Pinterest-ing

This week I bought some bananas and never got around to eating them, and right as I was going to throw them away I had the great idea to make banana bread! I've never made banana bread from real bananas before, I've always made it out of a box (yuck, I know) so I got on Pinterest to try and find a good recipe.  I found this recipe which includes chocolate chips so of course I couldn't resist:

For this recipe you will need:

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

3 ripe bananas

1 tbs milk

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup softened butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 cup chocolate chips

I had 6 bananas and figured I'd make an extra loaf to take to work so I doubled everything above.

Begin by preheating your oven to 325.  Then mix the flour, baking powder and soda in a bowl.

Then, stir together your bananas, milk and cinnamon.

Now beat the butter and sugar in a third bowl until it's fluffy.

Add in the eggs one at a time, beating after adding each one.

Now stir the banana mixture into the butter/sugar mixture, followed by stirring in the dry mixture to the rest.

The best part is saved until last: fold in your chocolate chips, pour the mixture into a greased loaf pan and bake for approximately 70 minutes!

Super yummy and I'm glad this Pinterest recipe turned out for my first time baking banana bread from scratch!

It's been a while since I last blogged so I thought I'd blog about a super easy (and very yummy) recipe.  I found this breakfast yogurt parfait here and knew I wanted to try it (just look at it!)

You will need to begin by making overnight oats (this takes no more than 2 minutes) and in the morning add the rest of the ingredients (maybe 5 minutes including washing/cutting fruit).

Ingredients:

1/4 cup Quick Oats

1/4 cup milk

1/4 tsp vanilla extract

1 dash ground cinnamon

plain Greek yogurt

strawberries

blueberries

granola

To make the overnight oats, just mix the oatmeal, milk, vanilla and cinnamon into a bowl, place it in the fridge overnight and it will be ready in the morning.

In the morning, wash and cut up fruit (if you prefer) and add the ingredients one by one on top of each other.

(Side note: if you are using Chrome and have troubles viewing Vine videos, type "Chrome://flags" in the address bar, look for "disable hardware-accelerated video decode" and click enable. Not sure if anyone else has this problem but I seem to every time I want to see someone's Vine)

Then sprinkle with granola and enjoy!

Thank you Frances for this RumChata cupcake recipe! I followed the directions and they came out a little overcooked and my kitchen turned out a mess but they're not too bad.  Here is a link to the original recipe in case you don't trust mine. 

For the cupcakes you will need:

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

1 1/2 cups sugar

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup RumChata

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp cinnamon

4 egg whites

To begin, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Make sure your stick of butter is room temperature (cutting it into small pieces will help move it along quicker) and combine it with the 1 1/2 cups of sugar.  Beat the two until the mixture is fluffy. 

Next, mix together the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon). Set aside (not pictured).  Then mix together the RumChata and vanilla extract:

Next you're going to alternate adding the dry mixture and RumChata mixture to your butter and sugar.  Start by adding 1/3 of the dry mixture to the butter/sugar, then 1/2 of the RumChata/vanilla, another 1/3 dry mixture, second 1/2 of RumChata/vanilla followed by the last 1/3 of the dry mixture.  

Now in a separate bowl separate your egg whites.  This is a total pain and for a clever trick that absolutely failed for me, visit this link for a video of how to do it using a pop/water bottle.  I attempted the bottle trick and it just broke the yolk so I gave up and separated the egg whites the old-fashioned way with the shells and scooped out the little bit of yolk that escaped.  Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

 Next, "beat the egg whites until soft peaks form." I'm not really sure what this means but I used my mixer to beat the eggs for maybe 20 seconds until they looked like this:

Fold the egg whites into your batter (DON'T use your mixer for this part) and then fill cupcake liners.  The recipe says to bake for 20 minutes or until the cupcakes "bounce back" when you touch them.  If I made these again I'd probably cook them for 16 or 17 minutes instead of 20.  

Now for the cream cheese/RumChata frosting:

(Make sure your cupcakes are cooled before frosting).

