So many recipes...so much time to try!

Baking and cooking took a back seat while in Texas. The one exception was making an Italian cream cake for BK's dad's birthday. I used The Pioneer Woman's recipe- it went over really well! I've jumped right back into cooking since getting back to Switzerland. It seems like all I've done over the past few days is destroy the kitchen, clean it up, destroy, clean...you get the idea.

Last night I made a quick and easy Tomato Basil Soup. It's a Cooking Light recipe, so it's really healthy, and it keeps for up to a week. It's a meal that's easy to heat up, considering we have no microwave. If you decide to make it, I would add some additional salt and pepper (to your taste), garlic powder and Italian seasoning. I like to eat the soup with a grilled cheese sandwich, and BK prefers a caprese salad. It's probably a little hot in Texas right now for soup, but this would be a great winter meal.

Tonight I embarked on two new recipes that I had not made before. I found an easy recipe for Sesame Chicken on Pintrest. BK is working late tonight, so I thought I would give it a test run to see if I should work it into the regular rotation. The recipe is really easy to make and turned out really good, but I woul d change a couple of minor things. The recipe says to make the sauce while the chicken cooks, but I would recommend making it before you start cooking the chicken, as to make sure that the sauce is ready to put on the chicken when it is done cooking. The other thing I would change would be to decrease the amount of fresh ginger in the sauce and possibly add a little more brown sugar to make it sweeter. Overall, it's also a really easy recipe that doesn't take much time. I think the leftovers will be even better tomorrow!

The dessert is the one that I'm really excited about (of course)! BK has asked that we have a new tradition: that I bake something for his team on Day 5 of the month. He lives in a work world where month close is on the fourth working day of the month, so day 5 is kind of a relief that the longest day of the month is over. Last month it was the cheesecake that I posted about, and this month I embarked on Peanut Butter Cup Crack Brownies. Yum!

As of this post, I haven't yet tested them- they need a little more time to cool. The one difficult thing about this recipe, specifically while being in Switzerland, is that they don't have peanut butter cup candy! Seriously...the Swiss don't eat nearly as much peanut butter as we do in the US. They go more for Nutella, if anything. Needless to say, I had to improvise the peanut butter layer that's under the top chocolate layer. The recipe also calls for a boxed brownie mix, but I don't really do box mixes of stuff, so I found another brownie recipe that I liked and made those as the bottom layer. It would have been nice to have a microwave for this recipe, especially when melting chocolate, but I used my double boiler instead, which worked really well.

I'm thankful to have this time to try new recipes and experiment in the kitchen. Hopefully this one goes over well at the office and all the Europeans appreciate just how good peanut butter and chocolate go together!