Thanksgiving Treats

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

I'll keep this short (okay maybe not that short) and sweet, very sweet! If you're like me and Thanksgiving is all about the desserts then I think you might like these two recipes. You'll like them even more if you're like me in that pie crust is not your forte as these recipes involve no pie crust.

First up is these yummy pumpkin cake rolls with cream cheese frosting. These are awesome, but slightly tricky. The best tip I can give you on them is to use parchment paper to line your jelly roll pan. In years past I've done them without the parchment paper and have ruined whole pans of this trying to get them out of the pan. I don't know why I didn't do this sooner! So don't even attempt these without parchment paper (I suppose you could use wax paper too, my mom always used to line cakes with that).

Pumpkin Cake Roll

Cake
3 eggs
2/3 c. pumpkin puree (not pie mix)
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. sugar
1 tsp. lemon juice
3/4 c. flour
2 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg

Filling
1 c. powdered sugar
8 oz cream cheese
4 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a large bowl beat eggs on high speed for 5 minutes while gradually adding sugar. From this point on fold all of these ingredients (DO NOT BEAT!) Fold in pumpkin and lemon juice. Fold in flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and salt. Spread this mixture into a heavily greased (and parchment lined) jellyroll pan. Bake for 15 minutes. Immediately turn out onto a clean dish towel that has been sprinkled in powdered sugar. While still hot, gently roll the cake in the towel lengthwise to form a roll. Place onto a wire rack to cool completely. When cake is thoroughly cool, unroll, remove towel and spread filling. Fillling: combine powdered sugar, softened cream cheese, butter and vanilla. Beat until smooth. Spread filling over cake and reroll. Sprinkle top of cake roll with powdered sugar. Slice into 1/2 inch pieces and serve, serves 12.

I usually make my cake roll a day ahead of time and leave the roll uncut and wrap with saran wrap and refrigerate. You could also make these way ahead of time and freeze, then defrost and cut. Trust me they are worth the work and you'll feel quite proud of yourself when you take the time to make these!

And if you have no crust making or cooking skills at all then this is the dessert for you. This is probably the easiest dessert ever, but tastes awesome and will make you the rock star at your potluck. This is a Paula Deen (from the Food Network) recipe. It's called, "Not Yo' Mama's Banana Pudding" and it's so true. Who thinks of dessert and craves banana pudding? Not me, until I tried this. But this dessert is definitely worth craving, and is beyond easy to make. You line the bottom of a casserole dish with Pepperidge Farm Chessman cookies (shortbread) then sliced bananas, then the custardy filling, and then more cookies on top. No cooking involved, just refrigerate.


And they have these cute seasonal Christmas cookies (normally they have chess men on them) that would make this dessert great for a Christmas party. Trust me, if you skip over the Pumpkin rolls at least give this a try, you won't regret it. It's best to make ahead of time though to give the filling time enough to set in the fridge and it gets even better the next day. You'll find the recipe in printable format here. Enjoy!

Not Yo' Mama's Banana Pudding

Recipe courtesy Paula Deen

Ingredients

• 2 bags Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies
• 6 to 8 bananas, sliced
• 2 cups milk
• 1 (5-ounce) box instant French vanilla pudding
• 1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, softened
• 1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
• 1 (12-ounce) container frozen whipped topping thawed, or equal amount sweetened whipped cream

Directions

Line the bottom of a 13 by 9 by 2-inch dish with 1 bag of cookies and layer bananas on top.

In a bowl, combine the milk and pudding mix and blend well using a handheld electric mixer. Using another bowl, combine the cream cheese and condensed milk together and mix until smooth. Fold the whipped topping into the cream cheese mixture. Add the cream cheese mixture to the pudding mixture and stir until well blended. Pour the mixture over the cookies and bananas and cover with the remaining cookies. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Pumpkin Cookies

Have you ever tried to make pumpkin cookies look attractive, or even appetizing? Well I did today and decided it's near impossible, but even if these cookies aren't beauties to look at they taste scrumptious in your belly. I found this recipe on www.allrecipes.com, one of my favorite recipe websites. I like this site a lot because there are tons of recipes, and lots of reviews so you can see what people say about the food before you try it. These cookies were very highly rated, and I'd say pretty healthy. I changed up the recipe a bit by using applesauce instead of the oil, and half whole wheat flour (that might account for the brownish color, but you don't even taste it). I also used half the amount of chocolate chips the recipe called for, and there are still plenty. In fact the only fat in these cookies is in the one egg and the chocolate chips, but when you divide that by 30ish cookies, you're looking at a very low fat cookie. We've even been calling them breakfast around here lately. They only have 2 WW points each (and they are pretty big, I calculated the points with the recipe making 30 cookies but you could easily make them smaller). Give them a try, you'll be glad you did.

Pumpkin Cookies

1 cup canned pumpkin

1 cup white sugar

1/2 cup applesauce

1 egg

1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour (if you don't have any you could just use 2 cups white)

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon milk

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

	Combine pumpkin, sugar, applesauce, egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, ground cinnamon, and salt. Dissolve the baking soda with the milk and stir in. Add flour mixture to pumpkin mixture and mix well.
	Add chocolate chips.
	Drop by spoonful on greased cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for approximately 10 minutes or until lightly brown and firm. Makes about 2 1/2 dozen cookies. Enjoy!

Be sure and see my sister Katie's Thanksgivng Traditions post over at Tangled and True. I love that girl.

Image from Tangled and True

New iPhone App...

It's the bad breath detective back on top of his game, this is seriously funny, maybe more so to me because it's my little brother, but it should give you a chuckle or two.

