Tea cookies and muscle fuel

I'm getting back on the baking bandwagon. I didn't get anything done while I wasn't feeling well, so it was a good thing we had enough on hand to get through without taking too desperate of measures.

This week I wanted to make a non-chocolate cookie as I have it in my plans to make peanut butter and chocolate granola bars(probably tomorrow). So I did some internet browsing and came up with a recipe for Swedish Butter Cookies from Taste of Home. Now, I have no idea if there is anything remotely Swedish about these, but that's what they call it.

The nice thing about this recipe is it calls for only very basic ingredients that you're likely to have on hand all the time.

Swedish Butter Cookies Recipe

I started with the ingredients. As I said, very basic. Do notice that I'm still using white sugar and regular white flour. I'm working on using up my more 'conventional' ingredients. I don't want to just throw things out, but I won't be rebuying things like this if I can help it.

He loves to mix. I would almost say that Ansel lives to mix! We did eventually have a melt down when the dough got to the point that he couldn't mix it.

The dough. It was sort of dry, but I packed it down and it got sticky enough.

Dough rolled out. It was sort of like rolling playdough, but not as forgiving. This would be fun for an older child(Kadin would have been ok with, but no way Ansel could have gotten it to stick together).

The cookies baked, cooling, and sugared. I would have taken a picture when it came out of the oven, but one of the tips I read said to cut the cookies immediately, so I made sure to do that.

They're basically crispy, buttery sugar cookies. I think they're good, but I don't know that I'd remake them. Not when there's so many other cookie options. I like that they're small, so I don't feel bad letting Ansel eat one or two here or there.

My husband has a thing for protein bars. His favorite has actually been more of a nutrition bar, namely the Zone Perfect Strawberry Yogurt Bar. I'm now left to wonder.... has he read the ingredients on that? There's actually a couple of things in there that are rather alarming. So, of course, I wanted to make this myself. I think the idea originally occured when I was watching Alton Brown. So, of course, I tried his recipe first.

Alton Brown's Protein Bar Recipe

This is a lot of stuff. I had to go out of my way to buy a couple of things to make this, like oat bran(which I never would have thought to buy) and soy protein powder. And yes, that IS plain old Skippy peanut butter. As I mentioned up above in reference to the cookies... I'm using up some things I have already. I got a heck of a deal on Skippy peanut butter a while back and stocked up. I used the end of this jar making the protein bars, and then I have one more jar. After that, I'll be buying fresh peanut butter from the store I buy most of our food from.

The other interesting thing that happened is that we discovered Ansel likes to eat plain, cold tofu. Who knew?

There was a lot of mixing. Ansel got to help a lot. And I could have taken pictures, but.... the majority of time, it all looked like vomit. And... it was terribly unappetizing. You never would want to try any of this. I even thought about giving up at some point. So here's the dough right before I spread it in the pan. Oh! And here's a picture of the unfiltered apple juice I used. I forgot it in the ingredient shot.

These looked pretty good coming out. That's all fruit, not chocolate, by the way.

And cut and wrapped up. I actually cut it into sixteen servings. I froze some of them since there's no way my husband will eat sixteen in a week. And I'd really rather my kids not get too used to meal replacement items. They have the time to eat "real" food, and I'm the one who has to prepare it for them anyway. So why the heck not?

And that's it for that! I did actually manage to also make dinner on this day. We had steak, baked potatoes, and salad. Very imaginative, don't you think?