We’re just a couple days away from Thomas turning three months old and I can’t believe how time has flown. Well, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. The weeks are flying by that’s for sure, but those middle of the night feedings are still something else. My sleep deprivation is not as bad as it was those early weeks when it felt like a horrible combination of being drunk and hungover at the same time, along with feeling like someone was pounding my head with a hammer while I was underwater. After not being able to stomach the sight and smell of coffee during most of my pregnancy, I’ve welcomed it back in my life with open arms. Coffee, I promise I will never leave you again.

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It feels really good to be back in the kitchen after a very busy couple of months. The rest of my summer was pretty much a write-off due to pregnancy fatigue, we were away for most of October due to our Italy trip and then I headed off to Ottawa to attend FBC2017. The beginning of November had us driving up to Newmarket for my brother’s wedding and afterward, my parents stayed and visited for an extra couple of days. Mid-November, we finally enjoyed some long-awaited weekends that allowed us to do nothing but sleep-in and catch up on housework and laundry. Now, I can’t believe we’re approaching the last month of the year – seriously, where did 2017 go?

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I can’t believe that I almost forgot to post this recipe for Soft-Baked Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies. Do you want to know what reminded me? Here it is – scrolling through my own Instagram account. I spotted a photo I had posted over a month ago of these cookies cooling on a rack on my kitchen counter and my jaw dropped when I found these photos still on my camera. Am I the only person who does that? Forgetting to edit photos and post recipes I mean, not scrolling through one’s own Instagram profile. I like to at least pretend that everyone secretly checks out their own account from time to time.

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For the past month I’ve been making a point of going through and cleaning up old files on my computer (call it spring cleaning if you will) and a couple days ago I came across the cookbook I made for my Grandma. I filled it with family photos, fun little snippets and of course, a round-up of her most loved, family favourite recipes. Last December I hounded my Mom to send me photos from her recipe notebook and then spent countless evenings transcribing her handwritten notes. The structure of each handwritten recipe was the same: title, ingredient list, oven temperature and then total minutes (i.e. 350*F – 11 minutes). That’s it. Luckily I spent a lot of my childhood and teen years observing her in the kitchen, so I was able to understand the lack of instruction for the most part, along with the help of a little kitchen intuition and of course, advice from my Mom.

Over the years I’ve featured a couple of my Grandma’s recipes here on the blog, but it wasn’t until I started the cookbook project that I was able to get her recipe for monster cookies. And after having a blast stacking cookies, taking photos and getting crumbs everywhere, I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to finally share the recipe. Always a crowd pleaser, monster cookies are fun, chewy cookies that are notably made with peanut butter, rolled oats and filled with lots of chocolate chips and M& M’s. As former peanut butter loathing child, I always wondered why my Grandma had jars of the stuff in her pantry and now I think I have my answer.

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Trevor and I have a real addiction for peanut butter. We make our own on a semi-regular basis and if you check out my blog archives, you may notice that I have over a dozen peanut butter recipes. There wasn’t a lot of PB goodness in the kitchen when I was a growing up, so I’d like to think that this is just me making up for lost time. So when Food Blogger’s of Canada and Hershey’s Canada were looking for bloggers to take part in the #DoYouSpoon campaign promoting Reese Chocolate Spread, I jumped at the chance. Peanut butter and chocolate? Count me in!

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It’s been pretty quiet here on the baking front. Even though we have air conditioning, our desire to eat anything flour or sugar-based has reached an all-time low. But if you shift through my archives, you’ll notice that this happens every summer. With the weather being as nice as it is, I tend to spend less time in the kitchen and more time outside. It’s not a bad thing, but I like to acknowledge it because the summer season is so short and we need to all get outside and enjoy it while it’s still here. Pretty soon we’ll be swapping our iced coffees for pumpkin spiced lattes and pulling our boots and winter coats out of storage. Ugh.

