Posted: May 23rd, 2011 | Author: admin | Filed under: non-crafty, projects: giant granny square, things i bake, things i crochet, year: 2011 | 2 Comments »
The Victoria Day long weekend is always a fun one for me, as it usually coincides pretty nicely with my birthday. (And man, there’s nothing like getting an extra day off for your birthday to make you feel special.) I turned twenty-five this year, and I celebrated by enjoying some wine and cake with friends.
(The cake, for the curious, is a banana-cardamom cake with chocolate buttercream frosting. I used one cake recipe to make two six-inch cakes, and I cut each cake in half then reassembled it to add the middle layer of icing. It was delicious. I’ve already eaten the leftovers for breakfast.)
I’ve also been celebrating the weekend by working on my blanket – there’s something about frantically racing the weather to finish an enormous wool something before it gets too hot that just feels like spring, to me.
Posted: February 18th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: internet as recipe book, things i bake, Uncategorized | Tags: baking, chocolate chip, chocolate chip cookies, cookies, dessert, food, food photography, holy grail of cookies, yum | No Comments »
Remember that healthy eating kick? I’m still totally on it, but I am not made of stone.
These cookies are – according to Smells Like Dessert – the absolute Holy Grail of chocolate chip cookies. I’m not entirely sure I agree – they’re good, but they’re not so good that I’m going to quit on my trusty family recipe. (They are also HUGE. Like, ENORMOUS. I can see why the recipe calls for making them so large, because they are a lot softer having been baked like that, but. This definitely makes giant, Starbucks-sized cookies, and one is more than enough.)
I also did something a bit weird with this recipe, which may be why I didn’t love them quite as passionately as the original blogger. When I went to start baking, I discovered that my brown sugar was hopelessly hard and unusable, so I tried a substitution gleaned from the internet: one cup of white sugar and a quarter cup of molasses to replace one cup of brown sugar. It worked out – the texture of the cookies is perfect, and they’re not too sweet – but there is a bit of a molasses-y aftertaste. I don’t mind it, really? But it definitely changed the character of the cookies.
Song of the Entry: Jack’s Mannequin – Holiday From Real
Posted: January 25th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: internet as recipe book, things i bake | Tags: baking, banana, banana-cardamom cupcakes with chocolate buttercream, buttercream, cardamom, chocolate, cupcakes, delicious, desserts, icing | 2 Comments »
Cupcakes!
Banana-Cardamom Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting, if we’re being fancy and descriptive about it. And oh my god, are they good. The cupcakes themselves are from the recipe here, found via foodgawker. They’re not what I’m used to making – the batter was really firm and almost cookie-dough-ish, as opposed to the more liquid cupcake batter I’ve made with other recipes in the past. It turned out wonderfully, though, and I have it on good authority from several people that the cupcakes are delicious.
The frosting is – well, we’ll call it chocolate buttercream, it’s sort of “the best I could do icing-wise with what I had in my kitchen,” but it’s made of cocoa and butter and icing sugar in proportions that worked out okay.
Song of the Entry: Plain White T’s – Big Bad World
