Baking Chocolate Crinkle Cookies With Buddy

I am heading into my last week of finals for my undergraduate-ever… weird. Anyways, a couple of friends and I went out to dinner the other night and we were trying to decide on dessert when I suggested that we go pick up a movie and then head back to my apartment and I would make these cookies that 17 & Baking did a few months ago and I have been dying to make. They are Chocolate Crinkle Cookies.

These cookies have a very simple recipe that can be brought together by hand, but make sure you read through the recipe because it will save you some sticky dough and headaches later on. When I finished the dough, I immediately started rolling the cookies out, and even though I had lightly oiled my hands, the dough was sticking terribly to my hands. Then my friend pointed out that the dough was supposed to be chilled for 4 hours before rolling out! So I finished rolling the first dozen cookies and I baked them and they turned out just fine, and to expedite the process of chilling the dough, I put it in the freezer for about an hour and a half. Once I put the dough in the freezer, it was so much easier to work with. After rolling out 2 dozen more cookies, the dough was getting warm again so I put it back in the freezer for about 10 minutes to finish up the final 2 sheets of cookies.

I ended up with about 4 and a half dozen of these cookies.

Here is the recipe, thanks to 17 & Baking who got it from All Recipes:

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 cups white sugar

½ cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

In a medium bowl, mix together the cocoa powder, sugar and vegetable oil. Make sure this is mixed together well. Then, one at a time, beat in the eggs. You could probably use a mixer for this but I mixed everything by hand and didn’t have a problem. After adding the eggs, add the vanilla extract. At this point, your dough will look like brownie batter. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Slowly add this mixture into the chocolate mixture, the dough will thicken up.

At this point, you are supposed to cover the dough and chill for 4 hours. Like I said before, you can put it in the freezer and have chilled dough in less time if you are impatient like I am.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. After the dough is chilled, it is time to roll it out. Put the ½ cup powdered sugar in a bowl. You want to lightly oil your palms and will need to keep oiling your palms about every 4 cookies or so (you will know when you need more oil because the dough will start sticking to your palms). Using a teaspoon, scoop a small amount of the dough onto your palm and roll the dough into a ball. You could really make the ball any size you want, I think I made mine bigger than Elissa did over at 17 and Baking, but they turned out well. So I’d say about the size of a walnut for the dough. Then roll the ball of dough in the powdered sugar until coated and place on a cookie sheet. You want to bake these for 10-12 minutes.

Allow the cookies to stand on the cookie sheet for a couple minutes before removing them. I just use a piece of paper towel laid out on the table since I don’t have wire cooling racks.

These cookies are more cake-like in texture, and best eaten right when they are warm from the oven. But they remain delicious when they are cooled.

I will probably be baking more this week as I have more free time and need to get rid of ingredients and food before moving home from college, so look for more posts this week!

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Cinnamon Rolls with Buddy

With the semester winding down, I am finding less time to bake, but more need to bake from being so stressed out. As an equine science student at my University, we have barn finals the week before regular class finals. So when normal college students are enjoying their last week of classes or actually having time to work on major projects that are usually due the last week of classes, I don’t. Our barn finals are held as a 5 day long horse show where you show off what you have gotten done with your horse over the course of the semester. It is so stressful, I can’t even explain.

So Sunday morning I decided to try making cinnamon rolls-from scratch. The recipe really isn’t very difficult or challenging, but it does take a lot of time just because there is yeast in the dough and you need to let it rise.

I previously tried to make this recipe and failed because I walked away from my hand mixer and it proceeded to topple my bowl of half-made, really sticky dough on the floor. Needless to say, I was very angry and it has taken me a couple months to re-attempt this recipe.

I used the recipe from my Betty Crocker cook book. The recipe says that it makes 15 rolls, so I halved the recipe and it still made 13 rolls, they weren’t very big-about the size of the ones you get from the tube.

Here is the pre-halved recipe:

Dough:

1 ¾-2 Cups Flour

2 ½ Tablespoons + ½ teaspoon sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 package Yeast (2 ¼ teaspoons)

½ cup warm milk

2 Tablespoons butter, softened

½ egg

In a large bowl, mix half of the flour (1 cup), sugar, the salt and the yeast. Add the warm milk (I just put the milk in the microwave for about a minute), the ½ egg and the butter. Beat this mix with an electric mixer for about a minute on low; make sure you keep scraping the bowl as you go to get everything in the mixture. Add the rest of the flour, and beat again.

Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead the dough for about 5 minutes (warning-the dough is very sticky at first). The dough should be “smooth and springy”. Grease another large bowl with shortening and put the dough in this bowl and turn the dough until the whole thing is greased. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise for about an hour and a half. The dough should roughly double in size. When the dough has risen, you should be able to leave an impression in the dough when it has risen.

