Little Helpers!

This post is going to be fun.

It will be fun, you see, because it was a fun baking experience – because I got to bake with three precious little girls.

Now you see, if you knew me in my kitchen (ask my hubby for verification!), you would never think that I would be able to handle this.  When I bake, I’m flying.  Well actually, when I live (which is well, always) I fly.  For some reason, it’s a go, goooo, GO for me all the time.  I can be seen literally running through the house at times if nobody is around, and perhaps at times when people are present.  SO – baking with others is normally a task for me.  I just don’t have time!  Well, I just don’t take the time…  But this day, I did.  And I’m so glad for it.  It was a great time with these three, and they even said that they had fun!  I was super happy about that.

This recipe is super easy.  It was one that my grandmother would set me to making, because it has few ingredients and it’s pretty hard to mess up (which I HAVE done, but they taste good no matter what anyhow).  For these, I always use a wooden spoon.  Also because of Nannie.  She liked using wooden spoons for quite a few things, and it stuck.  These squares are so easy to stir by hand that it’s really and truly a waste of time to get a mixer out and messed up.

Chocolate Chip Squares

2 eggs

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

2/3 cup oil

1 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350.

Stir together eggs, brown sugar, oil, and vanilla.  Add baking powder, salt and flour.

Stir until combined.

Add chocolate chips.

Pour into a greased 9×9 pan.  Bake for 25-30 minutes.

Lick dough off of spoon.

They’re really nice and gooey…. and chocolaty too.

Enjoy.

We also made homemade old-fashioned strawberry ice cream later on that day.  With a crank outside in the snow.  It’s really quite cool.  It takes awhile, but it’s most definitely worth it.  (But it’s not low-calorie by ANY mean!  Haha.)

It.

Is.

SO.

GOOD!

So, that was my really great day with these three great little ladies.  Hope you enjoy the squares.

Do you take your time to bake?   Or do you fly, like I seem to?

Rolling in the Dough

Rolling in cinnamon roll dough that is!  (The biscuit type.)

As much as I wish that it was the money-type-dough….  It’s not.  But this is the next best kind!  But!  Before we get to that…  Baking.  Who likes to do this?  Is there anyone else out there that just loves to bake?  Because I could bake sun-up to sun down if I had the people to bake for and the time to do so…  Just wanted to let you know about that.

Guess what!  Our little boy crawled for the first time yesterday!  It was a very exciting, but bittersweet moment.  Exciting because he’s crawling and growing up.  Bittersweet because he’s growing up SO fast.  I cannot believe how big he’s getting and how much he’s doing.  Have I mentioned that he claps and tries to sing along in church?  (Or that he’s a complete goof ball?)

Don’t you love the hairdo and expression?  🙂  Priceless.

Speaking of church, our church played the movie Courageous over the weekend.  It was a great movie.  I highly recommend it.  It is focusing on what God says of fathers in the Bible.  But it has great advice in it for mothers as well.  We are to bring up our children in a godly way, honouring Him through it all.  It’s a really hard task.  But completely achievable with the help of prayer and the Holy Spirit.  Joshua 25:15 – “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

On to these FAMOUS Cinnamon Rolls.  They are sooo good.  I’ve mentioned my grandmother in a few of my previous posts.  She was a real influence on my baking.  I have been baking as long as I’ve been standing (and probably before).  This recipe is one that she would let me help with right from the get-go.  It was our recipe (well, it’s hers, but it was our special time spent together eating the dough making them).  😉  We are a family that tends not to measure…  I know, I know…  Tsk tsk.  BUT – things just taste better when they aren’t perfect.  (Remember my gripe about perfectly round cookies?)  I love being able to judge how much of something I need to dump in without a measuring cup.  Don’t get me wrong, I still do measure a lot of things (especially for certain recipes when it is critical that certain amounts are exact), but I dump a lot of ingredients in the bowl willy-nillly.  Anyway, my ramble does have a point – we tend not to measure… i.e. – this recipe does not really exist.  I had to make my grandmother sit down and really think about what she puts in her cinnamon rolls, so I could write it down to have and to share.  So, here goes!

Nanny’s Cinnamon Rolls

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup margarine, softened

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla

Salt

2 1/2 – 3 cups flour

3 1/2 tsp baking powder

Stir together the margarine, eggs, milk, vanilla, and salt.  Once it is combined, add two cups of flour and the baking powder, stir. Add 1/2 cup flour, stir.  If the dough is too sticky to handle, add the rest of the flour.  If it seems okay, then don’t add any more.  Simple as that.

Now, this is one of those recipes that you just have to use a wooden spoon.  Well, I do at least.  My grandmother didn’t introduce me to a mixer until I was 10 or 11, so we used a wooden spoon to make most of the baked goods we made together.  And there are still a few recipes that I just have to use a wooden spoon to mix.  It doesn’t mix as thoroughly as our KitchenAid, but it gives these rolls a ‘homemade’ feel, and I get to feel quite nostalgic.

After you’re done mixing, slap it on a floured surface and roll into a rectangle (the dough should be about 1/2 inch thick, or whatever you prefer really).  Next – spread with margarine.  The more, the better.  Yum.

Then, sprinkle (very generously) brown sugar over the butter.  Don’t forget to spread it out and lick your fingers (and to wash your hands afterwards…).  Then sprinkle cinnamon over the sugar, to your own taste.  If you like raisins, you can throw some of those on top – SO good.  After all that, you can roll these puppies up.  From the long end.  They should look somewhat like this when they’re rolled:

I cut them into 12 rolls normally, but you can make them thicker/thinner if you want to.  Then put them on a greased cookie sheet, or in a greased 8X8 pan (depending on how you want them to turn out).

Oh!  Remember to cut the ends off, just a little slice off of either end to make them look better (and so that you have some extra dough to sample).  Nanny would save the ends for us every time she made them.  (And if I got through the door first, I’d quickly scarf down both ends so I didn’t have to share with my brother… Very sisterly of me eh?)

Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes, or until dough is set and slightly brown.

They looked so good.  I just couldn’t stop taking pictures of them.  Last one, I promise.  Best one too.

Wow.  One of my most favourite foods (I think I have a lot of those….)

And just a side note – Congratulations to my best friend Ivy, who just got engaged this weekend!

What is your favourite baked good?  Have any family traditions around baking?