What you will need:

12 ounces cream cheese, room temperature

1/2 cup butter, also room temperature

1/2 tsp vanilla

4-5 tbsp RumChata

1 package (2 lbs.) powdered sugar

I was really excited for this part because I randomly bought this bad boy at Walmart for like, $2 and have been waiting for a reason to use it:

Back to business.  Combine the butter and cream cheese until they are smooth:

Next, add in the vanilla and SLOWLY add the powdered sugar. I emphasize the word slowly because I did this "slowly" (I added the bag of sugar in 5 parts) and still had a cloud of sugar EVERYWHERE.  You might possibly change the genre of your background music to classical to calm your nerves as I had to at this point.  After this step, add in 4-5 tablespoons of RumChata based on the thickness of the frosting. 

I definitely recommend taste-testing at this point because the frosting is AMAZING.  Now, get out your frosting tool and have at it, OR do what I ended up having to do and use a teaspoon to frost your cupcakes.  I attempted the frost-er I had purchased and the amount of frosting that fit in it was about enough for 2 cupcakes and made a mess everywhere.  

OH YEAH AND MY CUPCAKES LOOKED LIKE THIS:

It's been a while since my cake-decorating days, clearly.  Using a teaspoon won't make your cupcakes look amazing, but they will be much better than my first three:

At this point I finally tried one and as I said before, it was a little overcooked and stuck to the paper, but wasn't too bad.  The RumChata taste was pretty subtle and overall tasted like a recipe for pumpkin muffins that I make but you should try these at least once. After eating one and looking back at how ugly the rest of them are, I cried for a second before I realized I'm not meant to be a confectioner and at least I have content for this blog, leading to a good grade in the class this is for, thus, hopefully (keep your fingers crossed!) contributing to me getting my master's degree next year! And I have a bottle of RumChata (minus 1 cup and 4 tablespoons) now!

This may be a boring post but honestly, cleaning a ceiling fan is pretty boring but is something that should be done more frequently than I’d like to do it. Meet my kitchen ceiling fan before cleaning:

Okay gross.  So I didn't want to just dust it because that was going to be messy and probably just leave me frustrated.  So I googled "how to clean a ceiling fan" for other ideas and there were lots to choose from.  One place says to use a pillow case and cover each blade, scraping the dust into the pillowcase but I don't have a spare one of those lying around and there would still be work to do after that.  Another site suggested taking the blades down and putting them in the oven on self cleaner? I wasn't about to do that because knowing me I'd burn the house down.  Finally I found that you could wash the blades in warm soapy water and I noticed how easy it looked to take the blades off so I opted for this solution.

Again, disgusting. And the blades just screw right out! I should've probably done this years ago.

So find a screwdriver or flathead, unscrew the ceiling fan blades (slowly if yours are as dusty as mine!) and put them in the sink. After I took down two blades I was already getting bored and hungry so at this point if you want to leave to go get sushi with your roommate, by all means do so because that's what I did.

After I came home and removed the rest of the blades I noticed they were made out of wood so I thought about just wiping them off with Pledge. I tried that on one blade however and it was by no means going to get the job done quickly whatsoever so I filled up the sink. I'm still not sure if you should wash wood ceiling fan blades in water but I was already not happy I had began the process and just wanted to be done.

The next step is pretty self-explanatory: use a rag to completely clean the blades.  Then rinse and set somewhere to dry.

I let them sit for about an hour and then had the genius idea to just put them back on and turn the ceiling fan on high, so:

Much better!! (Still missing the final light fixture, I washed that as well and it's still drying).  

A few weeks ago I conveniently saw this photo on Pinterest and with April Fool's Day just around the corner, I knew I had to do it to someone.  I decided that lucky someone would be my roommate.........

So to start you just need a few supplies and 15-20 minutes of time.  I bought three large apples at the store and went over to the onions to pick one out that looked similar to the apples I had.  Pick up some chocolate almond bark and you're on your way!

If you have time, refrigerate the apples for a bit as the melted chocolate will stick to the apples better when you're ready to begin.  Wash your apples and be sure they're completely dry.

Next, microwave half of the package of almond bark for 30 second intervals, stirring at each interval making sure the chocolate doesn't get too hot and burn (the chocolate shouldn't ever get hot, just warm enough so that it's melted). 

Stick popsicle sticks into each apple and cover with chocolate using a tablespoon.

Line a cookie sheet or cake pan with wax paper (depending on how much you are making) and set the apples/onions down so they can harden.

Now, cue the onion:

You'll want to peel off the top layers and cut both the top and bottom so it resembles an apple similar to the rest. Insert a popsicle stick (In this case, I used a slightly deformed popsicle stick so I could identify the onion later on).

