Cooking On the Side » Desserts

Rocky Road Brownie Pudding Pie

Kathy Strahs — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 05:16:55 +0000

This Rocky Road Brownie Pudding Pie is one of those recipes that separates the serious rich chocolate dessert fans from the rest. To take it on, you have to be willing to bake a pan of brownies ahead of time so that you have one bar to crumble into the pie. It requires you to crush nine dollars’ worth of chocolate chip shortbread cookies (thanks to Walker’s Shortbread for providing me with the cookies to create this post) to form the crust. You’ll need to make a from-scratch chocolate pudding, toast walnuts and whip fresh cream – nothing especially difficult, but there’s a time investment.

It is worth it.

I loved this pie. Everyone in my house did. It’s as amazing as “Rocky Road Brownie Pudding Pie” sounds.

There is the tiniest bit of salt in the shortbread cookie crust but it’s enough to really wake up the chocolate in this pie. Folding whipped cream in with the chocolate pudding gives it a light, mousse-like texture. Marshmallows and toasted walnuts complete the “rocky road” profile – like a grown-up version of the ice cream from your childhood.

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Check Out Some of My Most Popular Posts:

~ My most popular post to date was the one in which I compared three different brands of self-rising flours to see which produced the best biscuit. Find out which flour won!

~ King Arthur Flour calls these The Best Ever Fudge Brownies and I agree.

~ My Ice Cream Cookie Pie was over-the-top scrumptious.

About Cooking On the Side...

It’s the recipe collection I didn’t even realize I had – the one derived from the side of a bag of fresh vegetables, a box of sugar, a jar of mayonnaise. Cooking On the Side – as in on the side of food packaging – is all about “revealing” these on-the-package recipes, with photos of how they actually turn out, cooking notes and more descriptive directions than package space usually allows for. -- Kathy

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Yogurt Mixed Berry Pie

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:41:02 +0000

“It dee-WISH-us!!”

That’s the highest level of culinary praise from my two-year-old son. That and plate licking…both his own plate and that of his big sister. This Yogurt Mixed Berry Pie, from a recipe on the Chobani Greek Yogurt package, beat out even chocolate chip cookies among my kids this weekend. It’s got to be the easiest pie in the world to make and relatively healthy too. How perfect!

Think softer-style cheesecake…that’s pretty much what this pie entails. You drain the Greek yogurt overnight to get a very thick, creamy yogurt cheese. Mix it with a little sugar – not too much, you still want that tartness to shine through – spoon it into a graham cracker crust and top it with berries. That’s it!

It’s Pi(e) Day (3.14) – I hope you’ll have a chance to relax with a slice today!

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Clementine Orange Snickerdoodles

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:15:35 +0000

Over the past few years there’s been a little sleeper of a cookie trend among the food blogs. It hasn’t come through in huge waves, like macarons or hasselback potatoes. Just an isolated post here and there…but over time it’s nearly evolved into a movement.

Food bloggers have been tinkering with snickerdoodles.

Snickerdoodles – the after school cookie jar favorite that I, until recently, only knew in its classic form: rolled in cinnamon sugar. Well, the realm of snickerdoodles has expanded greatly. Check out some of the incredible flavor variations people have come up with:

Someone needs to open an all-snickerdoodle bakery stat!

If a flavor tastes great with cinnamon and sugar, it’ll probably taste great in snickerdoodles. That’s the guiding thought I had in my head as I gazed at the big bowl of clementine oranges on my kitchen island. The next thing I knew, golden hued, citrus-scented Clementine Orange Snickerdoodles were emerging from the oven. Adding clementine zest and juice to the classic recipe I shared on the blog a while back gave the cookies just enough of a flavor twist to be complementary and interesting, not overpowering. Now to give some of these other variations a spin…

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Valentine’s Dipped Rice Krispies Treats

Kathy Strahs — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:32:46 +0000

I was leafing through the Dean & DeLuca Valentine’s Day catalog that arrived in the mail last week when my eyes stopped on a lovely set of heart-shaped rice krispies treats. They were decorated beautifully in royal icing…and the box of six was priced at $42. Six treats for $42. That’s $7 per treat. If you add shipping, which is $11.50, that’s $8.92 per treat.

Be still my rice krispies heart.

