Sometimes I get these great recipe ideas in my head. And if you’ve ever been around me when I am baking, you know that measuring isn’t really something that I enjoy. While some people go all Alton Brown on baking trying to nail down the perfect measurements to be as precise as possible, I am more from the school of dashes and handfuls and eyeballing it. Which popular to contrary belief, does actually work in baking. If you kind of know what you’re doing. Which today apparently I did not. So here’s how it all started:

On Tuesday I hosted a nice dinner in my backyard for my tennis friends Heather and Caitlan who both had birthdays last week. For dinner, of course I tapped my recipe guru Uncle Jimmy – and ended up making grilled romaine salads with steak tips, gorgonzola, fresh tomatoes, and a warm bacon vinagrette. But of course, it’s dessert where I need to wow my guests. So I made this nutella crunch fro-yo cake (gluten free!). I didn’t have a springform cheesecake pan, so I just made it in an 8×8 glass dish, which all tastes the same in the end. And this cake was a major hit. Not even a spoonful left over after we got done with it. Our 24-year old coach even made an appearance when I told him what was for dessert. 

So with that in mind, I was thinking about how much my coworkers loved my browned butter rice krispie treats a few weeks back, and given I was feeling especially lazy today with a wicked case of the Sunday scaries, I thought what if I just added some Nutella to that recipe? That counts as a new recipe right? Well yes, if you don’t eff it up. I think if I just added two spoonfuls of Nutella, they would have turned out stellar. But I added an entire jar and it messed up the marshmallow consistency and got all weird and sticky like taffy and just wouldn’t coat the krispies. Ugh. And I couldn’t redo it because I didn’t have any more marshmallows and I was just not in the mood to go back to the store.

So I was staring at the box of Rice Krispies trying to think of what I could use these for if I didn’t have marshmallows. And I remembered seeing some recipes where people add them to chocolate chip cookies and it makes them a little bit airy and crunchy, and I figured sure, if it keeps me from having to walk back down to Stoppies, I might as well try it. So after doing some interweb perusing, I came across this recipe from Two Peas and Their Pod, one of my faves, and decided to adapt it a bit because I also only had mini chips. You can make these regular size too if you’re more organized with your ingredients than me.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup old fashioned oats
• 1 1/4 cups Rice Krispies cereal
• 1 1/2 cups mini chocolate chips

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Cream the butter and sugars in a mixer. Add in eggs and vanilla extract and mix on medium to high speed until creamy.

Step 2: Sift together the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda and add to the wet batter. Mix on a low speed until well incorporated.

Step 3: Add in oats and mini chocolate chips, and mix on low speed, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl so the oats are evenly distributed. Add in the Rice Krispies and just mix on low speed until they are incorporated, but being careful not to crush them to smithereens.

Step 4: On a parchment or sil-pat lined baking sheet, use a medium cookie scoop to place even-size balls of dough about an inch apart. I fix 15 cookies per tray if you’re doing the mini cookies. Bake at 375 degrees for 9-11 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Let them sit on the baking sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool.

So despite the snafu with the original Nutella, I think I redeemed myself with these mini krispie cookies. I was surprised that they do have a different texture you can actually taste when you bite into them. I think the krispies make them a little bit airier (if that’s even a word) so they have a nice crunch to them too. AND the best part about mini cookies is you can eat as many as you want and they never add up to a full-size cookie, hooray! Just like munchkins from Dunkin Donuts. (Unless you’re my trainer Rita reading this right now … in which case of course I did not have any of these mini cookies. Processed sugar, yuck! Burpees, yay!)

I’ll keep this short, because I still need to pack for my work trip to Pittsburgh which is giving me wicked Sunday scaries that can only be quelled by watching a few episodes of Teen Mom 2. Somehow Barb and Jeanelle screaming at each other is a sweet symphony that soothes my soul and makes me less anxious about the fact that JetBlue did not assign me a seat on my flight yet tomorrow. And it’s a well known fact that I like to book row 20 on JetBlue since they board from the back and then I don’t risk getting arrested on the flight when there is no overhead space and I go cray cray throwing peoples jackets out of the overhead bins. Not like that situation has almost happened before or anything.

You may notice a new look and feel to the blog. I’m testing out a new template and started playing around with my photos in Adobe Lightroom. I really need to invest the time in taking the tutorial because half the time my photos look more over-exposed than Casper the Ghost, but I’m getting there. Soon I’ll be asking you loyal readers (hi mom) for some recipe ideas that you’d like to see soon, once I get this whole new bloggy thing under control.

So aside from the fab dinner we had last Tuesday for Heather and Caitlan’s birthday – which ended in Heather calling the cops on our neighbors (and not even Crazy Eddie, shocking) the rest of the week was relatively tame compared to that. Thursday night we had our annual company summer outing at the Charlestown Navy Yard which luckily we had nice weather for. Company outings are much less fun when you’re older and responsible and limit your drinks and dancing in front of your coworkers. Back in the good ol’ days of my early twenties, I was much more fun at these outings. Like when I lived at the Raleigh Sheraton and some of the hotel staff took me out for my twenty-third birthday since I had lived there for so many months for work, and let’s just say every Sunday night after that I would be a little embarrassed checking in. And maybe I might have once rapped Nicki Minaj’s “Super Bass” at the company Christmas party. Or had too much vino on a boat in Boston Harbor and fell asleep in my new company windbreaker. Anyways, it was a tame night but still a fun one. These are the business consulting ladies that have to put up sitting in my row at work every day. Lucky ladies.

A benefit of being lame (tame) was that I could drive down to the Cape Thursday night and work from home on Friday. Which meant instead of battling traffic during rush hour, I was able to cook my parents a nice dinner on the grill in time for this nice sunset view.

And most importantly for what’s on the agenda for this week – my little sissy is turning the big 2-6 this week. Here’s to hoping she doesn’t try to dive into her birthday cake like when she turned the big s-i-x twenty years ago. Honestly though Kristen, what are you doing here?
Happy Sunday.