Recipe: Nanay's Blueberry Cobbler

Ingredients

• 3 cups fresh blueberries
• 1/3 cup orange juice
• 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 cup  butter, softened
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C)
2. In an 8-inch square baking dish, mix blueberries and orange juice. Set aside.
3. In a small bowl, thoroughly mix flour, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg. Set aside.
4. In a medium bowl, cream  butter and 1/2 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Gradually add flour mixture, stirring just until ingredients are combined. Drop batter by rounded tablespoons over blueberry mixture. Try to cover as much of filling as possible.
5. Bake in preheated oven for 35 to 40 minutes, until topping is golden brown and filling is bubbling.
6. Best served with vanilla ice cream. Breyer's Vanilla Ice Cream is our family's favorite. I recently found out that Breyer's has a No Sugar Added version.

Recipe: Nanay's Apple Crisp

Ingredients

• 10 cups apples, peeled, cored and sliced. We used gala apples but I think any apples will work
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 cup quick cooking oats or Quaker Old Fashioned Oats. 
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup melted butter

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C)
2. Place the sliced apples in a 9x13 inch pan. Mix the white sugar, 1 tablespoon flour and ground cinnamon together, and sprinkle over apples. Pour water evenly over all.
3. Combine oats, 1 cup flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda and melted butter together. 
4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for about 40 to 45 minutes.
5. Best served with vanilla ice cream. 

Recipe: Not-So-Sinful Brownies

On March 19, 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom of California released an Executive Order ordering all individuals living in the State of California to stay home or at their place of residence except as needed to maintain continuity of operations of the federal critical infrastructure sectors, as outlined at https://www.cisa.gov/identifying-critical-infrastructure-during-covid-19. 

Since then, our family has never gone out to eat at restaurants, not even ordering to go. I am comfortable with cooking meals from scratch but baking has never been my expertise. I make a few muffins. It's the easiest thing to make, I think. 

My youngest daughter's birthday was coming up and in our paranoia, we didn't want to order cake. So, I didn't have a choice but to try to bake the cake myself. I thought maybe I should experiment on making brownies first before I level-up to baking cakes. The cake didn't turn out the way I like it but the brownies did. 

I searched online for brownie recipes. With my first try, I followed everything to the letter. It was way too sweet for me. I've been trying to lose weight too but at the same time, I love desserts. It's hard but I have to indulge from time to time. With my second try, I experimented on the ingredients to make the brownies a little less 'evil' 😏  It was a success! You know how I knew? My sweet expert husband approved of it and my 3 kids loved it! Kids are always the best critics when it comes to dessert. 

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter
• 3/4 cup white sugar (the original recipe asked for 1 cup)
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder. I used Hershey's.
• 1/2 cup oatmeal flour (the original recipe used all purpose flour)
• to make oatmeal flour: Place the oats into the bowl of your food processor. Pulse the oats until they are ground into a powder-like consistency. I used Quaker's® Old Fashioned Oats.
• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Directions

✪ Step 1

Pre-heat oven to 370⁰F (175⁰C). Grease and flour an 8-inch square pan.

✪ Step 2
In a large saucepan, metl 1/2 cup butter. Remove from heat and stir in sugar, eggs, and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Beat in 1/3 cup cocoa,1/2 cup oat flour and baking powder. Spread batter into prepared 8-inch square pan.
Optional: sprinkle dark chocolate morsels on top.

✪ Step 3

Bake in preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Do not overcook.

In line with making this not so sinful, I chose not to make the frosting.

Book Review: The Super Life of Ben Braver

Title: The Super Life of Ben Braver
Author: Marcus Emerson
ATOS BL: 4.1
Interest Level: Middle Grade, Grades 4 to 8

This is my son's new favorite.

I like how it's written. If you put yourself in the shoes of an 11-year-old (as is the lead character), the settings, the habits, the choice of words and sentence structure is relatable.

It can be a bit dark...

Quote 1:
"Dear Diary,
Today I died.
Sincerely,
Ben "

...but it's also very funny...

Quote 2: "BTW, peanut butter cups are my fave. I love them, but... would I marry one? Probably not, but only because my second love, the PB&J sammie, would get jelly. Get it? Jelly?"

