Heather's Honey Bran Muffins

One of my all-time favourite activities is "Girl's Night" with my best friend Heather.  They occur most Thursdays (Grey's Anatomy), the occasional Tuesday (Glee) and anytime an epic chick-flick comes out.  The more crying the better.  Seriously.  

We used to have a tradition where one of us would pick up a bottle of Boones (cheap, fruity wine) on the way to the other's house.  Now we have bake-a-thon's instead (okay - the wine occasionally makes an appearance).  

 These muffins are Heather's signature recipe - you can always find some of these on her counter or in her freezer.  These are a great breakfast muffin and go excellent with your morning coffee. 

[Heather: These muffins are fast, healthy and delicious. I make a batch every two weeks and my house eats them for breakfast everyday. And with the news that a small amount of chocolate in the am will help your metabolism, they are even better for you!]

Ingredients

- 2 cups apple juice

- 2 cups chocolate chips

- 1 cup packed brown sugar

- 1/2 cup vegetable oil

- 1/2 cup honey

- 5 eggs, beaten

- 2 cups all purpose flour

- 2 tsp baking soda

- 1 tsp salt

- 4 cups bran 

Directions

In a medium bow, combine flour, baking soda, and salt.  Stir in bran.  Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl or electric mixer, combine brown sugar, oil, honey, and eggs; mix well.  Stir in apple juice.  Add bran mixture, and mix well.  Fold in chocolate chips.  

Cover, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or overnight for best results (can be placed in the freezer for 30 minutes instead). Batter will be thin; it will thicken as it chills.  

Stir chilled batter.  Fill greased or paper lined muffin cups 3/4 full. 

Bake in preheated 400 degree oven for 20-25 minutes.  Cool in pan for 10 minutes before removing to counter to cool. 

Enjoy! 

This is the oldest picture I can find of Heather and I (I'm on the left, she's on the right).  I'm pretty sure this was in grade 9 (yep, that would be the late 90's) - taken in front of our high school.  It's really too bad there is no photographic evidence (ha!) of our matching pixie cuts - mine hot pink, and hers smurf blue.   Yep, we were the coolest. 

Family & Friends Series: Heather's Apple Upside Down Cake

Hi guys!  I'm on vacation right now so I've asked my friend's and family to step in while I'm away!  Each day that I am gone, I will be sharing a recipe from one of my friends or family members.  I started this project with no clear goals, I was just hoping to fill a few of the recipe gaps while I was away.  I received an overwhelming response from everyone, and I am truly honoured and excited to be able to share with you so many great recipes made by so many of my favourite people!  Please enjoy their recipes and be sure to leave them comments at the end of their posts! 
Today's post is brought to you by my best friend Heather! Heather has guest posted on my blog before (Heather's Honey Bran Muffins) and is one of my favourite people to try new recipes with!  She moved all the way to Manitoba a few summers back and I still miss her every single day!  When she lived here we used to get together every Thursday to watch Grey's Anatomy and bake up a new treat together (Homemade Oreos and Chocolate Peanut Butter Muffins were both a result of one of these girl's nights).  We still bake together, only now we run up our phone bills and picture text each other instead!  I sure miss her, but thankfully she is just a phone call away! Today she's sharing her recipe for Apple Upside Down Cakes, a recipe that will definitely be making it's way into my oven soon! 

Homemade Oreos

You all remember my best friend Heather (she shared with us her famous recipe for honey bran muffins earlier in the year).  Well back when we were teenagers and our girl's nights were in the form of sleepovers at each other's houses, you could always count on two things: lots and LOTS of girl talk, and way too much junk food.  Oreos were always Heather's favourite - it got to the point where my Mom would always have a family sized package tucked away specifically for her visits!  Nowadays, I try to steer clear of store bought junk food, but I still have a soft spot for Oreos.  Needless to say, this recipe has been in the back of my mind for awhile now.
It was only natural that at a girl's night at Heather's place, she and I would try making these together.  It was a bit of a frankenstein recipe since we ran out of cocoa powder, but with Heather's quick thinking we subbed some bakers squares for cocoa powder.  We were really happy with how it turned out and I know I'll be making these more in the future. 
These cookies keep for up to a week if stored in an airtight container.  They also freeze real well and taste awesome while still frozen!   Ingredients - 1 cup sugar - 2/3 cup butter - 1 egg - 2 squares semi sweet bakers chocolate - 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour - 1/4 cup cocoa powder - 1 tsp baking soda

Cream filling: - 1/4 cup butter - 1/4 cup vegetable shortening - 2 cups icing sugar - 1/2 tsp vanilla extract - 1/2 tsp cream
Directions
Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees. Cream together butter and sugar, and then add egg. Melt chocolate and add to wet ingredients - stir until smooth. 
  In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients, and then add to bowl and mix until well incorporated.  Roll cookies into a ball  (I used 1 tbsp for the bigger cookies, and 1 tsp for the smaller cookies - the smaller cookies are closer to the size of an actual Oreo cookie).  
Place the ball of dough on a parchment lined baking sheet and flatten the cookies with your hand. Cold hands really help, but if the dough starts sticking - dust your hands slightly with flour.   Bake in pre-heated oven for 9 minutes.  At the 4 1/2 minute mark, I like to spin the cookie sheet around so that all of the cookies bake evenly.
For cream filling: 
Combine all ingredients and whip until smooth.  Add approx 1 tbsp cream filling for a large cookie, and 1 tsp for a small cookie (the same size as you made the balls of dough).  Roll the cream filling into a ball, and carefully squish it between two cookies.  
Enjoy!

