All That Fudge

I've been looking for a good fudge brownie for ages and have tried a bunch of recipes but never really got the feel. But today, I finally found a recipe that worked wonders and yielded the best fudge brownies I've ever tasted - soft, rich and absolutely fudgy!

Ingredients
4 large Eggs
1 1/4 cups Cocoa
1 teaspoon Salt
1 teaspoon Baking Powder
1 teaspoon Espresso Powder
1 teaspoon Vanilla
1 cup Unsalted Butter
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups All-Purpose Flour
2 cups Chocolate Chip

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease a 9"x13" pan.
2. Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them with the cocoa, salt, baking powder, espresso powder and vanilla until smooth.
3. In a saucepan, melt the butter & add the sugar. Keep heating and mixing the butter/sugar mixture. Don't let it boil. The heat will allow more sugar to mix into the butter and this will yield a shinier top top-coat on your brownies.
4. Add the hot butter/sugar mixture to the egg/cocoa mixture, stirring until smooth.
5. Add the flour and the chips. If you want the chips to stay whole, wait for the batter to to cool, about 20 mins, and then fold them into the batter.
6. Spoon the batter into the greased pan and bake for 30 mins or until the cake-testing toothpick comes out either clean or with only a few crumbs on it.

Best eaten hot with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top! :-)

Apple Pie!

I love autumn. It is probably my most favorite season of all. It's not too chilly and it's not hot. Plus the leaves are changing color and they go all crunch under your feet. What's not to love?

Also, when I think about autumn, the first thing that comes to my mind is cinnamon. I LOVE cinnamon! It is my absolute favorite spice. And cinnamon tastes best with apples and that's where you get apple pie with loads of cinnamon in it - perfect autumn dessert.

So, I got around to looking for the perfect Apple Pie recipe but all the recipes that I found asked for a pre-baked pie-crust. Then I had to go and look for a pie-crust recipe. But in the end I found easy recipes for both & combined them. Here goes:

For the crust:

Ingredients:
4 cups All-Purpose Flour
1 3/4 cups Shortening (or Oil)
3 Tablespoons White Sugar
2 teaspoons Salt
1 Egg
1/2 cup Water

Directions:

1. In a large mixing bowl, combine all-purpose flour, shortening, sugar, and salt. Blend together with a pastry cutter until crumbly.
2. In a small bowl, mix egg with water. Blend into flour mixture. Knead through until slightly firm. Divide into 2 balls and roll both out to 1/2 cm thickness.
3. Once rolled out, take a knife and cut 1-inch thick strips out of one of the crusts.

Original Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Ruths-Grandmas-Pie-Crust/ 

For the Filling:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Unsalted Butter

3 Tablespoons All-Purpose Flour

1/4 cup Water

1/4 cup White Sugar

1/4 cup Packed brown sugar

8 Granny Smith Apples

1 Lemon

2 teaspoon Cinnamon

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Melt the butter in a saucepan. Stir in the flour to form a paste. Add water, white sugar and brown sugar, and bring to a boil. Reduce temperature and let simmer.

2. Core & slice the apples and squeeze the lemon juice on them so that they don't go brown. Put in the cinnamon and mix gently until apples are coated well with the cinnamon.

3. Place the bottom crust of in a 9-inch pie pan. Fill with apples, mounded slightly. Cover by placing the dough strips in a crisscross manner. Gently pour the sugar and butter liquid over the crust. Pour slowly so that it doesn't run off.

4. Bake 15 minutes in the preheated oven. Reduce the temperature to 350 dergrees F (175 degrees C). Continue baking for 35-45 minutes or until apples are soft.

Original Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/apple-pie-by-grandma-ople/

Attack of The Baking Bug (Part 2)

One fine day, I opened the door to the fridge and there were carrots, carrots, CARROTS everywhere! It was as if Bugs Bunny had been put in charge of the groceries. I couldn't figure out what had happened at first. But then I started raking my mind for all the things I could do with a bunch of carrots. And I made the first thing that came to my mind...