Mix the filling in a small bowl/dish and set aside:

2 Tablespoons brown sugar

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

On a lightly floured surface, take the dough and flatten it with your hands or a rolling pin. The original recipe calls for a 10x15 inch rectangle and that is about what mine ended up being, so you might want to roll the dough somewhere between ¼ and ½ inch thick. Spread butter on the dough and sprinkle the filling evenly across the rolled out dough. Beginning on the long side, roll the dough tightly and then pinch the dough to seal the roll. Using either a serrated knife or dental floss, cut the roll into about 1-inch rolls. I used a serrate knife and it worked well. Grease a pan and place the rolls slightly spread out in the pan. Now cover the baking dish loosely with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise another 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and then bake the rolls for 30-35 minutes. I only baked mine for about 25 minutes and they were still brown and fully cooked.

While these were baking I made the glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

5-6 teaspoons milk

I doubled the glaze so that it would cover all of the rolls, above is the pre-doubled recipe.

After the rolls are done, remove them from the baking dish to a plate and allow the rolls to cool for a few minutes, glaze them with the icing you have made, and enjoy!

These were pretty good cinnamon rolls, but not the best I have ever had, and they were very time consuming, so it was a very good learning opportunity.

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Coffee Cake and Ginger Snaps with Buddy

This week I kind of went a little overboard. Let me tell you why we have 2 recipes this week…. So I am on my university’s Stock Horse Team and we had our spring show this Saturday. I figured the only night I would be able to bake anything would be Thursday night and I decided to rid myself of the sugary baked goods, I would make something to take to the barn with me on Saturday morning to feed the team and the students planning on showing and participating on Saturday.

I have this awesome recipe for coffee cake and I have made it more times than I can remember and it is always awesome. I have experimented with this recipe as well-making double the topping and putting half in the middle and half on top of the coffee cake (which was AAAAAMAZING!!). So I decided to make the coffee cake in a way that it could be had by more people than what an 8x8 pan would normally allow. I decided to go with coffee cake muffins.

Coffee Cake:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

1 ½ cup flour

¾ cup sugar

2 ½ teaspoons baking powder

¾ teaspoon salt

¼ cup oil

¾ cup milk

1 egg

You are supposed to mix the dry ingredients and then the wet ingredients separately. I have done this and honestly, with this recipe, I do not think it makes much of a difference if you just throw everything in a bowl and mix until combined. The batter will be mildly thick (if that makes any sense). Make sure the mixture is smooth, you can use an electric mixer if you desire, I just normally use a rubber spatula and keep stirring and folding until everything is mixed smoothly together.

Now normally, you would grease an 8x8 pan and pour in the batter (don’t worry if it does not seem like it is thick, this batter will rise!). But, since I was doing muffins, I lined a muffin tin with paper muffin cups and filled each cup half way. The halfway thing is very important because these do rise up to a full muffin size. (My mixture made 15 muffins)

Then you top each with the topping:

1/3 cup brown sugar

¼ cup flour

½ teaspoon cinnamon

2 Tablespoons butter or margarine

With the topping, you want to mix the brown sugar, flour and cinnamon all together until everything is well blended, then add the butter and using a pastry blender (or a fork if you don’t have a pastry blender) mix this up until it is crumbly. The butter should be in relatively small chunks (like the size of mini chocolate chips) and spread evenly throughout the mixture.

You want to evenly spread the topping over the cake or muffins. If you are making the cake, you want to bake it for about 25 minutes. If you are making the muffins, 18 minutes was the timing I found that worked out, but you always want to check the center with a toothpick.

This coffee cake is one of my favorite recipes, so enjoy!

I know I said I did two recipes this week, and so here is the second recipe. I got this sweet and simple cookbook for my birthday last year and all of the recipes I have made from it are awesome. It is a Gooseberry Patch cookbook. I highly recommend it.

Meme’s Molasses Cookies

¾ cup shortening

1 ½ cup sugar, divided

1 egg

4 Tablespoons molasses

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon ground ginger

In a mixing bowl, blend the shortening, 1 cup of the sugar, egg and molasses “until fluffy.” I used a hand mixer to do this and it worked out just fine. I had to guess where the “fluffy” point was, I just kept mixing until everything was blended and the cookies still turned out awesome.

