Category Archives: desserts

Thoughts on Mondays, and Foods I’ll Have to Say Goodbye To

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First of all, this gif sums up my feelings about Mondays the way nothing else can:
I wanna goThis weekend I celebrated St. Patrick’s Day like a grownup, with a mimosa and non-crap beer brunch at a friend’s apartment, followed by a table in a not-too-crowded bar. (I’m growing up before my very eyes!) One thing I do during most meals now is think about if it would be possible (and if so, how) to make that meal gluten-free. To my happy surprise, most of the dishes had pretty easy substitutions (make French toast casserole with gluten-free bread, make the quiche crust with a substitute flour, enjoy mimosas in all their glory, etc.). However, there was one dessert that I’m not sure one could ever recreate, and thus I am so glad I was able to enjoy it this weekend: slutty brownies.
browniesThat would be cookie dough, topped with an Oreo, topped with brownie batter, and gloriously underbaked.

If you can make me a gluten-free version of this I will give you a puppy.

Homemade Funfetti

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Whoever decided that funfetti is for kids was definitely wrong. Am I the only one who feels like their friends get more excited about funfetti in adulthood than they ever did as kids?
When one of my most-obsessed-with-funfetti friend’s birthdays came up, I knew I had to make it. But now that we are adults and care about what went into what we’re eating, I knew I had to make a homemade version where you could pronounce all the ingredients that went into it.
Enter Jessica of How Sweet Eats, who has funfetti-ed everything under the sun. This recipe is a slight adaptation of her funfetti cupcakes. For one, I made a cake. I also included salt in my version, an ingredient that, even in small quantities, makes all the difference in elevating baked goods.
Alternatively, you could use any vanilla cake recipe you like and just add sprinkles, but just be mindful of the serving size–a recipe for 24 cupcakes will yield a two-layer cake’s worth of cake, and vice versa. I baked this recipe (originally for 12 cupcakes) in an 8×12 pan, because that was what the grocery store sold with a matching lid. I don’t recommend making this in a 9×13 pan, as it will be quite thin. Use whatever you have that’s in between an 8×8 and a 9×13, or just make 12 cupcakes and only bake for 18-20 minutes.

Homemade Funfetti Cake With Chocolate Buttercream
For the cake (adapted slightly from How Sweet Eats):
1 stick unsalted butter (1/2 cup), softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract (the real stuff only, please!)
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
generous 1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup milk (any kind)
1/3 cup sprinkles

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and grease an 8×12 cake pan in whatever way you prefer. Beat butter and sugar in an electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy, 4 to 5 minutes. Stop and scrape down sides of bowl. Add eggs one at a time until combined, then beat in vanilla. Stop and scrape again. Add half the dry ingredients and beat on low speed until just combined, then add the milk and beat until that is combined, followed by the rest of the dry ingredients. Stir in sprinkles. Spread in prepared pan and bake until top is golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean, 20-25 minutes depending on your pan and your oven. Let cool completely on a rack.

For the frosting (adapted slightly from Savory Sweet Life):
1 stick unsalted butter (1/2 cup), softened
1 3/4 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons heavy cream (milk will also work)

Cream butter on medium speed until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Turn off mixer and add sugar and cocoa powder. Mix on low until just combined, then add vanilla, salt, and cream/milk and beat on medium-high until well combined, fluffy, and smooth, about 4 minutes. Spread on cooled cake and lick the bowl.

Baking for the Cure: Apples & Honey Cupcakes

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Earlier this week I was honored with the chance to share a recipe with Frosting for the Cause, a baking blog dedicated to helping find cures for cancers that affect women. I spend every summer raising money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation in celebration of my grandmother’s successful battle with breast cancer, so this was a project close to my heart. Click on over to learn more about my experiences, and how to make these apples and honey cupcakes!

