caramel cracker cookies (make your own candy, put it in a cookie, woohoo)

I’ve made these chocolate caramel cracker things a lot – usually around Christmas time when I decorate them all up and give them away as desserts. Then one day I day a thought… what if I put that crazy candy inside of a cookie? So I did it. And then I immediately gave away a bunch of the cookies because it was too much to have that deliciousness just sitting in my house. If you need some deliciousness in your house though, might I suggest making these? You might want to give some away, too. Or hey, keep ’em for yourself. I won’t tell.

First things first! We gotta make the candy. It’s easy, I swear. Don’t be frightened of the word “candy”. We won’t even use those scary candy thermometers or anything! Promise.

Brown sugar, butter, and condensed milk is what you need for the caramel goo. The chocolate chips are for later.

Get a tray and put your fancy silpat mat on it – or just aluminum foil. You’ll want this – it’ll make it easier to remove the candy and you’ll thank your stars you did that step.

For the goo, you just melt the butter and sugar with about half a can of sweetened condensed milk. Sit around and watch this on the stove and stir it every so often. You want to cook it until it starts to bubble and thicken up. From there, you’ll want it cook it for another 2 minutes. It’ll look all frothy and lovely, like below:

Pour the goo over your saltines.

Mmm, goo.

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frozen butterfinger pie

Need a quick and easy dessert for Fourth of July today? I got the hook up for you!

Last week I was planning on making dinner (macaroni and cheese — oh, I’ll have to post that one next week) and was asking Jake if he thought I should make dessert, too. He’s not a dessert person so he just kind of shrugged his shoulders at me. I decided it was better to ask Chris, our out of town friend, what he thought. He was much more receptive to the idea. Chris mentioned something about butterfingers and Jake then mentioned a pie, so butterfinger pie came up to the plate. See, I don’t even think of these things myself sometimes.

[The cast of characters]

This is a pretty simple no bake pie. You don’t have to freeze it – you can just leave it in the fridge – but freezing it gives it an almost ice cream like texture, perfect for a warm summer day. As you can see, you also don’t need a whole lot of ingredients to make this pie!

[Crush the vanilla wafers – bang, bang, bang!]

I decided I wanted to do this pie with vanilla wafers. You can also do an Oreo crust, graham cracker crust, or buy a premade shell. I put the wafers in a plastic bag and started to bang away on them until they were smooth crumbs.

[Melted butter and a tablespoon of sugar melds the vanilla wafers together to form a crust]

Add a tablespoon of sugar and six tablespoons of melted butter. Press it into a pie pan. I decided to bake mine for about 10 minutes at 350 degrees just to set it up a little, but you don’t really need to do that.

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