Carrot Cake!

I love food, but there's something about carrot cakes which makes my drift off to a Winter Wonderland, with my sitting in a glass covered veranda, watching the snow drift down from the sky in its beautiful white perfection while drinking cinnamon-spiked coffee and munching on an ooey-gooey carrot cake. Sigh

*drools*

Check out the recipe. The only things I changed about it were;

1. I used AP Flour and added a teaspoon of baking powder.
2. I didn't have walnuts so I threw in some raisins instead.

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 2 cups self-rising flour
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
• 4 eggs
• 3 cups grated carrots
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

For the icing:

• 1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
• 1/2 cup margarine, softened
• 1 pound confectioners' sugar
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease two 9 inch round cake pans.
• In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, cinnamon and sugar. Add the oil and eggs, mix until blended, then stir in the carrots and nuts. Divide the batter evenly between the two prepared pans.
• Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven. A toothpick inserted into the cake should come out clean. Cool cakes on wire racks before removing from pans.
• To make the frosting, use the second set of ingredients. In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and cream cheese; add the sugar and cream well. Stir in the nuts and vanilla. Use to fill and frost the cooled cake layers.

Pizza!

I have urges; I think of something and then I just have to do it. I'm also very lazy. So the urge to do something has to be much MUCH more stronger than my primal urge to not get off my ass.

There was one urge like this, recently, and that was an urge to make pizza - all by myself, from scratch - which I did.

Cheese! <3

I remembered my Mom making pizza once when I was a kid and the dough looked fine but when it came out of the oven, the base went all stiff after 5 minutes. So, I decided I needed to try something new. And hence I found a dough recipe on the internet which didn't use any yeast. Instead, there was yogurt. And the base was fluffy soft even after 30 minutes out of the oven (YES, I waited that long to eat pizza. Sigh).

The flavors I went for were Traditional Pepperoni (because my brother likes no-fuss kinda pizza) and Alfredo (because I have a strong affinity for anything Alfredo). And they both turned out great!

Plus, there HAS to be dessert, there is just no way that my brother and sister let me walk out of the kitchen without making something sweet. And hence came the Vanilla Latte cupcakes.

This is what happens when you pour chocolate syrup on cupcakes that haven't  had a chance to cool down.

Here's the recipe for the cupcakes!

With a whole lunch and then with the cupcakes with tea, it was indeed a great day!

Happy eating! :)

The Attack of The Baking Bug (Part 1)

Every time I'm bake home in Saudi, I feel so full of energy and since there isn't much else where I can put it, I channel all that energy to one of my all-time favorite hobbies - baking. I started baking about a year or so go, and by that I mean I started to really bake, make my own cakes and cookies as compared to the cake-mixes I used to throw together and put in the oven before that. I still use cake-mixes (thank God for Betty Crocker!) but there's a certain sense of accomplishment that comes from taking a bite out of a cupcake that you've made from scratch!

So, on my current, almost at its end winter break that I'm spending at home, I've been baking my ass off, literally! My siblings are over-their-heads in love with me because of all the cupcakes and the cookies that vanish almost as soon as they come out of the oven.

The first item that I baked when I got home were a batch of plain Vanilla Cupcakes, a no surprises, no labor task that I took over because I was feeling too timid for an over-the-top dessert and also because my Mom doesn't like chocolate as much as I do.

Yes, they were as yumm as they look!

My Mom loved these cupcakes. She declared them to be one of my best cupcakes yet, even though I wasn't particularly excited about them. But well, "mother knows best!"

If anyone is planning to make these, here's the recipe I followed. The only changes I made to this were:

1. Replaced cake flour with AP flour because I didn't have any.
2. Used Hershey's chocolate syrup as topping instead of making the dark chocolate icing.

Happy baking! :)