Lemon Brownie Recipe with Lemon Buttercream Frosting

I love all things lemon and I love brownies, so one day I was thinking and decided that there must be a way to make lemon brownies.  All the gooey chewiness of the brownie and the fresh flavor of the lemon.  I googled recipes but didn't come up with much that looked like what I wanted so I kinda made my own version of the recipe.  I used butter instead of oil because it complimented the lemon and made it extra delicious, but you can use oil instead of the butter.

Ingredients:

Brownies
Lemon Cake Mix
Lemon Jello Box (Small)
1/2 Cup of Butter Softened
3 Eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  In a bowl combine the cake mix and the jello mix.  Add in the butter and mix with a spoon until crumbly.  (Try to mix a little as possible for best results.)  Then stir in the eggs until just combined.  Pour batter into a greased 9x9 inch square pan or for brownie bites, a mini muffin tin.  Bake for 15 minutes for the square pan or 10 minutes for the mini muffin tin.  Allow brownies to cool before frosting.

Lemon Buttercream


1/2 Cup Butter Softened
3 - 3 1/2 Cups of Powdered Sugar
2 Tbsp of Lemon Juice
Yellow Food Coloring
Yellow Sprinkles and Lemon Head Candies (optional)

Beat butter until smooth.  Then add the powdered sugar and beat until all the lumps are gone and the frosting is very stiff.  Add in the lemon juice.  Add in the rest of the sugar a spoonful at a time until you have the consistency that you want.  Add 5 drops of yellow food coloring or more if desired to get the yellow color you want.  Frost brownies or pipe onto brownie bites and decorate with sprinkles and candies.

Begging for Oatmeal

Oatmeal and I go a long way back.  I grew up on a steady breakfast diet of mush which consisted of whole wheat flour and water with a little bit of honey.  So basically boiled paste.  It wasn't our favorite, so whenever we got oatmeal it was a huge treat.  Then I went to college and got married, and I kind of went off oatmeal for a while.  I was doing couponing for a while and managed to get a years worth of cold cereal for free so we ate that a lot.  After that, I decided that I didn't want my kids to grow up eating fruit loops and frosted flakes so I made them oatmeal.  You can imagine that they were less than thrilled after eating sugary colorful cereal for a year.

As I was thinking of ways to make oatmeal appetizing for kids I remembered back to my nanny days when I saw an instant oatmeal that had dinosaur eggs in it.  The eggs were an egg coated sugar candy that dissolved in the hot water to reveal a dinosaur sprinkle.  It was super cool, and the little girl I watched loved it.  Back in my kitchen I realized that I had some left over bunny sprinkles from Easter so I sprinkled some on top of the oatmeal to see if it made any difference to my kids.  It was magical.  The oatmeal had transformed from nasty cereal to a cool treat because it was covered in colorful bunnies.

It's been about 5 years since we started putting sprinkles on our oatmeal, and it is one of my children's favorite breakfasts.  If we are using colored sugar sprinkles I tend to put less sweetener in the oatmeal while I am cooking it so it is still healthy.  Sometimes we use just colored sugar, and often we use the generic rainbow sprinkles from the store.  Occasionally though we do something special and make the sprinkles match a certain shape or holiday.  Some of our recent favorites were the Little Miss Muffit or Halloween Spider oatmeal and the Patriotic oatmeal.  My kids loved the flag on their cereal and have requested that for our 4th of July breakfast.  I'm loving that something so simple and inexpensive has made our breakfasts a more fun and healthy meal.

Pink Lemonade Cupcake w/ Raspberry Buttercream Frosting

I love pink lemonade in the summer, and since I also love cupcakes I thought why not join the two.  The cupcakes came out tart and lemony and so the sweet, rich, raspberry frosting topped them off perfectly.  I had to make these about 3 times over two weeks because we just kept eating them all.

