Baked Cheese Bites

Do you guys remember how my Cake Batter Rice Krispies didn't turn out quite how I had hoped? Well, this week's recipe was a little bit of a mess, too.

I found the recipe for Baked Cheese Balls on Pinterest when Cole and I were scrolling through looking for something tasty to try. They looked so good and easy to make that we had to make them immediately.

We went to the store and picked up two different kinds of string cheese- Sargento's mozzarella and Kraft's jalapeno- because I wanted to dip mine in marinara sauce, and he wanted something with a little bit of a kick.

Ingredients:
String cheese
Milk
Bread crumbs

Cut the string cheese into bite-size pieces. Dunk each piece in a bit of milk, then roll around in some bread crumbs. 

Only use about 1/2 cup of milk and maybe a cup of crumbs. You can always pour more if you run out.

Transfer to a cookie sheet, making sure to space the bites evenly apart.

Little bites of cheese heaven

Here's where we hit the problem. The oven temperature and bake time didn't match between Pinterest and the actual blog. 

We baked ours for 8 minutes at 425 degrees and we got this:

Yeah. At least they didn't stick to the tray.

To be honest with you, we still ate these "cheese chips." Well, a few of them. They obviously could have been much better, but we just laughed about our failure and tried again.

For the second time around, we reduced the temperature to 325 degrees and only baked the bites for 5 minutes. They turned out better than the ones above, but they still weren't quite what we had hoped.

We also realized that the two different types of cheese melted at different rates. The jalapeno bites held up through the second round, but the mozzarella ones were pretty flattened.

Jalapeno on the left, mozzarella on the right

We didn't have time to try it out a third time, but I assure you that I will figure out the perfect temperature and bake time and post an update later this week.

My Tips:

We were thinking about trying a different type of bread crumb. The kind we used didn't have as much flavor as we had hoped. I think we will try out a different kind and possibly add some spices for taste.

I ate my mozzarella bites with a pizza sauce I heated up and Cole used a bit of ranch dressing to kick up the flavor of his jalapeno bites.

The good thing about this recipe is that it is baked instead of deep-fried, so it is somewhat healthy!

Have any suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

Chocolate Mousse Parfait

This week's post is for those of you desperately in need of some chocolate. The best thing is, you can change up the flavors and ingredients to form a parfait custom to your tastes.

Oreos, Cool Whip, chocolate mousse, vanilla pudding... Have I died and gone to heaven?

Mine doesn't look nearly as good as the original, but it still tasted wonderfully delicious.

Ingredients:
1 box chocolate pudding
1 box vanilla pudding
4 cups milk (for the pudding)
2 tbsp sugar
Crumbled Oreos
Small tub of Cool Whip

The point of this recipe is to layer all kinds of your favorite sweets to form a glass full of goodness. Remember, you can use whatever flavor of pudding you like!

I started off by preparing both flavors of the pudding. When they were set and ready to go, I took the chocolate pudding and turned it into chocolate mousse.

To do this, I mixed half the tub of Cool Whip and the sugar into the pudding. Caution! This will look scrumptious and you will be tempted to grab a spoon and eat all of the mousse in one sitting.

If you can keep your spoon out of it long enough to prepare a whole parfait, I can assure you won't be disappointed.

I may or may not have licked the spoons. All of them.

I started layering my parfait by dumping some crumbled Oreos into the bottom of my glass. I added some vanilla pudding, lots of chocolate mousse, and topped it off with Cool Whip and more crumbled Oreos.

My Tips:

I didn't fill up my glass because I thought it would be sweetness overload, and I was right. I honestly couldn't even finish the whole parfait.

Use the ingredients that you find most appealing- no one's forcing you to abide by a strict recipe! Just have fun with it. 

Set up a parfait bar at a kids party or family gathering and have them build their own desserts. Add chocolate chip cookies, sprinkles, M&M's, Reese's Pieces, peanuts, graham crackers or anything else you can think of. The kids will have fun building their desserts AND eating them.

Try it out! Have any suggestions for other ingredients? Let me know in the comments.

Buffalo Chicken Dip

So, Cole and I were house-sitting this week and we decided to bake something to make ourselves feel more at home. What was that something? Buffalo Chicken Dip, of course.

Buffalo Chicken Dip has got to be one of my most favorite dips. It always reminds me of parties and get-togethers of the past.

I found a recipe for the dip on Frank's Red Hot website, but I made a few changes.

Here's my version.

Mmm.. Tasty.

Ingredients:
8 oz cream cheese
1/2 cup ranch dressing
1/2 cup FRANK'S® REDHOT® Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese 
2 small cans of chicken (or 1 large can)

First, set your oven to 350 degrees and start by mushing the cream cheese into the bottom of your baking dish. It's not necessary to have a deep one- ours was only about 2 inches deep.

It gets easier to mix when all ingredients are added.

Then, add your ranch dressing, hot sauce, cheese and chicken. Mix it up!

It'll look something like this.

Half-way through the baking process.

Pop it in the oven for about 20 minutes. I took mine out halfway through to re-stir the newly melted ingredients.

When it's ready, let it cool for a bit before you devour it. Then spoon some onto a plate, grab a handful of tortilla chips and chow down!

My Tips:

Can I confess something here? I don't like ranch dressing. Maybe that's not such a shock to you guys, but most of the people I know think I'm absolutely nuts.

The good thing about this recipe is that the ranch and the hot sauce kind of keep each other in check. The ranch keeps the hot sauce from being too hot, and the hot sauce takes the dressing's flavor down a notch.

The original recipe says the ranch can be substituted with blue cheese, but we decided the dressing would be the best choice for us.

We made the dip again over the weekend, but added about 2 teaspoons of another specialty hot sauce (found in one of those sort-of-hot to my-mouth-is-on-fire hot sauce variety packs) to the mix this time. It was amazing. The two spicy flavors added so much to the dip that the batch lasted no longer than 36 hours.

 
Try it out! Let me know what you think. Are there any other variations that you like better?