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The Art of Running in the Rain

"To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift." -Prefontaine

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Baking

Cinnamon Buns

I have to admit that I’m a sucker for a good nordic concept that gives me the warm fuzzies. First it was hygge, and now it’s ‘Lagom,’ the concept of ‘not too little, not too much.’ I completely devoured Niki Brantmark’s book.

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It is now sitting in our living room (it helps that the cover is adorable) and the other day I was flipping through and came across a yummy looking cinnamon bun recipe. Moment of baking inspiration + Mira’s nap time = time for some cinnamon buns!

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There is just something about pouring flour into a bowl that really gets me. The *thunk* once it hits the bottom. The incomparable softness. I would love to lay in a pool full of flour.

dsc_0049.jpg Butter….not so much. I really dislike working with butter. Once it’s softened it sticks to my hands and the knife. I never feel as though I’m ‘cubing’ it quite right.

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Somehow, the dough ball is created.

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I can definitely find some beauty in every step of the process. Although, not when I dropped the bottle of rice vinegar and it smashed all over the floor.

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Mira woke up at some point, but she was happy to hang out while I baked (gotta love her growing autonomy).

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Cinnamon Buns

  • Servings: 10-12
  • Difficulty: medium
  • Print

BUNS

2 c flour

1/4 c fine sugar

1/8 c active dried yeast

1/4 tsp salt

1/3 c butter, cubed

1 c warm milk

1 egg, beaten

FILLING

1/3 c melted butter

1/3 brown sugar

2-3 tbsp ground cinnamon

GLAZE (optional)

1 c powdered sugar

1.5 tbsp milk

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
  2. In a mixing bowl combine dry ingredients, then mix in butter with dough hook.
  3. Add the milk slowly while mixing the dough until it appears sticky. If it is too wet add a small bit of flour.
  4. Cover and allow to rise for an hour.
  5. Place dough on floured surface and knead for 5 minutes. Roll into rectangular shape until about 1/2″ thick.
  6. Brush the dough with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon.
  7. Roll the dough on the long side and cut into about 1″ thick pieces. Spray a baking tray and place cut-side up on tray with a good amount of space between. Cover and allow to rise for 45 minutes.
  8. Brush buns with beaten egg and bake for 15 minutes (my oven required 20) or until the buns are golden.
  9. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
  10. (optional) Whisk powdered sugar and milk to make glaze, pour over buns.

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Be well.

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Sunday Style VIII (kind of) + Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hey all!

I was going to come at you with a Sunday Style post, but we didn’t realize until way too late that there was a big grease spot right where we were taking photos and they just turned out…meh….

I will share with you these two photos from the shoot, of my current obsession!

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These shoes are extremely comfy, cool (it’s been 100 degrees this past week), and very cute!  I got them on Urban Outfitter’s sale, and they are unfortunately all sold out now, but they have a lot of similar styles.

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Shoes: Ecote Huaraches (similar here, I would totally buy these ones too!)

Now it’s time for food porn!

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When you crave peanut butter and chocolate I believe you should just give in and go for the gusto!  These cookies are so delicious, they are super moist and everything about them melts in your mouth.

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I often find that the typical peanut butter chocolate chip cookie is just not peanut buttery enough for my taste.  Because these cookies don’t have flour in them it allows the peanut butter to shine through a bit more.

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Flourless Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies

  • Servings: 2 dozen
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup peanut butter
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 cup dark chocolate chips

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Mix peanut butter, sugar, egg, baking soda, and salt in a mixing bowl.
  3. Fold in the cup of dark chocolate chips.
  4. Form tbsp size cookies on cookie sheet two inches apart.
  5. Bake for 12-14 minutes or until golden brown.

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Mangia!

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Healthy Almond Joy No Bake Balls

Omagorsh, just typing Almond Joy takes me back to when I was younger and my siblings/cousins and I would walk to the store down the street from my nonna’s (Italian for grandma’s) house and grab a treat before watching a movie.  I loved picking Almond Joys (or in Canada a Bounty).  I will say that I preferred the Almond Joy because of, well, the almonds.  I’m a big fan of almonds any which way, raw, roasted, finely grated into flour, butter, etc.  I thought it might be nice to share with you a healthy Almond Joy ball.  I created this recipe on my own, and I think I outdid myself on the healthy part (each ball is only 60 calories with 4g of carbs, 1g of protein, and 1g of fiber), and the taste is spot on.

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It has been ungodly hot here in Irvine (ironically as I’m writing this post it’s raining), so I wanted to come up with a baked good that didn’t actually require any, well, baking.  These were quite easy to assemble, exactly how I prefer my sweet treats.  I like to get at them as quick as possible, patience is not my strong suit when baking.

Here’s most of what you need, I’ll be honest, I added a few more ingredients after I took this picture and then was too lazy to set up another one…

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Side note: after my first round, I decided to opt out of using the chocolate bar.  This is not because I don’t love Lindt, but because it required a stove and I just really didn’t want to turn on the heat.  Now my only thought about why using chocolate may be better than my cocoa powder + vanilla + coconut oil + coconut nectar concoction would be that it might form a nice shell when they are cooling, where as my mixture doesn’t seem to firm up very well.  Not that it matters to me, because I’m pretty much licking my fingers anytime chocolate is involved anyways.

