Pour Some Sugar On Me

Since I've been a temporary stay-at-home mom, I've had more time to experiment in the kitchen by cooking up healthy meals for the ACs.  I've also had time to indulge my sweet tooth by baking.  (And oh, what a sweet tooth it is.  One day my father-in-law saw how much sugar I added to my coffee and warned me I'd give myself diabetes someday.)  When we used to have organic fruits and veggies delivered back home, I'd make French-style apple tarts almost weekly because of all the apples we received.  The tarts were yummy but could get boring after a while.

Now that little AC is eating almost everything that we do, I've had to monitor the sweets that we have in the house.  Therefore, when baking, I try to keep it simple.  I stumbled upon this recipe for Sweet Beet Cookies, which are delicious. They are ridiculously easy to make, and for me, the most time-consuming part was grating the beets and stopping to measure how much I'd grated so far, which isn't really a big deal. The recipe states that you'll end up with 50 cookies, but for some reason, each of the 3 times I've made them, I haven't made more than 18!  Since I didn't get a lot of dough out of the recipe, I thought it would be fun to use my new gingerbread people cookie cutters.  The color of the cookies against the black skull platter keeps the Halloween spirit alive for me.  :)

Big AC loves these, and can eat most of them in one sitting (and I probably could, too).  Little AC will nibble an arm, and then decide they make nice toys and take them over to her play area to be forgotten.

For Thanksgiving, I had some leftover canned pumpkin, so I made Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies, using dark chocolate chips by accident.  (I thought I grabbed the semi-sweet bag from the pantry.)  I thought they were pretty good, but big AC thought the flavors competed against rather than complemented each other.  However, it should be noted he doesn't really care for dark chocolate.  And little AC preferred to pick the chocolate chips out and leave the pumpkin part of the cookie for Mama or Papa to finish.

Got any easy dessert/baking recipes to share?