Rich Frosted Chocolate Mug Cake

Lately I've really been enjoying making various mug cakes.  They are ready in just a couple minutes and make less dirty dishes than making a whole cake, not to mention that a whole cake would go to waste for us because there aren't enough people to eat it!

I think I've finally perfected the chocolate one the last time I made them so I'm going to present my recipe on the blog. Sorry, no pictures of the process since I made them quickly and late at night when the baby (oops, toddler now!) was resisting going to sleep. They were so rich and yummy!

Here's what you need to make 2. Just half the recipe if you are alone and have a chocolate craving. Or make the whole thing and devour it and feel sorry for yourself when you get the biggest stomach ache you've ever had in you life!

For the cake:

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1/4 cup oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• a handful of random melt-able chocolate (we had these truffle things that we were given for Christmas so I used 6 of them) use whatever you have around, chocolate chips, half a mars bar, whatever, as long as you can microwave it!

I defeated the purpose of making cake in a mug by mixing my stuff in bowls, if I was only making one I would have mixed it in the mug, it's just easier to do it this way if you're making multiples!

Mix all of the dry ingredients together in one bowl and whisk the milk, oil, egg, and vanilla in another. Pour the wet into the dry and combine.  Now microwave whatever chocolate you are using until it's just melted and stir it into your batter. Pour half into each mug and microwave for 1 minute 45 seconds. You may have to play around with the time depending on your microwave, start with 1 minute and then add 30 seconds, it might be done after that long.

The cake and mugs are going to be very hot so they will have to sit for a bit, this gives you time to mix up the frosting. For this you need:

• 1/2 cup icing sugar
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 tablespoon soft butter or margarine
• 1/2 teaspoon milk or cream

Just mix everything together with a fork, easy as that! You can spread the frosting right onto the hot cake before serving or you can do what we did, our cakes were really deep so we just spooned on a dollop of frosting for every inch of cake we ate!

*A quick change for if you want brownies in a mug instead of cake, omit the baking powder and use 2 eggs instead of one

*Other yummy add-ins: sprinkle of cinnamon, teaspoon of instant coffee, caramel, a peppermint patty pushed halfway down into the batter, etc!

Red Velvet Brownies with Buttercream Frosting

I've been spending an obscene amount of time on Pinterest lately, mostly just drooling over food and bookmarking recipes. I noticed that a lot of people are apparently obsessed with red velvet things and these brownies kept popping up over and over again. I figured I would give it a try, something a bit different than the usual brownies and blondies and whatnot. It was originally with white chocolate buttercream but I substituted it with the buttercream recipe that I've always used. I don't like white chocolate so I don't have any around.

Pardon the lack of pictures of the process, we had an early start to the day, I already had them out of the oven before I realized I should have taken pictures of what I was doing

Here's what you need:

For the brownies

• 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 2 tablespoons red food coloring
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup soft unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/4 cups flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

For the buttercream

• 1/2 cup soft unsalted butter
• 1 small bag of powdered sugar ( about 2 cups)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons cream ( I used the 18% that we have for coffee)

I started by making the frosting first so that I didn't have to clean my mixing bowl (and so that I could eat some while the brownies were mixing!) The frosting is the easiest part anyway. Just put everything in the mixing bowl and whisk until it's fluffy! That's it, it's done. I put mine in the fridge because I wasn't sure when I would get around to frosting the brownies.

Preheat your oven to 350 and grease and flour a pan, a smallish one, 8x8, 6x10, whatever you have. I used my springform pan because it's easier to get stuff out of.

Start the brownies off by mixing together the butter, sugar and vanilla until it's creamy. Then add the cocoa powder and food coloring, when that is combined beat in the egg and salt. Now you can add the flour, you're going to have to stop and scrape the sides of the bowl a couple times to make sure everything is red. Pour into your pan, my batter was pretty thick and I had to use a spatula to spread it around.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, a toothpick or knife should come out clean when you stab the brownies. I think mine went for about 45 minutes due to baby shenanigans and were too dry and a bit too dark on the bottom. 35 minutes probably would have been perfect.

Let the brownies cool completely before attempting to remove them from the pan, about an hour should do it. If you put the frosting in the fridge then take it out and let it sit for the hour as well and it should be ready to use. Frost, slice and serve!

*I only used about half the frosting, the rest went into the fridge for a carrot cake that I'm making soon.

The verdict on these brownies? Eh. Not great, I don't really see what the fuss is, is it just because they are red? I know I overcooked mine but the flavor really wasn't anything special, just very mildly chocolatey. Maybe I'm just used to more chocolate in my desserts?

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies!

It's true, these really are the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever had. I was pretty sick of the recipe I had for chocolate chip cookies, they never turned out the same and most of the time they were all thin and spread out and weird. I Googled and this recipe kept popping up over and over again. So I made it and it was awesome and made really soft, chewy cookies.  I will use this one forever. I've even cheated and made it with margarine when butter wasn't a decent price and it was still pretty good. I recommend using real butter though, they just taste better!

