Jennaral Eating: Avoidance tactics leads to baking in the kitchen

I was supposed to clean house today. So, naturally I found many other things to do to keep myself occupied to avoid the dreaded housework. I like a clean house, I just don't like cleaning house!

My morning started off with my Zite magazine on my iPad. Love, love, love this app. Going through it is one of the more enjoyable parts of my day. This morning gave me two really good ideas to avoid housework... I mean recipes to try out.

The first was chocolate covered peanut butter. Two of my favorite things. I got the recipe from The Brown Eyed Baker.

Here is a picture of her finished product (so you know what it *should* look like)

Feeling up for the challenge, I headed off to the Co-op, ground up my own peanut butter and bought Callebaut chocolate chips in the bulk section. I also spent a great deal of time holding a bag of these

but since I basically have eaten my weight in them over the past couple of weeks (and I have three bags stashed around the house - in vain hopes my husband and daughter won't find them) I put the bag back.

Got home and started on my peanut butter delight

Peanut butter, butter and brown sugar melted together

Then icing sugar added to it

At this point I had to pay the price for my laziness. I didn't sift my icing sugar and it had terrible lumps in it. I threw the whole thing in the Cuisinart and blended it

The peanut butter was supposed to cool to room temperature before it got shaped into cute little eggs on the pan. I could not get it to stay solid. Finally I put the peanut butter in the fridge for a while. After I got some peanut butter blobs on the pan I stuck them in the freezer to get a better shape. I had completely lost any hope of having "eggs" by this point.

I melted the chocolate chips with some shortening

Here are my peanut butter blobs waiting for their chocolate bath

After the bath. I should have tidied up the chocolate, but the extra run off was so yummy I hated to do that.

Checked out by my official taster, Jenna

The peanut butter inside

I had bought sprinkles, but completely forgot about them. We were driving home from soccer tonight when Jacob asked why there were sprinkles in the back seat of the car. Oh well....

They were delicious!!! Most definitely will do these again.

There was more time left and I still didn't want to clean, so I made homemade pop tarts I found on Scientifically Sweet

Fortunately, I had some pastry in the freezer, but the homemade strawberry jam was not ready right away so my first batch was with peach jam from the farmer's market.