In the Kitchen with Kate: Healthy Wendy’s Copycat Frosty

  
Really? That seems deceptively simple. But I had all of the ingredients on hand… And I had just finished 30 minutes on the stationary bike… So yes please!! 

  
I gathered my ingredients. 

And I blended. 

And blended. 

And shook the cup and blended some more. 

The mixture was really thick so I added another 1/4 cup+ of Almond milk. 

(The “+” is because I had just over a 1/4 cup left and went a head and finished off the carton! 😂😂😂) 

I blended some more. 

Taste test time! 

Ok, still really think and oh my goodness was that a chocolate overload! 

And not in a good way! 

And I’m out of almond milk, so I add some water. And then a scoop of vanilla protein powder. My thinking was that the vanilla would help off-set the bitter chocolate (cause 1/3 a banana wasn’t near enough sweetener!!) and to help keep the shake thicker after I added water… 

  
It worked!! So while the recipe wasn’t all that spot-on for me, with a few modifications I made it work! By the time I modified it, the caloric count was 234, which isn’t bad considering I had a scoop of protein in there! It was simple enough I’ll be making this me again! 

Oh, and well, I wouldn’t ever mistake it for a Wendy’s Frosty, it was really tasty, and 160 calories less (it would have been 260 calories less, but again, protein powder!!) 

In the Kitchen with Kate: Homemade Donuts

So, I know there are 1,000 ways to spell donuts.  I am lazy efficient, so I go for the shortest, yet still socially acceptable, version there is!

Now that we have that out of the way let’s continue.

A few days ago I told you that I bought a bundt pan.  What I didn’t tell you was that just hours after making that purchase in the store, I was on-line and accidentally bought a donut pan.

It arrived today! Let the confetti and streamers fly!

I have patience the size of a gnat, so naturally I hit up Pinterest and searched for a homemade donut, baked not fried, from scratch and E A S Y.

I found a recipe that, after a quick pantry check, I could make.

Thanks to Moms Need to Know, I was off and running!

I mixed the ingredients and put them in a zippered bag, cut off the tip and that made getting the dough into the pan so much easier.

Popped it in the oven and 8 minutes later, those suckers were ready!

Now, the blogger I used for inspiration had a glaze and a chocolate and, well,

But, have you seen this? I think if you look up “awesome sauce” this is what you’ll find. It’s not too sweet and was a perfect compliment to the donuts.

So, one minute and 30 seconds later, the chocolate was melted!  I took the donuts that were cool enough to touch and dipped them in the chocolate (and FYI, that container is the perfect size to dip the tops of the donuts, I didn’t even have to dirty up a bowl!)

BAM!

And then sprinkles, cause:

In the Kitchen with Kate: 5 Ingredient Paleo Chocolate Treats

I needed a treat the other night… and I don’t keep treats on hand, because treats on hand last about as long as it takes to type this sentence and then they are gone!

As such, I’m always on the lookout for some yummy treats that are fast and easy to make, and ones that don’t make 3 dozen at a time!  Because see above!

I found Primal Fudge by Practical Paleo on Pinterest and had to prepare it.

Okay, I’m done with the alliteration.  I just couldn’t resist once I got started!

How cute are those little guys? And while I am always looking for an excuse to use my muffin tins – she had me at 5 ingredients!

1/2 cup coconut oil
1/2 cup high quality cocoa powder
1/2 cup smooth almond butter
1/4 cup raw honey or maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

I was a little more flexible in my ingredient selection…

I’m currently obsessed with my PB2, and almond butter, peanut butter, same diff.  I’ll just mix up half a cup of my PB2 and it’s half the calories! I ended up mixing 1/2 cup dry and that shrunk as I was re-hydrating it, so I added in another 2 tablespoons.  This may or may not be important later on!

Once the peanut butter was mixed up, it was time to add the melted coconut oil.

Like how I did the whole Pioneer Woman snap-a-picture-while-you-are-pouring thing?  I was proud of myself!

Then I added in the rest of the ingredients and got to mixing.

It looks odd… but it’s starting to incorporate.  Oh, and the original blogger did mention that you could use either a blender or food processor.  I’m starting to wonder about now if my food processor would have been the better option.

Once everything is mixed, you are supposed to “pour” it into the muffin tins.  POUR.  Does that look like it will pour?

No.  No it doesn’t.

So, let’s improvise and add in a touch more honey and a splash of vanilla to moisten it up and make it pour-able.

