Have I convinced you yet to make cornflake or crispy crunch? If not, maybe today’s post will tip the balance!

Years ago I stayed at the Parker Palm Springs, a Jonathan Adler paradise with very delicious food and beautiful grounds. For breakfast one morning I ordered French toast that was coated in…wait for it…I bet you can’t guess…or maybe you can…crisped rice! That French toast was SO GOOD. Okay, so I think you can figure out the rest of this story…when Cora started telling me about cornflake crunch in the Milk Bar cookies, visions of crispy French toast danced in my head.

This week we tried making French toast with both the crispy crunch and the cornflake crunch. The crispy crunch was good, but I LOVED the French toast with cornflake crunch coating. It had a great crisp texture and was very tasty!

So, that’s all I’ve got so far for the cornflake and crispy crunch…but I’m sure I’ll think of more ways to use it! And if you think of other ways too, please share!

Crispy French Toast

 

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From Jane Maynard, This Week for Dinner

Author: Jane Maynard

Recipe type: Breakfast

Ingredients

• Sliced bread of your choosing (French, brioche, whatever!)
• Eggs whisked with about 1 tablespoon of milk per 2 eggs or so (2-3 slices of bread per egg)
• Cornflake crunch (you can use crispy crunch, too, but I liked cornflake better)
• Butter

Instructions

1. Dip bread slices in whisked egg. Dip in cornflake crunch to coat both sides. Dip bread AGAIN in the egg – some of the crunch will fall off, but that’s okay, most of it will stay on and you can just sort of pat it back in place.
2. Cook in a buttered pan over medium-low to medium heat until both sides are browned.
3. Delicious coated in butter and pure maple syrup!

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Okay, so there’s a bakery-cafe called Le Boulanger in my town that has these chocolate chip cookies filled with crisped rice. The cookies are darn good and have a great texture. You may recall last spring I was experimenting with crisped rice in cookies, but I wasn’t very happy with the result. I’m here today to proclaim that I have cracked the crispy code!

When my sister-in-law was first telling me about the Milk Bar cookies and mentioned that they had cornflakes in them, I started asking all kinds of questions with the crisped rice cookies in mind. Sure enough, the cereal was baked in butter and sugar before being put in the dough. I couldn’t wait to get home and try making the corn flake crunch with crisped rice and trying them in cookies. I had a sneaking suspicion this was just the little trick I needed to get it right.

I was right – it was just the trick I was looking for! My sister and I agree hands down that the crisped rice in these cookies has great texture, nothing like that first batch I tried. Also, I used my Perfect Cookie recipe instead of the NY Times cookie recipe, which also greatly helped with the outcome.

The end result? A seriously awesome cookie that pretty much comes out perfectly every time. They’re chewy, they’re crispy, they’re buttery, they’re chocolatey…they’re pretty much heaven.

You’re welcome.

Crispy Crunch Chocolate Chip Cookies

 

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From Jane Maynard, This Week for Dinner

Author: Jane Maynard

Recipe type: Dessert

Ingredients

• 2 sticks butter, softened to room temperature
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1½ teaspoons vanilla
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup flour
• 2¼ cups oats
• 1½ cups crispy crunch
• 1 package (10-12 oz) MINI semi-sweet chocolate chips (the mini chips help with distribution and texture)

Instructions

1. Cream butter and sugars at medium speed for 2-3 minutes. Add eggs and beat at medium-high speed for 5-7 minutes. Beat in vanilla, baking soda, and salt just until mixed. Add flour and mix at low speed until just blended. Stir in oats, crispy crunch and chocolate chips.
2. Make cookie balls (appx 2 tablespoons in size) and arrange on a cookie sheet lined with wax or parchment paper. Pat cookies down flat-ish, cover with plastic wrap and freeze or refrigerated for at least one hour.
3. Preheat oven to 350 F.
4. Bake cookies ~14 minutes, rotating the pan at the 7 minute mark. Cookies should be brown on the edges and starting to brown in the center when you take them out. Let sit on pan a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack”¦or eating! They are good warm but these cookies are also excellent cold, which is saying a lot coming from the fresh-baked-warm-cookie addict that I am.
5. Freeze or refrigerate remaining dough that doesn’t get cooked.

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Have you discovered Pinterest yet? It’s a lovely website that allows you to essentially bookmark stuff you love. And discover stuff other people love. Which is where I found the recipe for these peanut butter cups on a food blog called Iowa Girl Eats. I “pinned” the recipe so I would remember to try it later…and later came sooner than I was planning and I ended up making them that night.

These little treats are super easy to throw together and they really hit the peanut butter cup spot. A few of my friends had some the other night and loved them, so you don’t just have to take my word for it.

Easy Peasy Crispy Peanut Butter Cups

 

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Recipe originally from Iowa Girl Eats

Author: Jane Maynard

Recipe type: Dessert

Ingredients

• 1¼ cups peanut butter
• ¼ cup butter, room temperature
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1½ cups rice krispies
• Milk or semi-sweet chocolate chips, probably about 8 ounces or so.
• Mini muffin tin

Instructions

1. Directions (in my own words to describe exactly how I did it):
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly butter the muffin tin. Place about 6-8 chocolate chips in each muffin tin (32 peanut butter cups total, my chocolate chips were a little bit bigger than the standard Nestle chip – I used 6 chips per cup). Put pan in oven and until chocolate chips melt. You’ll pretty much have to feel the chips to see if they’re melted or not because chocolate chips tend to keep their shape even when they are melted. Take the pan out of the oven and squish down the chocolate in each muffin cup with the back of a spoon. Turn oven off and set pan aside.
3. The second time I made these, I must have left the chocolate in the oven for too long or something and the chocolate ended up actually going powdery and weird on me. SOOOO”¦I melted about 1½ cups of chocolate chips in the microwave, 30 seconds at a time stirring between each heating. This made for more dishes to wash, but I had much better control over the chocolate not burning. After spooning the chocolate evenly between all the cups, I refrigerated for about 5 minutes until the chocolate started to harden.
4. Mix peanut butter and butter together (I just used a mixing spoon), then mix in the powdered sugar and vanilla. Stir in the krispies.
5. Evenly divide the peanut butter mixture between the 32 muffin cups, pressing down into the cup and smoothing the tops with a spoon. Refrigerate until peanut butter firms up, about 15 minutes or so. Store in an air tight container in the fridge.
6. They taste good right out of the fridge or after sitting on the counter for 10 minutes or so.
7. Also, I halved the recipe and it worked perfectly”¦made 16 mini peanut butter cups.

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