Can you believe Spring is already here as of today? It seems like the first quarter of the year has flown by, but I’m ready for nice weather, playing outside with the kids, grilling, and having friends over.
We got a jump on ideas for delicious spring treats last night at my Great Value baking party – and everything we made just involved a few ingredients – so easy!
We decided to make something savory and something sweet, and the starring ingredients in both dishes were the Great Value crescent rolls and cream cheese spread. I love having dishes with overlapping ingredients, because it makes it cost even less to provide great food when you entertain – not to mention the lower Great Value prices to begin with!
So, I’m sure you’re curious about what we made, right? First let’s talk about our savory dish – cold veggie pizzas shaped to look like carrots! These are a fun way to introduce veggies into your kids’ meals, and with Easter around the corner you can remind them that bunnies love to eat carrots, so they should eat some too!
For our pizzas, first we rolled out crescent roll dough into sheets on baking pans, and baked them at 375 degrees until they were golden brown. Then my friend Amanda chopped up broccoli into fine pieces, while my friend Kristi did the same with carrots.
Once the dough is baked, we just cut out cone-shaped pieces. We made ours small, but you could easily make these bigger for a more substantial pizza piece. Then just spread each piece with cream cheese, and sprinkle with carrots and broccoli! The idea is to make the broccoli look like the leafy part of the carrot, but you can approach the design however you like best.
These are REALLY good – I’d had something similar before, so I knew I’d like these, but my friends were a little skeptical. These won them over, though, and I think they’ll be making them in the near future! My friend Jennifer’s daughters liked them, too:
Now, on to the sweet treats (always my favorite part)! We made stuffed cinnamon roll bites – and let me tell you, these are AMAZING. Like, so good I can’t even convey it with words… you will just have to make them for yourself.
For this dish, all we needed was the crescent roll dough, cream cheese, cinnamon, sugar, powdered sugar, and vanilla.
We mixed up a cinnamon-sugar combination to coat our crescent roll dough. We tore off small pieces to fit in a fun bunny-shaped muffin tin I bought, coated each one on both sides, and pressed it into each of the bunnies.
Then we mixed up 1/2 cup of cream cheese, 1/4 cup of powdered sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla to use as a filling.
For these small bites we just used a tiny spoonful, not filling the cavity up completely. Then we topped these off with another piece of cinnamon sugar-coated crescent roll dough.
Once these baked and cooled just a bit we popped them right out (easy with the silicone pan!) and had adorable little bunny-shaped, stuffed cinnamon roll bites. The tops of these are slightly crispy and the bottoms are gooey and amazing. We flipped ours upside down because the bottoms showed the bunny shape a little better. Aren’t they adorable?
You could easily modify these with other shapes, or you can do like my friend Jennifer did and make roll-ups – she coated a full triangle of crescent roll dough with the cinnamon-sugar mixture, spread it with the sweetened cream cheese filling, and rolled it up like you would a normal crescent roll. YUM!
I hope you’ll give both of these fun spring treats a try – and don’t forget you can make other easy desserts with Great Value cookie dough – I think we’ll be making Easter cookies soon!
Note: I am participating in the Great Value program with The Motherhood. I have been compensated for my time. All thoughts and opinions are honest and are my own.
