Blog Archives
Pizza Lab #42: Cinnamon Bun Pizza
Ask and ye shall receive. This month’s Pizza Lab was actually a request from a fan. We’d already been tossing around ideas for a different pizza, but when the request came in we jumped to it and brainstormed how to make this pizza work. We briefly tossed around the idea of making them cinnamon roll style, just using pizza dough instead of cinnamon bun dough. But ultimately we decided that, while it’d probably be delicious, it strayed too far from the traditional pizza format to be a Pizza Lab (though we may still experiment with that sometime in the future). Just putting cinnamon and sugar on the pizza dough would have resulted in a pizza too similar to the dessert pretzel pizza we made years ago. It was time to take things to the next level. We had to make this a stuffed pizza.
Test the Recipe: Grandma Lil’s Peanut Butter Cookies
“Test the Recipe” is a recurring column on PCFG where we test vintage (anything published before 1990) recipes and see if they stand the test of time or need updating. In this post we test the recipe as exactly as possible for the most accurate outcomes. Those recipes that need updating will be featured later in a “We Can Do It Better” post.
I’m mixing things up a little bit with this Test the Recipe post because I didn’t find it in a book; I found it in my grandma’s recipe box. As such, I don’t know the actual date on it, but considering the recipe is my great-grandmother’s I think it’s fairly safe to assume that the recipe falls within the time frame I established. I think a lot of the Christmas cookies my mom makes use my great-grandma’s recipes, but she doesn’t usually make peanut butter cookies, so I wanted to give these a try. I really enjoy peanut butter, and cookies are great, so I was excited to have some peanut butter cookies to eat. I’m sure my great-grandma didn’t come up with the recipe totally from scratch, but I don’t know where she may have gotten the original recipe from either.
Great-grandma Lillian
We Can Do It Better: Glazed Pineapple Cookies
So, I fully intended to remake these cookies a lot sooner than this. However between Christmas, a string of birthdays, and then Easter it’s kind of been dessert overload over here for the past few months. Only now that most of the dessert baking occasions have passed did I really feel inspired to give these cookies another go.
If you remember from the original Test the Recipe post, following that recipe the cookies came out fine, but weren’t really very pineapple-y and the glaze was kind of a disaster. So my mission was to bring more pineapple to the cookies while also improving the glaze. Luckily this was kind of a two birds with one stone type situation. So, what changes did I make?
Cheat Code: Egg-less Avocado Chocolate Chip Cookies
I realize this is now our third chocolate chip cookie recipe on the blog, but well, we really like chocolate chip cookies. While the chocolate chip cookie recipe using cream cheese instead of eggs came about out of necessity, this recipe was developed strictly out of curiosity. I remembered from an old episode of Good Eats that Alton Brown said that avocados are actually kind of similar to eggs in terms of fat content so that got me to wondering if avocado could also replace eggs in cookies. And I was right! The cookies ended up with a slightly different flavor than regular chocolate chip cookies, but nothing that can really be pin-pointed to avocado. Even skeptics will enjoy these cookies. They’re also some of the most cakey chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever had, so if that’s your favorite type of cookie, then these are for you.
The Snack Report: White Strawberry Shortcake M&Ms
When I saw that M&Ms had a limited edition flavor that was out for Easter, I figured what better to post this week than a review of them? For some reason this flavor is exclusive to Target, which actually has apparently happened before but I’m just now finding out about. In doing some digging it seems that M&Ms has released a few different seasonal flavors to Target in the past. I am now kind of upset that I missed out on some potentially awesome limited edition M&Ms. But I found out about these ones! And since we happened to be driving past a Target the other day, I managed to obtain a package. They’re definitely being marketed as a spring/Easter candy since the green M&M is wearing bunny ears (unless it’s all some sort of elaborate Playboy ad, but I doubt it). Other than the pastel colors I’m not entirely sure why they chose to make this flavor for Easter. Strawberry shortcake is much more of an early summer dessert, when strawberries are in season than it is a spring one. Seasonally appropriate nitpicking aside, let’s find out how these M&Ms taste.
