Holiday Baking Tips

!±8± Holiday Baking Tips

Baking for the holidays can sometimes seem like a stressful chore. It doesn't have to be!

The first thing to keep in mind when baking is to make simple treats. Family and friends are not going to care if it took you three hours to decorate a dozen cupcakes with the handmade roses; all they want to do is eat them. They will perhaps comment how nice they look - just before they inhale them.

The second thing to keep in mind is to have a variety available. Be aware of any family or guest allergies and have treats available for everyone. Rice Krispie squares are a good treat for anyone with gluten, nut or egg allergies, as they contain neither of these (although one wouldn't know it by the TV commercial where the woman dusts herself with flour prior to taking the tray out to her family).

The third thing to do is to get the family involved in the baking. This not only takes some of the pressure off of you, it also makes for some fun memories. Taking pictures of the children as they decorate gingerbread men or sugar cookies will lead to some fun Scrapbooking later. The pictures will bring back fond memories for years to come, long after the treats have been eaten.

Trick number four is to co-ordinate a cookie/square exchange. This can be done with friends and family members not living in your immediate household. Each person can bake one type of cookie or square (cookies usually work best for this) and divide it to be distributed amongst others. The others who are participating in the exchange will do the same and walla, everyone has a variety of treats. Cookie exchanges are also a nice way to give something to others. (Author's note: our 4H group did a cookie exchange and the trays of assorted cookies were dropped off at Senior's residences.)

The fifth thing to do is to start your baking early. Do not leave it all for the day or two before Christmas. The invention of the freezer lends itself to everything but the meringues to be made well ahead of time. For those who have family members who like to sample the baking, leave some out for them and hide the rest. Threaten them with their lives if they touch anything in the freezer before the big day. (All said in fun of course.)

Holiday baking can become a fun tradition as opposed to a chore if approached the right way. Get family involved, make a variety, start early and you will have a much happier Christmas. Make memories as well as cookies; your family will remember little Joey putting candy bits on the gingerbread man long after they remember what the gingerbread man tasted like.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Holiday Baking Tips

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Breakfast Cereals-2007's Best

!±8± Breakfast Cereals-2007's Best

The most healthful breakfast is whole grain cereal. If you're trying to lose weight, control cholesterol or diabetes, or just need a lot of energy, your best bet is a hot cooked cereal of whole grains, such as oatmeal; or barley, brown rice or wheat berries cooked and served like oatmeal. Flavor it with raisins or other dried fruits, cinnamon, and perhaps a handful of nuts such as pine nuts.

If you prefer cold cereal, you need to check the list of ingredients carefully. The FIRST ingredient should be a whole grain. Then scan through the entire list and if you see the words "partially hydrogenated," put the box back on the shelf. We recommend that you avoid foods with partially hydrogenated oils (or "trans fats"), and they still show up in many cereals (see the list below.)

Once you've eliminated all the brands made with refined grains or partially hydrogenated oils, check for ADDED sugars (you want little or none) and fiber (you want a lot.)

Raisins or other dried fruits will add a lot of grams of sugar to the listing on the nutrition panel; they are not distinguished from added sugars, so you can only estimate the amounts.

The fiber content listed on the nutrition label can be confusing because it's based on serving size, and very light cereals (such as puffed wheat) show little fiber per serving, but an acceptable amount when you adjust for weight. Cereals made from bran (the outer covering removed from whole grains) will have higher fiber content than cereals made from whole grains (which have the germ and starchy parts of the grains as well as the fiber), but they can be hard to digest.

2007 Update:I'm delighted to note that partially hydrogenated oils (trans fats) have been taken out of many cereals. The old list included 56 brands with PHO's; the new list has only 13! Most of the popular General Mills, Post and Quaker cereal brands no longer have them. Kelloggs is the one major cereal maker that has not yet removed them from many of their leading products; hopefully they will respond to consumer pressure soon.

