So, we suck at updating

Well guys, it's been a year.
This blog sure has grown =D I mean, wow, zero followers, zero comments, a meagar ration of pageviews (one of which was from Brazil - heck yea! Shout out to that Brazilian dude! Follow us, no really, please do)

But all that aside, I do believe it's time for us to put the past behind us and look to the
future!

STEVIA TOURISM!!!!

That's right folks! Without consulting ANY of you, we have spent the entire town budget on what we are going to be unveiling today.......AT NOON!!!!

Ok, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatball references aside, we are going to go back to posting stevia desserts because, to be quite honest, we have come a long way from those chocolate biscuits (see about two blog posts below for an explanation) and out stevia desserts are actually *gasp* good! So, without furthur adieu, I will leave you all with a little teaser of what's to come





That's right folks...NOTHING!!!! =) We are never posting on this blog ever again!

j/k, be back next week with strawberry cheesecake =D

We've returned!!

bet cha all were wondering when we were going to update next didn't ya? or maybe not considering the fact we have NO readers..... anyway, no we didn't die from a heavy cream induced heart attack a la the cinnamon cream cheese pie, my camera ran out of batteries, and i have yet to find the charger >=\ oh well.

so today is J's birthday!!!! he's 18, which pretty much sucks for me. he's going off to college in the fall, so i'll just be by myself =( since it's his birthday, what better way to celebrate than by baking a nice cake. sweetened with stevia of course. a quick update on the steiva situation, you MUST buy the little like .7 oz bottles of stevia (which they actually DO carry at rasin rack) like, you MUST. you don't want any fillers or anything at all in your stevia. that's why we kept having to use so much! hahaahh, we're dumb. we use the "sweetleaf" stevia brand, and we don't use QUITE as much as Lisa Jobs calls for... if you use too much it will give you that signature bitter aftertaste that our dad just LOVES (sarcasm). so anyway, J decided on a chocolate cream cheese layer cake with rasberry glace in the middle and frosted with rasberry icing. he likes rasberries. so we made it =D yesterday, because stevia desserts are like pizza. you have to wait a day so they taste better haha.

in case you were wondering, we've gotten much better at making desserts, hence the fancy sounding cake. the brownies which falied so misrably the first time we made them are now our favorite recipie!!! we even took them on vacation last week, although there was no room in the fridge for them, and i didn't know what was wrong about keepin ghtem on the counter anyway, but a good half-batch of them molded!!!!! WTF!!!!!! stevia is not cheap either. J almost ate one anyway, but mom stopped him. ok, well, if i ever find my battery recharger, i'll be sure to upload a pic. it's really pretty with nice pink icing. so manly. just like my brother. j/k of course. he just likes rasberries.

actually, what he really wanted to do was make a vanilla layer, a blueberry layer, and a rasperry layer, and cover it all in chocolate frosting. then, he said, we could call it an american flag cake covered in poop!!! O.o i had a more sophisticated idea, a pineapple cake filled with coconut butter and frosted with pineapple-coconut frosting. and then you could garnish it with shaved coconut!!! a pina-colada cake. but no, he just wanted his poop covered american flag cake. we compromised on the above mentioned cake. *sigh* boys have no taste.

Sinfully Cinnamon

I have somthing to tell all you ghost readers. something about me you should probably know. i am a cinnamon freak. no joke. when i make my oatmeal in the morning, i put is about a Tbs. of cinnamon. everyone else in my family takes a bite and says the cinnamon is WAY to strong. but not to me. there is no such thing as too much cinnamon.

with that being said, the next dessert was a no-brainer. when i first got the book, i was sold on this pie, but we just got around to making it. anyway, the base is, of course, a graham cracker crust. we use mi-del graham crackers, who have an acceptable 2-1 sugar-fiber ratio. six grams of sugar to three grams of fiber; about the best you can find in the graham cracker department. just be sure you don't go overboard. you won't want to anyway, since there is 1 1/2 cups heavy cream in this pie. yeaaaaa, with desserts like these, who needs sugar!

just look at those sinful layers.....mmmmmmmmhhhh......

anyway, needless to say, this pie was our best dessert yet =) how can you go wrong with heavy cream anyway? you won't want to eat the whole pie anyway, just a small sliver is enough to satisfy you. well, enough for me anyway.

dad still thought is could use more stevia... >=( if it were up to him, we'd use the whole bottle! the only disappointment i had was that the cinnamon wasn't very pronounced....and for a cinnamon freak like me, that sucks. next time i think i'll double the amount. after all, there is no such thing as too much cinnamon ;)

Chocolate Cherry Biscotti

whoops, haven't posted in awhile, but i guess that doesn't really matter since it appears no one really reads about our stupidity anyway hahaaaa..... anyway, so the cheese pie was demolished. i think. it's been to long so i don't really remember. the MAIN reason we haven't amde anything for awhile is because (if you ghost readers don't remember) we ran out of stevia making our cheese pie. soooo, we finally conned our mom into driving us to the nearest Trader Joe's (nearly 1 hr away in case you were wondering)and bought some bulk stevia. =) Trader Darwin's variety.....on a side note, why does Trader Joe's sell Trader "Darwin's" stuff?? what is Trader Darwin's anyway? why don't they just sell it under Trader Joe's. maybe Trader Joe had a brother? why do we care so much anyway?

