Cooking A-Z :: B is for Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

My first time browning butter was a pretty amazing experience. I managed to brown it without burning it and my oh my, the smell was heavenly. I typically don’t like the smell of butter, but browned butter, well, that’s a whole ‘nother story.

My birthday passed recently, and of course, I made my own birthday cake! I’ll be making a post on that very soon. (psst! it’s an oreo cake)

These really are some AWESOME cookies, so I highly recommend trying these out. The browned butter adds a dimension to the cookies that you can’t get with any other ingredient.

photo courtesy of bellalimento.com

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks unsalted butter
• 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 Eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
• 1 cup milk chocolate chips
• fleur de sel to garnish – optional

Directions:

1. Into a heavy bottom sauce pan melt butter over medium heat. Continue cooking until butter turns brown. Stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Set aside to cool.
2. Into a large bowl: mix: flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
3. Into your stand mixer add: butter and sugar. Mix until combined. Add eggs, vanilla and continue mixing.
4. Gradually add flour mixture and mix until just combined. Fold in chocolate chips.
5. Transfer dough to refrigerator to set for minimum of 30 minutes.
6. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Using a small cookie scoop, scoop dough balls onto a rimmed baking sheet lined with silicon, parchment or spray with non-stick spray. Leaving space between each for spreading.
7. Bake for approximately 11 minutes. Allow cookies to cool on pan for a minute and then transfer to a wire rack. Garnish with fleur de sel if desired.

Original Recipe

My First Time . . . With Piping Buttercream Rosettes!

I hope you all had an amazing Mother’s Day! Each and every day should be Mother’s Day considering what they’re always doing for us. This Mother’s Day, I made a layer cake for my amazing mom. I was running a bit (read: very) short on cash this year, so I couldn’t afford to buy her an extravagant gift. So I decided to try my hand at making a cake covered in rosettes.  

 

I did cheat a little, though. I used a dark chocolate cake mix instead of making it from scratch. I had an AP exam coming up, so I didn’t have much time to put together something. However, I did try to spice it up a little by spreading the inside with some delicious nutella.

For the frosting, I just made this basic buttercream and dyed it with a little bit of Americolor’s Teal food gel.

I know this isn’t perfect, but hopefully I’ll improve my “frosting skills” as I practice some more. If you have any experiences with frosting that you’d like to share, feel free to comment below!

 

Turtle Pie

Hi there! I’m Yuna and I’m a blogge– wait I already started this blog? Oh yeah, that’s right. I haven’t posted in what seems like forever. I have a lot of recipes to post, but I couldn’t find the time to write and post. A friend’s birthday did pass within these past few weeks! Which means… I baked something quite unique!

I didn’t have many of the ingredients needed for this recipe, so I ended up spending $30 to make this single pie. So for those of you trying to make your friend an inexpensive present, this probably isn’t the first place to look. Unless, that is, of course, you have cool whip, pie crusts, caramel, pecans, and peanut butter lying around your kitchen.

oOooOO look at that caramel-y chocolatey deliciousness.

Ingredients:

• 1 graham cracker/oreo cookie crust (homemade or store-bought, I used store-bought)
• 8 ounces cream cheese, softened
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup smooth peanut butter or more to taste (I used about 1/4 cup more)
• 2 cups thawed whipped topping
• 1/2 – 1 cup chopped pecans, toasted and divided
• 1/3 cup caramel ice cream topping + more for drizzling on top
• Melted chocolate for topping

Directions:

1. Beat together the cream cheese, sugar, and peanut butter.
2. Toast the pecans for around 3-4 minutes on your stovetop.
3. Add whipped topping and half of the toasted pecans to the cream cheese mixture and blend well.
4. Spread some caramel ice cream topping on the graham cracker/oreo cookie crust.
5. Spread the cream cheese mixture on the crust.
6. Freeze for 3 hours.
7. Take out the pie and spread the rest of the pecans over the top.
8. Melt some chocolate and drizzle it on the entire pie.
9. Drizzle as much caramel as you’d like.
10. Freeze again for 1 hour.
11. Serve and keep frozen when not being eaten!

Hot Chocolate Popcorn

Every girl who has her time of the month come by while going through a stressful period of time has to have some kind of a sweet tooth. I can’t possible be the only one! Well, that’s exactly what happened to me this week. Which is why I had to curb my craving for sweets with a touch (or maybe more) of deliciously sweet chocolate and salty sweet kettle popcorn.

Hot chocolate isn’t just for summer. I take a packet of hot chocolate to school if I want to make myself a cup to get my chocolate fix, or I make myself a quick glass to end my meal with a sweet, chocolatey touch. Another more unique way to get your hot chocolate fix is with hot chocolate popcorn!

I actually didn’t have a recipe for this, I kind of just went on a whim and put together some chocolatey things together and this was the absolutely beautiful dessert.

Ingredients:

All of the ingredients are to taste, you can use as much or as little as you want!

kettle corn or salted popcorn

milk chocolate

white chocolate

hot chocolate powder

parchment paper (optional)

Itty-Bitty Teeny-Tiny Chocolate Chip Cookies

Hi everyone! I’m Yuna, and this is my second blog on wordpress, but it is my first cooking/baking blog! I have a food-tasting/review blog titled twofoodiechicas, originally created on weebly. I decided to make the move from weebly to wordpress because I feel like there’s more of a community here, so I’m very excited to meet everyone here!

However, my twofoodiechicas blog has been running quite slowly because I’m the only one who does much eating. As the title may suggest, there are two chicas. But the chica I run my blog with is constantly dieting and doesn’t really eat much to review.

I’ve always wanted to start a baking/cooking blog so when I realized it would be hard to move all of my posts from weebly to wordpress, I seized the opportunity to start a new blog.

So here’s my first post! The original recipe calls them “Mini Chocolate Chip Cookies” but that was too boring for my standards. Therefore, I decided to call them… Itty-Bitty Teeny-Tiny Chocolate Chip Cookies. What a mouthful! Oh well, it adds a little bit of spunk in my day.

Recipe:

1 stick of softened butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup white sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/3 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup cake flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

WYD (What You Do//What Yuna Did):

1. Mix the butter and sugars together.

2. Add the egg and the vanilla into the mixture and mix until combined.

3. Sift in the flours, salt, and baking soda.

4. Mix until just combined and stir in the chocolate chips.

5. Refrigerate the dough until firm (Roughly 1-2 hours)

6. Preheat oven to 350ºF

7. Scoop 1/2 teaspoon balls onto a baking sheet

8. Bake for 5-8 minutes or until desired doneness.

Bonus Tip: Put a bunch of these into a jar (i.e.mason jar, empty peanut butter (or speculooscookie butter) jar) for a cute gift!

 Yields: 12 dozen cookies

Original Recipe