Peach and Raspberry Crumb Pie

Ever since learning that making your own basic pie crust is not only easy but tasty, I have not stopped making pies (and eating them).  Especially with so many fruits being available from strawberries to peaches to raspberries to blueberries to cherries.  I can't stop picking them up from the market!

This week's fruits of choice were peaches and raspberries.  For the filling, I used a recipe from The Ultimate Cook Book, which I had for a few years now but was never inspired by until now.  They have a section dedicated to fruit pies and you just mix and match the crust, filling, and topping.  How amazing is that!

Because I was using my tart pan, I went with the crumb topping found in my BHG New Cook Book instead of a double crust.  It only required brown sugar, flour, and butter.

Perfect combo of sweetness and tartness.  Gotta see how many more of these I can squeeze into the oven (and my pants) before the end of summer!

Donut Bread Pudding

I went through a bread pudding phase a few years ago.  I've made a wide range of bread pudding from the classic to the chocolate banana to the apple version.  So, imagine when my sister told me there was a donut bread pudding (adapted from All Recipes)!

Believing it might be too sweet, I had my sister bring sugar donuts instead of glazed donuts as the recipe suggests.  The custard base wasn't sweet at all.  Almost bland.  In the end, I had to make a powdered sugar glaze to pour all over the top.  So much tastier.

The Best Brownies

These incredibly moist cake-like brownies have a secret.  Besides containing Andes mint baking chips, they are made with whole wheat flour and dark chocolate.  So, they're practically "healthy" for you.  Well, that's what I told myself anyway as I inhaled 3 of them within minutes out of the oven.

The recipe is adapted from a tried and true Best Brownies recipe from Hershey's Kitchen.  I substituted all of the all-purpose flour for whole wheat flour, used Special Dark cocoa powder, and mixed in Andes baking chips.

The Best Carrot Cupcakes

When I came across Marzipan's blog post about the best carrot cake recipe, I had to add that to my to bake list as my own version was only okay.  I adapted this recipe into cupcakes in order to give some to one friend today and some to another friend tomorrow.  Because I wanted a slight crust to the frosting like the ones from those specialty cupcake stores, I tried a new cream cheese frosting from Cake Central.  To hint that these were carrot flavor, I threw on some orange sprinkles.

I'm not a huge carrot cake fan as the two friends which will be receiving these cupcakes but I tried one and did like it a lot.  I left out the raisins and the nuts by request; however, I think it would've shined a lot more with them.

Cupcake Bites

 I'm going to be baking a few different cake flavors in the next two weeks for a tasting; so, I had to make room in my freezer which was already full of cake scraps.  I had bags of lemon cake, chocolate cake, strawberry cake, and vanilla cake.  Unfortunately, I had to toss the bag of strawberry cake and vanilla cake as those suffered from freezer burn.  After my last somewhat successful attempt at one of Bakerella's creations, I decided to give it another go.  This time, I was inspired by her cupcake bites featured on The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

First, I started out by throwing the lemon cake and chocolate cake scraps into my food processor and giving it a few quick pulses to turn them into uniform size crumbs.  Then, I added a bit of vanilla buttercream frosting and mixed everything together until I got a consistency I wanted.  (No pictures of this step because I didn't realize how blurry they were until I uploaded them.)

Next, I rolled the mixture into cake truffles and placed them in the fridge for a few hours.  Just before taking them out of the fridge, I microwaved the chocolate candy melts in a plastic bag.  This made it easier to fill the candy mold.  Then, I dropped the cake ball right on top of the blob.  At this point, I realized all my cake balls were a bit too big for the mold but I really didn't want to reroll.  So, it made it a little trickier to handle during the second coating.

A few seconds in the freezer and they all fell out of the mold a lot easier than I expected.  I was trying to pry them out at first but then realized they just fall out when you flip the tray upside down, hah!

Then, I filled a condiment bowl with the pink candy melts and simply dunked the exposed top, trying to cover everything up until the edge of the chocolate covering.  To finish off the cupcake look, I added a bunch of sprinkles.