to mention we used sprinkles for the cheeks.

Gavin did help a little bit, but I have to admit, the "personalities" that are coming across on our reindeer's faces are all my fault.  I was in a hurry, not paying attention like I should have, and might have placed a few ingredients in the wrong places.  oops!

                                        

 

I am happy to say that the Reindeer Pops were a big hit at the dinner party we went to and it was fun watching people's reactions to the different looks each Reindeer had.  As big of a deal as this project became for us-- it really was fun to make and they were pretty delicious!  

 

Gavin was proud of his work and enjoyed showing off his masterpieces to all of our friends!  Hope you and your family have fun making this fun, cute, treats!

Mini Maple Pancake Muffins

 Brooks and I have a tradition where we cook actual breakfast meals and have family time on Friday and/or Saturday mornings.  We usually make puff balls, waffles, pancakes, muffins, biscuits, etc, but with this weekend being Brooks' first weekend home, I wanted to try something new.  I searched for some new recipes and found one on my favorite "baking" website (www.bakerella.com).  Mini Maple Pancake Muffins YUMMY!!  We made them Friday morning and they were delicious!

 The ingredients:

Getting to use my new mini muffin pan...

I added Chocolate Chips.. because, well, I love chocolate.

Gavin was waiting on the muffins...

and waiting... 

and waiting...

Yea!  They are ready! and H-O-T!

Gavin was so excited to eat them up!

Apparently, so were we.. we devoured them within 10 minutes.