Cover the onion in chocolate just as you did the apples. You'll probably want to cover the onion(s) last as they might make the chocolate taste bad.

Be sure not to leave any of the onion exposed as it might give the prank away... In the end my onion really did look just like the rest of the apples!

My roommate was home when I wanted to prank him, so I took my supplies to my parents' house and had my mom help.  I brought the chocolate covered "apples" home, told Luke I had made them and asked if he wanted one (yes) and if I could take a picture of him eating it (because I needed more for the blog post as it was such an easy process to make them ;)).

Now be sure that you give the prankee the chocolate covered onion and let them dig in!

The aftermath:

If you want to be nice, apologize and offer them a real chocolate covered apple, though you'll probably have to eat one yourself to prove it's real.

Hopefully I won't be killed in my sleep tonight.  The end :)

Looking around Pinterest I recently found this recipe for cookies, again using banana instead of butter and quick oats.  I like these as a healthy (okay, healthier-than-normal) alternative to cookies as I've been baking a lot of sweets lately and don't need to gain my freshman 15 at age 22.  These cookies are also no-bake which makes them easy and I had all the ingredients except cocoa powder.

You will need:

1 ripe banana

1 cup sugar

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1/2 cup milk (nonfat)

1/2 cup peanut butter

1 dash salt

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

3 cups instant oats

Begin by mashing the banana

Next, add all of the ingredients (banana included) EXCEPT the vanilla and oats into a medium saucepan.  

Doesn't look too appetizing but luckily it will smell good.  Now put the saucepan on medium heat and bring the mixture to a boil (don't forget to stir continually). Let it boil for one minute and then remove it from the heat.

Dump the mixture into another medium-sized bowl containing the three cups of oats and teaspoon of vanilla extract and stir.

Next, drop teaspoonfuls onto wax paper (if you have any, I obviously didn't and used aluminum foil... don't worry, it will work the same ;)). 

Thanks to my friend Tausha for this idea she found on Pinterest titled, "How many Cheez-Its can you fit on a cat before it wakes up?"

Luckily my roommate has a cat so I could try this idea out! All you will need for this game is a cat and a box of Cheez-Its.

I bought the white cheddar kind because I'm not a huge fan of original Cheez-Its, but I'm sure any type will do.

I poured a few into a bowl so when the cat was sleeping I would be able to grab them more quietly as to not disturb its nap.

Next, you will need a cat. (Thanks, Luke, for letting me borrow yours).

I positioned myself on the couch near the cat so she wouldn't be disrupted when she finally did fall asleep and had the bowl of Cheez-Its nearby.

Now, just wait for the cat to fall asleep:

The cat might re-position itself, but don't worry, it's just trying to get comfortable.

Once you're sure it's asleep, you can begin placing the Cheez-Its one by one anywhere on its body.

You get the idea... here is my final photo:

She woke up after I only got to 11 :(

This recipe for Blueberry Yogurt cookies was pinned by someone I follow the other day and they sounded really interesting, so I decided to give them a try.  They use Greek yogurt and no oil or butter so they're a little healthier than normal cookies but end up with a more muffin-like texture than cookies.

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar

1 1/2 cups plain Greek yogurt

1 egg, beaten

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup fresh blueberries

Begin by preheating the oven to 375 degrees.  In a large bowl mix together the sugar and yogurt, then pour in the egg and vanilla.

Then in a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt.

Now blend the dry ingredients into the yogurt mixture and fold in the blueberries:

When I was making these I didn't realize they were drop cookies.  So I greased my cookie sheets and dove into the mixture with my hands. Not a good idea because the dough is really sticky and more of a muffin mixture consistency which does not easily roll in your hands.  Instead take a spoon and drop the dough onto your cookie sheets, spacing them about two inches apart.  Then bake for 10 minutes and have a snack of Greek yogurt and blueberries while you wait!

After 10 minutes, remove the cookies and let them sit on the cookie sheets for another two minutes before you remove them to cool somewhere.

Looking around Pinterest the other day I found this really good idea for tuna melts.  If I eat tuna I usually just toast bread, mix tuna with some mayo and call it good but this looked much more exciting and is as easy as making grilled cheese: 

To make them you will need:

2 slices whole wheat bread

2 slices 2% cheese

2 slices tomato

1 can tuna

Anything you like to mix in (I just use light Miracle Whip but you could add in celery, carrots, salt, pepper, etc.)

