Breakfast Strudel

Easter's coming and my kids and I are starting to get excited!  We have lots of company coming and I can't wait to get started on all of the good food we'll be serving.

Today's recipe is a perfect brunch dish for Easter morning.  I made these for our Christmas morning breakfast and quickly fell in love with them.  I've adapted this recipe from Cuisine At Home.  

This strudel is easy to make and I LOVE that you can make it the night before, put it in the fridge, and bake it in the morning.  It's perfect for Christmas or Easter when you have other things to do in the morning.

I also love that you use puff pastry for the dough.  This was my first time using it and now I'm hooked!  It's so delicious, all buttery and flaky.  

And, hello!  Are these not so beautiful?!  They make a gorgeous main dish for breakfast or a brunch.  I just love, love, love these.  So easy and so good!!

Here's what you'll need:

1 (1.1 lb) box puff pastry dough (you'll find this in the frozen foods isle)

2 Tbsp. unsalted butter

1 C. frozen cubed hash brown potatoes (next time I'll try the O'Brien variety for more color)

1/2 C. diced onion OR 1 Tbsp. dried chopped onion (if you use O'Brien hash browns, you can omit these)

1 C. diced ham

11 eggs

2 Tbsp. minced fresh chives, optional

4 oz. cream cheese, softened

2 Tbsp. orange juice

1 egg

1 Tbsp. water

2 Tbsp. Parmesan cheese, shredded

Thaw pastry according to package directions, about 30 minutes.  While it's thawing, melt the butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.  Add potatoes and saute for 5 minutes.  Add the ham.

Whisk the eggs and chives (if using) together.  Add them to the pan and scramble just until set.  (They should still be a bit soft and wet since they'll continue to cook in the oven.)  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  Take off the heat and add the cream cheese and orange juice until blended.

Refrigerate the eggs while working with the pastry.

Unfold the pastry sheet on parchment paper that's been lightly dusted with flour.  Trim the pastry as shown.  

Fill with half of the egg mixture.  Fold up the flaps at each end and braid as shown.  Repeat with the remaining pastry and egg filling.  

Lift the strudels and parchment onto a baking sheet.

Combine the remaining egg and water.  

Brush over the top of the strudels.  Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

At this point, you can either cover the strudels and keep them in the fridge overnight or you can go right ahead and bake them.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until golden.  Let cool 5 minutes before slicing.

When ready to serve, cut the strudels at an angle.

These are so wonderful!  Hopefully these will help make your Easter brunch a beautiful breeze.

Chocolate Banana Muffins

Well, I'm happy to announce that our newest addition has arrived!  We are SOOOOOOO in love with him!!!

As expected, I don't find much time for cooking or baking, so I'm so thankful that I took the time to make meals in advance and stock my freezer with them.

On one of my cooking days, I had invited some friends to join me.  My friend, Robyn, was so sweet to make a couple batches of chocolate chip cookie dough that we balled and froze.  She reminded me that it's important to have some goodies on hand as well.

Definitely words of wisdom!

I then shifted my mode of making dinners to making treats too.

Today's recipe is one of those that I made in advance, froze, and have been able to pull out to treat my family.

When I was searching the web for a good banana muffin recipe, I came across this one.  (Original recipe found HERE.)  I asked my hubby if he thought I should try banana muffins with chocolate.  He didn't really understand why I was actually asking him this because in his mind, anything is better with chocolate.

So, we gave these a try and everyone LOVED them!  I thought the chocolate/banana ratio was just perfect - not so banana-y that you couldn't taste the chocolate and not so chocolate-y that you didn't know that these were banana muffins.  They are a PERFECT after school snack!

Here's what you'll need:

1 1/2 C. flour

3/4 C. sugar

1/4 C. cocoa powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. baking powder

1 1/3 C. mashed ripe bananas

1/3 C. oil

1 egg

1 or 2 C. chocolate chips (depending on how many you want)

                                        

(Just a little side note, I got this touchpad for Christmas, and this is my FAVORITE way to use it - finding great recipes!!)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt, and baking powder.  

In a medium-sized bowl, cominbe mashed bananas, oil, and egg.  

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients.  Stir until the mixture is moist and there are no more streaks of the dry ingredients.  Fold in the chocolate chips.  

With a large scoop or spoon, fill the greased or lined muffin cups 3/4 of the way full with the batter.  Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted int he middle of a muffin comes out clean.

When I made these, it made 12 regular-sized muffins and 12 mini muffins.

YUM!!!

Breakfast Rolls

So, my friends and I have a little bit of a problem.  When we get together to walk and get some exercise, we like to talk about food.  Many times, food that's so not good for us.  Then we go home and start making these delicious things we've been talking about.  Hence, our walking sessions turn out to be mostly for our social entertainment rather than keeping our bodies trim.

I love it!

That's where today's recipe comes from.  It was an idea that one of my friends had and tried and enjoyed.

We did too.

There's not much of a recipe to this, so it's easy to change the recipe to however you'd like it.

Here's what you'll need:

A tube (or two) of crescent dough, the seamless sheet

Cooked and crumbled breakfast sausage, or bacon

Scrambled eggs

Shredded cheese, any kind you'd like

If you haven't seen the seamless sheet of crescent dough at the grocery store, this is what it looks like.  I LOVE this stuff!  It's so nice when you don't have to worry about the seams in their original crescent rolls.  But if you can't find the seamless sheet, the regular crescent roll dough works just fine too.

Cook your meat and set it aside. 

Roll out your dough.  If you're using the regular crescent roll dough (that has seams), just press the seams together.

Assemble your ingredients.

Place scrambled eggs on the dough.

Sprinkle the sausage, or bacon, over the eggs.

Top with shredded cheese.

Roll up carefully jellyroll style (like cinnamon rolls).

Cut as you would cinnamon rolls.

I originally placed them onto a cookie sheet to bake.

They turned out ugly, still tasty, but ugly.  Like this...

Then I tried putting them in greased ramekins and the results were much better.  If you don't have ramekins, use a greased muffin tin.  It'd be perfect!  Bake at 375 degrees for approximately 15 minutes, or until golden.

We enjoyed these topped with country gravy.

So simple and so yummy! 

Bacon Pancakes

Are you a bacon lover?  We sure like it around here, so when I saw this idea online, I knew we had to give it a whirl.  It's SO simple and a fun change up to plain ol' pancakes!  

I was also thinking that this might be our Valentine's breakfast using two slices of bacon in a V-shape and making the pancakes into a heart shape over the bacon.  SO FUN!!!

Here's what you'll need:

Your favorite pancake batter (a pancake mix from a bag or your own from scratch - I used THIS one)
A package of bacon

Cook your bacon until almost done.  It will cook more with the pancakes.  Remove to a paper towel-lined plate to soak up the grease.

We have monster bacon I tell you!  Yours can be any size.

Mix up your pancake batter.  Place however many slices of bacon you can fit on your griddle, leaving plenty of room for the pancake batter.

Pour some pancake batter around and over each slice of bacon.

When cooked on one side, carefully flip each pancake over.  Mine were so big I had to use two spatulas.

I didn't think my kids could eat one of these whole pancakes above since they were so big.  So I cut the rest of my bacon in half and made more normal sized bacon pancakes for them.

They were just the right size for the little ones. 

Drizzle with syrup and enjoy!

We thought they were pretty fun!  Enjoy!!