Is it really whole grain? Manufacturers have also responded to the call for more whole grains in our diet, so you will find a lot more choices that meet my recommendation of "whole grains as the first ingredient". However, many that claim to be "whole grain" still include refined grains. You may need to do some detective work to see what you're getting. One-ingredient whole grain cereals (i.e., shredded wheat, puffed wheat, oatmeal) are sure bets. If you see milled corn, corn meal, wheat flour or rice in

Recommended: Cereals made from Whole Grains
(No trans fats, little or no added sugars; but check the list of ingredients -- recipes can change.)

Cheerios - General Mills

Chex, Wheat or Multi Grain - General Mills

Cinnamon Toast Crunch - General Mills

Cinnamon Grahams - General Mills

French Toast Crunch - General Mills

Golden Grahams - General Mills

Grape Nuts - Post

Grape Nut Flakes - Post

Great Grains, all varieties - Post

Healthy Choice Toasted Brown Sugar Squares - Kelloggs

Kashi (all varieties) - Kashi Company

Life - Quaker

Mini-Wheats, all varieties - Kelloggs

Muesli - Familia

Nutri-Grain, all varieties - Kelloggs

Oatmeal Crisp, all varieties - General Mills

Oatmeal Squares - Quaker

Organic Healthy Fiber Multigrain Flakes - Health Valley

Puffed Wheat - Quaker and others

Shredded Wheat, all varieties and sizes - Post and others

South Beach Diet Toasted Wheats

Total - General Mills

Uncle Sam - U.S. Mills

Weetabix

Wheaties - General Mills

Barbara's, Cascadian Farm, Mother's, Nature's Promise and other smaller brands that specialize in "healthful" cereals (but always check the list of ingredients).

Recommended: All Bran or High Bran Cereals
(no trans fats, little or no added sugars. )

100% Bran - Post

All Bran, all varieties - Kelloggs

Bran Flakes - Post

Chex, Multi-Bran - General Mills

Complete Wheat Bran Flakes - Kelloggs

Complete Oat Bran Flakes - Kelloggs

Cracklin' Oat Bran - Kelloggs

Crunchy Corn Bran - Quaker

Fiber 7 Flakes - Health Valley

Fiber One - General Mills

Fruit & Bran - Post

Granola, Low Fat - Kelloggs

Oat Bran - Quaker

Oat Bran Flakes - Health Valley

Oat Bran Flakes with Raisins - Health Valley

Organic Bran with Raisins - Health Valley

Raisin Bran - Kelloggs

Raisin Bran Flakes - Health Valley

Raisin Bran, Whole Grain Wheat - Post

Raisin Nut Bran - General Mills

Shredded Wheat 'n' Bran - Post

Total, Raisin Bran - General Mills

Weight Watchers Flakes 'n' Fiber

100% Natural Granola - Quaker

Not Recommended - Cereals that Contain Partially Hydrogenated Oils (Trans Fats)*
Many also are primarily refined grains and high in added sugars.

Basic Four - General Mills

Cocoa Krispies - Kelloggs

Corn Pops - Kelloggs

Froot Loops - Kelloggs

Golden Crisp - Post

Granola with Raisins, Low Fat - Kelloggs* (see note below)

Healthy Choice Mueslix - Kelloggs

Healthy Choice Almond Crunch with Raisins - Kelloggs

Healthy Choice Low Fat Granola with Raisins - Kelloggs

Mini-Swirlz - Kelloggs

Smacks - Kelloggs

Smart Start - Kelloggs

Special K - Kelloggs

Not Recommended - Cereals Made from Refined Grains
Many of these also contain a lot of added sugar

Apple Jacks - Kelloggs

Cap'n Crunch, all varieties - Quaker

Chex, Rice or Corn - General Mills

Cocoa Frosted Flakes - Kelloggs

Cocoa Blasts - Quaker

Cocoa Pebbles - Post

Cocoa Puffs - General Mills

Cookie Crisp/Chocolate Chip - General Mills

Corn Pops - Kelloggs

Corn Flakes - Kelloggs and others

Count Chocula - General Mills

Crispix - Kelloggs

Frosted Flakes - Kelloggs

Fruity Pebbles - Post

Honey Bunches of Oats - Post

Honey Comb - Post

Honey Nut Clusters - General Mills

Kix - General Mills

Lucky Charms - General Mills

Product 19 - Kelloggs

Puffed Rice - Quaker

Reese's Peanut Butter Puffs - General Mills

Rice Krispies, all varieties - Kelloggs

Total Corn Flakes - General Mills

*When I checked these cereals on 1/26/07, Kelloggs' Low Fat Granola with Raisins contained partially hydrogenated oils while their plain Low Fat Granola had none. I hope this means that Kelloggs is following the lead of the other cereal makers and that PHO's will soon be gone from all of their products. Meanwhile, protect yourself and check the list of ingredients! Cereal recipes change.

