Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

Instant cake!

That's right. 5 minutes total!

Anyone can do this :)
What I used was about 3 tablespoons AP flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa powder, a bit of baking powder.
Then I added one egg, mixed, then added 3 tablespoons milk, 3 tablespoons oil, a lil bit of vanilla and continued mixing. All in the same mug.
Then into the microwave for 2.5 minutes, and voila!

White Chocolate Brownies

I don't remember how this idea popped in my head, but I was thinking about doing something with white chocolate, and I remember someone asking me to make brownies for them.
I found a white chocolate brownie recipe online that I had all the ingredients to, and so yeah!
Really the only difference is that it's melted white chocolate and not regular chocolate.
I feel like these "brownies" ended up tasting more like cake than what I remember brownies normally taste like. By the next day, when I woke up, they were all gone because my parents finished them all.

Nutella Cookies

The other day I was eating nutella out of the jar with a spoon with a friend while watching Lord of the Rings. :)  And, I thought, what would nutella COOOOOKIES be like?

I literally just added nutella in the batter of a regular cookie recipe. I don't know the exact amount, I just kind of put as much as I felt like... 

Turned out pretty good! It was more on the crunchy side and the nutella flavor was actually more subtle than I expected. But it was still there and everyone loved it :)

Lemon Sugar Cookies

White Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookie

It really looks like an ordinary chocolate chip cookie. But ah! There is a subtle difference. I added melted white chocolate in the batter.
It's hard to taste the difference but it's there.
I taste the white chocolate more in the after-taste if at all.
People who could taste the difference couldn't identify what the difference was, so I guess I won't be making these again, since I can use the white chocolate for other stuff instead.
Maybe I should add more white chocolate in the batter? take out the dark chocolate chips?

Thin Mints

Homemade thin mints! :) Thin mints have always been my favorite girl scout cookies. Last night I decided to make them! 

There are no eggs, and no baking powder or baking soda in these. I guess that's how it's so crunchy :)
After making the dough I rolled it into two logs and put them in the freezer for 1 hour or so to make them firm. Then after preheating the oven I cut slices of the log, which are the cookies!

After the cookies cooled, I made the glaze/coating. It's just chocolate and butter melted together, really. I added some more peppermint extract because I felt like the cookie part itself didn't have enough. With that, I basically dipped each cookie in the coating and put them on a tray to cool completely and so the coating would harden.

I keep them in the fridge because I like them better cold :)

Cinnamon Chocolate "Squares"

They're supposed to be squares, like bars/brownies, but since I don't have a good rectangular tray for this one, I just baked it in a cake pan because that's all I have.

But shape shouldn't matter that much, right? :D

The middle is chocolate chips with cinnamon, sugar, and instant-coffee. The "cake"itself has cinnamon in it too, which is why it's darker than a normal regular cake. On the top is a simple chocolate glaze, melted chocolate with butter. :)

Ladyfingers

I needed to use up the rest of the mascarpone and quark before it expires... sooo I made another batch of tiramisu ice cream. I was too lazy to go to the store to buy ladyfingers so I decided to just make them myself.

I used a plastic bag and cut a hole on a corner to squeeze out the batter into the shapes on the tray. After the first tray got filled, the plastic bag got so messy and hard to handle that I got lazy and just spread the rest of the batter onto another tray, into a rectangular-like shape. I used that for the tiramisu ice cream since I would have to cut it into pieces anyways. So the ladyfingers in the pictures here are actually the "leftover" that was the first good-batch I made. Ladyfingers are always good as cookies too! :)

Ehehehe I tried to arrange them as an actual hand. I mean, they are called ladyfingers, right?

Buttermilk Blueberry Scones

I rarely eat scones, and the ones I have eaten are usually from some coffee/cafe place and they're hard and crumbly. But these ones turned out really fluffy and delicious! I place the credit to my prior experience working in a restaurant. :) I've made them so often that the recipe is just kind of ingrained. 

Fresh warm scones straight from the oven!

Baking here at home reminds me of the conveniences of baking in a restaurant. All the equipment provided there makes things a lot easier. 

But yeah! Definitely good use of leftover buttermilk.

Buttermilk Pound Cake

The honest reason why I made this is because I still have to use up the buttermilk before it expires. The reason why I got buttermilk last week in the first place was to make some banana bread. But ahhh! So much left over!

I had to use a Bundt pan because I don't have a regular tube pan.

You can probably tell what time of day I took these photos. In the evening it's more of a yellow-tint overall, because the lights in my house are just like that.
I do prefer taking pictures during the day with the light from outside, but I just didn't have patience for waiting until tomorrow to take them. Also, because it wouldn't be a whole cake anymore by then!

Plus, I think this lighting gives it a more warm-home-kind-of-feeling, which is nice too :)

1 cup of buttermilk down! Still got some more left to use up...

Buttermilk Chocolate Cookies

I have quite a bit of buttermilk that I have to use up before the expiration date, sooooo why not make cookies? :D

I split the batch into two and I used white chocolate chips for one half and then regular chocolate chips for the other half. 

They certainly look like regular chocolate cookies, but they're not! No eggs! The buttermilk adds a nice texture/taste which is hard to explain. 

The cookies kinda just melt into your mouth. :)

Tiramisu Ice Cream

I've made tiramisu ice cream plenty of times before. It's always one of my favorites :)

Even though tiramisu is supposed to have liquor, I don't put it in because I like it better without.

Below is an old picture of the same thing, tiramisu ice cream, but it's more fancyyyy in the sense that it has more chocolate decorations :)
I didn't have extra chocolate when I made it this week so that's why the first picture is lacking.

Devil's Food Cake with Midnight Ganache

It was my dad's birthday yesterday, so I made him a cake! 

This is the first pastry/dessert/baked-good I've made with alcohol in it. I soaked dried cherries in Cognac for a solid 6 hours, which I used for the filling.

The ganache turned out really well, and was the perfect amount too! Not too little and not too much; just right. I guess it's called "Midnight Ganache" because it has two chocolate-y parts, and caramelized sugar and cream. And I used super super dark chocolate so I guess that also added more of "midnight" taste.

Maybe it's supposed to be obvious, but I didn't realize until yesterday that the "Devil's Food Cake" is really the opposite of "Angel's Food Cake" aside from the name. Angel's food cake is supposed to be really light and fluffy (with more egg whites than yolks), while the Devil's Food Cake is really rich and dense (more egg yolks than whites too), and with this one specifically - helllla chocolate.


Decorating cakes is not one of my fortes. I It's something I've been trying to improve on, and I think I did a pretty good job this time! Instead of writing it directly on the cake, I decided to write out "Happy Birthday" in white chocolate on parchment paper so if I messed up I could always do it again until it looked right. Luckily I only had to write it out once; I think it looked pretty decent. I made some random squiggles and shapes just to use up the rest of the white chocolate, and just let it dry.

 The pieces were really fragile, so the "happy birthday" is actually "Hap" "py" "birth" "day" because the pieces broke when I tried to put it on. oops. But it's okay! :D it's not really noticeable.