Super Chewy Sugar Cookies

I remember when I was in college, they used to sell some of the best sugar cookies in the on campus cafe.  The other day I found an awesome recipe for sugar cookies, "The Best Chewy Sugar Cookies Recipe" from AddaPinch.com and I have to say, it is one of the best sugar cookies I've ever made.

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

• 1½ cups granulated sugar*

• 1 egg

• 2¼ cups all-purpose flour

• ½ teaspoon baking powder

• ½ teaspoon Kosher salt ( I just used regular as it was what I had on hand)

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

• ¼ cup granulated sugar for rolling cookies

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350º F. 
2. Cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.** Add egg and mix until well-combined.
3. Stir in flour, baking powder, salt, and vanilla.
4. Scoop cookie dough by the tablespoon full and roll into a ball.
5. Add granulated sugar to a large bowl for rolling cookie dough in before baking. Place each ball of cookie dough into the bowl of granulated sugar and roll to coat well. Place cookie dough onto baking sheet, spacing about 1½-inches to 2 inches apart. Lightly press each cookie down. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until lightly browned.***

Things we did

1. *Sugar - Now, I have a sweet tooth and I loved them, but some of my kids said they were too sweet (can you believe it?)  so you may want to decrease the amount of sugar.

2. **Creaming the butter and sugar. I usually always cream the butter and sugar in a recipe with just a wooden spoon but this time I decided to use the mixer for the three minutes and the dough came out so light and fluffy!  It was probably the softest cookie dough I've ever worked with.

3.  ***The directions call for cooking them 8-10. After 8 minutes they didn't look so done to me, so I left them in for 10 and I still wasn't satisfied so I ended up leaving them in for 15 minutes. I think this produced a crispier cookie than if I had left them in for the time specified, but they still had a great deal of chewiness to them, so I was satisfied.  I definitely want to try these again, in shaa Allah and I may reduce the time in the oven some from what I did this time as I know they still continue to cook on the cookie sheet for a bit.

Popcorn Balls!

For Eid, we made popcorn balls. They were super easy to make and tasty. I used a recipe from Taste of Home.com

Ingredients

• 7 quarts popped popcorn
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup light corn syrup
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• Food coloring, optional

Directions

1. Place popcorn in a large baking pan; keep warm in a 200° oven.
2. In a heavy saucepan, combine the sugar, corn syrup, water and salt. Cook over medium heat until a candy thermometer reads 235° (soft-ball stage).
3. Remove from the heat. Add the butter, vanilla and food coloring if desired; stir until butter is melted. Immediately pour over popcorn and stir until evenly coated.
4. When mixture is cool enough to handle, quickly shape into 3-in. balls, dipping hands in cold water to prevent sticking. Yield: 20 servings.

Things We Did:

-7 Quarts of popped corn is about 28 cups. We used 3 bags of microwave popcorn which yielded around 28/29 cups.

-I made up one batch of the sugary sweetness and poured it over the popped corn but it didn't seem like enough to coat them enough so I made another batch.

-Our corn syrup had vanilla flavoring in it already so I probably could have skipped adding vanilla but I added it anyway.

-We used two colors of food coloring (each batch of the sugar mixture was a different color). Although you can't really see it in the pictures, our popcorn balls were red, green (and yellow from the popcorn itself)

-We got about 31 balls, not sure how big each ball was, we might have made them smaller as we got more balls than the 20 the recipe says it yields.

Our mixture bubbling

Right after we poured the mixture over the popcorn

These were really good and pretty easy to make, however they make you feel like you want to run to brush your teeth directly after eating them :)

Streusel Topping

If you've never made streusel topping for your quick breads such as muffins and banana bread, you definitely HAVE TO give it a try. It really spruces them up by not only making them look prettier but also making them even more tasty!

I have been putting streusel on my banana breads for years and yesterday I branched out and tried it on some cinnamon quick bread that I made. I've tried many recipes over the years, but I found one the other day and it's the best one I've made yet!

After mixing up the streusel, you top the bread/muffins with it THEN you bake it.

Streusel Topping

What you need:

• ½ cup packed brown sugar

• ½ cup all-purpose flour

• ¼ cup quick-cooking oats

• ¼ cup (4 tablespoons) butter, room temperature

What you do:

Mix together brown sugar, flour, oats and butter until about pea-sized crumbles form.

 Top the muffin batter with the streusel topping, then bake.

My 11 year old made banana bread all by himself this week (under my supervision and it sure was fun) and we used the streusel topping. This is the consistency after we mixed it up:

And this was our banana bread after baking: