Homemade Smurfberry Cookies

The other day while we were out driving in the woods, we came across this very rare Smurfberry bush. We pulled over and smurfed a small basket full of the ripe berries. Sure Smurfberries are delicious to eat just by themselves, and of course we made some yummy Sarsaparilla with a handful of the berries but I was looking for something a little extra special to smurf. So I went up in the attic and dug out my great great grandmother's Smurf recipe book that she had discovered in her backyard among a patch of mushrooms....during World War I?!?

Anysmurf...the fact is Saturday we had a rare occasion where we had two social gatherings to go to so I decided to get a little creative and whip up some Smurfberry Cookies, since I can't stop talking about Smurfs. I had looked up a few Smurf cookie recipes online but they were all way too complicated so I just created my own. You can make these too. Here's what you'll need:

• 3/4 cup butter (softened)


• 1/2 cup sugar


• 1 1/2 cup flour


• 1 tsp. vanilla flavor


• blue food coloring


• Pomegranate Craisins


• Smurfs Breakfast Cereal
  

This recipe is simple to smurf. First, smurf the butter and sugar together and then add the vanilla. Then start to mix in the flour while adding dabs of blue food coloring. You'll want to wait till your mixture is mostly white before adding the coloring or you'll be adding blue to the buttery yellow and it won't look right.

While the mixture is forming into dough, sprinkle in the Craisins. I suppose you could use any ol' berry or fruit for this recipe. I went with Pomegranate Craisins because it's a flavor most people wouldn't identify right away and Smurfberries should taste unique and not just like blueberries or what have you. (I'm smurfing a story with these cookies people!)

While kneeding the dough, continue to add in as many Craisins as you wish and drops of food coloring. I added the blue coloring a little at a time because I didn't want the shade of the cookies to be too dark. I ended up adding enough so that the dough wasn't entirely blue, there were some swirls of white in there as well. I liked this look as it actually helps sell the visual idea of the blue and white design of the Smurfs.

Then at the last minute I had the idea to add a coating of Smurfs Cereal to the top of the cookies. Pour a little bit of cereal into a bowl, then when you roll small balls of dough for the cookies press them down into the cereal to pick up a few for a little crunchy blue and white coating on top.

Make sure your balls of dough are pretty flat to begin with. The dough didn't expand out as some recipes do and the second batch of cookies came out much better and cookie like than the first batch which is pictured above. Bake the cookies on a greased cookie sheet for 8 1/2 minutes at 375 degrees.

When they are done, let them cool for a smurf bit and then you'll have yourself a Smurfalicious Batch of Homemade Smurfberry Cookies. I think the Craisins did a good job as far as looking like a Smurfberry baked into a cookie and the light blue color swirled with the white evokes images of the Smurfs. The Smurf cereal on top is just a nice unique touch and another way to work the Smurfs into the cookies.

I made two containers of the cookies to take to our two parties. I also added in a bed of blue and red Stauffer's Smurf Crackers which are kind of hard to find in stores...so I went to their factory in York, PA and bought some directly from them. (Is that sad?) (That was a separate adventure and nothing to necessarily do with my homemade project.)

How to Avoid Bob Evans Killing You

Since the heart attack I had a little over a year ago, there are many foods that I simply have not had. One of the things that I was really starting to miss and crave was one of those heaping plates of pancakes or waffles with fruit and creme and all kinds of other good stuff all over them. Friendly's had some Apple Caramel Nut Waffles (or something like that) all summer long that kept mocking me from the pictures in the restaurant window or even worse the little tri-fold card that sits on the table inside. But I resisted! One of my all-time favorite things to get at a restaurant was some concoction Bob Evans' had that was something to do with bananas and creme and waffles. Even before the heart attack, when I saw the nutritional information on that dish I stayed away from it! But I had really been craving something like it lately.

My brain literally doesn't work this way sometimes, but it just dawned on me that ordering fruit/creme pancakes at a restaurant wasn't my only option in obtaining their deliciousness. I could make something similar at home and use better ingredients and portion control. Sometimes I forget that you can make food in your very own home!

