Blueberry French Toast

A traditional but healthy french toast recipe made easy, topped with maple syrup and warm blueberries.

You'll need bread, eggs, blueberries, butter or oil, milk (optional), and maple syrup.

I'm sorry but maple syrup is not optional. Maple syrup is 100% natural and WAY..I mean W.A.Y. better than any of the cheaper varieties that are just corn syrup and preservatives.

Use maple syrup. You deserve it!

Melt your butter in a skillet over medium or medium high heat. You can use oil instead. Both have fat, but I'm sorry to say fat doesn't scare me. In fact, fat won't make you fat. I know that sounds painful, but we need fat.

When I was about 4 years old, my parents always walked in on me nibbling on a stick of butter. I have many memories of getting my Barbies taken away because of the bite marks on the sticks of butter.

So...maybe I'm not the person to listen to when it comes to cooking with butter, but what can I say? It's good, natural, and it's not going to hurt you in moderation!

Crack your eggs into a bowl and add a little milk. The milk is truly optional, and I actually find that you'll get better french toast when you just use eggs by themselves.

The only problem with that is that we buy organic eggs (can you say, $$$$$$), and so I use milk to stretch the recipe a little.

To each his own; do what you please, if you please.

Now, pull a Bob marley and "Stir it up" (steeeer it up). If you don't know which song I'm referring to, or that I even am referring to a song, I encourage you to leave my blog and never return again, ever. You are unwanted and I'm ashamed to know of your existence.

Just kidding; please don't leave!!

So we have our bread, our eggs or egg mixture, and our skillet with either butter or oil.

Dip yo' bread into the egg stuff, making sure to coat both sides.

Add to the skillet and cook for a few minutes on each side.

Keep dipping and cooking until all pieces are done.

 I did end up adding some oil to what was left of the butter. I used canola this time, although evoo would have worked great, too. The oil makes it cook faster and I had a hungry husband in my midst.

And this is what you will get! Thick, warm, and yummy french toast. At this point you can just add maple syrup and dig in, although I strongly encourage you to take it a step further.

Not only does it add more healthy stuff to your plate, it adds sooo much more flava flave.

 Add za blueberries. Don't argue, just do it. You'll be proud of the presentation and it'll taste even better. I used frozen berries so I just thawed them out in the microwave for a minute before spooning them on.

Told ya!

Oh yes. Good stuff. Good stuff indeed!

Just when you think it can't get better, add some maple syrup.

Ingredients: 

4 Pieces bread (I used Ezekiel 4:9)
2 Eggs (if using milk, otherwise you might need 3)  

1 TBS Butter or oil

Maple syrup

Blueberries
2 TBS milk (optional)

Directions:

1. Melt butter in skillet.
2. Add eggs and milk to a bowl and stir.
3. Dip bread in eggs or egg mixture.
4. Drop coated bread in hot skillet.
5. Cook a few minutes on both sides or until light brown.
6. Top with blueberries and maple syrup.

~TheCrazyApron~

Jason Upton - Live

Random again. Jason Upton is probably my favorite musical artist. I love music of all kinds, but his music really moves me.

This was recorded around Father's Day.

Twilight, Husband, and Fatness

My mind is going in circles today with all kinds of random thoughts, so I figured I'd share. Nothing special, possibly boring, but all totally random. Maybe it will help clear my head a little. 

1. I love my husband more than I can type on a blog. He butters my bread. He sweetens my tea. He makes my cheeks blush, and my hair braid. Well, all hypothetically of course, but he does actually do dishes, which is just an added bonus. It's been just almost 4 years and I am completely swoonie for him. I don't think "swoonie" is a word, but it's what I am. Swoonie. And he's one hot dog, I'll tell ya that. He's the um......sexiest?...man on the planet, and probably off the planet as well. Can I say sexiest on my blog? 

2. I'm craving a Hebrew National hotdog on a whole wheat bun right now like oxygen. Well, not that much, but ask me in an hour.

3. I'm done with sugar. Well, not really. But I am cutting way back. Sugar and butter, I rebuke you from my house. I've gained back way more weight than I'd like to admit these last few months, and I know the cause. It's simple for me to lose weight with the things I eat, but I do need to cut out more sugar and butter. Mmm...sugar and butter.........

