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! :-)

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! :)