So, I set out to create my own Banana Waffle Goodness. And let me tell you something my friends, they hit the spot!

When ever we make waffles at our house we use the Bisquick Heart Smart Pancake and Baking Mix. It has slightly better nutritional numbers than their other brands, plus I use skim milk and egg beaters in the recipe. (My philosophy is cut the numbers down where ever you can!) Next I topped it with sliced banana, that's all good! I used Smucker's Sugar Free Caramel, which is also fat free and tried not to smother it with Fat Free Redi-Wip topping. I didn't realize that the caramel needed to be melted by running the jar under hot water for a few minutes, so it came out a little lumpy in spots. While I was in the ice cream topping section of the grocery store, I also picked up a little can of crushed nuts. There's nothing really healthy about them, so you got use just a pinch.

They were delicious and so tasty they didn't need the accompaniment of maple syrup! My wife, whose not necessarily a big fan of such dishes really enjoyed them and even my completely unadventurous kids liked them - though they prefer their waffles and pancakes with just ketchup.

I'm not sure what the exact Bob Evans dish that I used to enjoy was called, but they currently have something on their menu called Stacked & Stuffed Strawberry Banana Cream Hotcakes. According to the Men's Health website, one order will cost you just under 1200 calories, plus 42 grams of fat and 191 carbs! (If you do a carb exchange thingy, that's over 18 of your 21 daily carb servings!) Using the labels on the products I used and factoring in a little extra since I didn't use exact measurements on all the ingredients, a plate of Ed South's Banana Waffle Goodness has 335 calories, 11 grams of fat and 55 carbs. Well played, Ed South! Well played!

*I'm not claiming this is "good for you" it's just a healthier alternative to what a restaurant would serve you.

Still hungry? Check out my friend Amy's Pumpkin Pancakes. I'm trying to figure out a way to just conveniently appear on her porch one morning when she's making these!

C is for Cookies (and Christmas)

We're not big bakers or chefs here at the WWoB offices, but every Christmas I like to do a little baking. This year we got a little ambitious and made cookies from scratch, something I've never done before. Tanner and I started early in the day (this was December 23) while Elias was still at school and got some of the baking underway. Both the kids really enjoy helping out in the kitchen, Elias is especially fond of cracking eggs and Tanner will do any job you ask him. I have yet to establish any sort of product that has become tradition for me to make for the holidays so most of what we made was all new to us.

Do you have any idea how far back in the cupboard this rolling pin was!? Tanner is rolling out the dough to make Gingerbread Mickeys and Donalds.


We've made these before, with antique cookie cutters I got for a gift one year. They look really neat, but I should try and find a good gingerbread recipe because the dough from the store bought package is kind of tasteless. But they sure look swell, don't they!? Tanner had a blast pressing out all the cookies.

We made these Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies from scratch with a recipe from an (unopened) cookbook I gave my wife for Christmas last year. The recipe mislead me in forming the candy cane shapes so the first batch came out shaped like boomerangs (or something more foul if you wanna go there). The cookies have white chocolate and crushed up candy canes on top. Tanner was in charge of unwrapping the candy and smashing it up with a crab mallet.

These Stop n' Go Cookie Pops turned out really cute and were a big hit with the kids over the holiday. Elias and Tanner both took their job very seriously of sorting out a huge bag of M&M's into the different colors we needed. They also took great care in placing all the candies on the cookies when they came out of the oven. I got this recipe from a Betty Crocker Cookie Cookbook that was sent to the WWoB offices as a promo. Well played, Betty!

Finally, we took some of the packaged sugar cookie dough and made cut-outs with a bag of cartoon cookie cutters that I didn't know we had. There were a lot of treasures buried in the cupboard back with the rolling pin. We also made some of our own shapes like letters, Pac-Man and the Pigeon. They turned out really cool but didn't last long enough to get a picture.

The cooking supplies are all put away now and we'll dig them out again a couple days before Christmas 2011.

Happy New Year, ya'll!