Happy Birthday Blog!

The month of April marks 1 year of the Teen Cooking Queen blog!! That's 1 year, 12 months, 52 weeks, or 365 days of cooking, pictures, and posting. This is post number 43. By next year, I'm hoping to make it to 100 posts. Another reason to celebrate!

But, to celebrate the first birthday of the blog, there were cookies. And plenty of them. It was a cookie party!



That's just the beginning of our cookie-making. The menu included homemade peanut butter cookies and M&M(due to lack of chocolate chips) cookies. Both turned out marvelously.


And we ended up with a plate of soft, chewy cookies. And plenty of cookie dough that we gleefully feasted on.


Ahh, someone's hand reaching in for a circle of sweetness(most definitely not mine!) I really don't blame them. Go for the peanut butter one! Good choice.

BUT, that is not where the celebration festivities ended! Oh, no. Today, I was bored. As usual. AND, we just happened to have(momentarily clear throat) 8 pounds of strawberries in the fridge. My mom used almost half to make jam last night but there was still too many to eat. Or were there?

Yep, two of these babies occupied the entire leftover shelf of the fridge. It was insanity! Luckily, I remembered seeing the cutest little recipe for Mini Strawberry Pies on the Tasty Kitchen from rainydaygal. She also has a super cute blog, here! I had never made or eaten a strawberry pie in all of my existence but figured, why not? And got to work clearing out our strawberry stash!

First you have to cut in half(or fourths for the larger ones) 4 cups of strawberries.


Then mix them with 1 tablespoon vanilla extract and dump in a dry ingredient mixture of flour, sugar, brown sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

While the strawberries are marinating in their sugary coating, I prepared the crust. The recipe includes directions on how to make homemade crust, but I just used some premade crust that we had in the fridge and it worked fine. It also says to cut out 3 inch circles but I had to use a cutter slightly larger to make it fit. Stuff the circles into 9 cups of a muffin pan and fill with the berries.


Now this is where it gets fun! I used our new little pastry wheel(a pizza cutter also does the job) to cut strips of the dough and lay them across the mini pies in two directions to give a lattice top appearance. Pop them in the oven for half an hour and make yourself a snack! Cheese is always my pick.

When they come out of the oven their little tops are golden and crispy and the aroma will make anyone fall in love with them. I definitely did!

I attempted to put artsy strawberries on the top like in rainydaygal's recipe but it just didn't have the same affect.


Buy, anyway, happy birthday blog! I am excited for another year of (hopefully) delicious blogging!!