Butter or soft margarine

Put a skillet on the stove on low heat and begin by slicing tomatoes and mixing the tuna with mayo and whatever else you'd like.

Now lightly butter one side of each of the pieces of bread, then set them butter-side down on your skillet.  From here you just layer ingredients:

Just wait a few minutes for the bread to get toasty and the cheese to melt and they are all done! They're a little bit messy to eat but way better than plain tuna on bread :)

A coworker sent me this link about glass cutting a while ago and I thought the process made perfect sense so I decided to try it (thanks, Nancy!)

I practiced on a plain glass bottle first (without taking pictures) and when it sort of worked I moved on to the glass I wanted to actually cut and turn into a vase.  Spoiler alert: it didn't work (if you couldn't tell from the title). 

Finished product of my first attempt:

A little whack but technically it worked. This is the glass bottle I wanted to turn into a vase:

You will need:

Glass of some sort

Yarn/twine

Scissors

Nail polish remover

Candle or just matches (a candle with continuous flame worked better for me)

A large bowl filled with ice water

So you begin by cutting three lengths of yarn long enough to fit around the bottle with the ends tied together.  FYI the yarn I had would not light on fire later in the process, so hopefully your mom has some of this lying around like mine did:

Moving on, wrap it around your glass a few times. I cut enough to wrap it around twice rather than three times because the twine was much thicker than yarn and I didn't have a fire extinguisher on hand. Then soak it in nail polish remover:

After this, wrap it around your bottle and tie the ends off.

Now hold the bottle over the flame so the yarn or twine catches fire.

Wait until the flame begins to die down on its own and then immediately set the bowl of ice water where it (should) simply break off. I didn't catch a photo of this step but here is my finished product:

The other day I wanted to make something but wasn't in the mood to put in a lot of effort. Luckily I had pinned this recipe for 2-ingredient cookies that are super easy to make so I decided to try them for myself. 

All you need are a few old bananas and quick oats! The recipe calls for approximately 1 cup of quick oats to 2 bananas and I had four, but they weren't old enough yet.  After googling, "how to ripen bananas" I found a simple solution saying I could throw bananas on a cookie sheet in the oven at 300 degrees for an hour and they would ripen due to the sugars being activated.  I had nothing to lose so I tried it out...

After 20 minutes they were beginning to turn darker, and the article I read said they would be completely black after an hour but not to worry because the insides would be just fine.

After an hour:

They looked disgusting but I popped them in the fridge for a couple minutes to cool and then peeled them into a bowl.  I didn't take a picture of the insides because I was excited to get started but the oven trick worked really well!

Onto the cookies...

Mix around 1 cup of quick oats to every 2 bananas depending on the size of the bananas.  I tried to go for a consistency of cookie dough but as you'll see from the end result I need to play around a little more.

The recipe I had suggested adding in a handful of an additional ingredient or two, like chocolate chips, walnuts or cinnamon depending on what you like.  I had to go for chocolate chips...

I added in a cup of chocolate chips which was a little much, with four bananas and two cups of quick oats I'd probably put in 1/2 to 3/4 cup instead. At this point the "dough" smelled really good so I tried some and it was amazing before even being baked.

Next, grease a couple cookie sheets really well and roll the cookies out.

Now bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.  After 15 minutes I noticed the cookies hadn't flattened, so I waited a couple extra minutes but nothing happened.  I would suggest playing with the consistency of the bananas and oats or just flattening out the cookies on the cookie sheet beforehand if you want them flat.

After baking:

Eggs are one of my favorite go-to meals because they're quick, easy and can be made a variety of ways. I ran into this pin however and wondered how I hadn't thought of it myself sooner:

Over easy eggs made in a bell pepper! For as quick as over easy eggs are, this takes only an additional minute or two that is definitely worth it. 

Start by gutting a green (or red) bell pepper and cutting into slices as thick or thin as you'd like.  Mine were about an inch:

Then butter a frying pan and you're on your way! Keep the heat on low the whole time and set the slice of pepper in the pan, cracking the egg right inside.

