Chocolate Chunk Toffee Bars

Last Tuesday night I panicked. At the last minute, I remembered that I had committed to baking some kind of homemade treat for an occasion the next day, but I had completely forgotten about it! Oops. Luckily, the occasion didn't require anything fancy. If it had, I definitely think I would have been less likely to forget. Thankfully I remembered my obligation to make something, and thankfully it only took about 30 seconds for me to decide what to make. My chocolate chip graham cracker blondies are one of the simplest and fasted desserts to make, and the ingredients are ones that I always have on hand. So, I got to work making them! This time around though, I changed the recipe slightly (which is so easy to do and a great feature of this recipe!) to add chocolate chunks and toffee bits instead of the original chocolate chips and crushed graham crackers that I added when I first made these. Below are the ingredients I used this time around. Feel free to add different mix-ins to match your own personal preference!

Ingredients:

-2 sticks (16 Tbsp.) butter, melted

-2 cups brown sugar (I used light brown sugar)

-2 large eggs

-2 tsp. vanilla

-pinch salt

-2 cups all-purpose flour

-1/2 tsp. baking powder

-1 and 1/4 cups semi-sweet chocolate chunks

-1 cup Heath English toffee bits

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and butter or spray a 13 x 9 pan. Mix the melted butter with brown sugar, and beat until smooth. Beat in eggs and then vanilla. Add the salt, and stir in the flour and baking powder. Mix in your additions (chocolate chunks, toffee bits). Pour into your prepared pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 - 25 minutes, or until the middle is set and a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool completely before cutting.

Now these first few pictures I took basically as soon as the bars were just cool enough to remove from the pan. So you can definitely tell how warm, ooey and gooey (i.e., slightly undercooked!!) these are. It's my own preference to undercook them a bit, but you can cook them a couple minutes longer if you'd like. The pictures toward the bottom (when the blondies are on the pink plate) are the next day. The gooey-ness goes away slightly, but they're still very soft and yummy. :)

Mmmmmm...

The next time you need a dessert in a hurry, I hightly recommend you keep these in mind. ;) As I mentioned, they are incredibly easy and are made with normal ingredients that most of us have in our kitchens at any time!

Baked Stuffed Apples

I had never made baked stuffed apples before this recipe even though I have often thought about making them... I'm glad I finally did since they were super yummy! 

This great recipe came from an awesome blog, Eat, Live, Run. Check it out! And her pictures are waaay better than mine so this recipe looks a lot more appetizing on her site. :)

Ingredients:

-4 large apples (the original recipe recommends Granny Smith; I actually used some Golden Delicious and Macintosh because that's what I had)

-1 and 1/2 tsp. pumpkin pie spice (or a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, etc. - whatever you have!)

-1/2 cup apple juice (I used apple cider)

-1/4 cup pure maple syrup

-1 Tbsp. butter, melted

-1/3 cup dried cherries (I used craisins)

-1/3 cup roughly chopped walnuts (I used slivered almonds)

-1/4 cup cinnamon baking chips (this was my own addition - not in the original recipe)

-1/3 cup brown sugar, lightly packed (I think I used closer to 1/4 cup)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine the pumpkin pie spice, dried cherries, walnuts, and brown sugar (and cinnamon chips if you decide to use them) in a bowl and set aside. 

Carefully core the apples, making sure not to cut through the bottom. Fully fill the cavity of each apple with the brown sugar mixture and place apples in a glass baking dish with the apple juice poured in the bottom. 

Mix together the maple syrup and melted butter and drizzle over top the apples. Cover with tin foil and bake for 40 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 20 minutes or until the apples are tender.

Love this mixture of ingredients!!

Please forgive me not-so-great pictures. It's so hard to take good pictures when it's nighttime and no natural light to help out!

My overall appraisal of this recipe? Awesome! It was super easy and on the healthy side as far as desserts go. The tender, baked apples were incredibly flavorful and the filling inside was delicious! As I mentioned above, I substituted a few ingredients (craisins for dried cherries, almonds for walnuts, apple cider for apple juice), and I added one of my own (cinnamon chips). The flexibility of this recipe also makes it awesome. There's a lot of room to be creative here! Now, if you were looking to make this a little less healthy and a little more indulgent, I'd say that a nice scoop of vanilla ice cream would pair very well with the baked apples, wouldn't you? :)

Candy Pizza!

