Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Another classic! As much as I hate oats, granola, and especial oatmeal (blecchhh) these are one of my favorite cookies. Easy to make as well, and the recipe I use is from the Quaker Oats can!

Ingredients
-1/2 cup (1 stick) plus 6 tablespoons butter, softened
-3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
-1/2 cup granulated sugar
-2 eggs
-1 teaspoon vanilla
-1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
-1 teaspoon baking soda
-1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
-1/2 teaspoon salt (optional)
-3 cups Quaker® Oats (quick or old fashioned, uncooked)
-1 cup raisins

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350°F. In large bowl, beat butter and sugars on medium speed of electric mixer until creamy.

Add eggs and vanilla; beat well.

Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; mix well.

Add oats and raisins; mix well.

Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. (I used parchment lined cookie sheets which when the cookies bake, doesn't allow the cookies to spread very much. If you don't want dome shaped cookies, push them down a bit before baking)

Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until light golden brown. Cool 1 minute on cookie sheets; remove to wire rack. Cool completely. Store tightly covered. Makes about 4 dozen cookies.

Enjoy! :)

Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

I was meeting another couple for dinner tonight and the girl is pregnant. I thought, every pregnant lady has cravings...chocolate cravings! So I wanted to make chocolate cupcakes! :) There's a lot of different chocolate cupcake recipes out there and I'm determined to find the most moist. So..here's the start! I've made the Devil's Food Cupcakes from Martha Stewart's Cupcake book and they've gotten really great reviews. I made them with the dark chocolate frosting recipe in the same book. The frosting recipe is pretty rich and bitter. It has a great consistency, but, it's a bit too bitter. I like my chocolate sweet! So I found this chocolate cupcake recipe in the same Martha Stewart Cupcake book that uses buttermilk instead of the sour cream of the Devil's Food, and found a chocolate buttercream frosting on the internet..yummy. seriously.

This recipe is called the one-bowl chocolate cupcakes because all the ingredients in the recipe come together in one bowl. Pretty simple. It also uses no butter, instead it uses a small amount of vegetable oil for a more moist cake.

Ingredients
-1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
-3/4 cup unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
-1 1/2 cups sugar
-1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
-3/4 teaspoons baking powder
-3/4 teaspoons salt
-2 large eggs
-3/4 cup buttermilk
-3 tablespoons vegetable oil
-1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
-3/4 cup warm water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin tins with paper liners. With an electric mixer on medium speed, whisk together flour, cocoa, sugar, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

Reduce speed to low. Add eggs, buttermilk, oil ,extract and the water. Beat until smooth and combined, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.

Fill each cup with batter about 2/3 full.

Bake, rotating halfway through, until a a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer to wire racks to cool for 10 minutes.

then turn cupcakes out onto racks to cool completely.

Ingredients for the frosting:
-1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks or 1/2 pound), softened (but not melted!)
-3 1/2 cups confectioners (powdered) sugar
-1/2 cup cocoa powder
-1/2 teaspoon table salt
-2 teaspoons vanilla extract or 1 teaspoon almond extract
-4 tablespoons milk or heavy cream

Instructions

Cream butter for a few minutes in a mixer with the paddle attachment on medium speed. Turn off the mixer. Sift 3 cups powdered sugar and cocoa into the mixing bowl. Turn your mixer on the lowest speed (so the dry ingredients do not blow everywhere) until the sugar and cocoa are absorbed by the butter. Increase mixer speed to medium and add vanilla extract, salt, and milk/cream (I used heavy cream) and beat for 3 minutes. If your frosting needs a more stiff consistency, add a little more sugar. If your frosting needs to be thinned out, add additional milk 1 tablespoon at a time.

This is some yummy frosting...the cupcakes recipe makes about 18 cupcakes. I decorated the cupcakes with some chocolate shavings. ummmm yummmmm.....here you go! enjoy!

Chocolate Thumbprints

This recipe is from my Martha Stewart cookie book. The past few days I've been trying to bake french macarons and I've failed thus far :( So I picked an easy cookie recipe from my book that I know I won't fail to make me feel better. :(

Ingredients
-12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
-1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
-1/4 teaspoon salt
-1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
-1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
-4 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped
-1 1/2 teaspoons light corn syrup

Directions

Heat oven to 350 degrees. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat together 1 stick butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla on medium-high speed until smooth, about 2 minutes. Beat in flour, beginning on low speed and increasing to medium high.

The dough is a bit crumbly because there's no egg in the recipe to bind it all together so you really have to knead the dough into the balls. Roll dough by teaspoonfuls into balls, and place 1 inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet.

(I used parchment line baking pans). Bake for 10 minutes, remove from oven, and press thumb into tops of cookies to make indentations. Return to oven, and bake until light brown on the edges, 7 to 9 minutes more. (I found with my oven, 7 mins sufficed) Remove to a wire rack to cool.

