Cranberry Orange Shower Scrub

 Thanksgiving is right around the corner and I couldn't be more excited! I love the whole holiday season. The cooling air, the short days, fires in the fireplace, and especially the wonderful foods of the season. Not only do I like to include seasonal ingredients in my dishes, but also in my homemade body products. What a wonderful way to utilize these different ingredients and bring the magic of the holidays into different parts of your day!

Since my mom makes homemade cranberry sauce every Thanksgiving, she has bags and bags of cranberries in her fridge. So I decided to make a shower scrub using cranberries and another popular holiday fruit: Oranges. This scrub does wonders for your skin. The sugar and salt slough off dead cells and makes your skin silky smooth. Cranberries are packed with antioxidants which protect the skin, especially from harsh winter weather. Oranges also contain antioxidants as well as Vitamin C, an amazing nutrient for the skin. (Learn about Vitamin C's skin benefits here)

This scrub looks good enough to eat and will make your skin sweetly soft and radiant!

Ingredients

1/3 cup fresh cranberries
2 tablespoons water
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons orange juice
2 tablespoons salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method

Use a food processor and puree cranberries and water. Combine puree with sugars, orange juice, salt and vanilla. To use, massage into damp skin while in shower, then rinse. Store scrub in refrigerator in an air-tight container.

50 Calorie Cranberry-Orange Cookies

Recipes are like breast implants. You can't honestly accept compliments if they're not yours.

I literally cannot make a recipe without changing, tweaking or modifying it. Anyone can follow a recipe, but where's the fun in that? So, I adapted these cookies to my liking. Actually, that's not true. I had an idea for a cookie, found a recipe that had the right proportions of ingredients for the type of cookie I wanted to produce, and switched up the ingredients to my liking. And they turned out great! Not to mention, they're only 50 calories a piece! These cookies are chewy, perfectly sweet and filled with flavor. I made them more nutritious by replacing butter with ricotta cheese and swapping half of the white flour with whole wheat. This is the original recipe . As you can tell, I switched the recipe up quite a bit. And here it is:


50 Calories Cranberry Orange Cookies
Makes 30 cookies

1/3 cup low fat ricotta cheese
1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup minus 1 tablespoon whole wheat flour
3/4 cup minus 2 tablespoons white flour
1/3 cup craisins (dried cranberries) finely chopped plus 30
1/2 cup powdered sugar + extra
1/4 cup orange juice + extra
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon orange zest + extra
1/16 teaspoon fresh grated ginger
Pinch of cinnamon

Preheat oven to 300. Cover 2 cookie sheets with non-stick foil.

In a large bowl, use a whisk to cream ricotta cheese and sugar. Spoon flour into measuring cups and level. In a medium bowl combine flour, cranberries, powdered sugar, and cinnamon. Add flour mixture to ricotta and sugar. Beat until just combined. Mix in orange juice, orange zest and ginger until moistened. Form into a ball, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 1 hour. Once chilled, roll dough into 30 1-inch balls. Place 2 inches apart on cookie sheets and lightly press with a fork. Bake for 25 minutes. Cool.


If desired, create a thick icing with orange juice and powdered sugar. Top each cookie with a dollop of icing, a pinch of orange zest and one craisin. Store in an air-tight container. Enjoy!

Click below to enlarge nutrition facts

Cranberry-Chai Bread

It's been a month since I've updated. The holidays have come and (almost) gone, and I've finally found some time to just sit and write. I am currently at my cabin in northern Wisconsin with my family and boyfriend. All the ground and trees are frosted white, the lake is completely frozen, and the only sign of life is the deer tracks going this way and that. I love it here, it's beautiful, quiet and peaceful- a perfect getaway to write.

I've been wanting to make Chai bread for quite some time. But with a long holiday to-do-list, I kept putting it off. The kitchen was filled with Christmas cookies of all sorts, and even when I had the time to make it, I hardly had the space. Finally, one day last week, I set out to make the bread. It had been hanging over my head long enough, and I couldn't put it off any longer. Now, when it comes to breads, I have a basic recipe which I tweak depending on the kind of bread I want to make. This recipe I developed using applesauce or pumpkin instead of oil. But I didn't want my Chai bread to have either of those flavors. I wanted it to be just Chai- nothing else. So I looked through my very-worn Better Homes and Garden's cookbook, to find a recipe I could tweak. I finally settled on Cranberry Orange Bread. It was very basic and looked easy enough to change the flavors.


I immediately started to mix things together. After I had mixed up all the ingredients, I realized that there was hardly any batter. I read through the recipe again, this time more carefully, and realized that it called for a whole cup of cranberries. No wonder there was hardly any batter! I decided that I would add the cranberries, and hope the Chai-Cranberry combination would turn out in my favor. It sure did! I could hardly wait to try it out once it came out of the oven. It's the perfect cold-weather snack. Warm, sweet, earthy and just a bit tart. The combination of the different flavors couldn't have blended any better! And with a smear of butter, it's just heavenly!


