Peeps Crispy Treats

Yeah, Peeps, you know the marshmallow and sanding sugar shaped candies that come out at Easter time? My kids got peeped out this Easter, they must have received DOZENS of the things, so I decided to use them up before they all went stale. (Peeps get stale, true facts!)

I took some peeps and melted them in 3 TB of butter over medium heat on the stove, then added 6 cups of crispy rice cereal. I stirred them up and then pressed the molten hot peep-cereal mixture into a buttered 9 x 13 baking dish. Then, I decorated the tops with multi-colored sprinkles, just because, well you know MOAR SPRINKLES! It's a thing.

Enjoy!

Red Velvet Cheesecake

Tonight the fam and I were invited over to a friend's house for dinner. Fish Friday at an actual fisherman's house? Oh heck yeah! Our gracious host and hostess made the best fried mutton snapper. For those of you who do not like fish I have to recommend the mutton snapper as a very unfishy fish with firm white flesh. Tastes great, cooks easily and fish is after all brain food.

No sooner had the adults sat down to eat than we heard a dreadful wailing. Turns out that our darling girl had accidentally slammed her finger in the bedroom door of her friend. Our very nice hosts told us to go take the girl to the hospital. Not only did they keep our younger daughter for us while we went, when we got back they had kept our plates warm and covered. Then we were all able to relax with my contribution to the dinner. I made my very first sweet cheesecake. Once I made a savory crab cheesecake with a wild mushroom and cream reduction, but my husband has made a tradition of making me a new kind of cheesecake every year on Valentine's day. This year was scheduled to be the decadent and Valentine's day appropriate Red Velvet Cheesecake, but time and circumstances precluded that. So I took it upon myself to make it today. You can get the recipe here. It was a very good recipe, but I didn't use sour cream in it, I had some Greek yogurt and used that instead. I would tweak it slightly too by making a sweetened sour cream top instead of the thicker cream cheese and sugar top they used.

Red velvet is such a luxe tasting cake or cheesecake you'll hardly believe you are adding 2 bottles of food coloring to it! It just seems to odd to color a chocolate cake that way, but the result is undeniably striking. A true red velvet is a chocolate flavored dessert that also contains buttermilk which gives it a slight tang and keeps it from being too sweet. This recipe called for buttermilk as well as a teaspoon of white vinegar! The taste of that vinegar is not present in the finished product, but my research leads me to believe that the additional acidity may be to keep the color bright, since red is an anthocyanin? I am thinking of the reason we add a slug of white vinegar to red cabbage to keep it from turning grey when cooked. Anyhow, this was a terrific dessert and I am glad I tried it!

Happy Weekend everyone!

Quick hit -- Apple Brown Betty

I made the title of this post a link to Cooks.com where I found a recipe for a pressure cooker Apple Brown Betty. It reduces the cooking time from 45 minutes down to 15 minutes! Every day I love my pressure cooker more, I swear.

This recipe required butter and graham cracker crumbs, if one were to make this vegan you could use margarine and some sort of egg-less bread crumb. I think that next time I will sub out some of the graham cracker crumbs for old fashioned oatmeal. Also I would use more cinnamon than the recipe calls for and I would take the 1 cup of crumbs and butter and parcel it out into 1/3 C measurements, since you need three layers of crumbs all together.

We served the Apple Brown Betty warm in bowls topped with a wee bit of whipped cream. YUM! Plus a good dose of apples and raisins are always welcome. The kids ate it up and it made a nice amount for a family of 4, not too much at all!