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Posts tagged as “easy dessert”

Quick cherry ice cream parfaits with dark chocolate and pecans

Quick cherry ice cream parfaits with dark chocolate and pecansBrowse recipes, menu ideas and more From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

This perfect dessert is a sweet way to end a casual Valentine's Day dinner. It's unfussy and great for a weeknight. Plus, who doesn't love ice cream?

For extra deliciousness, scout out your local area for a dairy or creamery where you can buy homemade ice cream. I've been fortunate to live near a few excellent places. In the Rochester, New York area, try Pittsford Farms Dairy & Bakery; in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania area, try Klein Farms Dairy & Creamery in Easton, PA. If you prefer, you can also use non-dairy ice cream and nondairy whipped topping.

Luxardo and Fabbri Amarena Wild Cherries in Syrup are the best for cocktails, but the juice that comes with them is liquid gold for an easy dessert recipe like this. You can use a few tablespoons of the syrup blended with vanilla ice cream, a little milk, and a little bit of ice to make a great milkshake, or with yogurt and ice for a smoothie, too. Substitute canned, dark cherries in syrup, if they are hard to find and you aren't able to order from Amazon or a specialty food store online. I wouldn't suggest using maraschino cherries for this, though; quite simply, they are not as good in this recipe.

Quick Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

Quick Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip CookiesBrowse recipes, menu ideas and more From Anna's Kitchen (www.fromannaskitchen.com)

Have you ever had a craving for baked goods in the middle of the summer, or any other time when you don't want to turn on the oven?

Me too. The struggle is real, isn't it?

It always opens up this debate in my mind:

Option A. Give in and turn on the oven, making the whole house hot and uncomfortable in the process, even worse for Dave and me since we don't have central air.

Option B. Forget about it, and "save" the calories.

Option C. Forget the calories, and go get ice cream.

Recently, the idea came to my mind to use my toaster oven to make a quick batch of cookies. I wouldn't call this a brilliant idea, since I should've thought of it much sooner: my toaster oven is, in fact, an oven. A convection oven, at that. One with a little fan in it to simulate faster cooking.

Then again, I suppose my girlish figure is glad that I didn't think of this sooner. A successful batch of chocolate peanut butter cookies later, I have now opened up Pandora's box of small-batch dessert-making in the toaster oven that I probably should have just left alone.

Since this was a small batch and I left the butter out overnight before cooking, I didn't bother with the mixer. It was super easy to make these cookies by hand in about 10 minutes or less. At the end of it, I had a plate of warm, fresh cookies, and only a few tools to clean up. Super win.