BakeAwayGirl

I can't believe I haven't posted this recipe yet.  It could be argued that this recipe is what kicked off my obsession with cooking and baking.  I loved baking and cooking, but it was about how it tasted, and it didn't usually look all that great.  My parents bought me some cake decorating stuff for Christmas, and my cousin asked me to take a cake decorating class with her. I was hooked. Problem was, the recipe the class gave me looked phenomenal... and tasted like plastic.  So I did some research and discovered that the problem was the shortening.  I needed butter.  Be real, people, butter makes everything better. Now, I've done my research.  The general consensus, along with my own experience, is that the butter makes it softer, so it doesn't hold up for much real decorating.  If you're trying to make flowers or something along those lines, you're going to need a straight up shortening/confectioners sugar concoction.  However, for general frosti

I have been eating like a pig lately.  I mean, it doesn't bother me too much because I just love food.  Yes, I've got my warm winter padding on my body all year, but I'll keep my brownies and you can have the bikini :)  But still, I like my jeans and the way they fit so I will cut back on the onion rings for a few days. Maybe. When I stumbled upon the recipe for a chopped salad, I thought, "Hot damn, nothing better than a Portillos chopped salad."  Even better, this one was a southwestern chopped salad!  I was a little skeptical on this one, to be honest.  Salads can really easily be bland and not very filling, and I love me some good flavor.  But, we had most of the ingredients already and had to go to the grocery store anyway, so picking up the last few ingredients was easy. Mostly, though, I was worried that the salad dressing would be gross.  I love ranch dressing.  Mmmm.  Judge away, but I would douse everything in some good ranch dressing if I didn&#

So if you read the last post, I experimented with a raspberry crumble and it was a hit !  I was just going to post an update in the same post about it, but... well, this is Jeff's fault.  I was thinking aloud and said I was going to make a half-batch of the apple filling, and Jeff felt this was blasphemy.  Why make half the amount of apples when I could make them all? Men. So I gave in (who doesn't love baked apples?) and sliced two apples and diced six.  Why?  Well, we decided to make two different things.  The diced apples would be the apple filling in the crumble, while the sliced apples would be the base of a few small ramikins of apple crisp.  I mixed all the apple pieces with cinnamon, lemon juice, brown sugar, and nutmeg.  I let that sit in its juice while I made the crumble dough.  For some reason, the dough didn't ball up as nicely as yesterday.  It was much more like a pie dough today and less like a dough.  For those of you who don't know why that's

So it was your typical Sunday around here.  We slept in, did some grocery shopping, and I browsed Pinterest (of course).  We've been staying at my parents for a week to take care of the dogs while they were on vacation, and getting back to our own apartment and rhythm was nice.  Sleeping in our own bed again was beyond heavenly, and I never wanted to get out!  Unfortunately, the shower and grocery shopping called, so I did. While doing my lazy morning internet routine (facebook, email, weather, pinterest), I discovered a delicious recipe on Pinterest.  It was an easy, basic crumble recipe that called for raspberry, but I think you could do a lot with it.  We followed the recipe this time, but I want to try it with my apple pie filling as well.  The one thing I'll caution about that, however, is the rest of the dish is sweet, so the tartness of the raspberry filling was the perfect counterpart.  I would suggest raspberry, blueberry, cherry, or strawberry.  I'll be trying