I've been baking up a storm and bulking back up the freezer in anticipation of school starting soon.

Here are a couple of our go-to breakfast favorites:
Very Best Banana Muffins
Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cake from Once a Month Mom [actually called Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Coffee Cake]

And here's a new dinner favorite from $5 Dinners that I am almost certain you could do as a once a month cooking mostly in the crockpot so you could stock up the freezer - and let me tell you it is just that good!!

Cheesy Green Chicken Enchiladas - I will say that I didn't have any green enchilada sauce and the diced tomatoes I had were 'chili ready' so this is what I did.... I made the recipe as written but I only used half the cumin and since I didn't have sauce for the tortillas I used the shredded cheese that I always have in the fridge.

Here's what I would do next time... I'd add more heat to it. I loved the creaminess and if your kids are going to eat with you then you might not want to kick this up, but ours ate quesadillas instead. Next time I might toss in a small can of chopped green chilis with the chicken. Oh, and I'd add more cheese to the top. I love cheese and we always have it!!

I love to bake! I wish baked good were their own food group and probably no surprise that I tend to make the breakfast items off Once a Month Mom more than the others. Yeah, I noticed.

Yesterday I mentioned that I have all these apples and I've been baking A LOT. It got me to thinking about how I cut costs to keep my spending under control.

So, here are a few frugal baking tips:

1. Use dry ingredients.
Well, no duh.
I mean use dry buttermilk. I keep Saco Cultured Buttermilk powder in my fridge and I never have to worry about running out to get buttermilk for a recipe or wasting buttermilk in a carton that I'm not going to finish. A 16 oz. container costs around $4 and that's a lot of buttermilk. I've yet to finish a container but I'm getting closer now that I've made so many batches of Apple Streusel Muffins lately.

I also use powdered milk when I can. There's no reason to use cow's milk in baking and cooking if you don't have to. You can't taste the difference once it's been cooked/ baked so use the less expensive option. Either keep some powdered milk made up in your fridge or make some up the night before if you know you'll be cooking/ baking a lot the next day. A few minutes of time will save you money.

2. Use your Club.
I buy as much of my baking supplies at Costco as I can. Flour is $0.29/lb. at Costco vs. $.39/lbs. at Kroger and that's when it's on sale. Sure, I have to buy 25 lbs. but I bake a LOT. Also, I have 5 gallon tubs from the bakery up the street that I bought for $2.50. They are airtight and the flour stores beautifully.

What else do I buy at Costco?
Vanilla. So much cheaper there.
Brown sugar, too, unless there's a massive holiday mark down - which sometimes happens. Cooking oil is usually cheaper. Not always.
Sugar, almost always, and it's only in a 10lb. bag which means that after I fill my canister the rest fits in my cabinet.
Butter.
Eggs are always $.99/dozen which is cheaper than my Kroger.
Chocolate chips . I go through a ton of chips and yes, I get them at Costco but I also buy them at Kroger because the coupon deals are good and I need the mini-chips for Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cake. Kroger knows this about me and just sent me a coupon for a free bag of chips. I love that!

ZipLock Bags. I always get these at Costco! Our Costco membership gives us coupons to use at Costco and currently there are coupons for Ziplock bags so I stocked up on freezer bags. Even with reusing te ones that I can I go through a good number of bags and they are much cheaper at Costco.

So there are some of my tips for frugal baking. Do you have any?

Yep, we have more snow here in Virginia. It's a Winter Wonderland and thank goodness for Nick Jr. because Comfort and Joy have been out of school all week.

Being home all week also means that we're going through a LOT of food. Sure, we usually eat at home but the only meal that all of us are usually home together is dinner. Now, we're a family of four eating 3 meals a day plus snacks. Needless to say I am SOOO glad that Kroger had that mega deal sale last week and that we got out to Costco last night.

So for the next couple of days I'm going to post some of the recipes that have been keeping us going.

Breakfast has been easy. The girls love scrambled eggs and meat circles [trans. - sausage] so we had a big breakfast before going out to play in the snow.

Today, I pulled Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cake out of the freezer. This is a great go-to breakfast for us and I love making some smaller loaves to have around, too. This is one of my favorite Once A Month Mom recipes.

Come back tomorrow and find out what we've been enjoying for lunch. It's a yummy Cool Idea!

