Brownies and Bourbon!

So my mom gave me a brownie cookbook for the holidays last year, and I hardly bothered to crack it (sorry Mom!). I was trying to come up with something to bake this evening, and I decided to take a look. Low and behold I found a brownie recipe that called for BOURBON!

The brownie batter:

1 1/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter
4 squares unsweetened chocolate
4 squares semisweet chocolate
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla

So I mixed that all together, and threw in some secret ingredient while I was at it. Popped it in the oven at 350 for about 40 minutes, and took it out to cool

The fun part comes next. I'm not patient by any standard, so though I should have waited long for the brownies to cool, I hopped right on to making the topping.

Praline Icing Recipe:

5 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons bourbon
2 cups confectioners sugar.

So I melted together the butter and the brown sugar until it was all melty and bubbly. Then I was supposed to add the three tablespoons of bourbon. But I added six. Cause that's how I roll. And I used my favorite... American Honey. Mmmmmm, yummy. Some of it may have spilled straight into my mouth. What a tragedy!

Now for the confectioners sugar. I realized partly through the recipe I realized my powdered sugar was at work for our epic Mario Kart gingerbread house (trust me there is a post to come on that one!). So I had to substitute. I took two cups of sifted granulated sugar and two teaspoons of cornstarch. I threw that in the blender and blended it all together. Hooray for ghetto powdered sugar!

Anyway, so stirred that all into the praline mixture until it was nice and smooth and poured it all over the brownies. Ok, so I tasted a bit as well, and dear gods is it delicious. The extra bourbon was totally the right choice!

Hooray for bourbon and brownies! Fanfuckingtastic!

C is for cookie...

Chocolate peanut butter cookie that is!

So I had a mess of extra frosting from my amazing Reeses Cake that I needed to figure out something to do with. And I have practice with my fire spinning crew tonight (who were extraordinarily nice to me yesterday when I was having boy issues), and I thought, "I'll bake cookies!"

So

1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
Some vanilla
1 stick of butter
1 egg.

Then I melted the frosting that was hanging out in my fridge, and mixed that in. My next thought was... "Ooooooh chocolate chips!!!" Which I immediately dumped into the mixer forgetting that the batter was warm from the frosting. So they got kind of melty. Oh well.

I scooped batter onto cookie sheets, stuck them in the oven, and ended up with just about 2 dozen cookies. Hooray. They came out all chocolate and peanut butter swirled, and they taste delicious. Hopefully my crew likes them (it's the first time I'm baking for them)!

Reese's Cake

So I've moved to a new house, with a new kitchen, and a stove that works way better than the one at my last place. And I received a housewarming gift that will benefit the stomachs, if not the waistlines, of all who come in contact with my baking: my very own Kitchenaid stand mixer!

In the moving madness I failed to write about a delicious Devil's Food cake, with a chocolate/almond frosting. However, I'm on another baking adventure tonight, and ready to blog about it. It's a peanut butter chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting!

So I started with the basic cake:

2 1/4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick butter
3/4 cup milk (I'm actually using Silk PureCoconut milk these days. I love it!)
Splash in some vanilla
3 egg

Then I mixed in the secret ingredient. In a separate cup, I melted down 2 squares of unsweetened chocolate, a generous scoop of peanut butter, and the remnants of an opened bag of Reese's baking chips. When that was a gooey, delicious mess, I mixed it into the cake mix, poured it into my pan, and stuck it in the oven.

While the cake was baking, I made one of the best frostings that I have ever made from scratch. This stuff is seriously amazing. I melted one stick of butter, and about 1 cup of peanut butter (in the same container I used to melt the peanut butter chocolate mixture earlier, giving it just a hint of chocolate) and poured that into my bowl. I poured in some powdered sugar (2ish cups) I added a smidge more of the secret ingredient and a splash of the PureCoconut. I let my mixer have at it, and gave it a test once it looked good. It wasn't quite there, so I added a but more powdered sugar, and let the mixer have at it again. It was good to go after that. In fact, damn amazing. Oh man, we're lucky I haven't eaten it all.

But since it is late, and this tyrtle has to get up early for work, there is no time to frost the cake. It'll have to cool over night, and I'll frost it when I take it to dinner tomorrow. Hooray cake! Hooray mixer! Baking is the best, I swear.

Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate Brownies

It's been a while since I've baked much, but I felt like baking today. Besides, I haven't fed my new coworkers any of my crack yet ^_-

You want to mix together a cup of sugar, an egg, a splash of vanilla, a cup of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp baking powder. In a microwave safe container, melt down a nice chunk of butter (1/4 a stickish) and 3-5 squares of baking chocolate (depending how chocolatey you like). And cause these are dark chocolate, go ahead and throw in an extra square. You know you want to. Mix that in with the rest of your batter. This time around I also threw in a dash of cinnamon and a slightly larger dash of nutmeg. Just trust me on that. And some secret ingredient... because secrets make everything taste better.

I might as well be endorsed by Reese's, because I love baking with Reese's Peanut Butter Chips. They are super tasty and make pretty much any recipe better. So to mix in that peanut butter flavor, I melted down a full bag, and added them to the mix. Usually I'd do half peanut butter chips, and half actual peanut butter, but I don't have any at the moment. I swear this works just as well; using the real peanut butter is just a cheaper option. If you're going to go straight peanut butter and ignore the deliciousness of the peanut butter chips... add some extra sugar.

Anyway batter -> pan -> oven -> delicious.

After work edit:

My coworkers devoured these before lunch. And baking is totally the way to make friends at work. They all had to come tell me how much they loved them!

Screw the Directions!

Alright, so this week has been all about bastardizing cookie mixes. I got some Betty Crocker cookie mixes on the cheap at the grocery store, and I've been making cookies to quell the desire for stabsies. And both of these batches were excellent examples of one of my favorite baking rules: If the batter is so good you can't stop eating it, the end result will be even better.

First I started with a double chocolate cookie mix. It was basically chocolate cookies with chocolate chunks. So then I melted about half a cup of chunky peanut butter down, and stirred it into the mix. Then I added some Reese's Peanut Butter chips I had leftover from the peanut butter cheesecake. Added the secret ingredient, and baked away. The result was tasty. So tasty in fact, that somehow between when I went to bed and when I awoke 2 dozen of them disappeared into thin air.

Tonight I took the oatmeal cookie mix and ran with it. I'm not a fan of raisins in my cookies, so eff the raisins! Raspberries are where it is at. I had extra frozen raspberries from the raspberry scones, so I decided to put them to good use. I mixed them into my cookie dough, and also added some cinnamon and nutmeg for good measure. A little secret ingredient, and they were popped onto the tray. I topped each one with an extra raspberry and baked away. I wonder if there will be any left when I get up this time...

Chocolate Chip Muffins

So work is terribly stressful, which leads to baking!

Tonight I made chocolate chip muffins for the morning:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup milk
1/2 cup butter -- melted and cooled
2 eggs - beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 package (12 oz) chocolate chips

Okay, so maybe I added some extra chocolate chips, and some secret ingredient, but who's counting? Anyway, that yielded some tasty muffins (I may have had chocolate chip muffins and beer for dinner, oops?)

Just an aside, I love how having things in the oven gives me time to clean in the kitchen! I almost always do my baking dishes (plus whatever else is in the sink) while my treats are baking, and today I cleaned the stove top too!

Chocolate Cupcakes, Giant Cupcake, and Muffin Aside...

Saturdays are great days for baking. Yay baking. It's a problem, I know. And I've roped the roomie into my addiction. I'm a horrible person. So after our Saturday morning BSG fix, we found ourselves in the kitchen.

Alright, so I'd already been in the kitchen this morning. I whipped up a quick batch of lemon poppy seed muffins from a cheap mix that was on sale at the grocery store. With a bit of secret ingredient mixed in, I tossed them in the oven while I made coffee. After all, we'd need fuel for the cupcake madness to come. The mix yielded a nice half dozen, and for being so cheap and easy, they were pretty damn tasty.

But really, what matters here is cupcakes. Because who doesn't love cupcakes, right? Anyway, being the lovely sharer of addictions that I am, I had gotten her a Big Top Cupcake pan for the holidays to go with the lovely new stand mixer I knew she was getting. So she was baking with that for the first time. She filled it with funfetti cake mix, and into the oven it went. She made a tasty peanut butter filling for it too... it had peanut butter chips, peanut butter, butter, sugar, and milk. Yummy.

I made some chocolate cupcakes:
2 cups of all-purpose flour
2 cups of brown sugar
2 cups of melted semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 tsp. baking soda
2 large eggs
1 tsp. salt
1 cup of vegetable oil
A generous splash of vanilla extract
1 cup of water
And some secret ingredient

We were having oven issues today. Not everything baked evenly. Though I made about 2 dozen cupcakes, only about a dozen were presentable. So I frosted those with leftover frosting from the Murdercake. Added some sprinkles to make them super cute, and we have hooray cupcakes!