With all due respect to Dean & DeLuca – truly, I order gifts from them often – these are rice krispies treats…three-ingredient confections you can find, with very little variation, at any scout meeting/play date/bake sale across the country. Now, the ones they’re selling for $7 each plus shipping are nearly 2 inches thick, very even, impeccably adorned – the nicest ones you’d expect to see at any bake sale. But for about 45 cents each (I did the math!) and part of a weekend afternoon you can make really nice Valentine’s Dipped Rice Krispies Treats at home. And have fun doing it.

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Heart-Shaped Whoopie Pies…plus a Wilton Valentine’s Giveaway!

Kathy Strahs — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:12:47 +0000

I can already hear the creak of the step stool hinge unfolding the second I tell my 4-year old daughter that I’m about to bake something that involves sprinkles. That’s her cue to drop what she’s doing and get herself propped up next to me at the kitchen island to get involved in the action.

This weekend Heart-Shaped Whoopie Pies were on the menu. We had so much fun with the Bunny Whoopie Pies we made last year at Easter that I was eager to try some for Valentine’s Day. If you’ve never tasted a whoopie pie, these pillowy cakes with marshmallow frosting sandwiched in between are a real treat. Once again, we turned to a Wilton pan (included in today’s giveaway!) to create the fun shape. We decorated them simply with Valentine’s sprinkles around the edges but you can also get really creative and pipe words and other designs on top (like these from Baking Bites).

Ready to bake some fun Valentine’s treats of your own? Wilton is sponsoring a fabulous giveaway for us today: a Valentine’s Day Baking Prize Pack, valued at $50, including the heart-shaped whoopie pie pan plus Valentine’s Day cookie cutters, a pie press, sprinkles and more. Read on for how to enter the giveaway plus the Heart-Shaped Whoopie Pies recipe! [THE GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED]

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Creamy Lemon-Lime Bars

Kathy Strahs — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:43:50 +0000

From now on whenever I think of lemon bars I’ll be reminded of the time that I first met a group of cousins I never knew I had. We all convened at my parents’ house (it turns out they don’t live that far away) for dinner the day after Christmas, just ten days ago. Their great-great-great-grandfather was my great-great-grandfather. I did the calculation and determined that makes us 3rd cousins once removed. It’s a distant relation, but family is family.

One of my “new” cousins, about my same age, brought over lemon bars that day. I hadn’t had them in forever and hers were fantastic. I learned that both she and her sister love to cook and that her sister even has her own special occasion cake business. Even though we’re only 3rd cousins once removed I felt connected over this.

This little reunion prompted me to share a recipe for Creamy Lemon-Lime Bars today. The recipe, which I adapted from the side of a can of sweetened condensed milk, is more reminiscent of key lime pie than the traditional lemon bars my cousin made. They have a rich, creamy texture but are still very sweet, tart and refreshing. I brought limes into the mix to make things a little interesting (plus I love limes).

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Chocolate-Raspberry Thumbprint Cookies…The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap

Kathy Strahs — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:36:16 +0000

As busy as the holiday season gets – and this one is proving to be one for the records – I make it a point to carve out time for the things that I enjoy most about the holidays, such as baking and exchanging cookies. This year’s Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap, masterfully organized by Lindsay from Love & Olive Oil and Julie from The Little Kitchen, turned to be the mother of all cookie exchanges I’ve ever participated in, with more than 600 food bloggers sending 22,000 cookies around the world!

I took the opportunity to try out a Chocolate-Raspberry Thumbprint cookie recipe I found inside a box of Ziploc bags. What drew me most to these cookies (besides the obvious terrific combo of chocolate and raspberries) was the cream cheese in the dough. I hoped the cream cheese would give the cookies a soft, tender texture and that’s exactly what I got. I was happy to wrap them up and ship them off, a dozen at a time, to someone I’ve known since my early days of blogging, Shelby from The Life and Loves of Grumpy’s Honeybunch, as well as two folks I’m now “meeting” for the first time: Desiree from Gustatoria and Allison from Decadent Philistines Save the World.

And since this was exchange, that means I also received three dozen cookies in the mail as well! Read on to see the terrific cookies that arrived on my doorstep as well as the recipe for the Chocolate-Raspberry Thumbprint cookies that I sent.