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If you take a look through my recipe archive, you’ll notice that I tend to favour certain ingredients more than others. Besides fruit, some of my most common baking ingredients are chocolate, espresso and peanut butter. Baking with chocolate is obvious because chocolate anything is delicious. If chocolate is the main ingredient, I’ll add a quick dash of espresso to enhance the delicious chocolatey flavour. Peanut butter is a common baking staple because we always have some in our kitchen and Trevor is a fan of anything I make with peanut butter. Plus peanut butter and chocolate together rocks.

Speaking of peanut butter and chocolate, I’d been meaning to make this recipe for a while now, but until recently I was so convinced that I had already posted a peanut butter chocolate banana bread recipe. Does this happen to anyone else? A couple months ago, I had planned on making white chocolate cranberry cookies only to realize that I had already posted a recipe back in 2011. Since then, whenever I have a recipe in mind, I panic and search my archives to make sure I’m not accidentally repeating myself.

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Back in the fall, I purchased some 100-calorie peanut butter chocolate bars from Costco as an easy, portable purse snack. These bars was especially handy because I take a zumba dance class on Wednesday nights and I’m always famished on my hour-long bus ride back to our apartment. Being only 100-calories though, the bars never satisfied me after my workout so I wasn’t really that sad once we finished the Costco-sized box a few weeks ago.

Or so I thought. Lately, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. The calorie content may have been pretty miniscule for a post-workout snack, but the taste and the texture was something I couldn’t get enough of. It reminded me of a soft peanut butter puff wheat square with a hint of chocolate. Growing up, I loved homemade puff wheat squares, but I stopped making them a couple years ago when I read about corn syrup being pretty much one of the worst things you can put in your body (thanks Jillian Michaels). Since then I’ve completely sworn off baking with corn syrup, even though I know that I can’t completely avoid eating it (like in the 100-calorie bars).

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The fall season tends to give me two types of feelings. One is the need to organize all the things. This feeling is usually fulfilled with cleaning every inch of our apartment, sorting and donating a bunch of the stuff we no longer use (mostly clothing) and creating new organized ways to live our lives (i.e. cupboard organizers). Previously in our university days, this type of feeling used to be achieved by watching an Oprah special or a particularly depressing episode of Hoarders. Now, I find that the organization bug hits me twice a year: once in the spring and once in the fall. Our apartment has never looked better.

The other feeling that hits me is a weird type of nostalgia. I could blame it on the fact that its September and this time of year is usually reminiscent to those returning to school. However, it’s been 5 years since I said goodbye to my post-secondary career and graduated my way out of tuition fees and overpriced “mandatory” textbooks purchases. Now that I think about it though, this feeling started last week when Trevor and I spent a rare, quiet evening at home enjoying some scotch (him), red wine (me) and flipping through old bands and songs generated from a recent BuzzFeed list. Sometimes I feel so muddled down with trying to keep track and remember things on a daily basis that I am shocked to find out that I can recall lyrics from songs I haven’t listened to in probably a decade. It leaves me with a feeling of wondering “what part of my brain did I drag that information from?”

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Welcome to the new layout for She Bakes Here!

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working with the brilliant and talented Lindsay over at Purr Design to help make the scary leap from Blogger to a self-hosted WordPress site. Not only did she transfer every single file and comment, she also helped streamline my recipe index and made my recipes much more printer and user friendly. You can even like, tweet and pin each post! After being stuck with the limitations of Blogger for the last 2 1/2 years, I’m pretty much leaping with joy over the amount of freedom I now have. The popular post listing on the side bar? All Lindsay. The fact that my tweets show up again on the blog? All Lindsay again! (PS: I plan on tweeting more, I promise!)

So have a look around and let me know what to think of the new look. I’m still in the process of formatting each and every of my almost 200 posts, but if anything doesn’t work, feel free to pop me an email or comment.

In the meantime, I have a special recipe to share. Special for you because its delicious and you don’t have to turn on your oven to make it, special for me because it’s part of a fun memory I have with one of my closest friends.

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