Sopapilla Cheesecake Pinwheels

Hello everyone :) Happy Friday!! I thought we could start out our weekend with an excellent little dessert. Trust me, these are awesome! :)

There is NO WAY this recipe can be healthy, but by substituting the Neufchatel cheese for Cream cheese you save yourself some calories. Check out why this substitution is AWESOME here

Ingredients:
1 can Crescent Rolls
1 package Neufchatel Cheese, softened
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. Vanilla
Cinnamon & Sugar
Optional: 1 Tbsp. Butter

To start off, spray a piece of foil with nonstick cooking spray and unroll your crescent dough onto it. You DO NOT want to tear it into triangles, leave it in one big sheet. If your crescent dough starts to break apart, just push it back together with your fingers. In a small mixing bowl, stir together your neufchatel cheese, sugar, and vanilla. Once mixed, spread this mixture over your crescent dough. Next, sprinkle cinnamon & sugar on top of your cream cheese mixture. There is no specific amount to use of this, just however much you like! I LOVE cinnamon & sugar so I used quite a bit :) See pictures below:

 

Now, roll your crescent dough up into a log (long-ways... or hot dog style for my visual learners ;)). It should look like this:

Now, wrap your log up in the foil and stick it in the freezer. I left mine in there while I cooked dinner which turned out to be about an hour, but you don't have to do it this long. You just want your log stiff enough so that it doesn't squish to much when you cut it up.

Preheat your oven to 350. Once your log is stiff, take it out of the freezer and cut it into small pieces ( about 1/2 in thick). I placed mine on parchment paper, but you can just use a regular cookie sheet if you don't have any. Here is what your pieces will look like:

Now for the optional step. If you so desire (I desired!) you can melt a tablespoon of butter and brush it on top of your pinwheels to make them a little more flaky. This step is completely optional though.

Bake your pinwheels for 12-15 minutes or until golden brown. Here are some pictures of your finished product:

 

 

These are awesome with some honey drizzled on them as well. :)

 

Happy Cooking

& Enjoy!!

 

Loaded Baked Potato Casserole

Alright guys, confession time. I hate casseroles. Seriously, the thought of a casserole grosses me out. The thought of multiple ingredients mixed together in 1 pan is just not my thing, so when I saw this recipe here I was less than thrilled to try it. To my surprise... this thing is GOOD! Even for casserole haters like me, it's a treat.

Since Thanksgiving is a time when there are plenty of casseroles around, I thought I'd give you another casserole to add to your arsenal. Plus, this recipe is really easy!

Ingredients:
1/2 bag Shredded Frozen Hash browns
16 oz. Sour Cream
1 packet Dry Ranch Mix
3 oz. bacon bits (or about 10-12 slices cooked & crumbled bacon)
1 cup of your favorite cheese (I used Colby Jack)

I used store bought bacon bits in this to save time, but the bacon bits can easily be made from regular bacon strips. Just cook your bacon strips and then crumble them up.

To make this casserole, preheat your oven to 400. Combine all your ingredients in a large mixing bowl and stir until combined. Next, take an 8 x 8 square pan (or a 13 x 9 if you double the recipe) and spray it with non-stick cooking spray. Pour your ingredient mixture into the pan and spread it out evenly. Here is what your casserole should look like:

Bake your casserole for 45 min-1 hour (until the top is light brown & crispy). That's it! You are finished! Wasn't that easy? Here is a picture of your finished product:

Happy Cooking

& Enjoy!!

Mesquite BBQ Chicken (Crockpot)

As you all may have noticed, I have been quite the busy little bee with grad school lately. When you are busy, who doesn't like a really quick recipe?! Seriously, this recipe take about 1 minute to put together, and then about 10 minutes or less in prep time right before you eat... AND you can put the meat in still frozen. This is my kind of meal! Another great part, there are only 3 ingredients (4 if you are making a sandwich or baked potato)! :) Grab your crockpots and lets make some food!

This makes about 6 servings, but if you are by yourself, just use less chicken, sauce, etc. I usually put this on when I leave for work and school in the morning and it is ready when I get home.

Ingredients:
3 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or 6 small), still frozen
18 oz. bottle Mesquite BBQ Sauce
1 packet dry ranch dressing

To make this, pour your BBQ sauce and dry ranch into the crockpot and mix together (I usually put a little water in my BBQ sauce bottle after I pour it in to get the remaining sauce out and add some moisture, it comes out to about 1/4 cup). Next throw your chicken in there and coat it in your sauce. Put your lid on and set your chicken to cook on low for 6-8 hours (or on high for 3-4 hours). Here is what your chicken should look like before cooking:

Once your chicken is done, take two forks, shred it, and then throw it back into the sauce. Since it's cooked in the crockpot it will literally just fall apart. Here is what your finished product looks like:

YUM!!! I usually put it on sandwiches the first night we have it and then the next night cook some baked potatoes and have it on top with some sour cream. This time I splurged and I bought some of those nice Hawaiian bread buns, they were good!

