Every single year around the holidays, my family makes our famous Rocky Road Candy which melts in your mouth at the first taste. It is a blend of chocolate, peanuts, and marshmallows, that leaves you with a peanut butter after taste. I debated posting the recipe for the longest time, because it is my favorite thing and it is something that has stuck in our family for years. I have seen numerous recipes for it online which have never really been exactly the same, but it is probably out there somewhere if I bother searching long enough.

The history of making this basically started after attendance to our first family reunion. Every five years there is a “family book” with an update of each family and how they are doing. One year, they decided to include family recipes so we all could share. My Grandma Connie put her famous Rocky Road Candy that she made every year for the holidays and my Mom continued on with the tradition which then led to my little brother, CK, also continuing the tradition. Below is the recipe for you to enjoy this holiday season:

Connie’s Rocky Road Candy

Ingredients:

• (1) 12oz bag semi-sweet chocolate chips
• (1) 11 oz bag butterscotch chips
• (1) cup chunky peanut butter
• (2) cups salted peanuts
• (6) cups miniature mashmallows

Directions:

• Melt first three ingredients over double boiler (you can also do this in the microwave).
• Stir until well blended.
• Add peanuts and marshmallows, mix together, and spread into a 9×13 buttered pan (or any size that fits the concoction).
• Chill until firm, cut into squares, and serve!

Let me know if you have any questions about the process and I’m more than happy to help. Hope you enjoy as much as I do!

I am so backlogged with blog posts and finding the time to put them together, so I am going to try and get a lot of them done within the next couple of weeks. Expect a lot of posts in your feed if you subscribe!

My brother CK turned 20 on June 30th and always requests a cake for his birthday. Of course he picks an all chocolate cake. One funny thing I have to add in here is that, I asked him if he just wanted cupcakes and he says, “No I don’t like cupcakes.” I look at him strangely for a few minutes and ask him if he realizes what a cake and cupcakes are made out of. Obviously the same ingredients, just in a different form. His response? “I want a BIG cake, because I want a BIG slice. Not those small things.” His point was made. Anyway, on to the chocolate cake…I am actually not a big fan of chocolate, because it is too sweet for me, but he wanted a Double Chocolate Layer Cake. Which I think for him, is almost a continuous tradition. Anyway, those of you that don’t know how to make a chocolate cake, it is actually pretty simple if you don’t do it from scratch like we did. You can just go out and buy your favorite cake mix and some frosting and they usually have the directions on back. But if you want the whole baking experience, you can find a recipe online like this one. The cake ended up coming out pretty well for the quick amount of time that it was done in and frosted. Yes, the frosting was applied very fast, but all chocolate cakes are better messy. I do have to get a cake platter though for serving, because it was left on a regular large dinner plate.

VERY important side note that you must do or else the cake won’t taste like awesomeness: Part of the baking experience includes licking frosting off of your fingers afterward. It is the best part. Trust me.

So I did it again. I have always been a big foodie if you haven’t already noticed with my reviews of restaurants in the past, but learning how to make food yourself is even better.

The weekend of Mother’s Day, I found my time to be a little less consumed with work and more time for things I wanted to do before I spent Sunday with my Mom. I have a ton of cookbooks that were handed down to me from my Mom, so I decided to look around for a good recipe online where I had almost all of the ingredients and could make something really tasty. I ended up making some miniature Cinnamon Streusel Cakes and Chocolate Chip Cookies. The two snack flavors of chocolate and cinnamon ended up being a good mix in tastes and eating them while they are still hot is even better.

Streusel basically means something that is scattered or sprinkled normally on top of muffins, cakes, or breads. Normally people make their streusels in a bundt cake form, but I changed these up to make them an individual snack for everyone by putting them in cupcake form. It had a light cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top of it and was baked with cinnamon on the inside as well. This was a recipe I found in a cookbook, but I found one online that was similar here.

And of course the chocolate chip cookies are a very simple and have to be almost everyone’s favorite cookie. They are very simple to make and is a recipe everyone should remember, so I am throwing in the Nestle recipe as well for you.

So I debated blogging about this, because I didn’t want to steal the snack thunder from Scotty Snacks, but I just had to mention how awesome these were. I was preparing a big meal and did not know what types of desserts to include in the mix, so I walked past the baking aisle of Safeway and noticed a cake mix package of Lemon Poppy Seed Cupcakes. I ended up finding one and the cupcakes came out amazingly tasty. My lemon glaze came out a little lighter than the picture in Cupcake RN’s blog and I did not use as much, but rather a light drizzle. The lemon flavor was not too sour at all like most lemon flavored foods are, so I enjoyed these even more. Sorry I don’t have a picture of the cherry ones, but I ended up making those out of a plain yellow cake recipe I already had and making a cherry flavored glaze that turned out delicious! If the recipe wasn’t called for the cupcakes to be made this specific way, I would have actually thought they were muffins instead. They were very light and didn’t taste too sugary like most cupcakes do. I absolutely recommend trying out this recipe if you get a chance.

I was particularly surprised that I had enough time to actually bake something, because of all the work and traveling lately. I know it is a bit funny that I enjoyed the short time it took to make this, but being able to sit still for at least an hour without working or doing homework is a very rare find for me. Hopefully with work calming down, I will not have to travel as much and will be able to not only make tasty foods, but find time to myself and get all my personal things done that have been waiting for me.