We have a ton of snow on the ground. More than this part of Virginia has seen in over a decade and I can tell you that I didn't have to rush out to the grocery with everyone else on the planet.

Why? Because my freezers were full and I've been stockpiling.

Even though I haven't done a weekly grocery trip for anything other than perishables and baking items in almost a month we still have plenty in the pantry to get us through. I hope. Stay tuned an see how it goes.

This assumes that we keep power, too. If we don't then it won't matter how much I have in the freezer or stockpiled because I can't cook it anyway:) But mostly I know that we have enough food even if it doesn't all go together to make perfectly beautiful meals. Oh and we have toilet paper and diapers and milk and, I can bake bread, and all those other things that people run to the store for.

But still I'd like the snow to stop falling now. It's beautiful but we don't need anymore right now. Everything in moderation is a Cool Idea!

I think that the Food Network should have a new show called 'Homemade Cakes' and it could be a cautionary tale about cakes gone wrong or cakes that started out as good ideas but didn't quite make it.

Let's just say that Comfort will never confuse her birthday cake with store bought! She said she wanted 'big' and 'pink' - like Melody's. For those of you who have not had to watch the straight to video Little Mermaid story in which Melody - Ariel's daughter - has a birthday and then finds out that she is a mermaid. Well, the fairy tale cake is multi-tiered and pink.

There was no way I was going to try multi-tiered but I figured I could handle pink. I tried 'big' by cutting the cake into smaller pieces so that it could go taller. What I neglected to figure in is the structural integrity of a Betty Crocker cake is roughly that of a Twinkie. Zilch.

So, after a couple of layers it started to topple. I decided to make this a reality rather than an accident and put the cake on it's side so the layers were vertical intead of horizontal. Not a bad decision in reality.

The pink frosting as easy since I just put a bit of red food coloring into a can of white frosting. Where things went a bit wrong was the white piping that I tried. The 'cookie' icing that I bought was too runny to hold up on the edges and for writing so it moved across the cake.

Let's just say that this is a cake that a four year old enjoyed and tasted great but there are several reasons why there is not a picture accompanying this post! But no matter how it looked it tasted fine - if a bit sweet due to all the frosting - and Comfort got what she asked for a big and pink cake. But most importantly we had a lovely time together celebrating a wonderful day in the life of our family and I can't think of a cooler idea than that.

Now that Comfort and Joy are growing up each meal is a challenge. Gone are the days when I made their meals - either with my body or out of pureed fruits and veggies - and they looked at me like Oliver Twist saying, "Please, mama, some more."

These days we go through stages of not hungry, too tired, too mobile, etc. to eat and I think back with a strange fondness to just being able to pop a boob in their mouths and take care of dinner. I never had to wonder what to fix for them. But, alas, they grow up and we all needed better sleep and so there hasn't been any breastfeeding in our house for a year now. 

So it is with constant experimentation that I look to find the perfect breakfast food. Last summer I found a recipe on a mommy blog and made it the next day because it met all of my criteria for perfection.

1. Inexpensive to make.
2. Did not come from a mix and did not contain high fructose corn syrup.
3. Used honey or other natural sweeteners [we were noticing a, shall we say, unfortunate behavior issue that we thought might be due the sugar 'highs'.]

The next morning we sat down at the table and the girls looked at the muffins as if they were from another planet. They never touched them. I don't know what clued them in to the 'differentness' but somehow they knew. We tried again the next day, but had the same results. I liked the muffins but that wasn't the point.

Back to the drawing board and along the way, thanks to the coupons in the paper I had several boxes of muffin mix and a new mini-muffin pan. I made a batch of Betty Crocker Blueberry Muffins in this tiny tin and - you guessed it - Comfort and Joy practically ate their body weight in these the next day. In fact, each time I have used a box muffin mix and the mini-muffin tin they have eaten the results. However, if I have made muffins from scratch they have not. In their defense, I haven't wanted to eat the last batch either. Allrecipes dot com should pull that one because it was seriously defective:)

And now we are on the search for the PERFECT homemade blueberry muffin recipe. I have dried blueberries that I know the girls like and I want to try them in a recipe. I have a mini-muffin tin that yields tiny breakfast treats that tempt them into eating but I can not for the life of me find the right recipe. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know, we need your Cool Ideas!