Call me shallow but I laughed out loud on that one 🤣

...with lessons to be learned...

Quote 3: "Being a superhero is more than having powers -- it's about the struggles and the choices heroes have to make. It's about deciding to do the right thing even when the right thing is the hardest thing to do."

Recipe: Cinnamon Apple Muffins with Oats

It's back to school. I try to be creative about the snacks that my kids take to school. Some days they have fresh fruits for snacks, some days, I bake them muffins or cookies. I try to make the pastries as healthy as it can be. I can only do so much, otherwise, it would no longer taste good.

This week, I made Cinnamon Apple Muffins. The original recipe  calls for 2 cups of all purpose-flour. To add more fiber to the muffin, I replaced the 1 cup (out of the 2 cups) of flour with 1 cup of Quaker's Old Fashioned Oats.

Ingredients

• 1 cup all-purpose flour 
• 1 cup of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats
• 1½ teaspoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt (optional. I don't normally add salt to anything that I bake)
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 cups diced apples
• ½ cup (1 stick ) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• ½ cup milk

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375º F. 
2. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Set aside.
3. Cream together butter and sugar until lightened in color, about 3 minutes. Add an egg, one at a time, taking care to fully incorporate before adding the other. Mix in vanilla. I used an electric mixer for this.
4. Gently fold in flour mixture, alternating with milk. Stir until just combined. Fold in diced apples and scoop mixture into prepared muffin tins, filling about 2/3 to 3/4 full. I was able to make 12 muffins. 
5. Bake until a toothpick or skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean, about 30 minutes.

Since this is a healthy alternative, I didn't make the sugary toppings. Plus, the muffins are already sweet. However, if you do like to add toppings, check this recipe out: https://addapinch.com/cinnamon-apple-muffins-recipe/

Recipe: Banana-Chocolate Muffins

I read online that the secret to moist banana muffins was mayonnaise. Yep, mayonnaise! Initially, I feared that the muffins would taste like mayo but it turned out to be really good and the kids loved them.

Kids are the best critics when it comes to dessert. So when they approved of my chocolate-banana muffins, I know, I did well 😅

This recipe is actually a modified version of what I saw online. The original recipe does not have chocolate in it and it called for 1/2 cup of white sugar and 1/2 cup of brown sugar. I didn't want too much sugar so I replaced it with 1 cup of Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate instead - that's approximately 98g less sugar compared to the original recipe. I also added cinnamon and nutmeg for better flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 large egg
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 3 ripe bananas (Don't mash the bananas separately. Just throw them in with the egg and mayonnaise and mash them with the electric mixer.)
• 1 cup Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt (optional. I don't normally add salt to anything that I bake)
• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place 12 paper muffin cups in the muffin pans. The bottom diameter of each muffin mold in my pan is approximately 2 inches. 
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat together the egg and mayonnaise. Add the ripe bananas and beat until smooth. You can do this by hand or preferably, with a handheld electric mixer.
3. In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, Swiss Miss.
4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients into the well. Mix the dry and wet ingredients slowly and carefully. Do not stir. Stop mixing just when the dry ingredients are moist. Over mixing may produce tough muffins and bake unevenly.
5. Divide the batter between muffin cups (it should be about 2/3 of the way full) and bake for about 25 minutes or until muffins are set. Let cool slightly. 

The Silent Patient - Book Review

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is, by far, the best mystery/thriller book I have ever read (so far that my sometimes-forgetful-38-year-old-brain can remember 😅 )

I didn't see the hype prior to reading this book so my review is not influenced by the media hype. This book was totally new to me when I walked inside Barnes and Noble. I was in there to browse for whatever new books they have and I just happened to see this book in one of their shelves marked Mystery/Thriller. I read the synopsis and I thought it was interesting. So I grabbed it ☺

Alicia is an artist who was convicted for the murder of her own husband. Because she had not, literally, spoken nor uttered a single word since after the murder, authorities deemed her mentally ill. So they put her in a mental facility instead of putting her in prison with other murderers. She was being treated by her psychotherapist, Dr. Theo Faber. The story rolled from there. I don't want to give out anymore details but to give an idea of what it's about, look up ALCESTIS.

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