Not Muffins

I confess, I eat breakfast in the car. Most mornings you'll find me wiping peanut butter toast off my seatbelt or hoping the chocolate chips stay in my granola bar instead of melting on the heated seats. When I try to eat better, assuming I have some extra time in the morning, I'll make a smoothie. They're healthier and much neater. But let's be real, usually I spend any extra morning time on Facebook.

Kim, my Amazon warrior princess friend, follows a meal plan from her trainer that includes portable oatmeal for breakfast. She cracks 2 or 3 egg whites into a cup of dry oatmeal, mixes it up and throws it in the microwave. It cooks into a spongy bland cake that she can eat on her commute. Just the thought of this was enough to make me gag, although Kim swears you get used to it and I should try them. I decided not to risk it.

Then one day I came across a recipe from Roni at Green Lite Bites for a portable baked oatmeal that sounded tasty but wasn't full of sugar, and my life was changed. Or at least my breakfast was changed. They're super easy to make - you just dump everything in a bowl, mix it up, and scoop it into a muffin tin - and they're packed with nutrients and fiber to keep me full until lunch. They freeze great, which means I can make a pan, seal it up in the freezer, and then just pop one or two in the microwave before heading out the door. Breakfast is a no-brainer all week.

The first time I made these they came out golden brown with a slight crown, and looked like tasty sugary-lardy muffins. However, they tasted like... well, like someone took a bowl of morning oatmeal and cooked it in a muffin tin. *I* thought it was pretty darn good. My oatmeal-shunning family was not amused. They are now forever known in our house as Not-Muffins. I still bake them frequently but now I include full disclosure: These Are Not Muffins! They are baked oatmeal! Eat at your own risk!

I've spent a few months trying and tweaking various recipes to suit my taste, and these little gems have become my go-to car meal. My version tries to strike a balance between the ones that are glorified dessert and the ones that are completely vegan, gluten-free and organic. 

[Side note: I do sometimes use organic ingredients in my Not-Muffins. Then when the container is empty, I put it in a prominent location at the top of our recycle bin, camouflaging the empty wine bottles and Toaster Strudel boxes, so on garbage day my neighbors will think we always eat healthy like that.] 

The base recipe for my Not-Muffins is always the same.  What changes in each version is a "mushy" component to replace the oil (like mashed ripe bananas or unsweetened applesauce), and a small amount of complimentary add-ins to make it interesting (chocolate chips!).  I've linked some of my favorite combinations bleow, or you can use the base recipe with your own amalgamations to make a custom recipe. Baked oatmeal is pretty versatile.  Go ahead and use almond milk instead of skim milk, add a spoonful of peanut butter, substitute chia seeds for the flaxseed or drizzle a little maple syrup in the batter.  It's a new adventure every time.

Banana Chocolate Chip Not Muffins

Pumpkin Pie Not Muffins

Apple Berry Not Muffins

Morning Glory Not Muffins (pictured above)

Zucchini Nut Not Muffins

Seriously, check out Roni's blog.  She has amazing recipes and a great story!

The Cookie Exchange, Part II: Redemption

So, remember when I said I was going to rock the annual cookie exchange? Last year I struggled with my cookies, but this year I planned ahead. I found a recipe for a drop cookie decorated to look like Frosty just defrosted - cute and just a little twisted. Perfect. I did a trial run and decided that while the original recipe, from the Better Homes and Gardens website, was good, I wanted to make a few changes. It was based on a peanut butter cookie, which is always the last kind left on the complimentary cookie trays at those chain hotels that cater to business travelers. The dough was easy to work with, but the cookie was really dry and hard. So I substituted a fudgy, soft, delicious dark chocolate cookie that my family has been making for years. And since my snowman top hat looked more like something a pilgrim would wear, I used a chocolate melting wafer to better define the brim of the hat. I also decided to enlarge the carrot nose by using some orange-tinted chocolate. Now, I'm by no means a baker, but the end result was pretty cute and they were a big hit at the cookie exchange, which was well run and a lot of fun. But in typical fashion, my cookies did not come together exactly as I planned.   

The cookie part went off without a hitch - I melted baking chocolate, butter and sugar together, mixed in eggs and vanilla until it was smooth and glossy, then stirred in the dry ingredients. It's a really sticky dough, so it has to be thoroughly chilled before scooping spoonfuls onto the baking sheets. The cookies came out perfectly and after a brief rest to cool, they were ready to decorate. While they were baking, Best Friend stopped by to lend a hand. I intended to put her to work making tiny snowman hats out of mini Reece's cups and chocolate melting discs. That's when we discovered that apparently The Boy had found the bag of candy I had stashed in the cupboard and polished it off. Senior came to our rescue and ran to the store to buy replacements. While he was gone, I started melting white chocolate and spooning it on the cookies. With impeccable timing, I ran out of chocolate right after Senior returned from the store. The Girl's boyfriend happened to call at this moment, and was the next one to come to our rescue, showing up not only with the candy but also with a great big pizza! It didn't take long to finish the snowman puddles and top off with the little hats and chocolate chip eyes. The last decorating step was the carrot noses. I didn't have any orange food coloring, so I mixed red and yellow drops into some melted white chocolate. It came out kind of an insipid peach color so I messed with the tints for a while until Best Friend got sick of waiting and just squeezed in a big blob of red. I was pretty mad until I realized that I now had the perfect shade of carrot orange. Unfortunately the liquid food color had now caused the chocolate to kind of seize up, and couldn't be piped out of the bag. By now it was getting late and we had already plowed through a bottle of wine, so the logical choice was to mold 60 tiny little carrots by hand. The Girl stepped in to help us with our masterpieces. We had a great time rolling them out and didn't even try to make them consistently. Some were tiny, some huge, and we dropped them on the cookies in random melted abandon. I must admit, a few landed on the cookies... let's say... inappropriately. By the time we were done we were laughing hysterically, but the cookies looked amazing. We put the cookies into cute little snowflake cellophane bags tied with curly ribbons. Our masterpieces:

I haven't really had much holiday spirit this season. But as I settled on the sofa after the kitchen was clean and the empty wine bottles were nestled in the recycling bin, I realized that I wouldn't trade a whole box of perfect, easy cookies for one lopsided snowman cookie that only came together thanks to the group effort of my family and friends. That was an amazing gift.