moving right along. to make a long story short, we attacked our next project, chocolate cherry biscotti, with gusto; certain that our new steiva woul be a sort of magical charm that would make all our cooking efforts worthwhile. we made them, tasted the dough (mmmmm sweettttt) rolled it into a log, baked it, cut it into biscotti, popped them back into the over, took them out (smelling deliciously chocolaty) and took a big bite! ...........remember how the brownies tasted? yea, it was kinda reminicent of that. sweet? most definately not =\ it wasn't a huge failure though, the unsweetened dried cherries were a nice touch, the texture was impeccable, and they tasted fab with sweetened tea. (sweetened with setvia of course)

oh and in another side note, i nearly doubled the amount of steiva Lisa Jobs called for........and dad cautiously took one bite and screwed up his face like a five-year-old who just got his candy taken away. thanks for building us up dad. and no, he didn't finish the biscotti. he just went away saying "why should i waste my calories on THAT??" >=(

Cheese Pie

so that peach cobbler that we made was gone in like, 2 days........really makes a difference if dad eats it or not. O.o Anyway, since our last dessert was gone, obviously it was time to make a new one. we can't live without desserts for one day apparently.

Anyway, so somehow we decided to make the "Rich Ricotta Cheese Pie." sounds amazing no? So we got to the part where we add the stevia, only to find we had a megar six packets left. Just a side note, yes, we use the packets of stevia, ment for sweetening tea and coffee, to make gourmet desserts....who's bright idea was that? Although it really isn't our fault, Raisin Rack doesn't carry it in bulk >=( if anybody reading this (anyone? anyone??) actually buys the book and tries to make the desserts, i would highly (HIGHLY!!) advise you to go to Trader Joe's and buy some bulk stevia. or order it off the internet somwhere. i suppose we could do that too, but we're just to lazy. So! back to the cheese pie. throwing caution (and Lisa Job's recepie) to the win, we put in all six packets.

Another note, we did everything she said to do to avoid cracking of the cheesecake (it was cheese pie a minute ago, wasn't it?? O.o) and it still cracked majorly....=.= what planet do you LIVE on Lisa Jobs?? or are we just really crappy cooks? anyway, so it turned out pretty yummy, and our dad (obviously the most critical of desserts in our family; he has a MAJOR sweet tooth) said it was the best one yet =) although beating out the biscuits couldn't be THAT hard right?

it's even better when enjoyed with fresh or frozen blueberries.

Peach Cobbler and the case of the missing eggs...

A couple days ago, our "savoury dessert" (brownies in case you didn't remember) ran out... so we decided to make another dessert, nopefully with more sucess than the last one. so we busted into our frige to get out the "essentials" only to find one pathetic hard-boiled egg............

with a heavy heart we flipped through the book trying to find an eggless dessert (almost immpossible by the way) only to stumble upon a pear cobbler. well, we didn't have any pears, but our dad had frozen some peaches eariler in the summer. so with some casual bribing, we got the peaches and went to work.

just a side note, Lisa Jobs uses a crap-load of butter.....kinda like Juila Child, or Paula Deen. anyway, for the topping, we cut the butter in half and added some blackstrap molasses. because blackstrap molasses is delicious in toppings.

in another note, if your using frozen fruit, DON'T use all the liquid that comes off of them when you defrost them. or if you do, cut the water you add to the fruit. cause if you don't, you'll end up with some peach soup like we did >=( thanks goodness in congealed up over night in the frige.

and the verdict? yum! can't go wrong with fruit desserts.... and the topping was (of course) amazing. because I (A) made it. with blackstrap molasses.

it even passed "The Dad Test." victory!

Brownies......

so today we made brownies. Actually we made them yesterday, but they were a failure until this morning. We followed the recipe but apparently, our stevia sucks. We put in the right amount but they tasted like savoury salty, chocolate biscuits! Our dad came home and unwittingly took an enormous bite of one (like he always does to desserts) only to spit it out and exclaim, "Why am I eating this??" Yea, they were that bad. So we broke out our unsweetened chocolate, milk, and fail-stevia and attempted to make a chocolate ganache for them. But guess what? It tasted bitter... :( So with a bad mood and an upset stomach we plopped the bitter ganache on the salty biscuits stuck it in the fridge, and called it a day.

So this morning, J (the boy) gave the biscuits a second chance and ate one...for breakfast. (yum!) And guess what? He liked them! Especially when topped with peanut butter and bananas. (Naturally More pb if you were wondering...its amazing! ...shameless plug! :P) So then A came home (the girl) and ate one after lunch, and it was good! We'll still have to test it on the dad, but so far the ganache at least is a success.

So here's what we used:

We followed Lisa Job's brownie recipe in "Sensational Stevia Desserts" for the (biscuits) I mean brownies. The ganache we made ourselves without any recipe! :O

It used:
1 1/2 squares unsweetend baker's chocolate. (The other 1/2 a square mysteriously melted on the stove's burner. o.o wonder how it got there? A..?)
A bunch of milk, possibly 3/4 cup? We kept adding it to taste to try and get rid of the bitterness of the chocolate.
4 packs of NOW stevia extract, but whatever stevia your using is probably better.
Some corn starch. Our mom kept adding it, so i'm guessing like 2 tablespoons? enough to make it more pudding than ganache, but who actually knows what "ganache" is anyways?

I don't expect anyone will actually try to make this, but if you do, don't eat it until the day after with peanut butter or bananas...or both! Otherwise you might as well eat it with your turkey gravy and call it dinner.