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger together. Slowly add the dry mixture into the molasses mixture. After you get about half of the flour mix into the molasses mixture, the dough starts to really form and get thick, I had to up my mixer to the next speed so it could power through the mixture. Then you want to cover the dough and put it in the refrigerator to cool for a half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

After your dough is cooled, put the ½ cup of sugar you haven’t used yet into a bowl. You are going to roll the dough into little walnut sized balls and roll that in the sugar. Place the rolled dough on an ungreased cookie sheet. Repeat this process until you have filled up the cookie sheet. Make sure you keep enough space between the dough so that the cookies have space to spread out as they cook.

Place the cookie sheet in the oven for 10 minutes and then cool on the sheet for a minute or two before transferring them to a cooling rack or just a sheet of paper towel laid out on your table.

The recipe says it makes about 4 dozen cookies, I think I made mine a little larger and came out with exactly 3 ½ dozen. This was my first time making these cookies and they came out very good. My roommate said that they taste more like ginger-snaps. I do not know because I have not ever had molasses cookies or ginger-snaps. I know, craziness.

Well, that is all for this week, hopefully 2 recipes will hold me over til next week.

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Spice Cake with Buddy

So, for this edition of Baking with Buddy, I wanted to make something for my family for dessert for Easter dinner that I knew my family would really enjoy. I know that my dad loves chocolate cake, but that is too easy. Then I thought back to one of my dad’s birthdays and remembered that we made spice cake for his birthday one year and he loved it-and so did everyone else. So, I decided to make a spice cake from scratch. I know spice cake is normally more of a fall-season dessert but I really wanted to make it now, so I found a good recipe and went with it.

Then, a few nights ago after I decided on spice cake, I literally could not fall asleep because I couldn’t figure out what kind of frosting I wanted to put on it. I knew buttercream would be good, but I wanted to branch out and do something different that I hadn’t done before. Because, let’s be honest, that is the purpose of this blog, to get me to go broader in my baking. So I texted my friend over at beinguncreative.blogspot.com and we went though some different frostings, one of which was cream cheese. Call me insane (I know I am) but I don’t like cream cheese. I love cheese cake but not straight cream cheese. So I was wary about cream cheese frosting, but once I found my spice cake recipe, I found an all-spice cream cheese frosting. I was sold.

So, here it is in all of its glory-Spice Cake with All-Spice Cream Cheese Frosting!!

I one and a halved this recipe because the recipe called for a 9x12 pan, and I wanted to do a 2 layer 9-inch round cake. If I were to do this again, I would double the recipe because my round cakes came out very thin. I found both my recipes on Recipezarr.com.

Here is the spice cake and here is the all-spice cream cheese frosting.

The pre-one-and-a-halved recipe for the spice cake:

1 ½ eggs (to get the half egg, put it in a small dish, stir up the egg so the yolk mixes into the white and then pour half the egg in and you can dispose of the other half)

1 ½ cup sugar

2 ¼ + 6 Tablespoons Flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 ½ teaspoon baking soda

¾ cup vegetable oil

1 ½ cup water

1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon

1 ½ teaspoon nutmeg

1 ¼ teaspoon cloves (I didn’t adjust this from the original because the people who reviewed the original recipe said they would cut down on the cloves so I just didn’t adjust it)

1 ½ teaspoon all spice

Preheat the oven to 375.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, and just stir it. You could probably use a hand mixer but I just mixed it all by hand with a rubber spatula. I had 2 larger soup bowls that are exactly the same so I knew I was splitting the batter in half. So I poured half the batter in one bowl and the other half in the second bowl. This worked out very well. Seeing as I only have one 9-inch round pan, I had to bake one at a time. So grease and flour the pan (or pans) and pour the batter in. Baking these went about 18-20 minutes.

While allowing these to cool, I made the frosting.

3 ounces cream cheese, softened

1/3 cup butter, softened

¾ teaspoon ground allspice

4 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 teaspoons milk

Using a hand mixer, beat together the cream cheese, butter and allspice until they are well blended. Then one cup at a time, add the powdered sugar. At about cup 3, I added the vanilla and one tablespoon of the milk because the frosting was looking dry, and it worked out well. Then I added the final cup of sugar and the tablespoon of milk. It came together amazingly and tastes awesome.

Once you have your frosting and two round cakes, you want to find a plate that the cake fits on nicely. Put the first cake down and frost the top of it, then place the second cake on top of the first and frost the top and sides of the whole thing. My cakes came out with very round tops and so my sides have nice big gaps in them, but I don’t really mind since the cake is going to be enjoyed here by my family. I tried to cover up the gap a little bit while I decorated the cake; it didn’t really work too well but these things happen. I went through several tips, just playing around with the designs and such seeing as I am still really in the experimental stages of decorating cakes.

This cake turned out nice and moist and the frosting complimented the cake so perfectly!

Enjoy!

~Jenn