Lemon Poppyseed Cranberry Cookies

Oh, hey! It’s been a long while since I last posted anything. So, out of sheer boredom and curiosity I’m back posting a recipe. This one based off of a simple classic: Lemon poppyseed bread. But, since I don’t really do normal, I’m turning them into cookies and adding dried cranberries.

So, this time around I’m stealing from a couple recipes from TastesLovely and MomOnTimeout and taking what I like from each and adding in and taking away as I see fit. Anyway, let’s go ahead and hop right into it.

**Makes approximately 2 dozen cookies using medium size cookie scoop

 

• 3/4 cup of unsalted butter, softened
• 2/3 cup of granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons of yogurt (plain, vanilla, Greek, whatever)
• 1 1/2 teaspoon of lemon extract
• 2 cups of flour
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
• 2 tablespoons of poppyseeds
• 3/4 – 1 cup of dried cranberries to your liking

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. Cream butter and sugars together
3. Add egg, yogurt, and lemon extract and mix.
4. Add poppyseeds, baking soda, and flour about half a cup at a time to avoid a mess. Mix.
5. Mix in dried cranberries.
6. Place on cookie sheet and bake 13-18 minutes until slightly brown on the edges. Remove from oven and allow to cool. You may consider transferring to a cool sheet or dish to prevent cookies from overcooking and drying out.
7. Enjoy!!!

 

Last Week in Pictures

I’ve got a cake recipe coming up, but first I just wanted to post a few pictures from stuff that went on last week. Beginning with mini-meatloafs that I made for dinner one night. Recipe taken from here, but I used half ground beef and ground turkey amongst other alterations.

 

My brother got married over the weekend, this was his pseudo cake. The rest was cupcakes, which I’m told were delicious, I didn’t try them because I had… (see next picture)

Banana cream pie! Someone had a birthday. It was either a 35th or a 53rd. I’m not sure. The pie was delicious.

Then we celebrated some guys birthday at my house with ice cream cake!

And that was the week that was.

Grilled Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich

So, a new friend of mine mentioned this to me a short time ago and I decided I’d give it a go. (Shout out to Hillary!) Rather than just keep it to myself, I figured I’d at least share the fruits of my labor. This isn’t really a recipe so much as it is just something I was messing around with. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I even made it right, if there is a right way to make one of these.

I started out with some butter on bread, like so:

I threw the bread in a skillet and gave it that nice golden brown look that you know and love from your average grilled cheese sandwich. After that I took out my peanut butter and grape jelly, I tried to make this as healthy as I could. Maybe that was my downfall.This thing is supposed to be all about guilty pleasure and indulgence.

I spread the PB&J on the bread, closed up the sandwich and threw it down on the skillet for a little bit longer to heat up the filling. Removed and cut for a quick picture and then threw it down my face hole.

When I heard tale of this sandwich I just knew I had to try it out. It was pretty good. I think I need to give it another go and see if I can’t make it a little better, but all in all it’s a tasty twist on a classic treat. Normally I do PB&J on a couple of Eggo waffles which is just about my most favorite thing in the world, but this was worth a go. Apparently, this is a thing in Indiana, so if you’ve ever tried this or know of a way for me to make it better I’m all ears. Take care. See you next time.

Baking the Right Way

I thought that I had been doing a pretty okay job the past couple of months at baking up some sweets for friends and family. Turns out that it probably wasn’t as good as it could’ve been. What I mean to say is that I recently made one of my fairly routine trips to Home Goods, where I find a lot of my tools and picked up a couple of things notably an 8” Calphalon bread knife for $17, which I saw on Amazon for like $35. I thought that was my better purchase that night, but what turned out to be even more important was the oven thermometer I picked up for about $7. I popped it into the oven and since I didn’t have anything to bake left it there for a few days. Then I got the request for some Mexican chocolate chunk cookies from my girl so that she could share at work, I set my oven to 350 degrees to preheat it and when I peeked inside to see what the thermometer was reading I was startled because the temperature was about 50 degrees off! So, something was going inside my oven and now I’ve got a more accurate reading (assuming the thermometer is accurate), so I can continue with baking according to schedule. So, learn from my mistake and get yourself an oven thermometer, they’re fairly inexpensive (under $10) and helpful beyond belief.

About the Name: Steal the Baking

A friend asked me about the name last night and where it came from, I figured it would raise a question here and there, but probably more so with a younger crowd. Gather ’round children while I regale you with tales of yesteryear (the early 1980’s), back when kids played outside, the Internet didn’t exist yet to 99% of people, people wrote on paper, and not every single person had a ‘blog or microblog or Facebook or Twitter. No one knew what the crap an ‘avatar’ was and Pac-Man was about as good as it got. 

There was a game we played at school along with dodgeball, nation, four-square, and kickball called ‘Steal the Bacon’. The teacher would drop a chalkboard eraser in the middle of a volleyball court with two kids lined up on the outer baseline, they would say go and the two had to race towards the eraser, pick it up and bring it back to the baseline without dropping it. Pretty straightforward game, it kept the kids busy for half an hour and we got our heart rates up for a bit. So, when trying to think of a name for this thing I originally came up with Senor Baker, but as you can see it’s a pain in the bum for a Windows user to put the tilde over the n. So, after just making the ‘About’ page, I scrapped it and sat in front of my laptop trying to think of a name, then I thought of one, then it turned out a young lady had picked it just a few days prior. My luck. So, I went back to thinking, mind you it was already somewhere in the neighborhood of midnight or possibly later. Every name I came up with had already been used until I thought of a couple pseudo-naughty names that I thought (and still do) were hilarious, but then realized ‘I may have to explain this to my kids’, so I passed on those and somehow I think I read or saw something about bacon and steal the bacon came to mind or maybe it was just me thinking…’something something baking…c’mon brain’ and then ‘Steal the Baking’ popped into my reptilian man-brain. It’s perfect because I don’t really have any of my own recipes, nor have my parents passed down any family recipes, so I’ll have to steal from anyone and everyone else. 

So, that’s that. Now you know the origin story. Consider yourself a little more knowledgeable about the site.

 

Watermelon Ice Cubes

Let’s take a break from baking for a second and make something cold to beat the summer heat. This is adapted from this Relish.com recipe mostly because I know my kids aren’t into mint and partly because I didn’t have mint on hand. I went down to the basics for this one.

Pineapple shaped watermelon ice cubes? Yes.

My variation:

1 1/2 – 2 cups of watermelon cut into cubes

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup water

Roughly 1/2 of a lemon (The family likes sour stuff)

Throw it all into a blender and blend until smooth, pour into ice mold and freeze. Drop into your favorite drink and enjoy!

Hello World! Hola! Holla! Sup!

Welcome to Steal the Baking where I’ll be showing off some stuff I’ve got going on in the kitchen. The majority of the stuff you’ll see here has been pilfered from other sites, at least at first because I’m no professional I’m just a guy kicking around stuff in the kitchen. Yup.