Then, just for fun, splash some vanilla on your tablet cover.  At least it’ll smell good for a bit.  Sadly, even after adding more liquids, the mixture wasn’t able to be poured.

So I took my spoon and dropped and mushed the chocolate mixture into my silicone mini muffin pan and then popped those suckers in the freezer and set my timer for 15 minutes! Of course, once in the freezer, I saw a container of frozen blueberries…

And I grabbed a handful and popped the frozen blueberries on half of my chocolates.  And then reset my timer.

…..

15 minutes later

….

Mine look nothing like the original! They are pretty darn ugly, and you can see those white lines – where some coconut oil didn’t fully incorporate – so it’s a #PinterestFail, but you know what? They are pretty darn yummy! And at about 70 calories each, heck yeah I’m eating them!

In The Kitchen With Kate: 3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cookies

After my last peanut butter cookie fail, I was ready to redeem myself!

Ortsofsorts reminded me of the three ingredient peanut butter cookies – and I remember having made them before and they turned out great – and last night I was craving a treat – so it was on in my kitchen!

First, I don’t remember the recipe I used last time, so I hit up my Pinterest and found several that all had the same three ingredients:

1 cup peanut butter

1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1 egg

(Bake at 350 for 8 min – if you were wondering!)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting.  We only have crunchy peanut butter at the house.

Okay, I figure that modification won’t be an issue, I do it all of the time.

But, I was starving.  I had supper going on the stove; a wonderful quinoa mexican casserole – but it just looked too healthy.

So out came the chocolate chips.

Because chocolate.

Not bad, I used my scoop to get uniform sizes, but as I started to hatch mark the first row, I could see the flaw in my plan.

Do you see the flaw, yet? All of those wonderful nuts and chocolate chips have prevented the cookies from holding together like you normally see in cookies.  Because it is gluten free, there is no flour to bind things together! And on the cookies where a lot of chocolate chips were prevalent, when I went to hatch them, they fell apart.

But, you know me – I’m making these suckers anyway! You never know, the heat of the stove may make the ingredients magically bond to each other!

Or not…

Yup, that happened.  My gluten free three ingredient turned four or five ingredient peanut butter cookies with chocolate chips did not magically fix themselves in the oven!

Now, for those that only had a couple of chip and were in one piece with they went in the oven, they came out great! The ones that had fallen apart, well, they stayed apart; however, they also seemed to disperse the oil.  See the glistening around a few of the cookies? I think that was the peanut oil.  And, these things were insanely oily, not in a tasted gross way, but in a use 2 napkins per cookie way – and it really did just taste like peanut oil, so I have a feeling that this recipe shouldn’t be modified with crunchy peanut butter!

And well, you probably shouldn’t throw chocolate chips in there, either.

Naturally, we ate them all. It was a dessert before AND after dinner kinda night!

In The Kitchen with Kate: Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

I recently posted about my Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Blender Muffins and how they were inspired by my friend Erica making a batch of flourless cookies.

Well, Kendall asked how to make flourless cookies – and I had to admit, I had no idea! I stopped looking for a recipe for those when I found the muffin recipe!

But, Nancy at Spirit Lights the Way came to the rescue – and because Kendall asked:

Chickpea Chocolate Chip Cookies were made! 

You can follow the link straight to Nancy’s site for the full recipe; and I swear, if any of you ever tell Mr. T these were made with chickpeas I will disown you; however, let’s dive right in!

Start by gathering your ingredients, this recipe calls for raw peanuts.  Like that’s happening at my house, I subbed in a jar of already mushed up raw peanuts, frequently known as “peanut butter”.

Also good to note that while this recipe calls for a food processor, you had such success with your Magic Bullet, that hey – why not try it again?

Then discover that no matter how much liquid you add, those chickpeas aren’t going to become the desired consistency.

Oh that’s right, you used the blender attachment last time!  Pull that sucker out!

Transfer all of the ingredients.

Take the time to discover that the blender isn’t going to work.

Now it’s time to pull out the big guns!

Transfer all to the mini food processor in your kitchen because at this point, you just want those darn chickpeas pulverized!!

I’d like to point out, I have a brand new food processor sitting in my garage.  I got it for Christmas, but since I hadn’t had a need for it, and hadn’t made space for it in my kitchen, it’s still safe and sound in my garage.  Most normal people would have pulled that sucker out to start with.  You should know by now, I’m not like most people!