The Cookie Exchange, Part I: Lessons Learned

Last year I went to a cookie exchange.  The invitation had come in the mail, a beautiful glossy postcard asking me to bring 72 cookies, "creatively" packaged in half dozen portions with the recipe attached, plus another half dozen for the sampling plate. I only knew a couple of the women who were attending, but I was pretty sure they were all equally crafty and hostess-y, traits I used to have. But somewhere along the line, between the teenagers and the demanding job and my general loss of interest in impressing others, those traits disappeared.

Still, I didn't want to embarrass myself.  I wasn't going to bring the paper plate of cookies with dog hair on them, or repackage something from the Meijer bakery. So I looked in my recipe arsenal and found the perfect cookie recipe clipped from an old Taste of Home magazine - Christmas Shortbread Wreaths:

Click here for the recipe: Christmas Shortbread Wreaths from Taste of Home

I figured these would be perfect - they only have a few ingredients, and they're tasty and festive and travel well.  I'd made them before, although it had been several years, so I knew that in order to be successful I would need to keep the ingredients and the cookie sheets cold, so there would be minimal spreading.  I also knew that the decorations were best added just before you take the cookies out of the oven.  Too early and they melt, too late and they roll off.  For my cookie exchange, I decided to make smaller 6-piece wreaths and package them individually. To make them even better, I would dip the bottoms in dark chocolate first!  I bought cute little holiday patterned shrink-wrap bags so the cookie wreaths would hold their shape when swapped with the other lucky exchangers. This was going to be awesome.

I planned to make the cookies the afternoon before the cookie exchange, which took place on a Sunday. I would bake them all, then coat them in chocolate and let them set before packaging. Well, it takes a lot longer to make 12 little little wreaths than it does to make one big one. After the fourth one I was sick of the whole process. I had a few mishaps - some of the wreaths were a little dark, some had swelled in the oven until they resembled pregnant ankles, and a couple stuck to the cookie sheet and broke because I waited too long to remove them. I was using colored sugar for the decor which was getting everywhere and staining my fingers, resulting in a few random red and green fingerprints on the cookies.  Still, by early evening I managed to get a dozen fairly good wreaths baked, and figured the chocolate would cover a multitude of sins.

So, if anyone out there knows how to get chocolate on the bottom of a decorated cookie, please share your secret here. It was a disaster. I tried dipping but the cookies were too thin to get a good grip, and if you squeezed too hard the edges would crumble. I tried pouring the chocolate on a plate and snuggling the cookie down into the pool, but I couldn't pick them back up without getting the chocolate all over the top of the cookie. I tried turning them over and painting the chocolate on the back. I couldn't lay them on the cookie sheet or the colored sugar fell off, so I held the pieces in my hand. It sort of worked, but I couldn't get a nice clean edge. In the end, I had 12 plates of Charlie Brown cookies. There was no way I was going to take these to a gathering of Martha Stewarts. Time for Plan B.

One of my favorite cookies as a kid is a free-form meringue we called Fly-ups. My mom always told me that they were served during the bridging ceremony when a girl "flew up" the ranks from Brownie to Girl Scout.  I never actually made it past the Brownie stage so I can't verify this, but the cookies are pretty darn good and easy enough for a 9-year-old to make, which at this point was perfect.  Normally they have tiny chocolate chips in the batter, but I didn't have any on hand. What I did have was a delicious hunk of Sanders dark chocolate peppermint bark, which I chopped up and used in place of the chocolate chips. It was magnificent!  I can't find my recipe - all my cookbooks are packed up so my kitchen counter space looks maxed for any potential homebuyers. But this one is pretty close:

Click here for the recipe: Chocolate chip meringue cookie from Weight Watchers

I wasn't going to be able to shrink wrap such a delicate cookie, so the morning of the exchange I cut up the packaging. I stacked six cookies and wrapped them in a piece of un-shrunken shrink wrap, fastening them with ribbons to resemble a christmas popper (and by 'resemble' I mean they were in a vague tube shape with both ends tied off). I made copies of the recipe and fastened it like a tag on one end of each cookie stack, and headed off to the cookie exchange. When I arrived, I placed my cookies next to the hand-decorated gingerbread men, snowflake cookies dusted with edible sparkles, exquisite rolled cookies, and... the hostess's perfect chocolate-dipped shortbread cookies. I whispered a silent prayer of thanks for the decision to make a last minute change.

Last week an invitation came in the mail.  The cookie exchange is now an annual tradition, and I'm invited back. This time we need 11 dozen cookies!  I guess I could just hope to wow them with my packaging. But I decided to plan ahead. I found a cute recipe, bought the ingredients, and plan on doing a dry run before the big day.  I'll let you know how it goes.