Spicy Crash Hot Potatoes

If you are just visiting my blog for the first time, or haven't been by this week, I'm straying from my usual baking and diving into savory dishes. My blog typically focuses on sweet treat recipes and fun cake decorating tutorials. Well since the holidays, I've had a bit of a lull in cakes (don't worry I have 3 coming up in the next month). With that and the vast amount of sweets present around the holidays, I decided to start January off with more of a savory focus.

This savory themed week has sort of turned into The Pioneer Woman week! Blame it on the fact I watched a few reruns over the holidays and got her awesome new cookbook as a gift! Earlier this week, I shared her Red Pepper Pasta and her Whiskey BBQ sliders. Those I basically did 100% by the book. Today's recipe was tweaked slightly. In baking, I love taking recipes and making them my own. I'm not as confident doing this in cooking, yet, so I'm starting small by changing  up spices here and there.

You may recall I mentioned we made crash hot potatoes to go along with our whiskey sliders. Well today I'm sharing that recipe! Apparently, this is a dish common to Australia. I had never had potatoes in this way, but they were delicious.

I did have a couple things I would change for next time... We didn't have a potato masher, so we used a fork. I don't know if the potatoes we got weren't the best to use (our grocery was out of new potatoes), or if using a fork was an issue. Some of our potatoes crumbled up, instead of just breaking open.

Also, watch how much olive oil you use. We generously applied it to the sheet, and to the tops of the potatoes. We should have gone a tad lighter, though, there was a definite olive oil taste to them.

BUT, despite those minor issues, we really loved the potatoes. We can't wait to make then again with these small improvements. The original recipe calls for spices of kosher salt, black pepper, and rosemary. We switched it up to make a spicier version, replacing the rosemary with cayenne pepper. It was the perfect spice to compliment the sliders!

Crash Hot Potatoes ingredients:

• 12 new potatoes
• 3 tbs olive oil
• Kosher salt to taste
• Black pepper to taste
• Cayenne pepper to taste

Crash Hot Potatoes directions:

• Preheat oven to 450F
• Boil potatoes until they are fork tender

• Generously drizzle cookie sheet with olive oil

• Place potatoes on cookie sheet
• Mash with potato masher, turn masher 90 degrees and mash again
• Lightly brush more oil on the top of the potatoes

• Sprinkle on Kosher salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper 

• Bake 20-25 mins

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