Once you’ve pulverized the chick peas in about three batches, then it’s time to mix in the rest of the ingredients. I just had to take a picture, I used “all natural” chocolate chips, because somehow in my mind, that made them better.

The reality, those are generic chips I pulled from my freezer!

But, now that you’ve effectively wasted more time than it would have taken to just go get the darn food processor out of the garage, it’s time to roll little balls of dough and flatten them out with a fork!

8-12 minutes later – you have Flourless Chickpea Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies!

And, like Nancy admits in her post – these aren’t Tollhouse, but they are really good!  I’ll be making them again.

As soon as I’ve opened my food processor!    

P.S. I should probably also point out that because I was sharing with Mr. T,I did use vanilla instead of rum.

P.P.S. Okay, I totally missed the fact that Nancy H’s post linked back to Nancy T’s post When Chickpeas and Chocolate Chips Collide!  So, go check out NancyTex’s post! She actually used natural peanut butter, not the oily gross store bought one I did 🙂

P.P.P.S. I love that the three of us have all made the same recipe, and we all made it a bit different – that to me is what our trip around the sun is all about!!

Kate in the Kitchen: Bake Sale Crispie Treats

You all know (or most of you do) that I am a cheer mom.  The one thing in this world I never expected to be, I am.

Do you see Mr. T? Hint – he’s the only one without a bow in his hair.

On top of that, I not only signed up for the Booster Club, but I became a member of the Executive Council.

Honestly, I had no idea what a Booster Club really did – which is probably a good thing – because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have done all I did had I known in advance!

I’m sure the rest of the world knows this, but a Booster Club supports the “club” (Cheerleaders, baseball players, dancers, football team, etc.).  Primarily, they support with fund raising efforts.  So far this year we’ve had a pancake breakfast and that raised the money to buy our cheerleaders a vinyl banner for the football team to run through.  We also had a car wash and that paid for a new mat for the cheerleaders to use and for a full page in the football program advertising/promoting our cheerleaders.

That’s the background.  We are doing good things for the girls and Mr. T, that’s what it boils down to.

This Monday was the Community Pep Rally, an annual event that the school hosts where they invite the community to come down and meet the teams and coaches.  Apparently this is an ideal time for the Booster Clubs to do some fundraising.  We were all lined up at the front of the stadium hocking our wares.  T-shirts, little plastic bull horns, hats, and in our case – baked goods!

Naturally, upon finding out about this, I got busy searching Pinterest for wonderful ideas. What was I going to make? It had to be easy and it had to be awesome! I was going to blow those other parents away!

Not that I’m competitive or anything!

I decided on chocolate dipped rice cereal treats.  I won’t call them Rice Krispie treats, cause, well, I bought generic!

Oh – and I learned that you can now make these things in the microwave!! Holy cow it was awesome! No more standing over the stove and stirring constantly so that the butter doesn’t burn while you are trying to melt the marshmallows!! It was like the clouds parted and sunbeams were shining down on me!

I got the treats made with minimal fuss and mom helped me out by cutting them nice and neatly:

 

Then we went and added popcicle sticks, because in my mind, these were going to be on display – the highlight of the bake sale table!

Then I took some chocolate bark and almond bark and got it melted (in the microwave again!) and then gathered the other supplies – plenty of sprinkles!  The school colors are purple and gold and mom just happened to have some purple and gold sugar crystals, so I used that and the rainbow sprinkles I bought and had fun!

 

Then the unthinkable happened (and I just realized how blurry the picture above is – sorry about that!)

I’m not sure what I did wrong, or if a million Pinterest pictures are wrong – but my treats fell off of the sticks!

I just went ahead and took them all off the sticks.  My dreams were dashed – but all hope was not lost, I still knew that I was going to rock that bake sale!

Beautiful, chocolate and sprinkled covered rice cereal treats.  All wrapped up nice and neat in their own individual bag, ready to captivate the people that walked by our booth.

I showed up, I helped set up the booth, and then I pulled out my treats and ooohhh’d and aaahhh’d over how pretty they were.

And about 5 minutes later I remember that I lived in Texas.

And it’s 100 dg. in the shade.

And chocolate melts in 100 dg. temperatures.

There’s always next year!

The Downfall of Halloween Candy in Texas

I know I have inundated you with Halloween lately; however, I’ve noticed something that I must share.

First off, chocolate is chocolate and I’m not complaining; but I gotta tell you this!

Secondly, most of you know that I live in Texas. Texas is hot, that’s no secret.

