Jolene's Recipe Journal

It's the last Muffin Monday of 2024 and I'm wrapping things up with Cranberry Eggnog Muffins from my fellow New Englander and Taste of Home Community Cook Nancy Mock! She makes them as a way to use up holiday leftovers but I had to hide the ingredients from my guys to make sure I had enough. These are made with the standard wet into dry method. It's really important not to over mix muffins in order to keep them light and tender.  I use a cookie scoop to distribute the batter for all my muffins and this time I used it for the cranberry sauce too.  It's a layer of batter, layer of whole berry cranberry sauce, then you repeat the layers.  I swirled the batter with a skewer to marble it and then I sprinkled the tops of the muffin with some gold sanding sugar.  Turbinado would work great as well. I enjoyed the crunch of the sugar on top but they also would be fantastic with an eggnog glaze.  I didn't think ahead and only hid enough eggnog for the muffins themselves....

  Cake mix cookies are simple to make and you can dress them up in so many ways! This Hot Cocoa version features a Triple Chocolate Fudge mix and  Nestle Hot Cocoa and Marshmallow morsels. 

Z is for Ziti! This year I'm participating in a bi-weekly challenge with some blogging friends to post recipes using all of the letters in the alphabet.  It  can feature a food that begins with the letter of the week or the recipe name can contain the week's letter. I'm wrapping up with Easy Ziti Bake from Taste of Home.  The hardest part of the whole dish was actually getting the ziti!  First my grocery pickup substituted rigatoni.  My husband nicely offered to pick some up and came home with more rigatoni.  Third time was the charm!  The original recipe called for two pounds of ground beef but I used one pound and a pound of ground mild Italian sausage.  I browned them in the same skillet and then drained them.  You can use homemade sauce if you like but in keeping with the "easy" theme I used store bought. We are Ragu fans, for this I used a chunky sauce that already contains herbs and garlic. If yours doesn't, add 1 teaspoon of Italian se...

We're wrapping up Christmas Cookies Week and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have! Today I'm sharing Chocolate Mint Thumbprints, a festive and tasty recipe that I found on the Betty Crocker site.

While I was searching for eggnog cookie recipes, these Nutmeg Cookies with Rum Icing from King Arthur Baking Company kept popping up. Since not everyone can get eggnog I decided to give these a try.

It's been a year since I first attempted making biscotti at home and now I'm hooked! I've made eggnog , lavender & cardamom and even pumpkin seed cranberry .  After searching through dozens of recipes I decided on these Snickerdoodle Biscotti.

Y is for Yeast! This year I'm participating in a bi-weekly challenge with some blogging friends to post recipes using all of the letters in the alphabet.  It can feature a food that begins with the letter of the week or the recipe name can contain the week's letter.

Looking through past recipes I realized that I use lemon and orange a lot but not very much lime.  I searched the Taste of Home site and decided to give these Lime and Dried Cherry Shortbread a try.

Welcome to #ChristmasCookiesWeek!   We will be sharing delicious recipes all week long in celebration of the holiday season. Bloggers from across the country have joined forces to share some of their favorite recipes for your cookie trays and dessert tables.