Breakfast Cereals-2007's Best

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TheMotherhood.com - Creating a Festive Easter Treat Display with Rice Krispies

!±8± TheMotherhood.com - Creating a Festive Easter Treat Display with Rice Krispies

On April 15, 2011, women came to TheMotherhood to hear about the exciting conclusion of the Rice Krispies® Making Memories Challenge. Four incredible teams of four bloggers across the country created their own Rice Krispies® recipes and magical Easter displays, which the four "team leaders" discussed during the Talk via livestreaming video. See their beautiful displays below! You can view their innovative, delicious recipes on the Rice Krispies® Circle in TheMotherhood. "For this first Challenge, the four teams were asked to create a 'Magical Easter Egg Hunt' that would delight kids and be fun for the whole family," explained Cooper Munroe, TheMotherhood, as she kicked off the video feed. "They were required to use Rice Krispies to create an original Rice Krispies Treats recipe, but the other elements were up to their imaginations!"

TheMotherhood.com - Creating a Festive Easter Treat Display with Rice Krispies

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How To Make Rice Krispies Treats

!±8± How To Make Rice Krispies Treats

Ingredients: - 1/4c. unsalted butter - 4c. marshmallows - 2 tsp. vanilla extract - 4c. rice krispies cereal - 1c. butterscotch chips - 1-2/4c. chocolate chips

How To Make Rice Krispies Treats

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Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents, Oh My! Understanding Intellectual Property

!±8± Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents, Oh My! Understanding Intellectual Property

You are a business owner with a web presence. During a routine Google search for your page ranking, you discover something disturbing. There is another company out there with a name very similar to yours and almost identical content on their website. What do you do? Is your company name and website content automatically protected by copyright law? Should you have registered your company name as a trademark? Can you demand that they change their name and dismantle their website immediately?

Intellectual Property can be a confusing topic, and one that all business owners should know about. Sadly however, many entrepreneurs simply don't. Intellectual property is in very simple terms an idea that legally belongs to somebody, be they a company or an individual. Only the owner of that idea, or somebody the owner has a legal agreement with can use the idea. Generally, the owner of the idea is usually its creator unless someone paid them to create the idea, in which case the idea's owner is the person who paid for the idea. There are different kinds of intellectual property, but for the purpose of this article, we will focus on copyright, patent and trademark.

Patent - A patent protects the creators of new inventions. An invention can include anything from a new product or business method to a recipe. If you decide to patent your invention, there a few things you should know. First, you will need to apply for a patent in every country where you would like your invention to be protected. Secondly, getting a patent is going to cost you a pretty penny. You will have to pay thousands of dollars to patent your idea and it will take a minimum of 2 years (probably more) before you are granted a patent. Also, your precious invention will no longer remain a secret since your patent application will be made public once your application is submitted. If all of this wasn't enough bad news, patent protection generally only lasts for twenty years from the date of your application. Phew! On the up side, once your patent is accepted, you can sue anyone who tries to manufacture or sell your invention.

It's worth mentioning here that another method to keep your invention protected is to keep the method of manufacturing it a 'trade secret'. If you choose this process, of course, in order to manufacture your product, you will have to tell somebody. You would have to have anyone who would learn your secret sign a confidentiality agreement. Consult a lawyer if you plan to use this method.