Now, let’s add up these two facts. Halloween candy/chocolate is sitting on our store shelves which means it was shipped in weeks ago. (Why is it that when goods are transported on a ship it is called cargo and when it goes via a truck it is called a shipment?) Anyway… the chocolate was shipped to us, in massive box trucks, that aren’t air conditioned.

So, when the rest of you open a Reese’s peanut butter pumpkin, it looks like a pumpkin. When you open a Hershey’s chocolate tombstone, it has detail, it has writing that you can make out.

Here is what I get when I open a chocolate:

Happy Anti-Valentine’s Day!

First off, let me tell you that being a grown up sucks.  I’m reminded of that every year on Valentine’s Day.  You know how I finally knew I was a grown up? I didn’t get a chocolate heart from my parents.  That was a bad year.  Fortunately, my parents decided the same year to stop giving my sister and I our annual treat – so at least I got four more years than she did! hehehehe. I’m so awful!!

I did wake Mr. T up this morning and give him a card and his heart full of chocolates.  Due to the fact that he had wrestling practice this morning and had to be at school at 6:45, I have no idea if he got to have a piece before we left – I’m sure he did though! I worked for a couple of hours and then got ready for lunch with Bert.

Me and Bert at Christmastime

Bert is my friend, and in the same industry.  He calls on me professionally, so I see him every month or two, but as friends, we text almost every day. Last year Bert and I decided to have lunch, on Valentine’s Day.  It’s a time where we get together and eat and talk and laugh, and be very, very cynical!  It’s what we do best!  Okay, he’s better at it than I am, but, it’s all good.  I’ll let him be cynical, cause he pays for my lunch! In that spirit, we decided to call it our Anti-Valentine’s Day Date.  Don’t ask me why.  It’s just how we roll!

Today was our second annual Anti-Valentine’s Day date, and it was by far our best one yet!  We met at the same Mexican food restaurant, and boy did we pig out!  It was so good, so very good.  We caught each other up on our lives.  You’d think that since we text every day, we’d know everything there was; however, there are some things that can only be shared face-to-face.  He had to tell me about a Stage 5 Clinger that he’s somehow picked up.  Okay, I know how he picked the clinger up, he didn’t listen to me.  I was very clear; however, he was very drunk!  This happened at one of the few events that he attended without me.  We’ll be in Houston in June, and I’ve promised to stick by his side.  He thinks it’s to protect him, but we all know that it’s for the free drinks.  🙂  I kid, I love Bert, he’s a hoot.  While, I’d like to feel sorry for him and the Stage 5 Clinger, I can’t.

Once I got all of my “I told you so’s!!” out of the way we got down to business.  It was good to sit and catch up.  Expand on everything that we’d only touched about in our daily texts.  We talk about mutual friends, of which there are many, catch each other up on industry gossip, discuss our kids and generally just enjoy each others company.  It’s one of my favorite days of the year.  Right up there with my annual margarita Christmas lunch with TD.  Oh, and Bert got me the biggest heart full of chocolates I’m sure the store had AND a box of turtles.  Oh emm gee.  A girl can’t be any luckier than to have friends like mine!

It’s okay to be jealous!

One the way home, I called the local take’n bake pizza joint and put my name on a heart shaped pizza.  The past four years, this has been dinner for me and T.  He always loved that we got pizza on a school night, and the fact that it was heart shaped, well, he tolerated it because I get such a kick out of it.  I also stopped by 7-11 for a pint of vanilla ice cream.  I have a brownie mix just calling my name – and it’s Valentines Day, a regular brownie just won’t cut it, I think we need a brownie fudge sundae!

Then, I dropped the chocolates, pizza and ice cream at home and turned around and left again.  I have worked for a month on Bert’s anti-valentine gift.  I put some serious thought into it, I enlisted the help of one of his best friends and I finally made him the best gift a guy could get.  And walked off and left it when I left for lunch.  So, I headed up to the mail center and had them ship it, just a couple of cities over, for me.  Seriously, the postage cost almost as much as the gift did!  But, it’s worth it.  He’s going to love it when he finally gets it.  But really, I’ve had the gift done for a week.  It’s sitting on the top shelf of the secretary, right above where my purse is!!  I literally was inches from the gift and FORGOT TO TAKE IT!!!  Yup, that just happened.

The gift that got left behind…It has manly items like beef jerky, pistachio’s and his favorite part, four different types of whiskey.  

In conclusion, Happy Anti-Valentine’s Day to everyone out there!