 

Happy Cooking

& Enjoy!!

Posting Schedule

Hey everyone! I'm so so so sorry I haven't been holding up my usual 4 posts per week lately. The semester is getting down to the grind and so I am not going to be able to keep that up as of now. I promise I will give you at least 1 thing a week, but until after December, that is all I can promise. As always, let me know if you have any special requests for posts, I'm ALWAYS looking for new ideas and new recipes/DIY projects to try! You can email me at allthingswalkerblog@gmail.com.

Peanut Butter Cookies

About two weeks ago was my father-in-law's birthday. I wanted to make him something special from the heart, so I decided to go with some peanut butter cookies. Peanut Butter cookies are one of his favorites AND they are a crowd pleaser. :)

Best part about this recipe: It's SUPER easy and the cookies look like a professional made them when you are done. :)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup Sugar
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Butter (1 stick), room temperature
1/2 cup Peanut Butter
1 Egg
1 1/4 cup Flour
3/4 tsp. Baking Soda
1/2 tsp. Baking Powder
1/4 tsp. Salt
Optional Garnish: Hershey Kisses

To make these little beauties, put your butter in a mixing bowl and mix until creamy. Next, add in your sugar and brown sugar and mix for 2 minutes. Then, add in your egg and peanut butter and mix until incorporated. Finally, add in your flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt (this part might have to be done with a spoon).

Take your mixture and stick it in the freezer for 30-45 minutes. This will make your dough cold and hard so that it is easy to shape. Once your time is up, preheat your oven to 350, shape your dough into 1-1 1/4 inch balls, and lay out on a cookie sheet about 2 inches apart. You shape your cookies by rolling them around in your hands. If the cookie mixture starts to stick to your hands, put the dough back in the fridge for about 10-15 minutes before continuing. Here is what they should look like at this point:

 

Next, grab a small cup and fill it with water. Take a fork, dip it in the water, and make a criss-cross pattern on your cookie. You should need to dip your fork in the water about every 2-3 cookies.

 

 

 

Here is what your cookies should look like at this point:

Bake your cookies for 10-15 minutes (depending on how chewy you want them). Here is what they should look like:

If you are adding the Hershey Kiss, unwrap your kisses and press them down into the middle of your cookies while they are still hot. Here is what your final product should look like:

YUM!!!

Happy Cooking
& Enjoy!!

 

 

 

Almond Poppyseed Bread

How is everyone doing the day after Halloween? We had ZERO trick or treaters so it was an early night for us. The extra sleep was nice but still made me a little sad.

I got some bread pans for my birthday from my sisters and ever since then I have been looking for good bread recipes to try. I had never made bread before so this was going to be an experiment (as most things in our house are). Let me tell you, this experiment was DEFINITELY a success. This bread was SO good, we ate both loaves in about 2 days. :) I found the recipe here. This recipe is REALLY easy to make and is awesome!!

Ingredients:
-Crisco
-Extra Flour

Bread:

3 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

3 eggs

1 1/8 cups vegetable oil

2 1/4 cups sugar

1 1/2 cups milk

1 1/2 T. poppy seeds

1 1/2 tsp almond extract

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 tsp melted butter

Glaze:

1/4 cup orange juice

3/4 cup sugar

1/2 tsp almond extract

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 1/2 tsp melted butter

 

To start out, preheat your oven to 350. While the oven is preheating, you need to grease your bread pans (I used two large pans). This is done by rubbing a paper towel in Crisco and rubbing it all over the pan and then coating the Crisco in flour. Below is a picture of the Crisco on the pan, before the flour coating.

 

 

Next, mix all your bread ingredients together in a large bowl and pour into your bread pans. Here is what it should look like (and you can see some of the flour coating)

 

Cook your bread pans in the oven for 45-60 minutes. If you used dark pans like I did, you want to start checking your bread at 45 minutes to make sure it doesn't over cook. Your bread will be done when it is golden brown, and when a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Here is a picture:

 

When you start checking your loaves at 45 minutes, it is time to start the glaze cooking. In a small sauce pan, combine all your glaze ingredients and heat over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved (when you can't see anymore sugar granules in the glaze mixture). Once your glaze is done, remove your bread from their pans and pour the glaze over them (while they are still hot). I used a plate for this and it seemed to work well. The glaze will fall off the bread, so use a spoon to scoop up the extra and pour it back on top and on the sides until it is all gone. The goal is to have the whole loaf coated. Here is a picture of mine:

 



 

Trust me, you will love this stuff!!! The glaze will harden on the outside of the bread which tastes awesome and protects the moisture inside.

 

Happy Cooking

& Enjoy!!