Trademark - Trademarks are the marks used to distinguish one company's products or services from another's. They can include a product name, a slogan, and any other mark that is deemed to be unique to a company such as a logo or unique packaging. As a rule, you can't trademark descriptive words, geographical names or a person's name. You also cannot register a business' name. You can however, register part of a name used to identify a product or service. For example "Kellogg's Company" is the owner of the "Kellogg's" trademark and the "Rice Krispies" trademark. You cannot register a trademark similar to one that is already in use by another company. Beware; a trademark does not have to be registered in order to prevent others from using it. If a company is using an unregistered trademark in your geographical area, they can still prevent you from using it. You could perform a search in a trademark database and find later that you are using another company's unregistered trademark. If you find another company in a completely different industry using your unregistered trademark, you probably won't be able to do anything about it if they are not your competitors or if they are not in your geographical vicinity. Protection of a registered trademark however, is much stronger than an unregistered one, and once you have a registered trademark, you can prevent competitors from using it, or confusingly similar ones anywhere in the country in which your trademark is registered.

Copyright - Any written text, artistic work, or computer program is automatically protected by copyright. Anything you or I write, be it published, online text or unpublished, handwritten text, is copyrighted. Also anything we draw, paint, photograph, film, or compose is also protected by copyright. Copyright can be registered, but it doesn't have to be in order for it to be illegal for individuals to copy someone else's work. Copyright also lasts for an extremely long time. Usually it lasts the duration of the author's life plus fifty years at which point it becomes a part of the public domain and can be used by anyone.

Factual information cannot be copyrighted. For example, this article is based on fact. Although you cannot copy my article and claim to have authored it yourself, you can take the facts included in the article and use them in your own written material. If you would like to use a very small portion of someone else's written work, this is usually acceptable as long as you credit the author.

Finally, what do you do if someone uses your work without your permission? Your first step should be to contact the individual. You can usually either go to the contact page on the offender's web site or go to http://www.whois.com and enter the offender's domain to find contact information. If your initial communication doesn't get results, you should then send a 'cease and desist order'. For sample orders, just perform a search on 'cease and desist orders'. Finally if still no action is taken by the offending party, contact their web host and advise them of the situation and finally, contact search engines and make them aware of the situation. These actions should render the offender's website useless or in the very least give them enough trouble to convince them to remove the copied material.

For more information on intellectual property in Canada, visit the Canadian Intellectual Property Office at http://www.cipo.ca, for the U.S., visit the United States Patent and Trademark Office at http://www.uspto.gov and for Europe please visit the European Patent Office at http://www.european-patent-office.org

Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents, Oh My! Understanding Intellectual Property

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Halo-Halo - Filipino Dessert

!±8± Halo-Halo - Filipino Dessert

Summer is already here and you know what that means - tan, beach, and no classes (fortunately for students). But there is still an important thing about summer why we really long for it, and that's summer desserts. And of course, what's first on our list? That's none other than our favorite Philippine food - Halo-halo.

Ever since I was a kid, Halo-halo has already been my favorite summer treat (actually not just for summer but for the whole year!). The sweet taste of its ingredients topped with creamy, ice cream or leche flan just makes everyone seeing it crave for it. So, what's with this halo-halo that makes us Filipinos love it? Let's start from the top - Ice cream. We all know that ice cream alone is already a wonderful treat during summer, and combining it with many other sweet ingredients and (of course) a lot of ice, who would not love it right? The next cool thing about it is the combination of many wonderful fruits and other ingredients inside. Red beans, garbanzos, kaong, macapuno, langka, gulaman, sago, nata de coco, sweet potato, plantain caramelized in sugar, pinipig, and leche flan are just some of the ingredients you can add to it. Well, all of these ingredients in just one clear glass, who would say no to this? And one good thing about it is that there is no limit on what you want to add, as long as you think that it tastes good, go, add it! Another great thing about halo-halo is the ice. It is known for having many shaved ice that adds to the excitement of eating it. This treat would really satisfy your cravings for a cold summer dessert So, now that we know what makes halo-halo a Filipino favorite, why don't we try to do one? The good thing about this is that you don't have to exert much just for you to experience the fun of eating halo-halo. So, how do we prepare our favorite halo-halo?

