SMiLes by Meg

Tag: chocolate

Pumpkin Magic Bars

This weekend, a friend from college and I were going to go apple picking. Then we were going to make awesome apple-filled desserts. Then it rained. So, instead, we “picked” apples from A&P, as well as some other goodies, and decided to try a recipe she had found on Baker’s Royale for pumpkin magic bars.  Now, I’m all about magic bars.  I’ve posted them before here, and the addition of pumpkin was brilliant in my opinion. However, baking is always an adventure, and there are definitely some modifications I would make to this one if I were to try it …

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread

I am officially back in New Jersey. School starts next week, and my summer is coming to a far to fast close. After spending the last couple months indulging in the luxury of hanging out with my family and not planning lessons, coming back here was a bit of a shock. That shock was not improved by the fact that my AC unit had leaked, causing my floor to buckle into a mountain range.

Chocolate Whoopie Pies

Full disclosure: I made these on the 3rd of July, not the 3rd of August.  But as I mentioned earlier, when you don’t have a staff room to drop the treats off in on Monday morning, you have to save some recipes for later if you want to save yourself from death by diabetic coma.

Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes

At 12:36pm tomorrow, I will have completed my first year as a high school biology teacher.  This is crazy to me.  I started this blog the night before my first day of school in September, because what first year teacher doesn’t want to add additional commitments to an already overwhelming amount of work?  Every week, no matter how much lesson planning I felt I needed to do, I found time to bake something and write about it.

S’mores Cupcakes

My family came to visit me this weekend and we spent the time cramming the entire month of June’s festivities into two days.  On Saturday, we celebrated my birthday, which is actually this coming Wednesday, and today we celebrated Father’s Day, which is actually next weekend.  It was the first time we’ve all been together in awhile (maybe since Easter?), so it was awesome to get to spend time with them.  Also, I consider birthdays weeklong events, despite my dad’s insistence otherwise, so really it also served as the kick-off to my birthday week.

Cup Cookies

So I have a special midweek treat for all of you – a guest post by two aspiring young bakers.  My twin cousins Teddy and Jack made cup cookies (which you can then put milk in, eliminating the need for dunking), and they want to tell you about it.  Enjoy!

Peanut Butter Samoa Bars

Spring break was supposed to start Friday.  It was supposed to be a half day, and then I would have all of this coming week off.  However, apparently when you have seven snow days, those week-long-break perks of being a teacher can disappear.  So instead, I have two more days between me and an extended long weekend with my parents.  Rather than wallow in these extra two days, I used my last weekend before Lent is over to bake for one more person at my school, that happens to be a celiac (can’t eat gluten).

Nightcap Tart

So today is the first day of the year where I’ve been able to convince myself it’s nice enough to sit on my balcony to type my blog.  Granted, I’m wearing a fleece and cradling a cup of hot tea, but I am outside! Anyways, this weekend I had a group of teachers from my high school over for a potluck dinner.  Now, I’m really bad at potlucks.  Not because I don’t know what to make, but because I want to make everything.  It’s very hard for me to pass up the opportunity to cook things for other people, and by …

Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Buttercream

This weekend, I was fortunate enough to be able to go back home to Massachusetts to celebrate my grandmother’s eightieth birthday party with a large group of our family.  I was even more fortunate to be asked to make the cake.  You see, a couple summers ago I took a Wilton cake decorating class with my mom.  We learned how to make all sorts of things and were definitely the superior mother-daughter team in the class.  As part of that class, I made a whole bunch of royal icing flowers just to practice, and stored them away in tupperware (they …

Chocolate Shortbread Cookies

Want to know what happens when you have 6 snow days in a month and a half?  You lose all track of time.  Literally.  This past weekend was supposed to be a long weekend from school for Presidents’ Day.  We were going to have Friday through Tuesday off.  However, we had 4 snow days in January/early February, so the school decided to take away 2 of those days (Friday and Tuesday) because we didn’t have enough days built into the end of the year.  So in honor of having school on Valentine’s Day after all, I decided to make heart-shaped …