Irish Soda Bread Shamrock Cookies

I realize I'm a day late (literally) and a dollar short with this post since St. Patrick's Day was yesterday, but I still wanted to share this delightful, festive cookie recipe with you. For the past few years I've made the traditional Irish soda bread for St. Patty's. I bought buttermilk last week with the intention of making soda bread again this year, but then I all of a sudden had an inkling to try something different.

I thought, I wonder if there's a recipe out there to make Irish soda bread-ish cookies? Why of course there is! I found a few very similar looking recipes online and finally settled on trying one from a site, Grandma's Kitchen.

The cookies were quite easy to make. It is a little time consuming to roll out the dough, but it's not difficult at all. The flavor of these cookies was fantastic! I was honestly pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the taste of these cookies. I did think they'd be good, but I guess maybe I didn't expect to like them quite as much as I really did. They were certainly sweeter than an actual Irish soda bread, as they called for much more sugar than the bread recipes call for. They were almost a cross between a sugar cookie and a shortbread cookie of sorts. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what they tasted like, but the bottom line? They're delicious! I gave many of these cookies away to several friends over the weekend, and they all gave their stamp of approval as well. :)

Ingredients:

-2 cups all-purpose flour

-3/4 cup plus 2 Tbsp. sugar

-1/2 tsp. baking soda

-1/4 tsp. salt

-1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cold

-1/2 cup currants

-1/4 cup buttermilk

-1 egg

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, 3/4 cup of the sugar, baking soda, and salt. Using a box grater, grate the chilled butter into the flour mixture. Stir the mixture with a fork or pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in the currants.

In a small bowl, combine the buttermilk and egg. Add to the flour mixture and stir until a soft dough forms. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead 5 times. Divide the dough in half, and using a rolling pin, roll one half of the dough to 1/4-inch thickness. Using a 2-inch biscuit cutter or a cookie cutter of your choice, cut out the shapes and place on ungreased cookie sheet (I actually put parchment paper on my cookie sheets). Repeat with the remaining dough to form additional cookies.

If you cut the dough into circles, using a knife, score the top of each cookie with a large "X." Sprinkle the cookies with the remaining 2 Tbsp. of sugar. OR, you do not need to score the cookies if you don't want to (especially if you used other, shaped cookie cutters like I did with the shamrocks). I also chose to sprinkle mine with green colored sprinkles instead of the sugar.

Bake the cookies until lightly browned on the bottoms, about 10 minutes. Transfer cookies to cooling racks to cool completely.

This recipe made about 3 dozen shamrock shaped cookies for me.

No, that's not cheese. :) It's the grated butter! The grater worked so well to break up the butter. I think I'll use this method more often when I'm making scones and other similar items.

Currants!

I couldn't make shamrock shaped cookies on St. Patrick's Day without adding green sprinkles to them!

Oops! Which picture here doesn't belong? These were the green beers that Mike and I drank at home the evening of St. Patrick's Day. It was difficult to make them a really "pretty" shade of green, but you can still tell that we attempted!

I hope you all had a wonderful, festive St. Patrick's Day! This very Irish gal sure did. :)

Julie's Monkey Bread

Hi friends. I know you've been chomping at the bit, wondering what that second item was that I made for lab meeting this week! Ha, just kidding. :) From the title of this post you can tell that I made Monkey Bread!!! That is meant to be said in a very fast, excited manner...Monkey Bread!! This item is always a hit, believe me. I've made it several times before, but I actually have never used the recipe I'll share in this post, which is from my good friend from college, Julie. It's one of her signature dishes! In the past, I've used Cooking Light's Monkey Bread recipe. A month or two ago I had some friends over for board games, and Julie brought her famous monkey bread. I asked her for the recipe afterward, and now, here I am sharing it with you! At some point in the future I'll have to make the Cooking Light version again so that I can blog about that one too. The last time I made it was before the Barbershop blog was in existence!

Here is Julie's simple and delicious recipe. :)

-3 cans buttermilk rolls/biscuits

-1/2 cup sugar

-2 Tbsp. cinnamon

-1 stick butter (I used margarine)

-2 tsp. vanilla

-3/4 cup sugar

Cut the biscuits into quarters.

Place the biscuit quarters, 1/2 cup sugar, and cinnamon into a large ziploc bag and shake to coat.

Mmmm, love this close up of the biscuits, coated with delicious cinnamon and sugar.....

When coated, put into a greased bundt pan (the greased part is very important!).

Bring the stick of butter to a simmer on the stove, then add the vanilla. Slowly mix in the 3/4 cup of sugar until the mixture is smooth. Pour over the biscuits in the bundt pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes and then flip onto a plate or platter. ENJOY!!!