Dirty Blondies

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The great thing about working at a magazine that they don’t tell you about in school is the sheer amount of free stuff you end up with. Things sent for photo shoots, things sent unsolicited, things sent to other people that appear on kitchen tables and bookshelves on a regular basis. Most of the time, it’s manuscripts and books, screeners for TV shows, and my favorite, food. But the other week, the mother lode arrived: cookbooks. One food editor leaving is one food lover’s gain, and despite my careful selection, I still filled my tote bag with new volumes. Don’t be surprised if you get a cookbook for your next birthday.

One of the books I was most excited about was from Fat Witch Brownies in Chelsea Market. Their blondies are so good that when I worked near a deli that sold them I would eat a mini one almost every day. They taste like if a chocolate chip cookie had a love affair with cake–my dream child. Finally, I have their secrets, I thought!

Except when I started cooking, dreams did not come true. The batter was first impossibly thin and slightly curdled looking. I ran out of all-purpose flour and had to throw in a few tablespoons of whole wheat to get enough flour. Once it came together, it looked okay, but when the blondies came out of the oven…they were not blond. I knew I hadn’t used enough whole wheat to cause a color change, and I knew I hadn’t overcooked them, as I had regularly tested with toothpicks. They tasted fine–delicious in fact–but it still bothered me that mine didn’t look like the “real” thing.

I didn’t discover the problem until two days after I made them, when I saw my world’s-best-cook nana and gave her one to try. It turns out Fat Witch’s secret ingredient was to blame: molasses. That’s what keeps the blondies impossibly moist and chocolate-chip-cookeie-y, but it makes the brownies almost brown–hence the name dirty blondies. For non-dirty blondies, I’d recommend using light molasses, if your grocery store carries them. Either way, these might just replace your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Dirty Blondies (makes 12-16, adapted slightly from Fat Witch Brownies)

one stick salted butter, softened
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2/3 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8×8 baking dish with foil in each direction, leaving an overhang on all sides. Grease foil.

In a medium bowl, add the flour, salt, and baking soda. The original recipe calls for you to sift these together; I just whisked them to combine and it was fine. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixter, cream the butter and eggs together*. Add the sugar, molasses, and vanilla and beat until well mixed. Add flour mixture and beat at low speed until well combined. Fold in the chocolate chips, and make sure all the dry ingredients have been incorporated while you’re doing this. Pour into pan, smooth the top, and bake for about 30 minutes. When blondies are ready, a toothpick inserted into the middle should come out with only a few moist crumbs attached. Cool in pan for ten minutes, then move to a rack to cool completely. Cut into 12 or 16, pour a glass of milk, and dig in.

*I thought this was weird too, but the batter comes together in the end. Don’t be alarmed when it looks weird at first.

**Thanks to my friend Rachel for coming up with the perfect name for these!

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One-Bowl Cakey Brownies Even Fudgy Fans Will Love

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Like most people who consider baked goods to be a major food group, I keep basic baking ingredients on hand at all times. It keeps my shopping list small when I want to try something new and fancy, and means I don’t have to shop at all when I get in the mood to bake something.
I’m very into seizing the day when it comes to food, so when our muggy New York City summer took a holiday a few days ago and the temperature suddenly dropped to 70, I went on an oven-using spree. I’d been wanting to use the Bon Appetit desserts book I got for the holidays more often, and immediately hopped off my cookbook-covered bed and into my kitchen when I saw a really simple brownie recipe in the book. Anything that allows you to only have to wash one pot or bowl is a winner in my book.

Naturally, I didn’t realize until after I had already started melting the butter that the recipe called for unsweetened chocolate, while I only had semi-sweet, and not enough of it. This is why you should study both the recipe AND your pantry before you start cooking, folks. Obviously, this did not stop me, and I set about altering the recipe to keep it from being too sweet. I cut sugar, added cocoa powder and chocolate chips, baked it in a smaller pan than called for because that was what I had, and hoped for the best.
Here is a very important fact about me: I generally like my cookies and brownies underbaked. Real underbaked. Basically just warm dough or batter, really. Whenever I give you a baking time for these things, I’ve usually baked them for less. So you can imagine my disappointment when I cut into these brownies and discovered that they had a cakey texture. I resigned myself into just bringing them all to work…until I bit into one. Lo and behold, somehow these brownies were actually quite fudgy despite their appearance! They’re still not a true, goopy fudge brownie, but they ARE the perfect medium and a great bar to appeal to brownie fans across the spectrum. I suspect if you baked them a little less than I did they might even be a tad closer to my ideal, but either way, you should make them now. Unless you live in any state having a heat wave, which I think at this point is all of them, in which case I’d suggest waiting until the weekend if you don’t have central air (and if you do, I am oozing with chocolatey jealousy).

