Uses for new Philly Cooking Cream Original

Have you tried the new Philadelphia Cooking Cream Original? We love it and think it tastes a lot like creme fraiche for a fraction of the price (especially if you find a great sale and can match with coupons!).

If you look at all of the recipes associated with this new Cooking Cream you will probably notice, like we have, that most of them are for chicken dishes.

Well, if you use your imagination, you can come up with more great uses. It makes for a GREAT creamy macaroni and cheese and today we subsituted it for the sour cream called for in these yummy apple cupcakes. Needless to say, they came out super moist and DELICIOUS!

Peanut Butter Blossoms

In checking my competition on eBay one day, I noticed that someone had left feedback that "the cookies were good, but all of the kisses had fallen off"! Not my idea of a great peanut butter blossom cookie.

Thought I would share our process for ensuring that the Hershey kisses stay on top of your peanut butter cookies. First and foremost, find yourself a great peanut butter cookie recipe. When the cookies are fresh out of the oven, immediately push a kiss into each cookie (do NOT bake with the kisses in the dough). Wait about 30 seconds (no longer or the chocolate will be too soft!) and go back to each cookie and give the kiss a gentle twist. As you can see by our picture, this forms a ring of chocolate "glue" that will keep your kisses on the cookies.

Give our cookies a try at PB Blossom eBay Listing

A few tricks for a great Cream Cheese Pound Cake

Cream Cheese Pound Cake

It has taken us many, many years to finally perfect our cream cheese pound cakes. I remember once when we had our small coffee shop and were baking 6 pound cakes at one time. ALL of the cakes fell! What a disaster and utter disappointment not to mention the cost of all of those wasted ingredients!

Over the years, we have discovered a few things that make the difference and produce a nice, fine-textured cream cheese poundcake every time (you never want to have a "sad streak" in your cream cheese poundcake!):

~~Use a high quality cream cheese. We usually are not food "snobs" but it makes a world of difference. Do not try to save money by buying cream cheese in a large block.

~~Use unbleached flour for this pound cake and make sure that you sift your flour before adding to the mixture.

~~Bake your pound cakes in tube pans, not bundt pans. Makes it a lot easier to remove the cake after baking.

~~This cake needs to be baked low and slow. We bake ours at 300 degrees for 1 hour and 45 minutes!

Good luck with baking your Cream Cheese Pound Cake! But, if you would rather have us bake for you, visit our eBay listings.

A Baker's Best Friend

Have you ever struggled to get your brownies out of the pan or had your cookies stick to the cookie sheet? I know how you feel. We searched high and low for a way to get our yummy lemon bars out of the pan in one piece. The solution - REYNOLDS PARCHMENT PAPER!

Parchment paper has become our best friend in the kitchen. We always put parchment paper on our cookie sheets. We never use anything to grease our sheets, just put down the parchment and you are ready.

Another great thing is the fact that you can use a sheet of parchment paper over and over. If it gets a bit messy, just wipe it off and use it again and again.

Hint: Look inside the box and most of the time there will be a great coupon for your next purchase!

Sugar Cookies

If you would like your sugar cookies nice and soft like these sand dollar cookies, bake them as soon as you prepare the mix.

If you measure out dough with a tablespoon it will give you a nice sized cookie. We made the sand dollar decoration by pressing a cookie gun disk into the dough before baking!

If you would prefer to cut out your sugar cookies and have them resemble those yummy bakery sugar cookies you need to wrap your dough in plastic wrap and freeze (at least overnight).

Let the dough sit on your countertop for about 30 minutes before you are ready to prepare. You want the dough to be cold, but still pliable. Roll and cut out in shapes desired.