Now, I have to admit that I was unable to fully remove the monkey bread from the bundt pan and invert it onto a plate. Sad... I greased the pan very well, but that wasn't enough! No matter how hard I tried, the entire thing wouldn't come out. I may have waited too long to try to invert it (I'm not sure how long I waited, but it was longer than the 10 minutes that the recipe instructs). So anyway, I don't have a pretty picture of the monkey bread to show you. Sorry! All I have is a couple views from above the bundt pan, as you can see above here and at the very top of the post. However, the image below is one that I stole from online. I can assure you that had mine been inverted, it would have looked like this one... ;-) I highly recommend making monkey bread the next time you're having people over for brunch or are heading over to a friend's place for any occasion really. It's a hit with adults and kids alike, I promise! There's something fun (and obviously super yummy!) about eating cinnamon-sugary balls of dough without any utensils. It's quite enjoyable! :)

Ooey Gooey Cinnamon Buns

Yummmm...check out the ooey gooey goodness in the picture above. Love it! I made these cinnamon buns on a whim tonight since I wasn't planning to bake anything in addition to the chocolate chip cookies. So here's how I came to make them... After work I had to run a few errands, and during my travels, I was right near a Bertuccis, one of my absolute favorite restaurants. Sometimes I buy raw pizza dough from Bertuccis to make homemade pizza or homemade rolls. I haven't actually made cinnamon buns with the dough before, although my good friend Elizabeth did once when she used to work with us... I have a very vivid memory of that day! They were soooo good. Anyway, I ended up going into Bertuccis today for two random reasons. At the time, I really had to use the bathroom so that was one excuse for going in. And I was also pretty hungry as I was running my errands, so I thought maybe I'll buy dough in order to get a couple rolls! In the past when I've purchased the raw dough they often throw in a few baked rolls, which are super yummy. I wanted a roll as a snack today so I had to buy the dough! Haha. Until I got home though, I didn't really have a plan for the dough. I didn't have pizza ingredients on hand, and that's when I remembered my friend Elizabeth's cinnamon buns that time...so I thought I'd give them a shot! Here's what I did (sans any formal recipe!). Oh, and if you don't live near a Bertuccis, my guess is this would also work with any store bought brand of pizza dough or white bread dough. Read on for the steps to make these, and then you'll see the pictures of the entire process. :)

First I worked the dough with my hands to spread it a bit, and then I rolled it out more with my handy dandy Pampered Chef rolling pin. Next I spread some margarine on the dough. I thought about melting the margarine first but figured it would just melt when the buns were baked anyway! Then I made a mixture of three ingredients with these approximate measurements:

-3 tbsp. white sugar

-3 or 4 tbsp. brown sugar

-1 to 1.5 tsp. cinnamon

Then I evenly sprinkled this mixture over the margarine, and I also sprinkled a bit more cinnamon on after that. Next, I carefully rolled the dough along one of the longer edges (jelly roll style), trying to keep the dough tight as I rolled it. After it was rolled into a "log," I stretched it a bit more so that it was longer so that I could maximize the number of cinnamon buns it would make. Then I took a sharp knife and cut it into slices, with each being about 1 to 1.5 inches wide. I placed them into a greased 3-quart casserole dish and then baked at 375 degrees for about 23 - 25 minutes or so, until the tops were ever so lightly browned. I let the rolls cool before topping them with icing, which included these four ingredients (again, with approximate measurements):

-3/4 to 1 cup powdered sugar

-2 tbsp. skim milk

-1/2 to 3/4 tsp. vanilla

-a couple dashes of cinnamon

Voila! That is all. I'm going to bring them into work tomorrow to share with my coworkers. I am guessing they are best served warm, so we'll have to zap them in the microwave for a few seconds before consuming.... Can't wait for the ooey gooey delicious goodness!!

French Breakfast Puffs

Tonight I made a super simple breakfast treat from my Betty Crocker cookbook... French Breakfast Puffs. I made them to bring up to Vermont, where we're spending New Year's with some friends. I also made the Grasshopper Brownies for the same reason...to bring to VT. We'll be eating some tasty baked goods as we ring in the new year!

The French Breakfast Puffs are essentially a ball of dough covered in melted butter, cinnamon, and sugar. How can you go wrong with that combo?!? They're best eaten while warm, so if you don't eat them right after you make them, zap them in the microwave for 15 seconds or so, grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea, and you're good to go! :)

Another nice thing about this recipe is that it uses typical ingredients you often have on hand in the house...flour, sugar, eggs, milk, etc. Even better that you can make them at anytime!

As you can see from these pictures, I made two different sized puffs this time around...some I made in a regular sized muffin pan and some I made in a mini muffin pan. The smaller ones are almost like little cinnamon sugar donut holes!

The next couple pictures are from the steps you take after the puffs are baked... Immediately after taking them out of the oven, roll each one in melted butter and then in a cinnamon sugar mixture. Be careful though; they are hot!

And finally, a picture of the cinnamon and sugar before I mixed the two together thoroughly...love these two ingredients!! :)

Now go make yourself a delicious breakfast treat of cinnamon sugary goodness!