Chocolate, Chocolate Chip Muffins

I am a huge fan of Costco muffins.  Those huge delicious fluffy muffins that you can always only eat half of because they are so large!  I have never found a chocolate, chocolate chip muffin that is as moist and delicious as they are... that is until a recent "Girl's Night" with my best friend Heather. 

We hadn't set out to make muffins that night - in fact, she had already brought a package of mini Reese cups to satisfy our sweet tooth later on (one of the unspoken rules of Girl's Night is that whoever comes to the other's house brings chocolate and Dr. Pepper's or Tim Horton's, depending on the time of day).  I had mentioned that I wanted to try making a chocolate-chocolate chip muffin one of these days, and Heather determined that one of these days was in fact, today.  She pulled up a recipe App on her phone and we frankensteined one up until we figured out what we though would be the perfect recipe.  Heather further made the recipe awesome by placing a mini Reese in the centre of each muffin... just when you think "how could a muffin be any more delicious than this" you are wowed with a peanut butter surprise in the centre.  I hope you enjoy making these as much as we did! 

Recipe makes 24 muffins. 

Ingredients

- 2 2/3 cup all purpose flour

- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

- 1/2 cup cocoa powder

- 1 1/2 tsp baking soda

- 1/2 tsp salt

- 3 eggs, beaten

- 1 cup greek yogurt

- 1/2 cup water

- 1/2 cup milk

- 1/2 cup vegetable oil

- 1 tsp vanilla extract

- 1/2 cup semi sweet chocolate chips

- 24 mini Reese cups (optional)

Directions

In a large bowl, sift the dry ingredients together.  

In a separate bowl, combine yogurt, water, milk, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract.  Stir into dry ingredients until just moistened.   Fold chocolate chips into batter.  

Fill greased or lined muffin cups 2/3 full.

Place 1 mini Reese cup in the centre of each muffin.

Bake in oven (preheated to 400 degrees) for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Cool for 5 minutes before removing from pans to wire racks.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great holiday with friends and family.  We spend some time before Christmas visiting my brother and his girlfriend in Edmonton. They gave me an awesome gift - a new pasta maker and ravioli maker!  I'm hopefully going to try making my own pasta a bit later this week.   From Edmonton we continued onto Bonnyville to visit with Marc's sister and her family.  We had a great time visiting with everyone, and it was really cute spending Christmas morning with our nieces. When we came back home, my best friend Heather was here visiting from Manitoba, so she stayed with us for a few days.  We caught up with some much needed girl time (I especially enjoyed polishing off a bottle of red while watching Dirty Dancing one of the nights she was here).   Marc and I both managed to come down with a winter cold this week - he made us a huge batch of his awesome homemade chicken vegetable soup yesterday.  Whenever I'm not feeling very well, this soup always helps me feel better (plus it means I didn't have to cook, so that's always a bonus!   I decided to take this week off from blogging to recover from my cold and re-charge my batteries for the new year - I'll be back to regular blogging next week! 

Until then, Happy New Year!  I hope you all have a safe and happy holiday! 

Re-grow Romaine Lettuce

I saw something quite similar to this on Pinterest awhile back.  It was with celery  - since I absolutely DESPISE celery, you can understand why I didn't experiment with it instead. 
When we had Uncle Frank over for our first BBQ of the year a couple weeks back, I saved the bottom of the romaine lettuce that I purchased from the store and stuck it in a cup of fresh water on the windowsill above my sink.  I've made sprouts at home before so I know it's really important to rinse and change the water each day. I applied the same concept to the stem by replacing the water and rinsing the base each morning.  Almost right away I saw some growth, but after going away with Heather last weekend I came home to actual baby romaine leaves!  I can't wait to try this with different types of lettuce, and maybe even stick the base in my garden... 
Have you tried this before?  If so what did you re-grow?
xoxo Jax

May Long

Happy May long weekend my Canadian friends!  Our long weekend comes a week before the Memorial Day weekend in the US.  This weekend always means the start of summer for me.  It's well known fact in my town that nothing gets planted outdoors until after May long or you risk losing it all to frost (in fact - it frosted here last night).  There are a few brave folks who have already planted but they are the renegades of the bunch.   Our last frost is June 9th here in the mountains (something after living here for nearly 25 years, I am still coming to grips with). Thankfully I have three plots at my local community greenhouse so I have a jump start on the season, but I'll be planting my outdoors seeds the second the weekend has passed.  The Tuesday after this long weekend is nearly as exciting for me as the weekend itself!  
    This May long, Heather and I are heading out on a girl's road trip to BC.  Even though we have been had this trip scheduled for a long time, we have no real plans.  We have a general direction in mind (how brave are we not booking hotels in advance!) but really want to keep the weekend free-sprited.  I am really excited about the entire trip - I envision lots of 90's music, beaches, girl talk, and window shopping!
Marc's having a boy's weekend himself - his cousin is coming to visit from the city, and Uncle Frank will be taking them out to the lake on his new boat!  Who knows, perhaps there is a freshly caught trout recipe brewing for a future post? :) 
I have a post scheduled for Sunday - I'm a little bit nervous not being around a computer until  the following day, but I have faith in technology to do it's part (I hope those are not famous last words!).
I hope you all have an excellent weekend, and do something relaxing and fun!   Tell me, what are your plans for the long weekend?
xoxo Jax