Recent baking escapades

So....we've been baking and eating pretty tasty foods for the past several weeks.  It looks like the rest of you have, too.  Here are a few photos to pique your interest and maybe inspire you to try something new!

Two burger options....both had freshly (charcoal) grilled burgers, then topped with deliciousness!

Peanut butter bacon burger

Olive burger (with French style tabouli and fresh apples)

Another take on Chicago style deep dish pizza.  This recipe was much easier to make than the last one.  The final verdict was that the cheese version was better than the one with homemade Italian sausage.

We've also tried making some other bread products that we typically would buy at the store (we've not purchased tortillas since we made our first batch about a month ago...the kiddos love helping me make them).  Here we try out some sourdough English muffins for the first time (I made them without the parmesan and herbs).  Again...not going back to store bought.

Freshly baked English muffin with fried egg, mozzarella and tomato (Steve added jalapeno to his)

Here's our first batch of homemade bagels.  They were very tasty, but we'll be trying out another recipe next time.  And the English muffins were easier.....

And Elisabeth's carrot muffins from last week.  Again, another delicious morning muffin! (And somewhat healthy....it has veggies in it!)

Dream Pizza

Several weeks ago, I read about this cheesy pan pizza recipe from King Arthur Flour and knew immediately that I needed to make it. I had to wait till I had the right ingredients (which are quite simple, I just didn't have flour or cheese) but once I was able to make it, I found it was even better than I'd hoped. This is somewhere in between a greasy pan pizza (delicious, but can be a bit heavy) and a Chicago style stuffed pizza (also delicious, but can anyone survive eating that much cheese more than once every couple years?).

This pizza, or "dream pizza" as I like to call it, is like a bubbly pillow of warm bread with just the right amount of golden cheese on top, and a wonderfully crisped outer crust. We've made this several times now since that first day and have found it never disappoints. One of my favorite iterations was topped with mushrooms, rosemary and a garlic cream sauce, but we've found it's best to keep the toppings somewhat skimpy to allow the crust to rise to it's full glory. If you aren't yet convinced to try this pizza recipe, here are a few photos that will hopefully do the trick.

Inspired foods

All of the delicious food posts over the past few weeks had me and Olivia feeling excited to make some of them.

Here's our attempt at mini rhubarb-filled streusel muffins, inspired by Elisabeth's muffins from a few weeks back. I really like having a mini muffin with my morning coffee, and these were delicious. When I make them again, I'm going to try to pack even more rhubarb into them.

Do the Hancock Barnharts have a rhubarb patch that you harvested for Elisabeth's muffins? Or was that grocery-store rhubarb you were using?

And then we decided to try the dalgona coffee trend that Janell wrote about recently. I made them hot (instead of iced), and they were delicious! They look very pretty in the first picture, but it's almost like having a solid marshmallow layer on top of the milk, so I stirred it together for a delicious, rich sweet coffee (that's the second, less pretty picture). It reminded me a little of Vietnamese coffee, which is strong coffee mixed with sweetened, condensed milk, I believe.

This was pretty easy to make. A nice afternoon pick-me-up!

Thanks, everyone, for the inspiring recipes!