Blog Archives
Pizza Lab #26: Peanut Butter Cup Pizza
Chocolate and peanut butter, peanut butter and chocolate – it’s one of the world’s best flavor combinations to ever come into creation. The first person to combine the two should have won a Nobel Prize for their work towards bettering the Earth. Now, considering that Erik and I both love the peanut butter/chocolate combo and pizza, it’s kind of surprising it took us almost two years of doing Pizza Labs to make a peanut butter cup pizza. Luckily the wait is now over because for February that’s exactly what we decided to do.
We agreed early on in the month that we should do a dessert pizza in honor of Valentine’s Day. Considering it was one of our newest ideas, we pretty quickly settled on the peanut butter cup pizza. Also it has a lot of chocolate and chocolate and Valentine’s Day goes together. A combination (pizza and peanut butter cups) with a flavor combination (chocolate and peanut butter) that we love in honor of Valentine’s Day. What could be more perfect?
The Snack Report: Red Velvet Oreos
While it may seem really fancy, red velvet cake is essentially a chocolate cake made red using either natural or artificial red coloring, and has a cream cheese frosting. Though red velvet cake has been around since the early 20th century, it really seems to have exploded in popularity in the last few years. Now there’s red velvet everything everywhere. It seems like everything that can be made red velvet, is. It’s even spinning off into blue velvet and green velvet cake mixes.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, a day of love and things colored red, Oreo decided to jump on the red velvet bandwagon by releasing limited edition Red Velvet Oreos. They feature a red chocolate cookie with cream cheese flavored crème filling. So, how did they do?
Pizza Lab #25: Chicken Noodle Soup Pizza
It’s a new year, and time for another 12 months of pizza lab ideas. While our last Pizza Lab for 2014 ended pretty disastrously (so disastrously in fact that we couldn’t even work up the motivation to post about it. But we’ll revisit it someday, don’t worry), the first Pizza Lab for 2015 kicked things off to a good start.
The idea for this pizza came about from my thinking about what kind of pizza we should experiment with next while out on my third cold walk of the day at work. We agreed we should try to do something wintery for this one. And what’s more comforting on a cold winter day than a nice warm bowl of chicken noodle soup? Now obviously we couldn’t just pour chicken noodle soup onto a pizza crust. That would be very messy, and soggy; we just wanted to capture the flavors of it.
We Can Do It Better: Gingerbread French Toast
Back around Christmas time I saw on TV that the chain restaurant Denny’s was serving Gingerbread French toast. I thought that sounded delicious and decided we needed to try making it ourselves. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to try making them before Christmas. But while gingerbread men are a traditional Christmas cookie, just plain gingerbread is more of just a general wintertime treat, so there’s still time to make gingerbread French toast!
Some basic research revealed a plethora of recipes calling themselves gingerbread French toast. I feared we were too late to jump on the gingerbread French toast bandwagon. However, upon closer inspection we realized most of these recipes didn’t actually use gingerbread! They just used regular bread and added gingerbread spices to it (or were weird things that didn’t even look like French toast, but that’s another story). But where’s the fun in that?
Quick Recipe: Peanut Butter & Jelly Pancakes
Let’s talk peanut butter and jelly. We’ve all eaten it many times before, and for good reason. The PB&J sandwich is a legendary food thanks to its nutritional viability, quick prep time, and simple enjoyable flavor combination. There’s not many foods out there you can whip together in 30 seconds that will supply you with a good dose of protein, carbs, and sugar all in one go. What I’m getting at is peanut butter & jelly sandwiches rock.
But have you ever considered taking this old standby in a new, more breakfast-oriented direction? That’s where pancakes come in. Peanut butter & jelly pancakes work surprisingly well when you melt the peanut butter right into the batter, as opposed to just slapping the two condiments on between layers. When it’s cooked in like that, it actually creates a more mellow flavor since it’s now part of the cakey pancakes, but something about it is more satisfying, due to the more… ‘compound’ flavor you’re created. Don’t worry, it still tastes like peanut butter & jelly, just ever so slightly different, and awesome in its own right.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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