*snap*   *snap*  PIPER, WAKE UP!

*shakes head*

Oh, sorry. 

4. Without butter and sugar, I'm at a loss for words. Well, for recipes anyway. I'm forced to remember what I used to make before the fat and sweetness. That's sad.

5. I have a L-O-T to do this weekend for school work. Fine, not that much, but enough to remind me that being in school is a commitment. I need to get on the ball. Especially the work out ball (stability ball), but we already talked that kind of thing in 3 and 4.

6. I'll be voiding a few upcoming posts of food in the next several days. My next blogpost (probably tomorrow if I can remember) will be a homemade facial scrub. I use it all the time and it only involved 3 steps. SUPER EASY. So I want to share. So there. 

7. Seven is the number of completion so I should stop here. Yeah, so I just lied. Well, sort of. I said I was going to waver down a little on recipes for a few days, but what I meant was that I will waver, except the Twilight Saga stuff I'll be posting in the next day or so. New Moon comes out on DVD Saturday and my husband has already promised to watch it with me. He doesn't care for the series, but he knows I do, so he's all excited to let me buy it. Sweet, sweet man. (*see #1). On that note, I've already made Twilight cupcakes and look forward to more Twilight stuff on Saturday. Any ideas?!

BEST EVER Cream Cheese Frosting

 

I'm incredibly picky about cream cheese frosting because I grew up with an amazing little bakery in town. In fact, our birthday cakes always came from the Red Oven Bakery, and we always bought the red velvet cake with cream cheese icing. They might have the best icing I've ever had, but if so, this is a very close second!

But let's back track a little. Red Oven Bakery isn't the only reason I'm particular about my cream cheese frosting. I'm a lot more particular about cheesecake than anything else on the planet. Cheesecake must be New York style. It needs to be really thick and decedent, extremely tall, sweet, but not too sweet, and it needs to keep it's shape well. Those no bake cheesecakes just won't do, and if you have to put fruit on top, it's not really cheesecake in my humble opinion. 

So back to frosting.

Here's what happened... I Barefoot Contessa (aka: Ina Garten) is one of my very favorite cooks. She makes everything look amazingly delicious and yet super easy. When I saw her recipe for cream cheese frosting, I knew I had to make it. Plus Pioneer Woman said it was great, so I decided to trust her.

SO HERE'S WHAT HAPPENED: I made the frosting, all FOUR (4), yes F.O.U.R. sticks of butter and the final result was okay. I mean good, really good, but I wasn't overly impressed AT FIRST. But then guess what happened..I let it sit overnight. In the fridge. OVERNIGHT. And I don't know what happened..but something wonderful. Everything hardened just enough, and a little fornicating went on or something because the end result tasted like the best cheesecake I've ever had. In fact, I keep scooping some up and eating it like cheesecake. In fact, I hope no one is reading this anymore because that's really embarrassing. 

The ingredients are super easy:

* 1lb (1 box) powdered sugar

*1 lb (4 sticks) unsalted butter

3 (8oz/each) packages of cream cheese

* 1 tsp vanilla (optional)

Add everything to a bowl and beat on medium speed for a couple minutes, or until totally combined. Eat the entire thing within 30 seconds. Sorry, maybe that's just me. You can now add it to cupcakes or whatever else your pretty little heart desires. 

But if you taste this stuff, you'll know. You will understand. You'll be shaping it into cheesecake slices yourself. And if not, give it to me and I will. 

TRY THIS TODAY. And then let it sit for a few hours and try it again. It's worth it, I promise!

I'm thinking cake balls for tomorrow. I'm of strong conviction that cake balls should be made for every occasion know to man, thank you very much.

Sweet Irish Scones

 I found this recipe a few weeks back on sheknows.com and couldn't wait to try it out! I've never made scones before, so this was a totally new thing in my book. I vowed to bake these on Saturday so that we could eat them through St. Patrick's Day. I'll post another recipe tomorrow, but for now, this can get you through breakfast  on St. Patrick's Day if you're interested.

I don't do a step-by-step too often, but I had time and while simple, these things were a more than I'm used to doing for breakfast, so I thought I'd share. 

