New and Old Favorites

Don't these look amazing?!  Eric and I made these together - I made the baked apples and the cookie dough and Eric made the cookies :)

These are Snickerdoodle Thumbprints with Baked Apple Filling and they are as tasty as they look!!  All you do is bake apples with cinnamon until they start to soften, let them cool and add them to your favorite Snickerdoodle recipe (my 'old' favorite) by using your thumb to create a bowl shape.  Cook the cookies according to the recipe.  Even more exciting than having cookies is what I got to bake them in...my new oven (my 'new' favorite) :)

 

Sorry about the so/so pictures - the thing about trying to take a good picture of a shiny new object is that it is hard (at least for me).  I am so excited that we finally replaced the crappy range that we have been using (I was desperate to stop cooking outside in the middle of October so we bought the cheapest one we could find 3 years ago - at $300 you don't get much more than 'basic'). 

This range is a little more than 'basic' lol.  It's a Samsung Slide-In Electric Chef Collection Range with Flex Duo Oven.  It has 5 burners, which include a Fast Boil, Warming and Bridged options.  The oven is what really sold me - even though it is a single oven door there is an insert that you can use to create two different temperature areas so it has a double oven option!  It's also a convection oven - so I made all of my cookies at once and they all turned out just like the picture above - perfect!  The drawer below the oven is a warming drawer - not just the hold all your cookie sheets drawer, the window is really see-though when the lights are on so you don't have to open the door to check your food, and it came with a temperature guage that hooks up inside the oven and reads out on the control panel...I could seriously go on about this range all day :) 

Side note: Some of you know that this was not what was supposed to go here originally.  The plan was to have a real double oven and a seperate gas cooktop.  Unfortunately, due to some issues - that just wasn't going to happen anytime soon.  We were looking at around 3-5 years before we could even afford all of that.  I don't want to wait that long to have a completed kitchen.  So I compromised - to some it's a dirty word, but I think it is a reasonable thing to do.  I want to finish the kitchen (actually completely finish it) by the end of next year - which meant I had to re-evaluate what my priorites were.  While I know I would have loved the double oven/cooktop combo - I have never had it so it's not a great loss, and I am happy with my super cool range with the double oven option.  So now we can have countertops installed in a few months - instead of a few years :) 

So, back to the new range...I'm sure you can tell that there is quite a bit of space around the oven (for some reason you cannot get a 36" electric range - you can get gas ranges that size though grrr).  This actually turns out to be a good thing!  This gives me enough room to create pull outs on either side for utensils. 

Something like this - easy to reach and use! :) 

    

I'm still working on the plan for the cabinets, but hopefully I will have something to share soon!!

Have a great day!
Beth