Strawberry Crunch Monkey Bread

June 3, 2022 Amanda Plott

So you know those strawberry shortcake ice creams with the crumbly bits of strawberry crunch on the outside? So I may have come across the crumbs, and yes, you can actually buy them! Now what does one do with strawberry crunch crumbs? Well, obviously make some sort of tasty strawberry sweet! That’s when the idea for this Strawberry Crunch Monkey Bread came to be.

Take it as a breakfast, brunch, or even dessert. This nostalgic twist on monkey bread has to be one of my new favorites. It’s ridiculously easy to make too, just as most monkey breads are. Now, there really wasn’t a whole lot to do in the ways of making this lightened up. But, I did sub out some of the sugars for natural sweeteners…

Confetti Shortbread Cookies

May 31, 2022 Amanda Plott

Pride month starts tomorrow and I’m going to play around with rainbows in the kitchen as much as I possible can to celebrate. So here’s to hoping that these Confetti Shortbread Cookies will be the first of many Pride friendly treats and eats to come along for the next 30 days or so. I’m no stranger to shortbread cookies and I can tell you first hand that the dough can be more than a little finicky. But, the dough for these Confetti Shortbread Cookies was simple, easy to make, and didn’t give me much fuss at all.

Shortbread cookies are crumbly and buttery and sort of melt away in your mouth, and these here are no exception. Even with less sugar, these Confetti Shortbread Cookies are perfectly sweet and cut out really well with hardly any spreading at all…

Giant Monster Cookies

May 22, 2022 Amanda Plott

From Cookie Monster Cookies, now to these Giant Monster Cookies! I love making BIG cookies. These Giant Monster Cookies are peanut butter dough based and are loaded up with chocolate chips and M&M’s! They are fairly easy to make and all come together in one bowl with no chilling required, which quite honestly is one of my favorite parts.

The peanut butter in these cookies leave them perfectly soft and a little crumbly. I was sure to swap out all of the sugar for sweetener based alternatives. You should be able to use whichever brand you enjoy the most. My natural sweetener is stevia based and measures cup-for-cup like sugar, but the brown sugar blend that I currently have uses half of what standard brown sugar calls for…

Strawberry Waffles

May 19, 2022 Amanda Plott

I took a little bit of extra time this week to make myself some breakfast and I was not disappointed. These Strawberry Waffles were the perfect little bit of summer sweet strawberry to wake up to. I made sure that these waffles were from scratch too. And while they do take a few extra steps to make, they are definitely worth it!

The texture of these waffles is a bit more dense due to all the real strawberry goodness in there. It’s sort of on par with how banana bread is more dense and moist than a standard white bread due to the additional moisture from the fruit. But don’t worry, they still end up crisp on the outside and spongy on the inside!…

Easy Key Lime Pie

May 7, 2022 Amanda Plott

Key lime pie is one of my favorites. Not that I’d turn any fruit pie away, but there’s just something about key limes! I love that it’s a creamy textured pie that is cut through with the slightly bitter and bright notes that come along with a key lime. I haven’t made a key lime pie in a good long while, so I thought I’d whip up a super easy from scratch one to be able to enjoy on this very warm Texas weekend.

This Easy Key Lime Pie is made with just a few ingredients - six to be exact! And 5 of those ingredients are pretty standard to most home pantries. The only thing slightly exotic is the key limes themselves! Being as there are so few ingredients, there isn’t a whole lot of swaps you can make to adjust this into a more health conscious pie, but I somehow managed!…

Cookie Monster Cookies

May 1, 2022 Amanda Plott

Everything in moderation, right? These cookies are definitely a lot more decadent than I’m used sharing and enjoying, but I love a good big cookie. And I love anything cookie monster-esque. So, when I saw the original idea for these stuffed cookies, I just knew that I was going to have to do something similar and in a little bit more of a lightened up way, at least as much as I could manage anyway.

I did stuff my cookie monster cookies just a little bit differently and made a few sways to healthify them in my own way. These cookies start out with a from scratch blue chocolate chip cookie dough that is then stuffed with regular chocolate chip cookie dough AND an Oreo cookie…