Basic ingredients: Eggs, butter, raisins, milk, baking powder, salt, sugar and flour. For the flour, I used whole wheat, but I'd suggest an un-enriched all purpose flour. Whole wheat didn't make these rise much, but an all purpose would.

Speaking of flour, is this not the cutest mxing bowl? I'm truly obsessed with this bowl because first of all, I love glass mixing bowls, and second of all, my parents made it for me and gave it to us with wedding presents! It says, "Chris and Piper's Mixin' Bowl" LOVE it!

So let's get started! Sift the flour, sugar, and salt together. Dice up your cold butter into small pieces.

And then add the butter to the flour and mix it up with your hands. 

While I'm horrible at following directions, I promised myself I would in fact follow the directions on this recipe, since I've never made scones before. But it didn't look very mixed up, so I got this bad girl out:

And I was glad I did. It's not necessary, but it helped combine things a little since I left my butter out too long, and it was a little softer than it should have been. 

I really should have kept going, but I was impatient and had a sleeping husband, due to wake up any minute, and I wanted to have things ready when he woke up. 

So now that you've added the butter to the flour and mixed it up a little, add the raising and toss around with a fork. 

Until they are coated, and will look like this. 

In a separate bowl, pour in some milk.

and eggs.

And stir until combined.

Pour the liquid mixture into the flour mixture.

and stir it around with a fork until combined.

*Imagine there is a picture of it mixed up really well*

 The recipe instructs us to grab half the batter, but my huge cutting board wouldn't have supported that much, so I grabbed about a 1/4 of the batter. Now, shape it into a ball. 

And roll it out ....

Into about a 1/2-1" thickness. Mine was a little too thin on this batch, but it still worked fine.

Now at this point, you have some options. You can use a biscuit cutter and make little round scones, which I didn't do. Or, you could make them more traditional and triangle shaped. I went the triangle route this first time. 

And then cut into triangles. 

The recipe says to coat the top with milk for a glaze. I didn't notice this making any kind of glaze, but that could be because I used rice milk instead of cow's milk.

Place on a cookie sheet and place in the oven for 12-13 minutes.

Now these are "Irish" scones, so I thought I'd make them look more like it!

And since the milk wasn't doing much, and these aren't super sweet, I topped the second batch off with some cinnamon and sugar.

And then with the third and fourth batch, I added some blueberries and a blueberry glaze. As you can see, these were not very pretty, but my husband loves blueberries and since I didn't add them in there, I had to recover somehow.

And they all turned out pretty good. I didn't take enough pictures, but this was of the first batch, which I rolled out a little thin. For whole wheat, they tasted really good. Not too sweet, yet perfectly sweet with a bite with raisins. 

This was the inside. Very tasty! I'd make these again, but I'd roll them out to about an inch thick, and I'd use all purpose flour next time. 

Still great, though! SInce they weren't very sweet, I did add a glaze of powdered sugar and milk to them, which I tilted green. I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture of that

 But here's an unglazed picture. Very tasty little things! 

Recipe: 

Ingredients:
6-1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup sugar
3 teaspoon baking powder
1-1/2 sticks butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup currants or raisins
3 eggs
2 cups milk 

Directions:

Preheat oven to 475 degrees F. Sift flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder together.

Using your hands, mix in butter pieces with flour mixture.

Add currants or raisins and stir with a fork.

Mix eggs and milk in a separate bowl.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, and pour in milk mixture.

Working with 1/4 of the dough at a time, shape into a ball and roll flat into about 1" thickness on a floured board. 

Cut into pieces (with a cookie cutter, biscuit cutter, or just cut with a knife to make triangles)

Bake for 12-13 minutes or until very light brown.

I'm submitting this to the Paddy's Day parade. I'm new to this world, but man it sure is fun!!

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I also made some cupcakes. I just used a boxed cake mix (Naturally Nora) since that brand doesn't use enriched flour in the mix. They were soooo good!

Just plain vanilla cupcakes. 

BUT THE FROSTING!! The frosting is what made them to DIE for! 

I'm not kidding. 

It was the best frosting I've ever had. It tasted just like cheesecake.
 And in fact, I keep eating it my itself, which is NOT. GOOD. Especially because the recipe involves a massive amount of butter. 

I'll post the recipe sometime later today. 

And more St. Patrick's Day things tomorrow.