Cookies of Catan

Sorry I've been MIA! It's been a crazy last few months and since I haven't been inspired to do many cool things, I've felt like my blogging wouldn't be inspired either. But I'm gonna try to be better. Pinky swear.

So...Settlers of Catan is kinda huge in our lives. We love games -- collect board games -- and a few years ago we listened to our friends and family who said he HAD to play Catan. And we haven't looked back.

I've wanted to do some sort of Catan themed dessert for a while now. Matt and I just traveled to Idaho for a mini family reunion and since the cousins there are also huge Catan fans, we seized this opportunity to made this dessert a reality. At first I wanted to make a cake. Then I thought cupcakes.

It evolved to cookies.

Sugar cookies, using the game pieces as a template -- candy and cookies and frosting to recreate the whole game board.

I used Matt's aunt's sugar cookie recipe. You can find it here! (These may look really cool, but they tasted EVEN better.) Matt's cousin Kathryn helped out a ton with these -- she deserves a lot of kudos for coming up with some of the details (like the river that runs through the Ore cards) and she let me take over kitchen while she was trying to prepare a meal for eight people. So, special superhero status for that.

Here is a photo spread of the evolution of our Settlers of Catan cookies.

I had a poor showing at the actual Settlers tournament. But we don't have to talk about that...

Things I Love Mondays

I will tell you what I DON'T LOVE...

Technology that impedes my Dexter watching. We lost our Blu Ray remote. That only took like, I don't know, a week. And for some reason we can't get any Blu Ray discs to start without it. It's devastating; but I'm trying to be strong.

When Season 3 disc 2 of Dexter came in the mail from Netflix, I seriously thought about packing up both my children and driving to my parent's house -- since they are both at work -- and hunkering down there to watch it. But alas, who would watch my kids? A dilemma.

Right. Anyway.

On this week's edition of "Things I love", here it is:

I love my Martha Stewart Alphabet Cookie Cutters!

Photo Credit

There are so many fun things to do with these cookie cutters! Party favors; decorations. PLUS...with a little boy who is learning his alphabet, how fun is it to cook together, make fun cookies to decorate, AND use it as an educational tool? 

Plus, someone gave me the idea to fill those suckers up and fill them with cake batter for miniature cakes.

Here is a link to my cousin's blog with a great sugar cookie recipe: Sugar Cookies! And while you're over there, you can check out all the fun things she does.

And I'm a huge fan of Martha's Royal Icing recipe. Although, it took me forever to find out that no one sells meringue powder. I had to order mine off of Amazon. But if I'm out, I use raw eggs -- just don't feed those to pregnant women and kiddos. To be safe, you know?

Just color with food dye. 

Here it is!

Ingredients:

2 large egg whites (or more if you want thinner icing)
4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar (add more to thicken the icing)
1 lemon, juiced

Directions:

Beat the whites until stiff but not dry. Add sugar and lemon juice; beat for 1 minute more. Adjust thickness/thinness as you desire. You can store the icing in the refrigerator for 3 days.

Substitute 5 TBS of meringue powder and 1/3 cup of water for raw eggs.

Now go make some cookies. 

Petite Cheesecakes

Every other week or so my brother-in-law and sister-in-law come over to our house after Elliott is asleep and play games with us.

Usually it's Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. But we throw in some Fast Food Franchise, Power Grid, or Blockus in the mix. (While two person Blockus is fun, Matt and I have abandoned two person strategy games from our playing line-up. When you have two competitive people living in a house you have to adapt, you know? It's the little things we do in order to stay married.)

I like to take these opportunities to bake something fun -- because, well, there are two additional people and that means there is less of a chance that Matt and I will eat an entire batch of whatever it is I feeling like making. 

Tonight: Petite Cheesecakes! I had half a bag of Costco's individual Philadelphia Cream Cheese that was expiring next week. Either we were going to eat nothing but bagels or I was going to make a cheesecake.

While these are normally made with vanilla wafers, I had Oreos. So, I substituted those instead and...let me tell you...best decision ever...

These are super easy to make and really delicious -- plus you can play around with the presentation too. (Or mix up the flavor of Oreos: vanilla, mint.) 

So, place an Oreo in a cupcake liner.

And then spoon in your cheesecake batter.

Bake and serve!

You can either place it cheesecake side up or Oreo side up! (Inexpensive red wine is a nice addition too!)