Combine chocolate, 4 tablespoons butter, and corn syrup in a small heat-proof bowl. Set over a pot of simmering water; stir occasionally until melted and smooth. Allow to cool slightly. When cookies are cool, fill the thumbprints with the chocolate mixture..or I filled some of it with Nutella! :)

There aren't my favorite cookies, because the cookie part is not the most moist, so you definitely need some jam or chocolate in the middle. But they're cute little treats!!! enjoy! :)

Key Lime Bars

I've never remembered liking key lime pie. It's one of those things that I've never really had, but just decided automatically that I wouldn't like it. Last year, I was in Vegas with my bestie and we hit up Joe's Stone Crab. Not only are they famous for their stone crabs, but for their key lime pie. My friend wanted to share a slice. I wanted a better dessert, that I thought was delicious. But we got the key lime pie. And, it was not bad. But I didn't really think about it much afterwards. Then my BF ended up making some key lime bars from a recipe he found online for a movie/dessert night I had a few months back. He loves key lime pies so thought he'd try the recipe. I ate those, and it was pretty damn good. Then I found out the recipe is based on the key lime pie from Joe's Stone Crab. What do you know. Now I'm addicted to these suckers. I've made these too many times already. Enough tart balanced by the whipped cream and graham cracker crust. MMMMMM. This is also the recipe in my Martha Stewart's Pie book..so it's been validated by me and her. :) Here's the easy recipe:

Ingredients
-1 cup plus 2 1/2 tablespoons finely ground graham cracker crumbs
-1/3 cup sugar
-5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
-3 large egg yolks
-1 1/2 teaspoons finely grated lime zest
-2/3 cup fresh Key lime juice (about 23 Key limes total)
-1 can sweetened condensed milk (14 ounces)
-1/4 cup heavy cream
-2 Key limes, thinly sliced into half-moons

To make crust: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Stir together graham cracker crumbs, sugar, and butter in a small bowl.

Press evenly onto bottom of an 8-inch square glass baking dish.

Bake until dry and golden brown, about 10 minutes. Let cool completely on a wire rack. (Leave oven on.)

TO make the filling: Put egg yolks and lime zest in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Mix on high speed until very thick, about 5 minutes. Reduce speed to medium.

Add condensed milk in a slow, steady stream, mixing constantly.

Raise speed to high; mix until thick, about 3 minutes. Reduce speed to low. Add lime juice; mix until just combined.

Spread filling evenly over crust using a spatula.

Bake, rotating dish halfway through, until filling is just set, about 10 minutes. Let cool completely on a wire rack. Refrigerate at least 4 hours (or overnight).
Cut into 2-by-2-inch bars. For the homemade whipped cream, put cream in the clean bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the clean whisk attachment. Mix on medium-high speed until stiff peaks form.

Garnish bars with whipped cream and a slice of lime.

yum! Enjoy! :)

Eye balls cake pops!

I love the people at my dentist office. I had an appointment today for teeth cleaning and wanted to bring them something. Since it's Halloween, eye balls cake pops it is!! :) it's easy. bake your cake, and roll them into balls. I chose red velvet because I want it to look "bloody" when you bit into the pop. hahah. Then I took green chocolate disc and after I dipped the pop in white chocolate, I stuck the disc on before it dried. Like this:

Then I used a edible black pen and drew on the black circle on the green disc. Then I used some melted chocolate to stick the small white confetti on to the black circle for the eye. Then I used melted red chocolate to drizzle over the white part of the eye as the veins. It would have saved aLOT of time if I had a red edible pen. But I couldn't find one. It still turned out pretty funny. funny cute. hahaha

Then I stuck them in these tins I found at Target for a buck each. Pretty useful!

sorry, in the picture you can't really see the tin itself. Hope you guys all had a safe and happy Halloween!!!

Bridal Open House

I've always had a sweet tooth. Halloween was my favorite holiday because of all the candy I got. I separated the crappy candies (like the red hot balls of fire) from the ones I loved...and I loved chocolate. When my mom forced my sister and me to take swimming lessons in the summer at CPE (Cerritos Park East), after every lesson I walked across to the community center where there were vending machines. I'd spend my allowance on cookies and cream twix [no longer in production :( ]. We also live next to a Thrifty's (long since closed) and my sister and I would walk over and I'd browse the candy section and come home with a stash (like the Dip Stix mmmm...). When we were given a bag of candy to sell at school as fundraiser, I'd pretty much buy the whole bag myself. I have a whole mouth full of cavities to prove my dedication to sweets. When I was in college I discovered Godiva chocolates. When I went to Washington DC to intern, I discovered Lindt truffles. YUM.

I baked some cookies when I was living at my parents house. I never baked too much there because my mom always yelled at me for making a mess even when I wasn't. It was just easier not to hear her yelling. I didn't really even get into baked goods until after college. Cookies, cakes, cupcakes, ice cream, gelato, you name it. Then it really turned into an obsession. Everywhere I traveled to, ate at, I had to have dessert. I love Japanese desserts, the bakeries in Paris, shaved ice in Taiwan...

When I moved into my own place, I baked a little more. I've always dreamed of having my own bakery, or sweets place..or something. That would be awesome. I've been thinking about that more and more as I've recently started to bake ALOT. My sister suggested that I have a booth at the Bridal show at her new hotel to try and solicit some business and get my name out. This is what came of it..

I liked how it turned out. :) I made it a black, white and pink theme because the last minute business cards I printed out from the internet was those colors. Black background with pink and white letters. And this is what I made:

It was tiring but fun. Spoke to a lot of people. Realized I definitely need to get a website up, and hoping maybe this will turn into something! :) thanks to those that came out and kept me company. :D spread the word, everyone needs to have a sweet life!!