 

Ingredients:

Pink Lemonade Cake:

1 Box White Cake Mix
3 Eggs
3/4 Cup Buttermilk
1/2 Sour Cream
1/2 Packet of Pink Lemonade Koolaid
1 tsp Vanilla Extract

 

Raspberry Buttercream Frosting:

8 oz cream cheese
1/2 cup butter, softened
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup frozen raspberries, thawed and strained


Preheat oven to 325 degrees.  Combine cake mix and koolaid mix.  Then beat in the eggs, buttermilk, sour cream and vanilla.  You can add pink food coloring if you want a deeper pink color for the cupcakes.  The picture above had no food coloring added.

Line cupcake tin with cupcake liners and fill each liner about 3/4 of the way full.  Bake for about 11-13 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

While the cupcakes cool, beat cream cheese and butter together until smooth.  Add the powdered sugar in 1/2 cup at a time until frosting is the consistency you want.  Then add in the vanilla and raspberries.  Mix until combined and then pipe the frosting onto your cooled cupcakes.

Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream inspired Cookies

I have a thing for Ben and Jerry's so when I had to make some cookies this weekend I allowed my obsession to inspire me.  These cookies are based on Ben and Jerry's Everything but the... flavor.  All I can say is Yummy!!  I'll be honest, one plate of the cookies never made it to the event, and the three that did were gone before dinner even started.  Not bad!  They were chewy with a hint of peanut butter, lots of chocolate and here are there a little bit of toffee crunch.  The white part of the cookie resembled a chocolate chip batter so the brown sugar/butter flavor was in there two.  Delicious!!

So here's what I did.

Ingredients:

Vanilla Cake Mix
Milk Chocolate or Fudge Chocolate Cake Mix
3/4 Cup Brown Sugar
3/4 Cup Butter Softened
4 Eggs
2 Tbls Water
1/4 Cup Flour
6 Mini White Chocolate Bars (I used Hershey's Cookies and Cream Bars)
2 Large Heath Bars
10 Small Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Combine the Vanilla cake mix in a bowl with the brown sugar and half of the butter.  Then beat in two eggs.  Add half of the flour and 1 Tbls of water.  Mix tip combined.  Chop up the chocolate bars and peanut butter cups into medium sized chunks.  Gently stir them into the white batter.
In a separate bowl combine the chocolate cake mix with the remaining half of the butter.  Beat in the remaining eggs.  Then add the remaining flour and water.  Mix until combined.  Now we are adding the chocolate and vanilla mixes together, but we want a swirl effect and do not want them fully mixed.  I put the chocolate batter on top of the vanilla and pulled my mixing spoon through both several times creating swirls of the two mixtures.  Once you are satisfied with the mixture spoon the batter into 1" cookie balls and drop them on a greased cookie sheet.  Bake for about 8 minutes.  Cookies should be starting to brown on the bottom but not the top.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownie Bites

It's no secret.  I have a serious obsession with brownies.  The are so gooey, so chocolatey so good.  The only way to make them better is to top them with your favorite frosting and some sprinkles.  This recipe combines two of my favorite yummy treats, Brownies and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.  Yum!!  We could hardly wait to eat these.

 

 Ingredients:

Your favorite Brownie Mix

Eggs

Vegetable Oil

 

Cookie Dough Frosting:

3/4 cup butter, softened

4 oz cream cheese, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2-3 cups powdered sugar

Garnish:

Mini Chocolate Chips

Brown Sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Prepare brownie mix as directed.  Use a non-stick spray to coat each hole in mini muffin tin.  This will help them come out without sticking.  Fill the cups to about 3/4 of the way full and bake for about 12 minutes.  I like mine still gooey on the inside so if you like them done you may want to add 2-3 minutes.  Set them out to cool.  In order to get the brownie bites out of the tin without them sticking, place the cooled brownie pan into the freezer for 30 minutes.  

 

While the brownies are cooling combine the butter, cream cheese and sugar in a bowl and beat until smooth.  Then add the salt, flour and vanilla.  Add the powdered sugar 1/2 cup at a time until frosting reaches the consistency that you like.

 

Once the brownies bites are starting to harden pull them out of the freezer and remove them from the muffin tin.  Then pipe the frosting onto your brownie bites.  Sprinkle with brown sugar and mini chocolate chips.  Enjoy