Yes, candy pizza...you read correctly! Apparently I like to make pizzas that are not your typical tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings... Remember my Breakfast Pizza post? Yummmm. Actually, I do love making regular pizza at home, but I just haven't blogged about it yet. I'll have to do that soon! In the meantime, I'll share with you a very fun recipe for a dessert-themed pizza. :)

My mom used to make a delicious candy pizza for us when we were younger, and that was my inspiration for this one. When I decided to make this the other day, I was not planning ahead very well and I did not have time to chat with my mom beforehand to get her recipe, so sadly this is not the same original recipe she used to make. However, it is very close in terms of its flavors, toppings, and overall deliciousness! You can read the recipe that I followed here. It's from good ol' Betty Crocker!

Now, the main difference between the recipe I used and the one my mom used to make is the crust...  Both pizzas have a peanut butter crust, but my mom's was from scratch, whereas I used the shortcut of Betty Crocker's peanut butter cookie mix, pictured below.

You can read the exact instructions in the link provided above, but essentially this recipe simply involves making the crust with the peanut butter cookie mix, oil, and an egg and pressing it into a pizza pan, after which you add whatever toppings your heart desires!

I added dry roasted peanuts and semi-sweet chocolate chips...

...and butterscotch chips and dark chocolate m&m's.

You bake those toppings for a while before adding the mini marshmallows (which I like to think of as the pizza's "cheese"!!).

The marshmallows only bake for the last 7-8 minutes or so.

Look at them all puffy and fluffy! :-D

For a fun touch at the end I drizzled on some chocolate syrup and caramel sauce...

And that's all there is to it, friends! This recipe literally takes about 30 minutes from start to finish. Sooo easy! I think it'd be such a super fun recipe for kids too. They'd love to pick out some of the yummy candy toppings and put them on the pizza themselves, I bet! I think it'd be tasty to add different types of candy bars or candies, chopped into smaller pieces... Reese's peanut butter cups? Snickers? Milky Way? Hello!! 

I've got a busy week, but I hope to post again before the weekend is here...we shall see! Stay tuned for more yummy Barbershop goodies. ;-)

Butterscotch Chocolate Bars

Greetings! I changed it up on my last post with a unique breakfast recipe for you (Breakfast Pizza), but I'm back to a more traditional Barbershop recipe this time around...a dessert! I actually have several recipes in the line up right now too; I have been very busy baking but I haven't kept up with blogging about each recipe. I actually made these butterscotch chocolate bars a couple weeks ago.

Alrightie, on to the recipe! I won't chat too much during this post, I promise. ;-) These bars take no time at all to make and are a crowd pleaser. It's a win win situation! I used a recipe from a book called the Favorite Brand Name Cookie Collection. The last time I was home in upstate NY, I was looking through some old cookbooks we used to use, and I came across this one. I was perusing through it and recognized several recipes we used to make...brought back many great memories! My mom didn't mind if I borrowed the book, so it's now in my possession. :) And even though I have made several recipes in the past, this one for the butterscotch bars was not one of them! So it's a new one to me, and it will be a keeper. Oops, I just chatted and I said I wouldn't...

Okay, here's the recipe!

-1 cup butterscotch flavored baking chips

-1/4 cup butter or margarine, softened

-1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

-2 large eggs

-1/2 tsp. vanilla

-1 cup all-purpose flour

-1/2 tsp. baking powder

-1/4 tsp. salt

-1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt butterscotch chips in small, heavy saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly; set aside. Beat butter and sugar in large bowl until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Beat in vanilla followed by the melted butterscotch chips. Add combined flour, baking powder, and salt. Beat until well blended. Spread batter evenly into greased 9-inch square baking pan. Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown and center is set. Remove pan from oven and immediately sprinkle with chips. Let stand about 4 minutes until chocolate is melted. Spread chocolate evenly over top. Cool completely and cut into squares. 

Next up for you are some pics of the process!

Chippy chips!

Mmmmm, the butterscotch chips look sooo yummy melted!

Here I am adding the melted chips to the rest of the batter.....

I love the butterscotch swirls in this picture!

When the bars come out of the oven, you immediately sprinkle with chocolate chips.

Here's a close up so you can see that the chips are starting to melt from the warm bars, fresh out of the oven.

This is after I had just begun to spread the chocolate....

And here's the final product!

Now, I actually forgot to take a picture of a butterscotch chocolate bar on its own! I must have been too distracted by the delicious flavor of this recipe. :-D So I don't have a picture to show you the final product alone, but here is a picture of the bars after I had removed a couple of them from the pan.

