use real butter

Recipe: cookie butter truffles

My refrigerator is packed to the hilt with cookie doughs, candy fillings, and other ingredients for assorted baked goodies. We are coming down to the wire in the next couple of days and it’s always a miracle when I can send the packages of homemade treats out the door. I’ve cruised through five pounds of butter and it looks like I’m going to have to get some more to finish this year’s deliveries and shipments. Part of the reason for my cookie frenzy is because we got a nice dump of snow (finally!) Saturday, so Jeremy and I got out early to catch some first tracks on the mountain. The other part of the reason for the perceived time pressure is because I had to wait until this non-cold finally passed before I could start making cookies to give to other people… and dogs.

the beautiful view from corona chair at eldora

neva inspects the pumpkin peanut butter treats before they go in the oven

Are you the type to walk into the grocery store and browse before you decide what to buy or do you go in with a grocery list? After a couple of decades of data, I know for a fact that I need to walk in with a grocery list. It saves me both time and money. This is particularly true if I go shopping when I’m hungry. But sometimes, even with a list in hand, not having eaten anything by 3 pm means the likelihood of unauthorized items appearing in my basket will increase. So it happened last week as I wheeled through Trader Joe’s looking for a handful of things jotted on my notepad. And then I saw the cookie butter. Plunk – into the basket it went. Then the speculoos cookies. Plunk. I wasn’t sure what would become of them, but I figured I would hash that out later. And I did come up with something eventually – cookie butter truffles. I just wanted to see if they would be good.

speculoos cookies and speculoos cookie butter

let’s make truffles: cookie butter, salt, chocolate, butter, cookies, confectioner’s sugar

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Recipe: apple bacon cheddar dog (abcd) treats

While working on our annual digital year in photos, I scrolled through a lot of snaps I took of Neva when she was a wee pup. I had completely forgotten about them because I was in such a state of sleep-deprivation for a period of three or four months starting on May 23, 2015. Jeremy was in the other room, but he could tell I was looking at puppy pictures because I kept squealing and cooing at the computer. Neva was so cute, but she was so feral compared to a normal dog – because she wasn’t a normal dog. She was a puppy.

these cute little faces will suck up all of your time

Oh, but now Neva is becoming a really good girl as she settles into a routine of the familiar. She’s now used to watching dogs, cars, and people passing through our neighborhood. She doesn’t flip out when she sees birds anymore (there are so.many.birds). Her favorite places to nap depend on where the sun is hitting the house. Neva knows to ask when she wants to go outside instead of sneaking into the office to piddle next to Jeremy’s desk. I remember how it took forever and a day to walk anywhere because she had to put every damn pine cone, rock, stick, blade of grass, and flower in her mouth. We loved her little adorable puppiness, but we both knew from the start that we couldn’t wait for her to grow into a dog.

Neva always knows when I’m making HER treats in the kitchen. She’ll hang around patiently at my feet until I pop them in the oven, at which point she stares longingly at the oven. I’m not sure how much variety Neva needs in her treat selection, but I know for a fact that these treats are her number one all-time favoritest treats on the planet. I threw them together last month with a bunch of leftover ingredients and she’s been pretty devoted to them ever since. They smell fantastic while they bake because duh – the treats are made with cheddar cheese and bacon! I used applesauce as a healthy binder, along with an egg, and threw in some parsley for her breath. So I wanted to share this with anyone looking to make some extra wonderful goodies for their canine companions.

applesauce, bacon, cheddar cheese, egg, parsley, whole wheat flour

prepping the ingredients for mixing

chop the bacon and parsley fine, especially if you are making small treats

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Recipe: chocolate budino

I am routinely guilty of tackling my “spring cleaning” in October – after the fall shoot is done, but before ski season kicks into high gear. And well, if ski season gets an early start, then we boot spring cleaning until next fall. Except this year we undertook a spring purge. Call it the decadal cleaning, because it’s time to puppy proof our house. We never had to do this for Kaweah because she was already 6 years old when we moved in and so good about leaving things alone like trash, compost, food that wasn’t hers, plants – everything.

But puppy… puppy will have to learn. And while we’re puppy proofing, why not go through all of our closets, cabinets, drawers, files, and basement? Oh, and let’s rearrange the furniture, too. It snowballed into a multi-day project in which most of the house was sorted for reorganization, recycling, donation, or trash. I’m happy to report that the smallest category was trash. Our car is loaded with old retired electronics and generations of computing equipment to be recycled responsibly at CHaRM in Boulder.

jeremy replaced our uv decals on the windows so birds won’t crash into our house

I’m glad to finally get this cleaning out of the way. For the past several days the weather has toggled between rain, snow, graupel, and hail. We’ve also had some mighty fine thunderstorms roll through in the afternoons and at night. The high country is getting snow – and that is a truly marvelous thing. Perhaps if the stars align, I’ll get to ski one more time before puppy comes home. The best part about this winter holdout is that she won’t have to wait until autumn to get her first taste of proper Rocky Mountain snow.

mist and snow up valley

storm front approaching

graupel falling on our deck

Even though I don’t do requests on this blog, when I last posted about Bacchanale, people had asked me if I’d recreate the recipe for their chocolate budino. I must admit that the thought had crossed my mind, but I didn’t put it into action until we had our neighbors over for dinner last month. I spent some time recipe testing (and I loathe recipe testing) to get it right, and I think we have a winner. I started the crust with a cookie crumb base because it is just the right crumbly, sandy texture to go with a super rich, thick, creamy pudding.

vanilla, sugar, butter, salt, chocolate sandwich cookies

melted butter, cookie crumbs, sugar, salt, vanilla

mix it all together

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