Bake n' Blog

A new cookie recipe I tried this Holiday season was for Cut Out Chocolate Cookies from the Hershey’s website. There’s also a recipe included for chocolate glaze on the same page, but these cookies were tasty without it (and I was a little too lazy to try it!).

This recipe is fairly easy and I had fun using the new cookie cutters I recently bought. My only gripe was the lack of counter space I had when rolling out the dough! Next time I’m going to have a go at getting fancy with the chocolate glaze.

Chocolate crinkle “cookies” - though they’re more like two-bite brownies covered in powdered sugar. Very chocolatey. I made another batch using peppermint extract, which seems very appropriate for the holiday season.

I made apple pie. A very simple, very quick apple pie of my own invention (I tweaked a traditional cake recipe and added apples).

You need: 3 apples, sugar & cinnamon; 2 eggs; 1 1/4 cups flour and ditto sugar; and, finally, some butter, very thinly sliced.

Mix the eggs, sugar and flour. Don’t whisk, just stir them together. Prepare a spring form with butter and breadcrumbs and pour the mix in. It’s thick so you might nedd to help it cover the form a little. Slice the apples and sprinkle sugar and cinnamon to taste over. Put the thin slices of butter on top. For my oven it would be about 400 degrees F (=about 200 decrees C) and about 40 minutes. Just make sure it’s fairly baked and doesn’t burn and you should be fine.

Apple Pumpkin Muffins (with streusel topping). I changed the original recipe by replacing the oil with applesauce, using white whole wheat flour instead of white all-purpose, and cutting the sugar by 1/2 cup.

After searching for an easy, but excellent pumpkin muffin recipe, I happened upon this one from this really cool blog. It was simple, but the outcome exceeded my expectations! The muffins came out moist with just the perfect amount of sweetness and spice. Of course, I wanted to taste these autumn treats with cream cheese frosting. To experiment, I made just enough for just one muffin. Since I didn’t have any confectioners (powdered/icing) sugar on hand, I looked up a substitute (minus the cornstarch), ground some sugar with a mortar and pestle, and followed this recipe.

Super quick & easy coconut macaroons. I changed the original recipe by using organic unsweetened coconut threads, organic turbinado sugar, and whole wheat flour. I doubled the amount of flour, and I also added almond extract equal to the amount of vanilla extract. Yum! (Sorry, Anne!)

Oatmeal-Cranberry Cookies with White & Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips from this recipe on allrecipes.com. The dough came out a bit crumbly, so did the resulting cookies. These didn’t flat and even out while cooking, so I ended up pressing them down with the back of a spoon after dropping them on the baking sheet. (The first batch came out more as buttons than cookies; which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since they’re practically bite-sized.)

I have got to try and make these!