Easy Holiday Latte

I love my Keurig, but I have found myself at Starbucks a lot more recently, for one simple reason: I am a sucker for holiday flavors. I love pumpkin spice lattes, gingerbread and caramel brûlée lattes, and peppermint mochas. In order to save a little money, I've been trying to create holiday coffees that I can make at home, without buying special syrups. 

My old stand by is an easy pumpkin spice latte. I brew a Cafe Escapes Vanilla Latte kcup and stir in a little pumpkin pie spice. My newest favorite flavor is the gingerbread cookie latte. It starts with the vanilla latte, which is a pretty good base because it is creamy, but lends itself well to adding other flavorings. Then I add some ginger and cinnamon, and before I stir it all up, I stick the end of my stir spoon in molasses, stirring the molasses and spices into the latte all at the same time. 

I'd love to hear your favorite coffee recipes, feel free to share!

Strike out

I had it all planned, I was going to blog about how I made French bread this afternoon. I was going to talk about how I was dying for meatball subs, but I didn't have any buns or any good bread at all really. I kept trying to think of something else to make for dinner, and then it his me, duh! I can make my own French bread!

I was planning on telling you where I got the recipe, and sharing how easy it was, but then, well, I'm still trying to figure out what happened...

I've made bread before, lots of bread, I'm no stranger to using yeast. And the recipe that I found on Pinterest had a lot of great reviews, and it really was easy, but it tasted nothing like French bread, it didn't really look like it either.  It didn't taste bad, we used it to make meatball subs, which were wonderful, but I can't very well recommend a eclipse that I will never use again.

I'll just stick to buying day old French bread from the grocery store. That's all I've got for you today. Oh, no, wait, I did finish my fingerless gloves, they turned out cute huh?!

Easy muffins!

I'm giving a presentation at a teaching conference in April with some of my favorite ladies, so we got together this morning to get down to business and finish up our presentation. Of course I couldn't pass up an occasion for some baked goods, so I through together some very, very easy Banana chocolate chip muffins. Here's my recipe for your next brunch - they got rave reviews this morning (I may have eaten two...).

Banana chocolate chip muffins
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
2 cups mashed bananas
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup mini chocolate chips

Mix together sugar, oil, and eggs until well blended, add bananas. When all wet ingredients are mixed together add salt, baking soda, and flour until moistened. Finally add chocolate chips and spoon into muffin tins. Bake at 350 degrees F for 25 minutes or until tops are golden.

See, I told you it was easy. After all of the hard work that we got done this morning, today I am especially grateful for lazy Saturday afternoons. Usually my Saturdays are crazy, with all kinds of errands to run, places to be, things to get ready for. So today I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to just sit and do nothing!