Friday, December 23, 2011

Sweet Potato Cake

This isn't exactly a healthy recipe, but it could be made healthy if you used Splenda! I've never even had sweet potatoes, but my sister and I were needing to use up some pecans, and I found this recipe! It's actually for 2 1/2 dozen cupcakes, but we made it into a cake for the sake of traveling.

Batter:
40 oz. of sweet potatoes, canned or boiled; mashed
1 cup olive oil
4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon maple extract
2 cups brown sugar sugar
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ginger

Pecans:
2/3 cup pecans (or walnuts)
1 tablespoon butter
1/4 cup brown sugar


Preheat the oven to 375ยบ. Whisk together (we used a blender) the mashed potatoes, olive oil, eggs, vanilla, maple extract, and brown sugar. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger. Add to the sweet potato mixture and whisk until combined. Bake for about 12-15 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. We frosted using one container of store-bought cream cheese frosting.

Now for the pecans. First, grease a large sheet of parchment paper. Put the pecans in a large pan on the stove on medium heat. Add the butter and brown sugar. Stir, scraping the bottom well, until all the sugar is melted and completely liquid. Spread the pecans on the parchment paper, separating them with the spatula so that they don't clump together. Once cooled, top the frosted cupcakes with pecans.

No rating for this recipe - I wouldn't classify it as healthy or cheap, but definitely good for the holidays!

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Chocolate Popcorn

I had never heard of chocolate popcorn before last week.... or least not that I remembered. And now, I just want to eat it all the time!

I made it to take to a Christmas party, and I plan on making some for the family over the holidays.


Six bags of popcorn requires 1 package of almond bark.
(I used light buttered popcorn and white almond bark.)

Melt the almond bark on the stove; I split the package in half and melted each half separately, due to the size of my pans. It's also easier to pop a bag of popcorn, drizzle some chocolate over it and shake it up. Each time you add a bag of popcorn to the bowl, drizzle some more chocolate on it. The first batch we attempted to drizzle all the chocolate over all the popcorn, which didn't work well at all.

[In case you've never dealt with almond bark, stack two similar pans on top of each other. Fill the smaller one with a little less than half of water; it will go on the bottom. The bigger one will partially sit on/lean into the other pan, but won't touch the water.] 

When it's all said and done, it still looks like normal popcorn, for the most part. The first time I ate it, I thought it was just normal popcorn. So, don't expect it to be covered thickly with chocolate!


Rating: Not the absolute healthiest treat, but there are far worse! I just love how easy it is to make :)