The Perfect Brownies (super easy too!) aka "Hershey's Best Brownies"

We LOVE these brownies at our house and it's kind of dangerous how easy they are to whip up.  Takes only 1 bowl and a few minutes and you're on your way to fudgey, chocolatey brownie heaven...

Ingredients:
-1 cup (2 cubes) of  Butter (Olive Oil & Coconut Oil both work too!)
-2 cups of Sugar
-2 tsp Vanilla
-4 Eggs
-3/4 cup Cocoa
-1 cup Flour
-1/2 tsp Baking Powder
-1/4 tsp Salt

Directions:
1-Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2- Grease a 9x13" pan and set aside.
3-Melt the butter in a large microwave safe bowl.
4- Stir in each of the rest of the ingredients by hand until everything is well mixed.
5-Pour into the greased pan and spread it out evenly.  The batter will be thick.

6-Bake for 28 to 30 minutes, until the brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan.)

7-Let them cool for about 10 minutes (if you can wait that long and enjoy!)

**There are a lot of awesome things you can do with these brownies.  One of our favorites is to sprinkle chocolate chips over the top right after the come out of the oven and leave them for 5 minutes or so and then when they are melted spread them over the brownies like a lovely ganache or frosting.  Super easy and delicious.

Banana Bread of Muffins (whole wheat and no sugar/sweetened with honey)

1/2 Cup Butter, melted
1/3 Cup Honey
2 Eggs
3 Bananas, mashed (try to keep it around 1 cup)
2 Cups Whole Wheat Flour
1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon Cinnamon
1/3 Cup hot water (just out of the tap is fine)
Chocolate Chips (optional but we love them in this recipe!)

1- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
2-Grease 2 loaf pans or 2 muffins pans (for 24 muffins.) If using cupcake liners spray each liner with a little oil so the muffins won't stick so much to the paper.
3- Melt the butter in a big, microwave safe bowl.
4- Add the rest of the ingredients to the butter. (See this tip for the honey)
5- Mix with a spoon just until everything is combined (it should still be lumpy.)
6- Pour the batter evenly into 1 loaf pan or use a long handled spoon to spoon the batter evenly into the 24 muffin cups.
7-Bake the loafs for 60-65 minutes or the muffins for 25-28 minutes.

Simple Tip for baking and cooking-Spray measuring cup with oil

OK, several of the people who have attended my meal planning classes have requested that I put the baking tips and tricks I share in the class on this website so I thought I would start adding those.  These are basically things that help making things faster, healthier and of course, more simple.
The one I'm going to share today is something that  wished I would have known years ago!  When cooking or baking with sticky things such as honey or peanut butter or molasses, spray the inside of the measuring cup with cooking spray before you measure your sticky ingredient. (I use olive oil in my Misto since it saves a ton of money, doesn't have any preservatives or chemicals like the cooking sprays in aerosol cans and keeps your shopping list shorter since you most likely already have olive oil on your list.)

It's like magic when the honey just slips right out!  Yay! (OK, maybe I get over excited about these kinds of things but I always appreciate a good life hack to keep things more simple!)

No more wasting half of your molasses while trying to get it from the bottle to your cookie batter and then wonder how accurate that measurement actually was!