Cheese Coins

I am a recovering junk food junkie.  I love a good vending machine.  For the record, I love the crunchy Cheetos not the puffy, styrofoam peanut version and yes, I find Chester Cheetos really skeezy.  Almond Joy over Mounds.  Early Famous Amos Chocolate Chip cookies (whoever took over that company screwed up that cookie that's for damn sure)  For less than five bucks I could get a fix of salty and sweet in one quick insertion of change.  The advent of paper bill slots only made it worse.  I was often weak but back in the day you didn't feel like you were getting ripped off.  Today you're lucky if you pay less than a buck for a bag of 15 M&Ms.

But I am getting better.  Now I just try and make my own snacks.  So it made me happy to see a recipe for cheese crackers in the latest edition of Cook's Country magazine.

OK I know they call them cheese coins but when you're fighting for attention in the world of internet recipes and tv audiences you don't just want to throw out there another cheese cracker recipe.  So I thought I'd give them a shot.  Plus it gave me just another excuse to buy cheese ( a worse addiction than junk food).  Pretty straight forward recipe, combine cheese, flour, seasonings and butter, mix, roll, chill, slice and bake.  I will warn you about two things.  You need to roll and slice your coins as evenly as possible because of the second thing, careful baking.

You need to watch these crackers the same way you watch pinenuts when you toast them and bacon when it's frying because they will burn if you are easily distracted by some cat in a ridiculous hat on your Ipad.

Even if you watch your crackers carefully while in the oven, if you've cut them unevenly the thin side will burn and the thick side will be slightly undercooked and nobody wants that.

So I finally get the hang of the right slice thickness and bake time and the house is smelling Cheese Heaven.  But the coin tag was cracking me up.  So what if I wanted to give these as gifts.  What would be a fun packaging idea?  First I wanted to roll them in wax paper.  I cut open a paper towel tube and shoved the wax paper in side.  Then I carefully placed my coins inside and taped up the wax paper.

Then I got on my computer and designed some cheese cracker coin rolls and put the wax encased crackers inside.  Take that Martha Stewart!

I know I'd laugh if I got a couple of these tubes of cheese coins. However do NOT take them to the coin machine at your local bank unless there's a teller there you really like and will help you clean out the crumbs from the gears of the machine.

Oh yeah, a few months from now if you see this packaging idea on Etsy or in an Edible Gift Giving book, remember you saw it here first.