Pop-Tart Tuesday - Soft Peanut Butter Cookies

A dessert is not dessert unless it has chocolate...

... usually...

However, I recently found this great recipe for peanut butter cookies that are (almost) as good as having a chocolaty dessert. It all began on evening when the smallest of chocolate morsels could not be found and ended up with these:

I was skeptical at first since I tend to burn overcook things a tid-bit. But I've recently started using the timer on our oven (novel idea, don't you think?) and even when the timer is going off for 3 minutes because I'm chasing after Mr. Motion, they still turn out alright! 

Here's the recipe:

Ingredients

1. 1/2 cup of margarine (I've been using butter and they turn out fine!)
2. 1/2 cup peanut butter
3. 1/2 cup sugar
4. 1/2 cup brown sugar
5. 1 egg
6. 1/2 tsp. vanilla
7. 3/4 tsp. baking soda
8. 1/4 tsp. salt
9. 1 3/4 cup of flour

Directions

1.    Blend the butter, peanut butter, both sugars, egg and the vanilla together.
2.    Mix the flour, baking soda, and salt together and add to the 'wet' ingredients.
3.    Chill the dough for 15 minutes (this was in the original directions... I always forget and put it in the   freezer for a few minutes while the oven, which I also forgot to pre-heat, is getting ready!)
4.    Form the dough into balls, roll them in sugar, and place on cookie sheet.
5.    Bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

The best thing about these cookies is they actually stay soft instead of getting crispy and are sooo easy to make. Yeah for gooey peanut butter!

Happy Baking!

Mary

Pop-Tart Tuesday - Resurrection Rolls

Yeah for the very first Pop-Tart Tuesday!

A while back I was reading my all time favorite blog, I Am Momma Hear Me Roar. The writer, Cheri, is probably the most creative, productive person I have ever 'met'. On Fridays she features another blogger's idea. Whether it be a craft, recipe, or creation, she tries it out and let's her readers now how it goes. Before Easter Sunday she was trying out these amazing rolls from Kim at Feathers from My Nest and they looked like a lot of fun - so Justin and I made some together. (Isn't it the best when your hubby bakes with you?!)

To make these yummy rolls all you need is some frozen pastry dough, marshmallows, some butter, sugar and cinnamon. You take the dough, roll it completely around a marshmallow, brush some butter on it, roll it in cinnamon and sugar and bake for 15-20 minutes at 350. That's it! Isn't that amazing?

They're called Resurrection Rolls because after you bake them, they're hollow inside, illustrating the empty tomb after Jesus rose from the dead. What a fun treat for Easter! 

Here's how ours turned out:

(pre-baked)

(a post-baked roll with marshmallow oozing out the sides)

Now, for ours, I could not find the frozen pastry dough anywhere so I made the recipe for cinnamon rolls that I make on occasion. It worked out alright, but I think they would have been more puffy if I had used the dough from the store. We noticed that it was very important to cover the entire marshmallow with the dough, or the marshmallow would explode, leaving you with a tomb with a hole - I guess those ones could have been the tomb after the stone had been rolled away! :)

I really think this will be a good, food-y way to showcase the empty tomb. While it's too late to make them for this year's Easter (sorry 'bout that), you could either make them for a yummy treat or keep them in the archives for Eater 2012. 

Mmmmmmmm!

Mary

P.S. I had never heard of these before but the curriculum for our kids' program at church had them as an activity to teach the kids about the empty tomb last Sunday. There was no way I would attempt this with 14, 3 through 6-year-olds, but if you have a few kiddos at home (or are the super-duper organized type) it would be a great activity.