Blog Archives
The Snack Report: Ritz Fudge Covered Crackers
I feel like we’ve said this before in Snack Report, but it seems like everybody has jumped onto the “limited edition” bandwagon lately. Oreos have become the worst offender, but nearly every snack food has dipped its toe into the limited edition waters. One of the latest to join in is Ritz crackers. Their limited edition offering is Fudge Covered Ritz. We first saw these in the grocery store last week, and this week they just happened to be on sale, so I decided to give them a try. I was actually kind of excited about them because I really enjoy crackers. Cheese and crackers and peanut butter and crackers are classic snacks, but I’ll also just snack on crackers plain. So the prospect of a dessert cracker was intriguing.
The chocolate plus salt combo is nothing new. It has gained in popularity over the past few years though. Chocolate covered pretzels and peanuts have been around for a long time. And chocolate covered potato chips entered the scene a bit later. There’s even chocolate covered bacon. So chocolate covered crackers really isn’t that far out of an idea. But can they stand up to their predecessors?
Test the Recipe: Hearty Whole Grain Coffee Cake
It can be a lot of fun looking through old cook books. Some recipes you look at wondering what people were thinking back then while others still sound really yummy. Though it’s usually pretty easy to tell the horrific vintage recipes at first glance, sometimes it can be harder to tell for sure which recipes have actually stood up to the test of time. That’s where our new recurring “Test the Recipe” posts will hopefully come to help. We plan to find recipes from vintage cookbooks/recipe cards/magazine cutouts, etc. and test them out. For the first run through we will follow the recipe exactly (barring any possible ingredients that are very hard to find/might not exist anymore in which case we will make the closest possible substitution) and see how it turns out. If it turns out good, then that’s it! Recipe is good to go and you can rest assured that you will end up with something yummy if you make it. If it doesn’t turn out good? Well then we’ll be revisiting the recipe and tweaking it and then posting our version of it as a “We Can Do It Better” post at a later date.
Our first recipe up for trial is from the Quaker Oats Wholegrain Cookbook from 1979.
There’s a bunch of interesting sounding recipes in there, so we’ll probably test some more from there, but first up is the “Hearty Whole Grain Coffee Cake.” I enjoy coffee cake but hadn’t had any for awhile, so it seemed like a good place to start.
Quick Recipe: Apple-Stuffed Baked Apples
A couple of weeks ago we were trying to think of desserts to serve at our fall party that were simple, but yummy. We’d served our Apple Crisp Pizza last year and felt like we should mix it up a bit. Baked apples seemed like a good choice. But we didn’t want to just fill them up with brown sugar and call it a day. So what better way to get the most apple-y apple dessert? Put apples inside the apples of course! Add some pumpkin spice, and bam! Super fall dessert. This recipe is super yummy, and really easy. It’ll impress your friends without stressing you out. And it’s great to serve at fall parties, though you could totally just make some for yourself if you want (which you probably will).
The Snack Report: Oreo Thins
Oreo just keeps on crankin’ out new flavors and varieties. Earlier this year, we took a look at S’Mores Oreos, which were actually pretty awesome. On one hand, it’s getting kind of tiring seeing them shill out inane ideas like red velvet and key lime, but at the same time there is a tiny bit of excitement in seeing what crazy crossover they’ll do next. Their newest addition to the product family is a bit of an enigma, Oreo Thins. They’re essentially your regular old original Oreos, but half the thickness. That’s all there is to them, yet they’ve caused a little bit of a stir on social media and people I know for whatever reason. Apparently people are interested in them.
*Interest intensifies*
Pizza Lab #31: Tres Leches Pizza
We’ve come up with some crazy crossovers for our pizzas before. This pizza maybe one of the strangest. But strange doesn’t mean bad! The inspiration for this pizza was tres leches cake. “Tres leches” means “three milks” in Spanish, so as you can imagine, three milks are involved in the making of the cake. Traditional tres leches cake is composed of a sponge cake soaked in a combination of evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream after baking. Yet despite this, when done correctly the cake is still light and airy, not soggy. I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the cake, but I imagine someone dipping cookies into milk was involved somewhere, since it’s a similar concept.
How we came up with the idea for this pizza I’m not entirely sure; this was mostly Erik’s idea. But we both brainstormed out the details and execution. Obviously we couldn’t just have a mostly naked pizza that’d been soaked in milk. A pizza needs toppings. The original plan was to top it with dulce de leche. Dulce de leche is a caramel like sauce made from condensed milk. This plan eventually changed though, because despite the fact that pre-made, canned dulce de leche is a thing that exists, we could not find any in stores near us. And making it from scratch takes at least 2 hours, and quite frankly, we just didn’t have the time to babysit cans of milk for that long. So we ultimately ended up on plan B, which was to use our go-to caramel sauce recipe, which takes about 5 minutes to make. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though…
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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