DIY Halloween Party

Happy Halloween! I know there are a ton of differing opinions on this "holiday", many of which are religiously charged, but lets put all the away for a little while and have some fun! I love Halloween, not because I like to be scared... in fact I literally detest being scared.... I love it because it's an opportunity to spend time with friends, family, and people you need to catch up with, all while being silly and dressing up in the process. Not to mention, Halloween calls for some really great cooking and crafting! :)

Today I'm featuring all the things involved in the Halloween Party the official taste tester and I hosted last night. Get ready, this post is going to be packed full of fun things! The graduate program I am involved in is a cohort model which means we all go through the same classes together at the same time. Every year a new cohort comes in so, this campus organization we have works to unite all of us in this crazy journey. Trust me, it's always good to have a support system! Last night, everyone came over in the first and second year cohorts to enjoy some food and fun together.

As yall know, I love to cook AND I love Pinterest so this party was my opportunity to marry my two loves. As someone at the party said, Pinterest was all up in that party last night!! Don't worry about time either, most of these snacks take barely any time to make and can be made tonight before your Halloween party. :)

The first snack I had was the Monster Cake Pops from yesterday's post. You can find the recipe for that here. I decided to go with some variety and make some Ghost Pops too. These are made the same way, except they use white chocolate instead of green. To make these extra special, wrap a Styrofoam block in some black scrapbook paper, preferably one that looks "Halloweeny".

Next, I wanted to make some broomsticks I saw on pinterest here. These are SO cute and SO easy to make. I turned on the TV and had these done before the first commercial break. All you need for these is a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and a Bag of stick pretzels. To make them, you just unwrap the Reese's and stick the pretzel in the top. Here is a picture of them:

 

As you can see from the picture above, my broomsticks shared a tray with the creepy eyeballs I made. You can find those here.Out of everything at the party, these eyeballs were the biggest hit. By the end of the night that side of the tray had been demolished! To make them, you need white chocolate baking disks (same ones you use for Cake Pops), square or round pretzels, and chocolate chips. An optional ingredient is the brown or red sprinkle sticks (I used brown because I couldn't find any red). To make these, simply lay out your pretzels on a baking sheet and place one chocolate disk on top. Heat your oven to 350, and then cook your eyeballs for about 3-4 minutes (they are done when the chocolate is shiny). Once you take your eyeballs out of the oven, immediately put a chocolate chip in the white chocolate, pointed side down. Then, if you are using the sprinkles, add those on to look like eye veins. Here is what your finished product looks like:

The next thing I made were some witch hat cookies that you can find here. Out of everything at the party, these were my personal favorite. These are really easy to make too (theme here? I think so!). For these you need some Keebler Fudge Stripe Cookies, Orange Frosting, and some Hershey's Kisses. You can make your own frosting, but I was in a hurry and couldn't find orange food coloring so I just bought some. The time it saved was totally worth the extra $2 to me. Take your cookies and put them chocolate side up. Then unwrap your Hershey's kiss, add some icing to the bottom and stick  them together. These were quick to make too and were fabulous. Here are some pictures:

The final thing I made were some Bones. To make these, all you need are some mini marshmallows, pretzel sticks (I bought 1 bag for both the broomsticks and the bones and still had over half the bag left), and some white chocolate (I used the same white chocolate disks from the cake pops and the eyeballs). To make these, stick one mini marshmallow on each end of the pretzel stick and then dip in white chocolate. Then, place them on some white chocolate to dry for about an hour. Here is a picture of the finished product:

To finish everything off, and so we would have something to drink, I bought some orange Hawaiian punch and put it in a beverage dispenser. I highly recommend a beverage dispenser if you do a lot of entertaining. They are easy to use and make the presentation of your party look so much nicer. We got ours at Walmart for $20. I also, bought some blue Hawaiian punch and put it in a punch bowl with a frozen skull in it. I bought the ice mold at Target for $4 and it really made the punch look cool. I added a few gummy worms into the water before I froze it and it turned out very colorful! Also, you can use the mold year after year if you are careful removing the ice! Here is a picture:

 

For our main dish, I picked up a 6 ft sub from Walmart and some chips. These are fairly affordable at $28 for 30-40 people. That's less than $1 per person! Not to mention, it's a great conversation starter when people first get there and notice it. The table we had would only fit 4 feet of sub at a time, so we just kept the other part in our fridge. All the veggies you see in the picture come with the sub when you order it, and then I picked up some chip bags to go with it.

 

 

So, to put it all together I have included pictures of the whole thing at the bottom along with pictures of our guests. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and the snacks!

 

The spread

 

Poor Jeremy, he was the only guy there from the whole program!

 

We had a costume contest and my friend Nancy won in her Frog costume. I picked up her trophy at Target for $2.50. I would highly recommend doing the costume contest, it really gets people into the party for not a lot of money!

 

Maggie, although not thrilled about her costume, was a cat getting eaten by a shark.

I was a peacock and the official taste tester was Brutus. Here is a picture of the back of my costume, which I am proud of because I made it!

 

 

 

Happy Party Planning

& Happy Halloween!!