Non-baking with Buddy

Well, I know I said this was going to be a weekly endeavor, but this past week and a half has been absolutely insane. I know I mentioned that I am an equestrian student, but this week was full of being at the barn until 10pm, lack of sleep, finding out why your favorite horse is lame, and testing on other horses. It has been crazy. Anyhow, when I took the cake from the previous post to the barn, the instructor with the biggest sweet tooth did not know of the cake until it was all gone. So, he requested these no-bake cookies. This is a recipe I have made many times, and it just is so easy!

Before getting started with the cookies, you are going to want to line cookie sheets with wax paper. I lined 3 cookie sheets because you can fit about a dozen cookies on a sheet.

Depending on the size of the cookies, this recipe yields about 2 ½ to 3 dozen cookies.

Chocolate Oatmeal Drops

1 stick (8 tablespoons) of margarine or butter

¼ cup cocoa powder

2 cups white sugar

½ cup milk

½ cup peanut butter

1 Tablespoon Vanilla

3 cups Oatmeal (instant)

You are going to want a large saucepan for this. First, you melt the butter in the saucepan and add the cocoa powder, sugar and milk. Try to either not heat the butter on high or have your other ingredients ready to go in, especially if you are using real butter because you do not want it to burn. After these ingredients are mixed, allow the mixture to boil for about a minute and then remove it from the heat. Here, you want to add your half cup of peanut butter and the tablespoon of vanilla. (A little tip about the vanilla, get the peanut butter melted before adding the vanilla that way your mix has cooled a little and you don’t get a sizzle of evaporation when you add it.) Stir this until the peanut butter is dissolved.

Once the peanut butter is dissolved, add your 3 cups of oatmeal and mix it in until all of the oatmeal is coated with the chocolate mixture.

After everything is mixed well, take a teaspoon (or a tablespoon if you want bigger cookies) and just scoop the mix up and drop it onto the lined cookie sheets. As you are finished placing cookies on the sheets, place them in the refrigerator. (It helps if you clear some space in the refrigerator before you get started on everything.) They probably take about 20-30 minutes to set up and cool completely.

Once they are cooled, you can remove them from the cookies sheets and put them in a storage container of your choice.

That is all for now, hopefully things will calm down a little bit and I can get down to business with my baking.

Enjoy everyone!

Baking Chocolate Cake With Buddy

Baking With Buddy #1

Hello everyone. My name is Jenn, Buddy is my nosy and obnoxiously lovable cat. I am a senior in college where I lead a stressful life riding horses (no sarcasm there). Anyways, I enjoy baking and I am going to a local college where I will be going for a culinary certificate next school year. I want to bake once a week and this is my way of keeping me committed to it. So, without further ado… I will share my first baking project of the blog!

For a cake with no butter in it, it is very tasty and remains incredibly moist. I love this recipe for chocolate cake.

I made a simple chocolate cake, one layer in a 9 inch pan. The recipe is from Hershey’s website and I halfed it. The original recipe is available here

Here is a pre-halved version of the recipe:

• 1 cup white sugar
• ½ cup + 6 Tablespoons flour
• 6 Tablespoons cocoa powder
• ¾ teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• ½ cup milk
• ¼ cup oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ cup boiling water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients in a medium to large bowl (depending on if you are doing half or a full recipe). Then add the milk, eggs, oil and vanilla and mix with a hand mixer for 2 minutes on medium speed (this isn’t completely necessary, I just mixed it really well by hand with a spatula). Then add in the boiling water and mix that in well. When you first put the water in, it looks like you aren’t going to be able to mix it in but trust me, it does come together just fine. The batter will be thin, so don’t panic.

You are going to want to both grease and flour the pan you are using, I have found that sprinkling some flour in and making sure it covers all where you have greased makes for a very easy removal of the cake.

Once you have greased the pan, pour the batter in and stick it in the oven for 30-35 minutes. I have made a full recipe of this in a 13x9 pan and it needed the better part of the time (closer to 35 minutes) but this time I used a 9 inch round spring-form pan and I set the timer for 32 minutes and that was the perfect amount of time. But when the time is up, use a toothpick and poke the middle of the cake and make sure it is done by not having any gooey cake on the toothpick.

Then you want to let the cake cool, if you want once it is cool enough to remove, you can put it on a wire cooling rack.

For frosting the cake, I cheated this time and used store-bought frosting ONLY because I got a 56 piece frosting tip set recently and I really wanted to try out frosting something without having to make my own frosting. But I promise, no more cheating!!

With the frosting tips, I used the couplers that came with my set, and I figured that just using a gallon size plastic bag would be suitable for piping frosting. Boy was I wrong. I busted the seam on the first bag I used then with the second one, I somehow busted a hole right along the coupler. So, the next day I went out and bought some Wilton’s brand decorating bags, both disposable and I spent the money on a good, real, washable decorating bag. Using the disposable ones, I over-decorated the cake. I ran out of vanilla frosting so I started using some of my roommate’s chocolate frosting that she had in the fridge (unfortunately, sorry, also store-bought). Which intermingling the frosting in the same bag made for some awesome looking frosting (picture below). I think I will be mixing frostings in my decorating bag more often because of how it turned out. I think the cake turned out very well. I took it to the barn and left it for the staff to devour and it was gone within 2 hours of me leaving it and everyone that had a piece had nothing but great things to say about it.

Enjoy!

~Jenn~