BakeAwayGirl

Salad from the top view You may have noticed that I love Southwestern American food.  I love Mexican food, but I think I like the Tex Mex better.  It has a lot of spice and flavor and cheese.  The best way to do this, in my opinion, is salads.  They taste so fresh but have so much more flavor than your every day salad. Last month, we had a potluck at work.  Potluck at my work is code for snacks and desserts, but usually no real food.  I had a recipe in my To-Do List Pinterest board, and decided it was perfect for a more substantial aspect of the potluck.  The recipe made way more salad than I anticipated, but it was no problem!  The recipe was a hit, and I even sent the bit of leftovers home with people because they loved it so much. Here's the catch.  The recipe for the dressing wasn't very good, in my opinion.  Some people really liked it, but I wouldn't do it again.  I'll include it here because some people loved it.  For me, I would simply mix salsa in with

Before I start this one, I'll preface it with a simple breakdown of this recipe:  If you don't like mint, move on, this one isn't for you.  If you care for mint at all, make these. Now, mint lovers, this is the best cookie for Christmastime.  The original recipe I found was not specifically for Christmas, but it uses Andes mints, and those scream Christmastime to me.  This tastes exactly like mint chocolate chip ice cream in cookie form.  So delicious.  Jeff even suggested we put two together around a scoop of vanilla ice cream to make ice cream sandwiches. In the original recipe, it calls for Andes mints chopped.  That was way too time consuming for my liking, so I just broke them up with my hands.  They break pretty easily, so that wasn't a problem, but it was still time consuming and uneven, so there were some that were still very large.  I vaguely remembered that Andes mints came in chocolate chip sized pieces, but I didn't see them at the store and figured

Couldn't even wait to take a picture! My favorite way to find a new recipe isn't actually Pinterest.  I prefer accidentally discovering a food I love (by eating it of course) and then asking someone for the recipe.  This past summer, at my cousin's birthday party, her roommate brought out a chocolate cake.  Me and chocolate are besties, so of course I took a piece.  After the first bite, I decided I had discovered my new favorite chocolate cake! This cake is luscious.  Decadent.  Sinful.  Devil's Food Cake, you naive child, you haven't tasted sinful yet. There is so much chocolate, but it is balanced out by enough moisture that it never becomes cloying and overdone.  It's just delicious.  Every bite is worth the calories.  I will admit I have only made it once because we had company in town and I wanted something to wow the crowd.  Simply making it for Jeff and I, or even a small party, feels too gluttonous.  After all, something made with all these ing

Who doesn't love biscuits?  The best part of most restaurants is their bread or biscuits, and let's be real, those Pillsbury biscuits are addicting.  I normally don't try to make many breads or doughs because it's such a delicate process.  Dough needs the right amount of flour and water and handling.  Too much of any one of those things turns your final product into a rock hard mistake. I had buttermilk for a different recipe and with the leftovers, I was craving biscuits.  I decided to venture into this totally unknown territory and try it myself.  I did what most women do... I asked my mom for help.  No idea why I did this.  My mom is a perfectly good cook and she likes to experiment every now and then, but she has gladly handed over the majority of cooking over to me when I lived at home as an adult.  Apparently she tried biscuits only once and hers were hard as stone. So I was on my own!  Luckily, I had played enough with pie crust dough that I knew the ridicu