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Stovetop Cocoa with Toasted Homemade Marshmallows

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 05:41:57 +0000

Hot chocolate was that special treat we got to have after school when it was too gray and rainy to play outside (which didn’t happen all that often in the Silicon Valley). It was something I could make by myself – I’d just microwave some water in a mug and tear open a packet of Swiss Miss. I especially loved the kind with the tiny little marshmallows that would float on top.

I read ingredient labels more often these days and, not to specifically bag on Swiss Miss because they’re not alone in this, but there are a lot of unpronounceable ingredients in those little packets that go a bit beyond “cocoa”, “sugar” and “milk”. And let’s not even get started with the marshmallows. This past rainy weekend I decided to pull out a saucepan and make this treat from scratch. Doesn’t the idea of Stovetop Cocoa with Toasted Homemade Marshmallows just sound like it would be better anyway? Let me assure you that it is.

The cocoa recipe comes from the Hershey’s Cocoa package – it’s just unsweetened cocoa, sugar, milk, water and a little vanilla. It is outstanding! When you top it with a fluffy homemade marshmallow, with a toasty tan outer shell from a quick minute under the broiler…it seriously makes me wish for more rainy gray days.
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Chai Pumpkin Pie

Kathy Strahs — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:23:15 +0000

I’d been looking for a good excuse to post an updated pumpkin pie recipe on Cooking On the Side. That first pumpkin pie I posted two Thanksgivings ago was great and all, the classic Libby’s version that I and millions around the country have enjoyed for years. But ever since that post I’ve been wanting to challenge myself to bake a pumpkin pie that was more from scratch – roast a pumpkin and make fresh purée, roll out my own pie crust. Well, I found my excuse to bake a new pie in the form of a sticker on a sugar pumpkin.

On the sticker was a pumpkin pie recipe that not only started with making your own pumpkin purée (no surprise there, it’s attached to a pumpkin) but it also called for a rather unusual custard ingredient: a cup of hot water. I researched a slew of other pumpkin pie recipes and not one called for water. And they all have two eggs, while this recipe on the pumpkin sticker only called for one. The closest relative I could find to this type of custard filling was a Chinese egg custard – in that dish, hot water or other liquid is mixed in to create a light, silky texture. I became very intrigued by this water approach.

I couldn’t leave well enough alone. For my pie, I decided to brew a cup of chai in lieu of the plain hot water the recipe called for. The notes of cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper and star anise in the tea complemented the pumpkin amazingly and enhanced the traditional pie spices. If you’re in the mood for an all-homemade twist on the classic, Chai Pumpkin Pie is definitely a great way to go.

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Double Chocolate Cookies

Kathy Strahs — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 04:42:05 +0000

I officially have a sweet tooth…or so the new diet and exercise app I recently downloaded to my iPhone tells me. Day after day for the past week, as I’ve logged everything I’ve been eating and drinking, MyFitnessPal has been telling me that I’ve consumed more than double my daily recommended volume of sugar. It gets worse…I’ve usually exceeded my recommended volume by the end of breakfast. Talk about eye-opening!

Just to be clear, it’s not like I’m eating Double Chocolate Cookies for breakfast or anything like that. My main culprit has been orange juice. As it turns out, a single 8-ounce glass of my favorite OJ that I’ve been drinking for years delivers 69% of the amount of sugar I’m supposed to have in a day. Add in a piece of fruit and – BAM – I’m over my sugar limit by 8:30 AM. Granted, I’m pretty sure that natural sugar from fruit isn’t as bad as refined sugar but still…I had no idea.

The good news is 1) I’m now much more aware of my sugar intake thanks to this app (and thanks to my friend Dara from Cookin’ Canuck for first introducing it to me through her recent post) and 2) with this awareness I can now make better eating decisions. I cannot bear to completely eliminate from my diet rich, gooey, brownie-like chocolate cookies like the ones I’m sharing today from Ghirardelli. But I’m now able to do a better job of determining what “moderation” looks like. If I indulge in one of these bad boys, that’s pretty much my treat for the day.

Have your cookie and eat it too! But if you need a little help with keeping your sweet tooth in balance, especially with Halloween and the holidays fast approaching, you might consider an app like MyFitnessPal (and no, I have no connection with this company whatsoever – I’m just a happy customer!).

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