Thinking Thin

Attention Skinny People: read no further. I do not want to be held responsible for making skinny people skinnier. No, that would be a crime against humanity. But if you are like me and your curves have curves then you might want to try this taco soup recipe. It has guaranteed weight loss results (I guarantee it). I got this recipe on the very first night that I ever went to a Weight Watchers meeting, like 4 years ago, and have made this soup a "go to" when I want to drop a few pounds in a week. If you're like me and you want to enjoy the holidays (ie. bake and eat lots of yummy food) than you might want to lose a few pounds now to allow for all those extra seasonal calories.

Taco Soup (2 and 1/2 points per cup of soup)

3 cans any type of beans (I use pinto beans in chili sauce, black beans, and kidney beans and for heaven's sake rinse your beans so you don't leave that thick film on them)
2 cans of diced tomatoes (I usually use RoTel tomatoes for one of these two cans, but today when I made it I didn't have any RoTel tomatoes on hand so I used one can of diced tomatoes and one can of Herdez salsa, but beware these additions make for a spicy kick!)
1 can whole kernel corn
1 can water
1 lb. cooked ground beef
1 packet ranch dip mix
1 packet taco seasoning mix
1 can 4 oz. diced green chilies (if you use RoTel tomatoes or the salsa you don't need this)
1 medium onion diced

Brown your hamburger along with the diced onions until the hamburger is cooked through. Add seasonings and canned items and stir, simmer for one hour. Garnish with cilantro and fat free sour cream (they make it so much better!).


It's a really simple recipe, and it makes a lot of soup. If I am really trying to have a good weigh in this soup seriously helps. I usually have it for dinner a couple of nights and a lunch or two as well (it is possible to get sick of this though so it's no cabbage soup diet or anything). The soup is very filling, and I usually like to eat it with some fat free sour cream and some baked tortilla chips, but skip the cheese, you don't even need it. Unless you're skinny. Then I suggest some shredded cheddar cheese, and lots of it.


And does anyone else watch Project Runway? I decided that Carol Hannah looks like this dog from Lady and The Tramp (she's the one that sings "He's A Tramp"). I'm not trying to be mean, I like Carol, but she bears a striking resemblance to this dog in a cute sort of way. She's a cute and very talented girl, but she wears WAY too much eye makeup. And she could use a little help in the hair department as well. Carol Hannah if you read this feel free to find a picture of a dog that looks like me and post it on your blog for all to see, no hard feelings...

Nancia's Pizzeria

Usually Friday night around here means pizza. And lately that pizza has been the $5 buck pizza from Little Caesars, but I think we were all getting pretty sick of that, so last Friday I decided to make pizza. Dallas wanted to know where we were getting our pizza from and I said, Nancia's Pizzeria. He thought it was a real restaurant until he realized I meant that I was making the pizza. Anyway it ended up tasting really good, but the kids were wishing that they could take more part in the process. So yesterday I made the same dough, but rolled it into 4 pizza crusts instead of two, and made a pizza bar for the kids to create their very own personal pizzas. It turned out to be a lot of fun, and quite yummy. I used this pizza crust recipe that we love and use all the time. Then I set out the toppings, and our signature sauce-Ranch dressing (seriously try it), and let the kids have at it. One other ingredient that I love on pizza is Fennel Seeds. Just sprinkle a few on before you put the cheese on, they really add great flavor.




The great thing about these pizzas was that I rolled the crust pretty thin, and made decent sized pizzas so that we had enough left over for lunch today. I think that we might be eating at Nancia's Pizzeria more often, it's much better than Little Caesars, and a lot more fun!

The Tooth Fairy returns

Yesterday I volunteered in Dallas class at school and noticed a strange phenomenon going on amongst his peers. They all looked fairly normal until they opened their mouths, and that's when you saw it. Every single one of them looked like a toothless Hillbilly, or the kid on the cover of Mad magazine. I realized how grateful I am that you go through such an awkward stage of losing teeth when you are too young to care. In fact Hallie can't wait to lose her teeth because she thinks it's cool.


So Dallas recently lost another tooth and lucky for him the Tooth Fairy decided she'd better get back in his good graces so she put a little more effort into her offering. Dallas didn't get any old dollar bill this time, let alone one he'd seen before. I think she learned her lesson on that one. No this time the Tooth Fairy wanted to prove herself and left a Sacajawea golden dollar coin. I think the boy was a bit confused since he'd decided he didn't believe in her anymore, but let's just say this time there was some magic back in his eyes the morning after she appeared. That's how I like it, no more suspiciousness.

For My Primary Peeps

This month in Primary we are focusing on serving our families and others. So when I had to come up with something for sharing time last Sunday I decided that we needed some kind of service coupon that the kids could fill out, and give to their family for an act of service that was performed on their behalf.


Then I told the kids to come back next week and in the following weeks and report on the service they did. For each act of service the kids complete they can put a warm fuzzy into our jar. We are going to try to fill a jar with "warm fuzzies" just like President Monson spoke about in his conference talk. Once our jar is filled we'll have a treat or activity with the primary kids. I thought it would be fun to come up with a service project/activity to do once we've filled our jar. I picked a pretty big jar, so it could take a while, but I think the kids will have fun with it and hope to have a lot of service rendered in the meantime.


So how did I make my cute coupon? I did what I always do, I called upon my talented peeps, in this case it was my sister Katie to the rescue. Katie used her mad computer skills and came up with this coupon for me to use (there are four coupons per sheet). And her coupons turned out so cute I thought we had to share (with her permission of course). So here you go, feel free to steal this idea for sharing time, class time, or family home evening. Click here to print the service cards. Make sure you click on download (top left corner), and then open the adobe acrobat reader version to print, otherwise you'll get a condensed and cut off version. Let me know if there are any problems printing this!

And don't forget to sign up for Katie's Puj 100 tub giveaway! You still have a few days left to enter.