Laugenbrezel (German Soft Pretzels)

This is not the super soft, sweet pretzel that many malls offer. This has a bagel like texture that is much better I think! Salt as much or as little as you like and serve with a favorite mustard or cheese sauce.

Apple Crisp

We do not follow this recipe precisely. Depending on who is making the crisp, and how many apples we have, we often fill our pan 3/4 of the way full because we really like apples. Instead of cutting in cold butter, ours is usually softened and we just mix it with the topping ingredients. Since we do not like super sweet apple crisp, we use one cup sugar in the topping, but use more if making for company. If the topping seems a little dry, we add extra butter to the top when we put the apple crisp in the oven.

While this is great for dessert with vanilla ice cream, we often eat it for dinner. We also enjoy it warm for breakfast with milk.

Aunt Bonnie’s (Reble) 12 Grain/Seed Bread

We asked Aunt Bonnie for a good bread recipe when we were in Colorado. She was super sweet and gave us this recipe plus all the ingredients that we needed to make it. While Aunt Bonnie found all the ingredients and Adrian ground everything, we enjoyed spending the afternoon just chatting and being able to be with Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Bill. We then walked back “home” to enjoy the rest of our lazy Sunday.

Red River Date Muffins

Mom really likes Red River Cereal and wanted me to try it. I agree. It is very good! However, it takes awhile to cook, so we decided to look for muffin recipes that use it. After cooling the muffins, we freeze them for an easy breakfast. Just remember to pull early so they can thaw out.

Cinnamon Rolls (with Caramel Option)

This recipe is one we often use for Christmas or for the children’s breakfasts as they head to summer camp. They are easy to turn into caramel rolls by a simple step that I included.

If you prefer to make the dough early, you can form the rolls, place in pan and then cover with heavy aluminum foil. Place in the refrigerator at least 12 hours, but not longer than 24. Then, when ready to bake, place unwrapped pan in cold oven and bake until golden brown (35-40 min).

Wishing Cookies

Aunt Bonnie made us these cookies for the first time nine years ago. She told us that “if you break them into three pieces without talking, your wish comes true”. It has never been proven, since my kids can’t stop talking long enough to break a cookie into three pieces 🙂

Chocolate Chip Cookies

August 4th is National chocolate chip cookie day.

For some reason, I did not bring a chocoate chip cookie recipe when we moved to Slovakia.  My friend, Joan Britton, gave me this recipe and told me the dough was really thick (her recipe called for one egg), but was the best recipe.  I could not find chocolate chips there, so I just cut up chocolate bars.

We took them to work to share and I often left out the chocolate for our friend who was allergic to it.  The cookies are still very good without chocolate!

When we moved overseas again, the eggs were smaller and we discovered two eggs worked very well.  We also could not find brown sugar, so we started using molasses instead.  Even though we can get brown sugar here, we prefer being able to adjust the molasses to our own personal tastes.

Blondies

These are just a very simple chocolate chip bar cookie.

Pretzels

If you are looking for a sweet, mall like pretzel, this is not it. This is also a good recipe for adding sourdough discard.