Halo-halo, as what its name mean is all about mixing different ingredients that all-in-all makes a good tasting dessert. So, here are your ingredients 1 ripe large banana, 2 ripe mangoes or 1 cup canned ripe mango, 1 cup firm gelatin set into gel and cut into 1/2-inch cubes, 1 cup canned ripe jackfruit, 1/2 cup sweet corn or chick peas (garbanzos), 1 cup young shredded coconut, fresh or canned, 1 cup cooked sweet yams or (ube halaya) glutinous purple yam, cut into 1-inch cubes, 2 cup shaved ice, 2 cup milk, 4 scoops of favorite ice cream, 1/2 cup chopped peanuts or rice crispies, and if available leche flan. So, here's how it's done, first, peel the mangoes and slice its meat in ½ inch cubes, discard the seed. Now, prepare tall glasses from where your halo-halo will be put, and divide the ingredients into equal parts, depending on how many tall glasses you've prepared. In each glass, place ¼ of each ingredient. Adding the ingredients layer by layer, starting from the beans, to the fruits such as jackfruit, and gelatin, for it to have a good and appealing presentation. You can now top this with ½ cup of shaved ice. Pour milk of ¼ cup on top of the shaved ice. Then put Ice cream on top and leche flan or ube. And that's how you do your very own halo-halo.

This halo-halo is truly one of our original Filipino recipes that all of us love. So, why not try to prepare some for your family this summer! Enjoy eating!

Halo-Halo - Filipino Dessert

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Red, White and Blue Bunny® Rice Krispies® Ice Cream Treats

!±8± Red, White and Blue Bunny® Rice Krispies® Ice Cream Treats

Learn how to make colorful Rice Krispies® treats filled with Blue Bunny® All Natural Vanilla Ice Cream for the perfect 4th of July treat!

Red, White and Blue Bunny® Rice Krispies® Ice Cream Treats

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How Do You Make Crunchy No Bake Cookies?

!±8± How Do You Make Crunchy No Bake Cookies?

One of the most common questions people ask is: 'How do you make crunchy no bake cookies?' Most people have no problems making wonderful, soft, gooey, cookies, but, when it comes to great tasting crunchy no bake cookies, there are a lot of failed recipes.

The remedy is simple. If you want a crunchy texture to come out, you have to put something crunchy in. But first, a clear distinction needs to be made between the desired crunchy texture of a perfect cookie, and, the hard, teeth-chipping texture when your cookies have been over cooked. So, first and foremost, do not overheat any of your ingredients and you won't be left with hard, inedible cookies.

There are lots of ingredients that can be added to cookies to provide a crunchy texture. If you like nuts, a couple of ounces of chopped walnuts, almonds, or, Brazil nuts will add crunch. A little trick of mine is to use my coffee grinder to chop up my nuts - why buy another grinder when you already have one?

If you don't eat nuts, or don't have any available, a handful of cereal can add crunch, and flavor, to your cookies. Rice Krispies, and Frosted Corn Flakes are two of the most popular additions.

Adding crunchy peanut butter will work, as will putting some graham crackers in the blender (or coffee grinder)for a couple of seconds. You can also crumble some vanilla wafers to add to your cookies. The key thing you need to remember is that most of the items mentioned here contain a lot of sugar, so, just reduce the amount of sugar called for in the recipe otherwise the cookies may be overly sweet.

This recipe is an old favorite of mine. The cookies have lots of crunch and are a welcome change to the standard oatmeal and peanut butter no bake cookies

No Bake Rice Krispie & Date Nut Cookies

1/2 cup unsalted butter
1/2 cup Sugar
1 Egg- beaten
1 cup chopped Dates
2 cups Rice Krispies
1/2 cup chopped nuts (any variety)
1/2 tsp Vanilla extract
1 pinch Salt (can be omitted)
1/2 pack shredded Coconut,

Put the butter, sugar, egg and dates in a saucepan and heat on medium high for five minutes, stirring constantly. Let stand until lukewarm. Mix the Rice Krispies, nuts, vanilla, and salt in a large bowl and add the cooled liquid. Fold the mixture together and then form into small balls. Finish by rolling in coconut and making a pyramid display on a nice china sweet plate.

How Do You Make Crunchy No Bake Cookies?

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