We must take our collective hats off to Jennifer, the amazing self-taught baker behind Not Your Momma’s Cookie blog. She posted these seriously awesome Game of Thrones cake pops the other day, and we are in totally in awe of them. Their sweet irony may not numb the sting we are still feeling from poor Ned Stark’s grizzly death at the end of season one, but we are impressed. She provides a detailed how-to that includes his manly goatee and the blood dripping down the stake. Seems like an ambitious undertaking but, perhaps the finale will be worth it?

Are you a Game of Thrones fan too? Got any viewing party ideas?

In recent weeks I’ve made brownies with black beans and peanut butter pie with squash inside. This past weekend I added another guilt-free goodie to my repertoire: peanut butter banana chocolate chip cookies. What makes them so healthy? No sugar! Not one little pinch. There’s also no flour and no eggs. In fact, I’m not even sure you can technically call these buttons of yumminess cookies — they are more like congealed clumps of well-matched ingredients. I found the recipe on Babble’s Family Kitchen blog. Here’s my version:

Peanut Butter Banana Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Clumps

3 large, ripe bananas
1/2 cup peanut butter (or some other kind of nut butter that floats your boat)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups traditional oatmeal (use gluten-free if you want)
1/3 cup shredded coconut
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup chopped semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350. Get your cookie trays ready. I used a non stick spray on mine, but lining them with parchment paper would be even better.
2. Mix wet ingredients in a bowl: bananas, peanut butter, oil, and vanilla.
3. Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl: oats, coconut, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.
4. Mix wet and dry ingredients together and stir in chocolate chips.
5. The mixture should be well combined and have a goopy, sticky texture. Using a tablespoon, scoop out large clumps of the batter and place on the cookie tray. They won’t spread while baking, so don’t worry about how much space is between them.
6. Bake 12 minutes or until the bottoms are golden brown. Allow to cool slightly before removing from tray.
7. Eat as many as you like, knowing that they are full of good things!

When it comes to trying to make foods a little bit healthier, I am game to sneak in some vegetables where they normally don’t dwell: Brownies with black beans, chocolate cake with beets, macaroni and cheese with cauliflower. So when I spotted this Jessica Seinfeld recipe for chocolate peanut butter pie, I had to to give it a go. Peanut butter and chocolate is one of my biggest weaknesses, and the fact that this dessert contained some pureed squash wasn’t about to slow me down.

It’s a refrigerator pie, no baking, just some some mixing and cooling. First, you make the crust out of graham crackers crumbs and a little margarine. (Or you could skip this and buy a ready-made.) Jessica suggests you use low fat graham crackers, but I had the regular ones handy.

Next, make the pudding base on the stove. Mix two cups of low-fat milk (again, Jessica is watching your weight and suggests skim, but I used one percent), 1/4 cup of corn starch, 1/3 cup of sugar, 1/4 tsp salt, an egg and one egg white. Stir constantly over medium heat until it thickens. Then, stir in 1/2 cup of yellow squash puree (I used frozen, thawed).

Once you have the base, divide it in half. In one, mix 1/2 cup of peanut and add in three tablespoons of sugar. In the other half, stir in one table of unsweetened cocoa.

Then, pour the chocolate mixture into the crust. Pour the peanut butter mixture into the center of the chocolate pool. The recipe says to chill to for two hours, but I’d do it longer than that.

The completed pie is not gonna win any ribbons: Mine never gelled and basically became a blob on the plate once served. But oh, what a yummy blob! It’s hard to stop eating, it’s so good.

Click here to see the full recipe for Jessica Seinfeld’s peanut butter pie.

Here are some other sneaky vegetable recipes.

Macaroni & Cheese with Cauliflower

Here’s a guest post from our neighbor Jenn, who is always trying out healthy, child-friendly recipes in her home. The other day she wowed us with these blueberry and yogurt based cookies. They were so yummy, you’d never know they weren’t really bad for you. Enjoy!

I had seen the Momofuku cookie mixes at Williams-Sonoma last weekend and the Blueberry-Cream one caught my eye. But I wasn’t about to spend $16 on a cookie mix. Nevertheless, the idea of blueberry-cream cookies stayed with me. I started to fantasize about adding white chocolate, too. So a few days later I decided to make them from scratch.

I wanted to make the dough slightly healthier than normal chocolate chip cookie dough, so I Googled until I came up with this recipe for yogurt-based cookie dough.

I thought the tang of the yogurt would offset the sweetness of the white chocolate. Normally you would pair cranberries with white chocolate because they are naturally tangy, whereas I was using dried blueberries are quite sweet, which are quite sweet.

I altered the recipe a bit: Instead of using 3/4 cup all-purpose flour and 1 cup white whole wheat flour, I used 1 1/2 cups while whole wheat flour and 1/4 cup wheat germ. I used full fat Greek yogurt (it’s what I had on hand) and I omitted the semi-sweet chocolate chips, since I planned to add white chocolate chips.

The overall result was good! Yogurt makes the consistency more cake-like, but it really does add make a nice trifecta with the blueberries and white chocolate. Next time I’ll probably use more all-purpose flour instead of all whole-wheat. The taste of the whole-wheat flour comes through a bit too much.

Thanks Jenn. These are great, but we might just have to splurge one day on those Milk Bar cookies — just to do a taste test!

I’m an utter cookbook junkie – I get more excited when a new one arrives at my house than just about anything else. Immediately, I start poring over the options, contemplating which delicious dish I’ll make first. Inevitably, this turns into a scour of my pantry and fridge, to see if I can possibly conjure the ingredients to make something right there on the spot. And almost every time, I come up empty-handed.

So, when I spotted the recipe for Joy Wilson‘s cinnamon rice pudding in her new Joy the Baker Cookbook, I jumped off the couch and started scavenging as usual. Milk? Check. Rice? Check. Wait…no eggs. No problem! No eggs in this recipe. I continued down the list, slowly realizing I’d hit the jackpot: a recipe I could actually make from what I had on hand. Imagine!

Turns out, this rice pudding is as delicious as it is accessible. True, I added a bit of rum and some raisins (rice pudding without raisins just feels wrong to me somehow), but the core recipe was delicious, sweet without being cloying, and packed with the warm flavor of cinnamon. In all, a total success, especially for something I whipped up at 8 pm on a Wednesday.

I’ve included a few of my tips in the recipe below, in italics so that you’ll know my nonsense from her expertise. But I would just add that this would be a particularly excellent use for leftover rice. Also, Joy claims this is 4-6 servings…but in my house, it was more in the 8-10 range, possibly even 12. I was eating rice pudding for days…which is never a bad thing.

Click through for recipe!
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