Yummmm.

Bon appetit from the Barbershop! See you next time!

Banana Soft Serve

Hello friends! "Long time" no post (long time = 5 days). Sorry about that! I hope you've had a good week. I wanted to share the latest dessert to come out of the Barbershop...but first, I have to warn you that it does not require any baking! And even crazier, it only requires one ingredient. ONE! :)  

Yesterday, my friend Jenn posted some fabulous ideas for easy, healthy snacks on her blog. One idea for a healthy snack was banana soft serve. I clicked on the link Jenn provided, and the title of the post from another blog was "This Post Will Change Your Life." That's pretty serious sounding, I'd say! With a title like that, I knew that I just had to try it. So tonight, I made my own banana soft serve by following

this recipe from a blog entitled "Choosing Raw."

Since I mentioned earlier that this recipe only requires one ingredient, and since the title of my post is "Banana Soft Serve," I bet you can figure out what that one ingredient is... BANANAS!! But, they must be frozen bananas, fyi. Here's what you do... :)

Take a few frozen bananas (tonight I used two), and put them in a food processor. I cut them up into 1-inch, or so, sized pieces first (didn't put the bananas in whole!). 

Turn on the processor and let it run for a minute or two, stopping to scrape down the sides every now and then. The recipe actually says to let the processor run for five minutes, but honestly, the soft serve looked to be the correct consistency after only about two minutes! 

So I actually ran it in 30-second increments or so, scraping in between each one. Perhaps the consistency would have been a bit lighter had I run the processor longer, but I really liked the consistency that mine was tonight! 

I only ate half since eating the whole batch would have meant eating two whole bananas, and I didn't need to do that tonight! I did, however, "dress up" the soft serve by adding a dollop of fat-free, sugar-free cool whip and a drizzle of Hershey's syrup.

Yummmmmm. Seriously. It was such a delicious, guilt-free treat!! I would HIGHLY recommend you try it...SOON. ;-)

Valentine's Day Treats!

I have to admit that I will not be baking any special treats for Valentine's Day this year... And it saddens me! I love this holiday, most especially for the endless recipes out there for delicious, Valentine's Day themed goodies! I could spend hours exploring recipes in cookbooks and online. Sometimes I do. :) This year I'll be on vacation out of the country during Valentine's Day, so there will be no baking in the Barbershop.... :-( I thought I'd still share some super fun (and mostly very easy!) ideas with you though in case you're still wondering what you'd like to make for that special someone.

KraftFoods is always a favorite of mine for perusing recipe ideas. They have many simple recipes, as well as many healthy ones! And I always love websites that share recipe ratings. I make a habit of reading what others think of the recipe before I try it! Check out the following two ideas. One is a chocolatey recipe for Chocolate & Mocha Sweetheart Brownies....mmmmm. And one is a lighter, fruity recipe (low in calories!) for cute Strawberry and Chocolate Gelatin "Cupid's" Cups (pictured above). They both look super easy!

If you want to get a little fancier and spend more time in the kitchen, I might suggest these two recipes. They look so pretty!!! One is for Truffle Tarts with Raspberries. How delightful do these look? And another idea is this recipe for a classic Valentine's dessert due to its color, Red Velvet Cake. Delicious and appealing to the eye! Red Velvet Cupcakes or Red Velvet Cake Balls would be fun too! Boy, the options are endless...

Or how about the festive treat of chocolate covered strawberries? How can you not love these?!

I would suggest going "all out" too and making ones with white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, etc... :)

Yet another fun idea (I know, I'm going wild here, forgive me) is to make your own Valentine's fortune cookies! That would be so fun. You could really get creative with making your own fortunes!! :) Kids and adults alike would like those. My mom always makes traditional sugar cookies, shaped as hearts, topped with a delicious frosting that she tints pink...then she places a fun conversation heart on each of the cookies...

I would always look forward to these cookies each year. My mom's sugar cookies are definitely the best!

And for adults, a delicious Valentine's cocktail is a must, right?! This drink, Dos Amores, looks amazingly delicious. As do all of these on this site... Or maybe this unique liqueur, Hum? It looks quite yummy!! Be creative too...make your own! ;-)

However you celebrate Valentine's Day this year, I hope it is a LOVEly one for you! I hope you might be inspired to bake something delicious after reading this post too. ;-) Happy Valentine's Day, family and friends!