Baking and Candy Making - Part 1

So - this week and last week I worked on the Holiday Baking Theme.

How did I go about doing this? First I want to good old trusty "Pinterest". Saving up some ideas and then working towards them. Here is my "Food" board that got me started with this Holiday Baking theme! https://www.pinterest.com/juliarobinettecreations3/food/

As you can see with the pins, I was able to get quite a few ideas to start working on some awesome and delicious creations! But first - I needed to get myself into the "baking" mindset. So how else to do that then baking some Pre-made Peanut Butter cookies!! On my shopping spree for ingredients for the Holiday Baking theme I also bough two different kinds of Peanut Butter cookies from the Pillsbury company.

My Review on these cookies are the following: They are "ok". Why only ok? Well - I have tried several different kinds of peanut butter cookie so far, some homemade, some pre-made mixes, some "frozen" like below. In all of my adventures with peanut butter cookies, I would have to say that the Betty Crocker brand, pre-made (non-frozen) was the best so far. These Pillsbury cookies were good, don't get me wrong here... but they lacked enough peanut butter flavor to really put that UMPH into the bite. It is possible that frozen cookies do not taste the same. So I may adventure over to the dry mix aisle next time and try the Pillsbury dry mix and see if they can match the Betty Crocker taste. Below are pictures of the package and the cookies in the oven :).

My next adventure this weekend was making Truffles. Now - on this adventure I guess you could say I "cheated" in the process as I did not fully do the "tempering" process. In my research I got a little intimidated in what all was required for that and was reading tons of "horror" stories. I finally decided to try a variation of a recipe (from online and a cowoker) and "eat" my losses :-P. Yes - I mean how could not doing the right tempering process on chocolate be so bad?

Anyways - I wrote up the variation of the recipe and created a nice graphic. Below is my "revised" (taking advise from coworker and online versions of truffle recipes) recipe. Enjoy! And remember - this recipe is of the cheating way to make truffles... so the worst that can happen is you have some slightly gooey chocolate on your hands afterwards that you can just eat with a spoon :).

Recipe

(yes - I see some mistakes and will be updating this post shortly will let you know when updated :) ... I guess this is what I get when I want to express my excitement and fun of this adventure !! ) :

This is only part 1 of my Baking and Candy Making Escapade! Next weekend I will be working on a Fudge Recipe and Sugar Cookies (and maybe a pre-made mix of Pumpkin Bread).

Until then - Enjoy and Let me know in the comments if you have any other recipes or cookie/baking brands to check out.