One-Pot Brownies
3 ounces semi- or bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 stick unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (if you have dark powder, I think it would work great)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
generous 1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup chocolate chips, divided

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8×8 baking dish with foil in one direction, then the other, leaving an overhang on both sides. Grease foil.

In a medium saucepan, melt butter and chopped chocolate over medium heat, stirring frequently just until almost melted. Turn off heat and stir until completely melted. Let cool slightly, at least 15 minutes.

Whisk sugar into cooled chocolate/butter mixture, then eggs and vanilla (hopefully you did not break your whisk, because if you use a scrambler thing like me it will take forever), whisking until eggs are well combined. Add cocoa powder, flours, and salt, and whisk until combined. Stir in 1/2 cup chocolate chips.

Pour batter into prepared pan and top with remaining 1/4 cup chocolate chips. Bake until brownies look set and a toothpick inserted comes out with moist crumbs attached, about 30-35 minutes, but start checking around 25 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool until warm in pan, then use foil to remove from pan and let cool completely on wire rack. Slice into 16 squares and enjoy, especially if you’ve got whipped cream lying around.

Chips

Triple-Chocolate Chip Cookies

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They say when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade.

They also say that when life gives you so much Easter candy that you still have a ton left in May, you should make cookies.

Oh, do they not say that? Well, I say that. It’s sound advice. You should definitely follow it. Especially if you just bought a snazzy new stackable, space-saving tiered cooking rack and need to test it out. You know, to see if it works.

You can obviously use chips for this recipe, but chopped chocolate does melt through the cookies so nicely. I’d recommend you use real milk chocolate and not Cadbury Dairy Milk bars, which are what I had lying around–they developed a kind of grainy texture after baking. But I do recommend you follow at least one aspect of my recipe exactly: the butter. I use salted butter in this cookie, and it makes all the difference in the world. I’d go so far as to say that after this, you’ll switch to salted butter in all your drop cookie recipes.

This is not the definitive chocolate chip cookie, but it is quite tasty nonetheless. You can mess with the chocolate ratios below if you prefer one kind of chocolate more than the other (I am normally a dark-only girl, but I loved this combo). Feel free to swap out the whole wheat flour for all all-purpose flour; even though you can’t taste the whole wheat, the cookies do taste better when you eliminate the health aspect, like all things in life.

Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies (adapted from the Mrs. Fields Cookie Book)
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 sticks salted butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar, packed (either light or dark–doesn’t matter)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (the real deal. Please, please do not use the fake kind)
1/2 cup milk chocolate, in chips or chopped
1 1/2 cups dark chocolate, in chips or chopped
1/4 cup white chocolate, in chips or chopped

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Whisk flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl until well combined. Set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugars together on medium until fluffy. Be patient–this will take at least 3-5 minutes. It’s ready when it kind of looks like a brownish buttercream. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add eggs and vanilla and mix just until eggs are completely incorporated. You should see no yolk streaks and the batter will look slightly curdled but smell wonderful. Scrape down sides of bowl again. Add the bowl of dry ingredients and all the chocolate (yes, at the same time) and combine on the lowest setting until just incorporated.

Scoop dough by rounded tablespoons onto baking sheets about two inches apart. If, like me, you have a tiny oven and thus can only use tiny baking sheets, they *can* be one inch apart but you will likely be separating cookies when they come out of the oven. Bake for 20-24 minutes, depending on your oven and how undercooked or crunchy you like your cookies, until golden. Cool on sheets for a few minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack to cool completely. Taste at least one cookie as soon as they are cool enough to handle. You know, for poison.