Alright, y’all. After my last post about Irish Soda Bread, and it’s non-authentic-ness, (I doubt that’s a word, but roll with me), I decided I should really get into this and make the real stuff, the stuff you’d find on a family’s table in Ireland.

Luckily, I won that mahusive amount of cheese and butter from KerryGold a few months back. Included in that giveaway was The Country Cooking of Ireland by Colman Andrews. It’s a beautiful book, big enough and full of enough gorgeous photographs to grace a coffee table.

I’m going to admit something to you now: This post is having a total identity crisis. It seemed simple enough. It’s March (p.s. how the hell is it MARCH?), which means St. Patrick’s Day. It means lots of Irish themed food, like Irish Soda Bread, will start popping up in the grocery store, the blogs, and restaurants. And let’s face it: no one’s going to pass up an excuse to drink copious amounts of green beer and eat Guinness Stew.

I don’t know about you, but some nights I am wiped from work and the temptation to succumb to take out, eat out, or something in a box is almost too much to resist. One meal that James and I are happy to eat any time of year is chicken noodle soup. You may think that homemade soup is something you need hours and hours for, and yes, sometimes that’s true. But on a weeknight, it really is possible to have homemade soup in under an hour.

There are a few pantry items you need to keep on hand in order to make this possible, but believe me, once you’ve done that, when you go to stare into the depths of your fridge, and suddenly realize you’ve got everything you need for this filling and healthy supper, the wash of relief and hunger might just be at equal measures.

Sometimes, the inspiration for a recipe comes from the most bizarre of places. The other day, I was reading a free novel I’d downloaded to my Kindle (I adore my Kindle!) and the baker in the book was brainstorming recipe ideas. One of the recipes the author played around with involved cashews and a chocolate base cookie, but I thought I could take it one step further, turning cookies into brownies, and adding nutella into the mix.

I realized as I was thinking out the recipe that I haven’t posted a brownie recipe to this blog since I started it. In fact, Butterscotch Brownies were the first recipe I posted to my blog, back on May 20th, 2008.

Spiced Apple and Pear butter is kind of becoming my canning specialty. Fruit butters are great for canning because there’s no messing around with any jelling agents or pressure canning. Just straightforward fruit, sugar, spices, and a water bath canner.

Typically, I cook up a batch of this in the slow cooker over a few days and then can it in 4 or 8 oz jars. This time I canned it in pint jars because that’s what I had handy. The butter can be spread on toast, or used in recipes that call for jam, like chocolate chip jam bars by my friend Tracy.

My Grandma Wogan lived in Union Star, MO… a tiny little sleeper town in northwest Missouri. As tiny as the town was, I remember it being full of magic spots when I was a little girl. She lived in a log cabin (that always smelled like coffee), which was about as far different from our suburban ranch home as it could be. She had huge trees all over her lot, with a big tire swing in her backyard. My sister and I would spend hours just swinging on that swing, feeling like we were flying up to the highest tree branches.

Since I am new here and trying to buy friends with baked goods (pretty much how I get all my friends), I thought I’d share a recipe for German Chocolate Brownies. Everyone loves those, right?

This recipe is a combination of two different recipes…I loved the topping on one, but wanted to use my favorite brownie recipe instead. Keep in mind that you can totally adapt this to use your own brownie recipe or even a mix. Just be sure to double the topping if your brownies require a 9×13 pan.

I find few things as satisfying as baking homemade bread. I really love everything about it. It is amazing to me that a few simple ingredients can (after a few hours) turn into a beautiful, fresh loaf of bread. Plus, it is a great addition to any meal, and I can’t eat soup or salad without a fresh roll or slice of bread.

I also enjoy the process. My KitchenAid mixer gets plenty of use in my kitchen, but I rarely use it when I make bread. There’s just something stress relieving and calming about kneading bread by hand. Sometimes it’s fun to get my hands dirty, you know?

So, when Amber asked me to write a guest post for Bluebonnets and Brownies, I immediately knew that I should make homemade bread. I bake bread almost every week, and I am always excited to try new recipes.

You can count this as really cool or really crappy. I am going to count it in the really cool category: this year, the entire country will be throwing parties for my birthday. Well, I should probably rephrase that. They’ll be throwing parties on my birthday. This year, my birthday lands on Super Bowl Sunday.

James really kinda likes American Football, as he calls it, but doesn’t follow it religiously. I’m much more a basketball girl. (Go Spurs Go!) Growing up in a town where there’s only one major sports league team, those colors (black and silver) run deep. To this day, my favorite athlete is David Robinson (known as The Admiral to San Antonio Spurs fans), and he’s been retired for over ten years. So it didn’t even occur to us when the Super Bowl would be, where the Super Bowl would be, or why we would even need to know. And that’s how we came to book a vacation to Dallas-Fort Worth, the same weekend that the Super Bowl is being held there. Oops.

I haven’t been as excited to post anything to this blog in a long time as I am these Movie Theatre Cookies. They started out as just an inkling of an idea when James and I went to the cinema to see Tron: Legacy (visually beautiful, but not so much the plot).

I don’t know about you, but I can’t go to the movies without popcorn. With butter. It makes me sad to sit through a film without it. Oh, I know it’s horrible for you. I really do. But I love it. James prefers to have sweets when we go to the film. A “Super Squishy” (ICEE) or some Raisinets. And that’s where this idea first popped up. James got Raisinets that day we saw Tron. And he said to me, “Wouldn’t Raisinets be awesome in cookies?”. Yes, yes they would be.