butter pecan cookies

eummm. this comes from simply recipes. i didn't have granulated sugar so ended up using light brown sugar in the cookies and for the rolling and sprinkling parts. it's very difficult to get the cookies rolled in brown sugar so it might have been a lighter coating than the recipe calls for. but these are some delicious melt in your mouth cookies. make sure to use a good quality butter as that will be the dominate flavor you get and with the lower grade stuff you'll get less of a buttery goodness and more of a so-so cookie. go ahead and toast extra pecans to eat (i think i ate about a cupful by the end of the day).

happy lunar new year!

yummy lil things

happy birthday to M today! and happy belated to mimi! i feel bad for those birthdays so soon after xmas b/c they get lost in the shuffle.

 this is quinoa wheat bread getting ready for the oven (it's delicious and has a wonderful crunchy texture mixed within soft bread). s4 loves the bread book so that is probably going to get added to our cookbook collection

you can see all the cute quinoa grains sprinkled in the roll!

are these plates not the cutest thing in the world?!?!? they are cb2 plates and there's one more in the group but i have to find the perfect food to put on it, thanks lucy! i especially like the poor guy w/ his tongue stuck to the peppermint stick a la "a christmas story" (which, i didn't see on tv during the holidays. what is the world coming to?)

checked out this raw cookbook from the library. M wanted healthy food for her bday as the holidays were just a back-to-back food fest. i halved the date logs recipe and added in crushed pecans. they are a nice sweet (but not overly sweet) treat. the coconut and pecans are wonderful together. it kind of reminds me of a less sweet halvah that you would get in india.

this is a chocolate swirl yeast bread with a powdered sugar/butter struesel topping which i have to say using powdered sugar for a struesel is a first for me. baked this with mimi (i think the 3 loaves had 5 sticks of butter between them). it was delicious (i will find a link for you!) but i would have halved the chocolate filling and topping amount as we were having difficulty finding places for it to go. but the bread is deliciously sweet. my next goal is to bake stollen as one of my volunteers brought in a delicious loaf of stollen.

happy eating/baking!