Here is what you need:

- 16 oz of cream cheese

- 3/4 cups of granulated sugar

- 1 Tbs lemon juice

- 1 tsp vanilla extract

- 2 eggs

- Oreos

- Toppings (cherry pie filling, cookie crumbs, caramel sauce)

And here it what you do:

Soften the cream cheese and beat until smooth. Add in the sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and eggs. Beat the mixture for several minutes until it's well mixed. Fill the muffin tins 2/3 full and bake at 375 for 15-17 minutes.

Cool. Chill. And serve. 

Enjoy! 

Donuts Part 2

If donuts are the next cupcake (or maybe cake pops are the next cupcake and I've got a post about those suckers soon!), then I am uber trendy with my donut pan.

Fried donuts are out; baked donuts are in! Some of my naysayers have been silenced!

I took donuts to Book Club on Saturday -- here is my tray ready to go:

Are those Maple/Bacon donuts you see? Why yes, yes they are. Everything is better with bacon!

And the glazed donuts were so much better this time -- drizzling the powdered sugar/milk mixture over them when they are warm and then letting them cool was so much better than my dunking method. The glazed donuts were virtually indistinguishable from something you'd buy for yourself on a Saturday morning at some fancy-pants bakery. 

Want to make these donuts?

Head back to Eat, Live, Run's blog to grab the basic donut recipe.

And here are the recipes for the frosting!

Chocolate Glaze


1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips
1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Toss into a saucepan on the stove, warm over low heat, and stir until all those chips are melted!

Dip the donuts into the mixture while the glaze is still warm.

Maple Frosting

4 1/2 cups of powdered sugar
1/2 cup of butter
4 tablespoons of milk
2 tablespoons of maple flavoring (I used McCormick)

Whether you want to go with the powdered option (dust those suckers in sugar), cinnamon and sugar (melt butter, create mixture, dunk in butter, dunk in mixture), glazed (1 tablespoon of milk, 1/2 cup powdered sugar - drizzle), or any of the above options, you are sure to have a foolproof treat to take to parties, picnics.

Breaking in the Donut Pan

My desire for a donut (doughnut, donut -- whatever, right?) pan started when I checked out the Sneaky Chef cookbook from the library.

About two weeks ago I stumbled upon a donut pan on Amazon.com and I bought it on impulse. And when it arrived in the mail about five days later, I looked at it and said, "Huh. Fancy that. A donut pan. How often am I really going to make donuts?"

Yes, I said "fancy that" -- don't judge.

Clearly I did not want to make Sneaky Chef donuts. It's not that I have anything against them and I'm not opposed to whole wheat donuts with hidden spinach, but there is a time and a place for making something you are going to feed your kids and a time and place for making something that you are going to eat sinfully while watching "Black Swan" after the kids are asleep.

(One could argue that these are BAKED donuts after all and so not that sinful.)

After looking at all sorts of recipes that exist out there on the world wide web, I decided to use the recipe my friend Sunshine shared with me from one of her favorite blogs Eat, Live, Run.

The recipe can be found here. I picked it because I had all of the ingredients I needed on hand. (All of the ingredients with the exception of buttermilk...but I never buy buttermilk when it calls for it in recipes. I made my own by combining one cup of whatever milk I have and one large tablespoon of lemon juice. Brilliant.)

Here are my beloved cake donuts right out of the oven:

They didn't cook evenly -- one side was darker than the other. So, next time I might try to flip them halfway through. But despite that small hiccup, I thought they looked beautiful. And then I made the glaze. The writer of "Eat, Live, Run" spooned on the glaze and let it soak in -- a nice idea and one that would work just fine. I use that exact same glaze recipe for my killer peppermint sugar cookies and I dunk those cookies...so, I decided to do the same for these. And instead of soaking it in, they had an amazing glazed top.

For two of the donuts, I melted some butter in a bowl, brushed it on the top and then dipped them in a sugar/cinnamon mixture. And while I was going to cover two of them in a chocolate glaze, I decided it was too time intensive to make the glaze for just two donuts -- I'll break out that experiment when I make these next time.

Anyway, here is my plate of deliciousness. I'm pretty happy with how they have turned out. Don't you just want to come over here right now and have one? You can't. I'm not proud to admit that we already ate them all. Purely for blogging purposes, of course.