Chocolate White Chocolate Reese's Cookies

I like to make person specific treats for birthdays. This was one of them. One of my trivia members had a birthday in April and I made these cookies for her. She said she like chocolate, peanut butter and white chocolate. Just the day before I had been trolling my usual baking blogs and ran across this recipe on Confessions of a Cookbook Queen.  

I didn't make any purposeful changes to the recipe. (Although I didn't use enough Reese's cups, but I blame Hershey's for that one). However, the recipe turned out differently than I anticipated. The cookies were much flatter than the pictures on the Queen's blog. Maybe I should have chilled the dough beforehand. Regardless, they were tasty and a hit at trivia.

Chocolate White Chocolate Reese's Cookies

Ingredients

• 1 1/4c butter, softened
• 2c sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2t vanilla
• 2c flour
• 3/4c cocoa
• 1t baking soda
• 1/2t salt
• 20 oz bag Miniature Reese's White Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups, chopped into chunks (or about 2 generous cups) .... I only had 14oz. Lame.

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and parchment up those cookie sheets.
2. Cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium speed until fluffy. 
3. Add eggs one at a time, beating until completely mixed in. Add vanilla and mix just until blended.
4. In a separate bowl, combine flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt. 
5. Add to butter/sugar mixture and mix on low speed until well blended. Fold in chopped peanut butter cups.
6. Drop by 1.5T cookie scoop on an parchment covered cookie sheet. Bake for 7-9 minutes. Allow to cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes (they will cook a bit more during this time) before removing to cooling racks.

I couldn't only find 14oz (I think) bags of Reese's cups in all flavors of chocolate. As I said...lame. I would suggest trying to use the prescribed amount and chopping them maybe only in half rather than in fourths, like I did.

Chocolate Covered Bugles

I'm just racking up the list of chocolate-covered salty situations. And I'll keep going until I've covered the world in chocolate (and thrown some bacon in there, too). 

Did you ever put Bugles on all of your fingers and pretend you were a witch with really pointy (and salty) fingernails? Yea, me either...

I couldn't decide how to best dip them, so I tried pointy end first as well was open end first. Both seemed to work, but I think dipping in the open end first is the winner. Plus, you can totally stand them up on that end once you have shaken them out. Don't want to leave the opening filled with chocolate because then the ratio of chocolate to Bugle would be jacked up...in my (I would say humble, but we know that would be a lie) opinion.

Chocolate-Covered Bugles

The ingredients are simply Bugles and baking bark. (As you can see, I used both milk and white.) 

And the directions are easy as melt, dip, chill.

Don't have much in the way of commentary. These were definitely better than the Funyuns, but still not as good as the Cheetos. They were polished off with a quickness, so regardless of how they stacked up against previous creations, they were good times.

Dreamsicle Cookies

When was the last time you had a dreamsicle? Those orange sherbet popsicles filled with vanilla ice cream were a staple at the lunch table in elementary school. Good times with good people, bee-tee-dubs. (Shout out to Lyssa!)  I remember having races to see who could get to the vanilla first. Looking back, I don't really see the point of that now, but hey, we were like...9.

Anycookie, I haven't had one of those things in a minute, so when I saw a recipe for a dreamsicle in cookie form, I couldn't resist. And then I found out it uses TANG! Double awesome! Some of my friends from way back should be the spokes-family for TANG! they drank it so much of it.

And then I made the cookies....uh weird. And I don't mean in taste because these suckers tasted JUST LIKE a dreamsicle. Regardless, the dough was really powdery. Like REALLY powdery. And, although I wouldn't consider that I burned them (I don't think I did), they all got pretty brown pretty quickly on the bottoms. Like I said...weird. I'll throw the recipe on here, but only so you can compare it to others and avoid ones similar to this. 

 

Dreamsicle Cookies

Ingredients

• 1/2c TANG!
• 3/4c sugar
• 1 1/2c white choc. chips
• 1 3/4c flour
• 1 egg, slightly beaten
• 1/2c butter, softened
• 1/2t baking soda
• 1/2t baking powder
• 1t vanilla

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and prep your cookies pans with your handy dandy parchment paper.
2. Cream together butter and sugar. Add the egg and the vanilla.
3. Mix together dry ingredients and then incorporate into creamed mixture. 
4. Add in the white choc. chips.
5. Use your small cookie scoop and really smash that stuff in there so it actually sticks together.
6. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes and let cool on tray for 5 minutes.

They look good; they taste good. Regardless, I'm sure there is a better base out. I have a bunch of tang left, so I'll keep looking and see if I can find another version to try.

Fruity Cocoa Pebbles Treats

Do you have a favorite cereal? Wait...do you have TWO favorite cereals? Why not combine them to make one awesome treat? That's what I did.

I can't say that these two are my favorite in general, but they are my top choice when making these kinds of treats. I wanted to make Fruity Pebbles Treats and Kyle wanted Cocoa Pebbles, so I made these as a compromise in the hopes that the end result would actually taste good. And it did.

Fruity Cocoa Pebbles Treats

Ingredients

• 3c Fruity Pebbles
• 3c Cocoa Pebbles
• 1T butter
• 4c mini marshmallows

Directions

1. You know the drill. 

I would recommend that you measure out and mix the two cereals before adding them into the melted marshmallow to make sure that you get an even distribution of cereal in each square.

Yes, they were good. I could definitely pick out both flavors. They melded well. This is opening doors to a number of different variations. I could even put in as many as three or, dare I even contemplate it, FOUR cereals. Look out!

Icing on the Cake Batter Bark

Cake! And with that...non-cake things that taste like cake! I recently made a couple of batches of Cake Batter Rice Krispies treats, leaving me with a bag of open yellow cake mix. So I went back to the source of that fabulous recipe and found yet another cake-flavored concoction: cake batter bark! That chick from How Sweet It Is knows where it's at.

That being said, this particular recipe left me wanting. You may remember my previous confession of loving icing/frosting almost as much or even more so than cake itself. So I made a few changes and voila: pure bliss in chocolate bark form.

Icing on the Cake Batter Bark

Ingredients

• 12oz white chocolate chips, melted (dudes, just use any old brand)
• 1T (heaping) of yellow cake mix, sifted
• 1/4c chocolate frosting (I used the kind that comes with sprinkles!)
• 1.75oz jar of rainbow sprinkles

Directions

1. Cover baking sheet with wax paper.
2. Melt chips and mix in cake batter. Spread out over wax paper.
3. Meanwhile, soften/melt the frosting so that it is pourable.
4. Drizzle the frosting all up over the white chocolate.
5. Shake those sprinkles (and the ones from the frosting itself) evenly over the chocolate/frosting mess. Press the sprinkles down a little, if you can.
6. Chill in freezer for 15 minutes. Break apart and have your cake bark and eat it, too.

I wasn't sure how the frosting would set, so I tried to keep the bark in the freezer for a long as I could beforehand. Though it's fine at first, the frosting definitely softens up and gets a little messy after the bark has been sitting out. Meh. WORTH IT! This is definitely something I'm going to make again. I never think cake-flavored things taste enough like cake. I think I'm comparing everything to the cake batter ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. BEST. EVER. So I may try the next batch with more cake mix and slightly less frosting. 

This is another recipe that allows for variety: the potential cake mix and frosting combos are endless. Need I say it? Yes, I think so. Aaaaaaaaaawesoooooooooooome!