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So I know some people prefer the Mounds over the Almond Joy (I’ve yet to meet one, but I believe they’re out there), if you are one of those people simply use a half a cup of coconut flour rather than a quarter almond/quarter coconut flour, and don’t sprinkle the outside with chopped almonds.

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Healthy Almond Joy No Bake Balls

  • Servings: 11 balls
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print
Ingredients

Balls

  • 1/4 c almond meal
  • 1/4 c coconut flour
  • 1/4 c shredded unsweetened coconut
  • 1/4 c canned coconut milk
  • 1/8 c coconut sugar

Chocolate coating

  • 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
  • 2 Tbsp coconut oil
  • 1 Tbsp coconut nectar*
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 Tbsp coconut sugar
  • 1 Tbsp canned coconut milk

Topping

  • 1/4 c crushed raw almonds

* I used 2 Tbsp and it seemed slightly too sweet, use just 1 if you like less sweet

Directions

  1. In a food processor (I have a ninja, thanks mom and dad) combined all of the ‘ball’ ingredients and blend (I used the dough setting).
  2. On a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper form .5-1 inch balls, set aside.
  3. In a separate (microwave safe) bowl combined the chocolate coating ingredients and microwave in increments of 10 seconds, until the ingredients form a melted chocolate texture.
  4. In a small bag place 1/4 cup raw almonds and crush them (this is very stress relieving so I advice you buy the whole almonds and crush them yourself).
  5. Using a spoon dip the balls into the chocolate mixture coating completely and then place them back on the parchment paper.
  6. Once all of your balls are covered in chocolate (after writing this sentence I realize all the jokes my husband will make about this recipe, I’m surprised it took me until this point in the post) and placed back on the parchment paper, sprinkle them with your crushed almonds.
  7. Place balls in the freezer for as long as you would like, I could hardly wait 10 minutes.

Nutrition

Per ball (yields 11 balls) – this also assumes that you have about half the chocolate coating left in your bowl.

  • calories: 68
  • fat: 5g (GOOD FAT!!)
  • carbohydrates: 4g
  • fiber: 2g
  • protein: 1g

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Mangia!

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Kalli’s baby shower

I was honored to be able to hold a co-worker and friend’s baby shower at my place on Sunday!  Kalli is such a great person, she is very sweet and when I’m around her I find myself smiling more!

Her baby is coming very soon, and all the other SLPs at Boyer and myself decided to have a baby shower for her.  She is having a little baby girl

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And we just can’t wait to meet her!!  Even though we all knew she was having a girl I had this urge to make a gender revealing cake.  My plan was to make cupcakes with pink cake hearts in them, but then that seemed like too much work so I turned it into a cake.

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Turns out the recipe for both the cake and the icing weren’t that great, so this cake was all for the unnecessary gender revealing factor.  It satisfied something in me and I think Kalli was amused 😛

The decoration committee was in full force and I’m so proud of those girls!

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Kalli and Josh’s theme is “Welcome to the world.”  They love to travel (they recently went to Thailand), and so we went all out with maps!

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Everyone chipped in on food and dessert and there were so many yummy treats to eat.

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Jenny left me a few of the pretty plants and the Canadian flag!! Yay shout out to my homeland 🙂

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Rebecca did a great job with the baby shower games, my favorite was ‘guess the baby’

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Mostly because the set up was so pretty.  Can’t go wrong with an old fashion trunk!

Baby made out like a bandit, and so did the babies papa with some yummy beer.

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The shower was so much fun, and Kalli is such a warm person and it’s so easy to see why people love her!

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We all had so much fun putting it on, I guess if we ever want to branch out of speech therapy we could always go into baby shower planning 🙂  Love these girls!

Be well.

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Raspberry chocolate chip muffins

Okay, so I may have picked a TON of raspberries.  But now we have jam for months and these delicious muffins, so all in all it was definitely worth the work.  I found the recipe at sweet cannela.  When it comes to following recipes I try not to reinvent the wheel, but I’ll admit that I made a few minor adjustments to this recipe (one of which included adding chocolate – um, can you blame me?).

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Heat the oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C) and grease yo’ muffin tin – I used coconut oil and we had a really good time!  My batch made 12 pretty robust muffins 🙂  FYI these muffins took like 5 seconds to prep and 25 min to bake, SUPER quick!

This is what happens to coconut oil in Seattle in the middle of the summer…..I’mmmmm mmmelting

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Mix 2 bananas, .5 c almond milk (I used hemp), .5 c brown sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 1.5 tsp maple syrup in a food processor (or ninja — hiyah).  Blend the ingredients until they become a smooth liquid.

IMG_0286In a separate bowl combine 2 c of rolled oats, 1 tsp of cinnamon, 1.5 tsp of baking powder.

Add the liquid mixture and mix it with a spatula.  Gently fold in 1 c of raspberries, and if you’d like chocolate chips (I just poured until it looked pretty).

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Fill up your muffin cups and bake for 25-30 minutes.

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OMNOMNOMNOM!!!!!

Be well.

 

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