My mom bought me a small frying pan perfect for making over easy eggs so that's what I used for this; I like to cook over easy eggs by throwing a lid on top so I don't have to worry about flipping and it cooks faster (no, I don't have a lid with this pan so I use a different one that clearly doesn't fit but it gets the job done... don't laugh at me) 

Let it cook for just a few minutes and you're done! Mine ended up a little overcooked because I was making toast in the meantime, but was delicious nonetheless:

Everyone has been talking about "sock buns" lately but I have weird hair and things that work for most people never seem to work out well for me.  I was looking around Pinterest today, not even looking for hair-related pins and came across this link to a girl's tutorial on how to do a sock bun.

It looked good so I figured I'd give it a try and it actually worked on my hair! I cut one sock so I had an extra of course, and my mom is always looking for easy ways to put her hair up so she agreed to be my model to show how it is done.

First, find a sock.  I used a longer one because my hair is thicker and I wanted to make sure it would hold.  Cut just the toe off so you're left with a tube.

  Next, starting on one end of the sock roll it tightly so you end up with something that looks like this:

Now cue my mom because it would've been hard to take pictures doing this to my own hair.  Put your hair in a regular ponytail however high (or low) you'd like the bun to be.  

Now put the ends of your hair through the center of the sock like this:

After this, wrap your hair around the sock and roll both your hair and the sock up until you reach the ponytail. Voila!

Nearly perfect sock bun.  My own turned out a little messy with my curly hair but I imagine it would be better had I straightened it (not happening on a snow day).  Super easy, super fast and not too shabby :)

This weekend while browsing around Pinterest I stumbled upon a fun, cheap recipe for the above cake batter chocolate chip cookies (original recipe here). The colorful photos were really attractive and the cookies sounded as if they would taste amazing based on the name. I was also glad that I had all of the ingredients on hand, including white boxed cake mix that I would have probably never used otherwise. 

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/4 cups white boxed cake mix

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter (I used salted because I wasn't going to the store just for butter)

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup light brown sugar

1 egg, room temperature

1 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup sprinkles

Start by mixing together the flour, cake mix and baking soda.  In a separate bowl blend the butter, white and brown sugars together on medium speed.  Then mix the egg and vanilla in until it becomes creamy.

Next, add in the flour mixture and mix until they are just combined.  Don't overmix.  Then fold in the chocolate chips and sprinkles. I had some leftover sprinkles that didn't quite come to half a cup but I wasn't going to worry about it.

After this you are supposed to refrigerate the dough for at least 1 hour (or up to 4 days).  According to the blogger the dough is sticky, so chilling it will help the cookie from spreading too much.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Put tablespoons of rounded dough onto an ungreased baking sheet.  According to the recipe, you are supposed to make the cookie dough balls more tall than they are wide to make them fluffier.  I'm not sure that this did anything but the Internet told me to do it so I did. Bake the dough for 10-12 minutes until the edges are slightly browned.  Then allow the cookies to cool down on the baking sheet for 4 minutes and then you may transfer them.  

For my first Pinterest recipe experiment I wanted to try something a little easier as well as something I hoped would taste good. While pasta salad is a side dish for most people I'm always cooking boxes of Suddenly Pasta to snack on or take on the go with me (don't judge). After looking around I found this recipe for pasta salad pictured below:

Ingredients

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

3 garlic cloves (finely chopped or minced)

3/4 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 pint small cherry tomatoes

1 lb. medium seashell pasta

1/2 cup Parmesan cheese (the recipe calls for shaved but I used grated)

1/2 cup thinly sliced fresh basil leaves

I began by cutting all of the cherry tomatoes in half and chopping the garlic cloves so the tough part would be out of the way. I did struggle with trying not to eat all of the tomatoes before I began but luckily I did end up with quite a few left to put in the pasta.

Next, combine the oil, garlic, pepper flakes and salt and simmer on low heat for 5 minutes.  Then add half of the tomatoes into the mix and simmer for another five.

After this, dump the tomato mixture into a large bowl immediately dumping the other half of the tomatoes into the mixture and stir.  Let this stand for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to create the sauce.

In the meantime, cook the pasta in a large pot (this shouldn't take more than 8-10 minutes and you can cut the basil to kill time) and then drain the pasta before tossing it into the tomato mixture, finally adding the cheese and basil leaves. 

Pin·ter·est·ing; the art of attempting a project one has pinned to a board on their Pinterest account.