Cranberry-Chai Bread
Makes 10 slices

2 cups Whole Wheat Flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup granulated Splenda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cardamom
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
1 chai tea bag
1 egg, beaten
1/2 teaspoon finely grated orange peel
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cup brewed black tea
2 tablespoons applesauce
1 cup chopped cranberries (I used frozen cranberries, chopped them with the food processor, and measured 1 cup)



1. Sift together flour, sugar, Splenda, baking powder, salt, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and the contents of the chai tea bag.

2. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, orange peel, vanilla, tea and applesauce. Stir into the flour mixture until just moistened.

3. Fold in chopped cranberries

4. Pour into a greased 9x5x3 loaf pan, and bake at 350 for 60 minutes.

5. Remove from the pan, and cool on a rack.

Enjoy warm, with honey or butter.
Wrap in plastic wrap and store in the fridge.







Nutrition Facts per slice
Calories: 136 Fat: 1 g Saturated Fat: .2 g Cholesterol: 21.3 mg Sodium: 312.4 mg Potassium: 22.5 mg Carbohydrates: 31.1 g Fiber: 3.7 g Sugars: 12 g Protein: 3.9 g

Dessert Centerpieces for the Women's Bible Study

Am I good at procrastinating or what? I have a good excuse though. I have been BUSY!

I have started Culinary School and I love it! I have already learned so much, and I am so excited about what I will learn in the future!

A lot of people from my church are really supportive of my passion for baking, and the ladies from the Women's Bible Study asked me to make dessert centerpieces for the bible study opening brunch! So for the past month and a half, my mom and I have been planning and shopping, and I have been perfecting the recipes for each dessert. The opening brunch was this past Tuesday, and it went great! There were (miraculously) no mess-ups or mishaps, and it went as smoothly as possible! I thought I would share some pictures with you all and see what you think! All the recipes are my own, except for the biscotti and apple dip. Everything else I created myself! If you would like any of the recipes, please comment and I'd be more than happy to share them with you.

Here I am working the night before. For three days I had been baking non-stop. Monday night I was up until 2am baking, then woke up at 6:30 to finish up! We had to be set up by 9am! My dog Buddy was a very helpful vacuum whenever I dropped anything.

Here is my favorite dessert. These are miniature chocolate cakes layered with espresso ganache and topped with buttercream frosting. I wanted them to look like little espressos with foam on top! I started by making chocolate cakes in 9 inch cake pans, and cutting out 2 small circles per cup. I filled the bottom of the cup with espresso ganache, put a cake circle, more ganache, another piece of cake, and finally piped the frosting on top.

The little espresso cake, up close. I sprinkled a bit of espresso powder on top.

Next are miniature no-bake cheesecakes. I didn't want them to be as dense as classic cheesecake, so I folded Cool-Whip into the cream cheese 'batter' to make them light and fluffy. I also added lemon zest, vanilla, and powdered sugar. The crust is a simple graham cracker crust, and there are three different toppings: Blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry. I made the sauces by pureeing the fruit, passing it through a fine sieve, and cooking the juice with sugar and cornstarch. A cheesecake close up!

These are one of my favorite creations, 'Dutch' Donuts. I used the same almond filling used to make the Dutch cookies 'Boterletters' or Dutch letters. I made a simple cake donut recipe and thickened it up with a bit of flour. Then I stuffed the dough with the almond filling and fried them, and sprinkled a bit of powdered sugar on top. I made a simple glazed of powdered sugar and milk to go on top.

Here is almond biscotti with a chocolate ganache and apple slices with a cream cheese and brown sugar dip.

There are two different kind of muffins here. Pumpkin and cranberry-apple. I also made a maple butter to go with them! Both are made with whole wheat flour and NO oil. I had to have SOMETHING healthy, right?! The maple butter was made by melting maple sugar and butter, then whipping it into room temperature butter.

Here's the last centerpiece. The top are my latest creations, Caramel Apple Tarts. I wanted to play off the Autumn theme and combine apple pie with caramel apples. The crust is a snickerdoodle cookie baked in a tart pan. The apple filling is basically an apple pie filling, only cooked over the stove, with lots of flour, brown sugar and apple cider. The bottom are mini pumpkin pies, my grandmas pie recipe just miniaturized!

Here they are after the centerpieces were moved to the desserts table. My wonderful mom made fruit spears, fruit cups, and mini cupcakes to look like sunflowers.

Here I am asleep after all the ladies left. The week had caught up to me!

This is a 'Thank You' gift the ladies made me. It is now hanging in my kitchen! The text on the apron says 'Taste and See That The Lord is Good.' Which was the theme for the brunch.


I had SO much fun doing this. It was a LOT of work, but very worth it, and great experience. Next up: Engagement desserts and wedding cupcakes!