Remember that little Pillsbury Bake-Off that we submitted recipes to ages ago?  (To check out the recipes, just click on “Pillsbury Bake-Off” under the category sidebar.)

It was a fun thing to try, even if we did get a little bit tired of Pillsbury products by the end.  Alas, the judges did not like our recipes, and we were not asked to compete for a million dollars.  (Maybe next year.  =]  )

In any case, many of you have probably already seen this in the news, but the 2012 winner has been announced for (drum roll please):

Pumpkin Ravioli!

When I first saw the name, I immediately thought of the savory versions of this that we’ve made or had in restaurants in the fall.  But imagine my surprise to find out that this is a dessert!  Have you considered the full implications of this?  Imagine a sweet spaghetti with a strawberry sauce!  Or a sugary lasagne!  Or a grilled cheese sandwich made with pound cake and orange icing!  (And yes, I have actually tried that last one.  It was paired with cupcakes made from meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  Don’t judge.)

I’m curious to try this, or maybe with some variation, but that will probably have to wait until the fall.  We’ve run through our frozen pumpkin from last fall’s purchases, and I’m not a huge fan of canned squash.  In the meantime, though, maybe a rhubarb filling could be delicious…

So, I recently learned that mole (the Mexican dish) rhymes with mole (the animal), not olé. (Is it possible for a word to rhyme with itself? I dunno. We’re going to pretend “yes”). Whaddaya know.

Anyways, so this was my final submission to the Pillsbury Bakeoff, and it was by far my favourite. It also seems like the one that’s least likely to go anywhere, just because mole is such a polarizing dish. Most people I know either love it or hate it, and I agree that it’s a little off the beaten path, so… *shrug*. I like it, and that’s all that matters.

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So, of the recipes I made for the Pillsbury competition, this one was definitely my least favourite. I thought the filling was good, but it just didn’t really blend right. The extreme buttery-ness of the biscuits basically overpowers everything else. So, I wouldn’t recommend using this with a Pillsbury product — but if you’re looking for an awesomely yummy jerk chicken recipe, have I got a deal for you!

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My third recipe submission in the Pillsbury Bakeoff is a cousin of the Crescent-Wrapped Sausages from my last post.

(These guys are the ones on the right)

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So, here’s my second installment in the Pillsbury Bakeoff. This is a recipe that we’ve actually been making for a couple of years now, but it required some refinement before we finally submitted it:

Crescent-Wrapped Sausages

(The sausage guys are the ones on the left. I did two different recipes at the same time this night, to maximize my RSTR (recipe submission trial rate))

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The famous cookies that everyone wants the recipe for!

Ingredients:

1 pkg(s) Pillsbury Sugar Cookie Dough
2 oz(s) Hershey’s Semi-Sweet Baking Chocolate, melted and cooled
3.5 oz(s) caramel candy (about 10 pieces)
1 tablespoon(s) milk
0.5 tablespoon(s) butter

Number of servings: 15

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Melt the caramel candy in the milk and butter, either on a stove-top on medium heat, or in the microwave. Allow the caramel to cool slightly.

Roll out the sugar cookie dough on a sheet of wax or parchment paper to a final thickness of about 1/4″.

Spread the melted chocolate over the top of the cookie dough, leaving about 1/2″ of plain dough on the top and bottom edges. Repeat with the melted caramel. If the dough has become too soft to handle, put the dough into the freezer for about 3 minutes to harden.

Starting at the bottom edge, carefully roll the sugar cookie dough up into a long tube, keeping the filling on the inside of the roll. Seal the final edge by pressing the dough into the roll.

Cut 1/4″ disks off of the roll and place 3″ apart on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 12-14 minutes, or until the cookies are golden. Allow the cookies to cool on the sheets for 2-4 minutes before removing and cooling completely.

This post details my first submission to the Pillsbury Bakeoff competition. What I’d like to do in this series of posts is not only give you the recipe that I used, but discuss some of my thought processes in coming up with the recipe, and some possible variants and improvements that could be made.

But first, the recipe! And a gratuitous picture to get you to click the “more” link below it.

Moroccan Chicken

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Do you all remember this post  yummy and delicious apple-cranberry cinnamon rolls?

Well, the submission deadline is behind us, and now we can share our yummy recipes!

The final recipe:

1 can of cinnamon rolls (Pillsbury® Grands!® Refrigerated Cinnamon Rolls with Icing with 5 rolls/pack – these are the ones that actually have rolled dough.  I tried to do this with one of the 8/pack, and it didn’t work very well)
2 apples, peeled and diced
1/2 c craisins
1/4 c brown sugar
1/4 c butter
1 tsp vanilla

Carmelized apples in the brown sugar, butter, and vanilla.  Meanwhile, unrolled the cinnamon rolls and cut each in half to give 10 pieces.  Put the cranberries and caramelized fruit on the rolls, and re-rolled the dough with the filling inside.  Put the cinnamon rolls into a buttered 9×13 pan, and baked at 375 for 25 minutes.  Immediately after removing the cinnamon rolls from the oven, spread frosting (included in the cinnamon rolls package) over the top, and served!

What do you all think?  Is this worth a million dollars?  =]

So, as we’ve mentioned a couple of times before, the Pillbusry Bakeoff is happening (or actually, it happened — the deadline for recipe submission was yesterday), so I spent most of the last month trying to come up with recipes for the contest. Now, I have no illusions at all about actually winning the competition (especially given the style of food I decided to submit), but this was certainly a fun way to get thinking about some new recipes, and some old recipes in new ways.

I ended up submitting five recipes in total, all of which I thought came out pretty well, and could be adapted to a number of different situations. In this post, I’ll describe briefly each of the recipes, and then over the course of the next couple weeks I’ll be posting some more details on each of the recipes. Also, of course, we’ll post information on how our various entries fare — the Pillsbury judges select 20 recipes to “compete” online over the summer, where the winners are chosen by popular vote; the top 10 recipes chosen in this forum, together with 90 recipes selected by the Pillsbury judges, will proceed to the finals in Orlando… sometime next year, I think.

So anyways, without further blathering on my part, here are the five recipes I submitted:

• Moroccan Chicken
• Jerk Chicken Sandwiches
• Crescent-Wrapped Sausages
• Basil Chicken and Cashew Crescents
• Chicken en Mole Empanadas

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Ah, the bakeoff.  I’m working on perfecting another recipe for caramel-chocolate pinwheel cookies, and this is certainly proving to be more of a challenge than the cinnamon rolls.

My first attempt was
+ tasty
+ quick to make
+ beautiful (on the baking sheet)

but was also
- messy
- impossible to get off of the baking sheet in one piece.

See?  Aren’t they pretty?

Regardless, I couldn’t submit the recipe in that form, so it was back to revisions.  My second spin through was much more successful – I think I finally managed to get the proportions right, and actually let the cookies cool before trying to scoop them off of the sheets (which helped with the final presentation).

I was pretty excited, because we brought these to church for a pot luck tonight following a day of service in the community, and I actually had people come up to me afterward to ask what was in the delicious cookies!  I don’t think that’s ever happened to me at a pot luck of this kind before, so that was really neat!