Easy, Delicious Peanut Butter Dip

I love Peanut Butter.  No, I mean I really, really love it. One might say I have a teensy weensy obsession with it.  Apparently the addiction is contagious in my house. We put it in our oatmeal, sometimes in cereal (hey, don’t judge..you know you’re weird too), on toast, rice cakes, ice cream, heck I even cook a chicken dish with it.  I must confess that I have fed my kids peanut butter straight from the jar without a second thought.

But the cold, hard fact is that you can’t exactly pass off peanut butter as the healthiest of snacks.  So I came up with a little dip that satisfies both my need for a peanut butter fix and my desire to feed my kids well.

So super easy.

3 Ingredients (yep, we clearly shop at Costco):

You can use any version of these items (i.e. it doesn’t have to be natural peanut butter or greek yogurt) but this specific combo happens to be a proven winner.

Just scoop some PB and Yogurt and add the cinnamon.

Mix it up and voila!

We most commonly dip sliced apples in it but the possibilities are endless!

For Jack I have to cut the apples into tiny pieces and put the dip on each one, otherwise he will simply use the apple slice as a spoon and never actually eat the apple!

If you try this with something other than apples let me know how yummy it turned out!!

***BTW – if you are so inclined, get fancy with it like my stepmom Jenean and add other ingredients (she added some sliced almonds for crunch and a little bit of cocoa).

Mango Cucumber Salad

I’m still an old fashioned ‘pinner’. In my spare time (chuckle) I tear pictures and recipes out of magazines and ‘paste’ them in a pretty little notebook.  Recently I tore a page out of Real Simple that gave a bunch of yummy ideas of what to do with a mango. This amazing little salad was one of them.

There was no recipe per se but it just said to mix the following ingredients (I’m listing the amount of each that I used):

2 mangos

1 avocado

1 large cucumber

1/3 red onion

1 jalepeno

juice of 1 lime

Salt and Pepper to taste

See that pretty little jalapeno?

That’s from our garden.  Eventually I’ll be able to supply the cucumber and onion for this dish but I’m afraid I’ll have to move somewhere tropical to grow the rest (tempting).

My avocado was very ripe so it almost acted like a dressing after I stirred everything together.

This was so yummy!  Awesome summer dish.  If it were up to me this alone would have been dinner but that doesn’t fly in my household so I paired it with a light pasta dish.

Delish.

Bunny Butt Cupcakes

There is an abundance of Easter treat cuteness on Pinterest (as I’m sure you all know…come on admit your addicted).  I stopped cold though when I came across these from Created by Diane:

No brainer, these are the winners.  This past weekend we threw an early Easter celebration coupled with Jared’s birthday party so it was the perfect excuse make ‘bunny butt cupcakes’.

Knowing that the decorating part would take awhile, I decided to save time by using store bought cake and frosting (picture me briefly hanging my head in shame).  I used Diane’s idea of the marshmallow for the tail but I had ‘white sparkling sugar’ sprinkles in my cupboard and no nonpareils so sparkly tails it would be. Just dip the marshmallow in water and roll…

Grace helped me along with the feet (melted white chocolate in a Wilton’s Squeeze bottle – my new favorite tool by the way). No, it’s not that we have neglected to brush her hair in two weeks, she’s just fresh out of the shower 😉

I made 32 cupcakes so 64 feet…wow.

Let them dry

then flipped them over and painted on the pads and toes with pink candy melts

I wanted to see if I could make them look more ‘furry’ so I rolled half of them in coconut and dang, these are stinkin’ cute if I do say so myself.

I still liked the smooth look too though

I made a gluten free cake topper for Jared with the frosting (his favorite – peanut butter cream cheese, recipe below) in green to coincide with the colors of the wrappers.  Here’s the The Cupcake Tower displayed at Auntie Gay’s house:

Ta Da!  So fun.

Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting:

(frosts 18-24 cupcakes depending on whether you’re spreading with a knife or piping with a bag)

1 C. softened cream cheese

1/2 C. peanut butter

2-3 C. of powdered sugar (depending on how sweet you like it)

3 Tbsp. milk

Combine all ingredients in a bowl.  I usually hand mix slowly until most of the powdered sugar is absorbed so as not to powder my entire kitchen when I turn on the mixer!  Mix until smooth.

Aunt Jann’s Coconut Macaroons (gluten free!)

I happened to marry into a family of amazing cooks (no pressure), one of whom is Jared’s Aunt Jann.  She recently sent out several of her recipes to the family in order to gain some feedback for a cookbook she intends to write and I was lucky enough to receive a handful of them.  Grace and I decided the other day to start with her Coconut Macaroons, who says you can’t start with dessert?

These are easy folks.  I mean EASY.  And yet, I still managed to mess up the first batch (we’ll get into that in a minute).

Here’s your ingredients:

2 Egg Whites

1/4 tsp. salt

1/3 cup sugar

14 tsp. almond extract

1 C. shredded unsweetened coconut

Preheat oven to 325 °and line cookie sheet with parchment paper. Beat egg whites and salt until almost stiff.  Gradually add sugar and beat until egg whites stand in peaks*.  Add flavoring and fold in coconut.  Drop by teaspoonful onto parchment paper and bake for 15 minutes, rotating for even browning.  Cool slightly and remove.

*Here’s where I messed up.  With my first batch I didn’t beat them long enough and they were almost runny before baking, chewy afterwards.  The second batch I  really paid attention and they were much fluffier!

Here’s my girl in action

Every good baker should taste test right?

Such a pro.

Ta Da!

Of course they look particularly pretty on The Cupcake Tower in some mini cupcake liners

My review:

These are delicious!  My only revision with the second batch was that I put 11 teaspoons of the Almond Extract instead of 14 to cut the sweetness just a bit.  But this is definitely a personal preference, I’m the gal who only orders 1 pump of flavoring in her grande Starbucks latte’.

My favorite part about these is how fast and easy they are.

Thanks Aunt Jann!  I’m sharing this recipe as a teaser and will let you all know when the cookbook is PUBLISHED 🙂