Strawberry, er, I mean Blueberry Muffins

Remember the wonderful Strawberry muffins Mom and I made? We got the recipe from Kathy at The Noble Pig's website and here is her original recipe. Here's my original post about it.



Anyway, I've been wanting to try the muffins with blueberries and I finally got around to it the other day. They turned out great!


So, go make you some muffins!

Strawbery Soup

Can you name the theme that my last few posts have had? And just to make it more difficult, this recipe doesn't involve butter! That's a first!



I'll give you a minute to think it over. In the meantime, let me refresh your memory. This is the third post resulting from the marathon baking/cooking weekend that I had with my mom.



On Father's Day, we took a lunch over to my Grandfather's retirement home and we all had lunch together. One piece of our menu included Strawberry Soup. I got this recipe from Allrecipes and the original recipe is here.



INGREDIENTS

2 pints strawberries
2 cups plain yogurt
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup water
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom



Put everything into a blender and whirl away. Chill before serving.



Mom, Bailey and I loved this dish. We let Bailey and her friend Tiffany sample a bit of it on Saturday and they immediately declared their love. Tiffany went a bit further and proposed marriage to this soup. It's that good.



The guys, especially Rominal, didn't quite get the whole idea of a fruit soup. Rominal said that it tasted like melted strawberry ice cream.



Yeah, and the problem would be?



After this comment from Rominal, Mom and I decided that we loved this soup no matter what he said and that our problem might just be that we needed a taster with more sophisticated tastes.



Anyway - I highly recommend this soup.

Fresh Strawberry Bars

So, did you happen to see the Better Homes and Gardens May, 2009 cover? Did it make your mouth water too? Oh, you missed it? Well, it was a picture of Fresh Strawberry Bars. They looked so wonderful that I knew Mom and I had to make them during our weekend of marathon baking.



Here's the recipe:

3/4 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup peanut butter
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup strawberry jam
4 cups small whole strawberries, halved or quartered

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Line 13x9x2-inch baking pan with foil, extending foil beyond the edges. Set aside. I decided to leave our bars in the 9x13 pan, so I did not line the pan with foil, I just left the bars inside the pan. I did butter the pan real well though.
2. In large mixing bowl beat butter and peanut butter on medium to high for 30 seconds. Beat in sugars, baking powder, and salt until combined. Add eggs and vanilla; beat until combined. Beat in as much flour as you can with mixer. Stir in remaining flour.
3. Spread dough in prepared pan. Bake 25 minutes or until top is lightly browned and toothpick inserted near center comes out clean.
4. Cool completely on rack. Remove from pan by lifting foil. (again, I just left it in the pan) Spread jam and top with berries. Cut into bars. Serve at once or refrigerate up to 6 hours. Makes 24 bars
Make Ahead: Wrap the peanut butter base in foil; store at room temperature up to 24 hours. Before serving, top with jam and berries. Or freeze the peanut butter base in a freezer container up to 3 months.



We had mixed reviews for this dessert. Bailey and I loved it, while Mom and Rominal weren't that thrilled with it. Rominal isn't a good judge though, because he really doesn't like sweets that much (how I ended up with someone who doesn't like sweets is beyond me). To make matters worse, he doesn't like peanut butter that much either. Mom agreed with me in that we both thought that it was a visually pretty dessert and would be good to take to a pot-luck function.



Here's the cooked base.



Oh goodness, how did that extra butter get in there? Gosh - it was everywhere Saturday!



And here's a picture of the finished product. The magazine would have you take this out of the pan, which did look much better, but that would have meant I would have had to find a serving plate and dirty another dish. It just wasn't going to happen. Even using my dishes sparingly, we still had to run the dishwasher 4 times on Saturday because of all of the cooking and baking we were doing. I think that might be a new record for me.




Back to the Fresh Strawberry bars -



I would recommend this recipe, and I know Bailey would as well. In fact, she and I just finished up another slice each. Yummy!!

Strawberry Muffins from the NoblePig

My mom and I love to cook. Whenever we find a recipe that we'd like to try, we set it aside and hopefully someday get around to actually making it. We decided that we needed an entire weekend to make all (or just 13) of the recipes that we had been holding onto.

This is that weekend. So, expect some posts of our baking highlights over the next few days.

We started our morning with this:



What? What's your point? (All of this butter didn't go into the muffins, so don't freak out!)

Ever since I saw the Strawberry Yogurt Muffins recipe that Cathy from The Noble Pig posted about I knew we had to try them.

Her recipe is here. We followed her recipe exactly except that our store didn't have coarse sugar, even though our store is supposed to be the biggest in Texas. So, instead we bought and used Sugar in the Raw. I don't think it was the same, but it turned out ok.

Here are the muffins before they went into the oven.




And here they are afterwards. We can't stress enough how good these muffins are. You simply must stop whatever you are doing and go make them now.




The muffin part is so light and airy. I think they would be good with blueberries as well.



So far we have made 10 of our 13 planned recipes, and this is one of our favorites.