Start by preheating the oven to 325 and gathering your ingredients:

Stuff you need

• 2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup melted unsalted butter (if all you have is salted butter or margarine skip the salt in the recipe!)
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon vanilla 
• 1 egg
• 1egg yolk
• an entire bag of chocolate chips (I used this bag of Caramilk thingies I had in the freezer)

Butter, sugar, vanilla and egg

Start by melting the butter and mixing it with the sugar and vanilla for a few minutes until it's nice and fluffy, then beat in the eggs. Combine all of the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and add to the mixer. Mix until just combined ( it should look pebbley) and then add the chocolate chips and give it another quick mix. You don't want to overmix it, the dough will be tough and the cookies will be hard.

Dry ingredients added and just barely mixed

Your finished dough

Chopped Frozen Tiny Caramilks

Grab a good sized handful of dough and lightly flatten it into a "cookie patty", no need to roll it into a ball or anything.  Bake at 325 for 16-20 minutes.  Make as many as you want and freeze the rest of the patties for whenever you get a cookie craving.

Handful of dough

Squish!

4 cookies for us to nom right away about to go in the oven

The rest can go in the fridge or freezer

Hot cookies!

OM

NOM!

Vanilla Soy Mocha

Bleh. It's dreary and rainy and chilly and I want a mocha. Starbucks is too far away especially since it's pouring out and spending the $4+ for a tall mocha with soy and added vanilla syrup isn't really within the budget right now. I'm reserving my Starbucks treat for when they have Gingerbread again closer to Christmas.

So I'm going to try this DIY style and hopefully it's good. I have vanilla soy, I have chocolate syrup and I have coffee concentrate normally used for iced coffee. Sadly I do not have whipped cream or chocolate shavings. Boo.

So I'm starting by microwaving 1/3 cup coffee concentrate and 2/3 cup vanilla soy milk until it's nice and hot. I left just a bit of room for the chocolate sauce and a dab of cream. I also had to add a bit of simple syrup because I like my stuff super sweet.

Holy crap, I just remembered we have these! Mmmmm, sprinkles!

The verdict: Not quite Starbucks quality, maybe because I'm not normal and always get a ton of whipped cream on my drink, even if it's made with soy. That may be the problem, it just doesn't taste creamy or vanilla-ey enough, it's still quite enjoyable and better than a lot of other coffee shop drinks I've had.

Chocolate Syrup

 Chocolate syrup isn't something that we usually buy since it runs upwards of $4 a bottle even when on sale. We bought a bottle of Carriage Trade (knock-off brand, their tea tastes just like Tetley) syrup for $3.49 at the beginning of the summer and just recently finished it off. I fully intended to buy another but wasn't able to find it again, either the store was out or they don't carry it anymore. I really like to have iced mochas in the afternoon when I start to run out of energy and I found this super easy recipe online so I decided to give it a try while I was waiting for some bread to bake.

The recipe I found called it Almost Hershey's Syrup and used Hershey's cocoa powder but it's far more expensive than the Trophy brand cocoa powder that I have always bought, about $6.99 versus the $4ish I normally get mine for.

Here's what you need:

• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup water
• dash of salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Whisk everything together in a pot over medium heat, let it get to a boil for just a minute to make sure all of the sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool. Pour into whatever container you want to use (I reused the chocolate syrup bottle and it ended up filling it more than halfway) and store in the fridge. Use however you like!

This ended up being quite a bit thinner than syrup you would buy but that just made it way easier to mix into milk!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Brownies

This is a recipe I've been meaning to get around to making for quite a while. Like most recipes it's one that I found online and modified to fit ingredients that I have around or to exclude things I don't like. I rarely ever do chocolate things because I honestly didn't bother picking up cocoa powder until today and chocolate chips are pretty expensive.

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup peanut butter (I used chunky)
• 1 cup melted butter or margarine
• 2 cups brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• chocolate chips (as much as you like, I only had about a half cup left)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups flour 

Directions:

Start by preheating the oven to 375.

Mix the sugar with the melted butter and vanilla, then beat in the peanut butter and then the eggs. You might have to scrape the bowl to get all of the peanut butter into the batter. Now mix in your chocolate. If you want to add some chopped up peanuts now is the time to do that!

Now mix in the salt and flour until just combined. I had to stop when it was half mixed to scrape the sides of the mixer again. The batter is thick!

Lightly grease whatever pan you are going to use, I'm using an 8 inch springform pan because I like to cut my brownies like slices of pizza. It makes them taste better! I swear, it really does! Dump the batter into the pan and spread it out with the spatula or your hands if you don't have a spatula.

Bake at 375 for 30 minutes. Turn halfway through if your oven is like mine and is hotter towards the back.

These were pretty good, mine could have used more chocolate chips because it was more peanut buttery than chocolatey. One thing I discovered, filling a brownie with peanut butter makes them REALLY heavy.