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.

Jon's Goals For October

In October, I'm going to experiment with adding 2x20min naps and getting up a little earlier, instead of fighting Alice's natural wake up time. I re-read the section on sleep in The 4-Hour Body a couple days ago and the concept of polyphasic sleep appeals to me. I often want to work on projects at night but I'm too fatigued or lose attention too quickly to use my time effectively.

I plan to finish a few of the books I have started by committing an hour or more to reading each day, likely first thing in the morning or when I'm bored during the day instead of watching videos.

I plan to reduce non-work related, non-research related video watching to just 2 hours each day. This means I won't be taking full advantage to my Netflix trial I have going now but I'm not going to miss anything.

I'm going to track my wasteful internet time using RescueTimer for Firefox. I'm going to track it for a couple weeks, which will likely result in an immediate behavior change, then I may even go as far as blocking certain sites during the day, or after X visits each day. If I only check Facebook and Twitter twice a day my life isn't going to get worse, but I'm sure to gain at least an extra hour of free time each day.

I'm going to record and complete another sample pack to sell. For the product I have in mind it will take 5 hours to complete. I just have to get started.

30DC2 - the end

The end of the second round of our 30 day challenge ended.
It wasn't really successful in terms of accomplishing the goals and following the rules but we did reduce our spending on groceries. Compared to a few months ago, we're eating better, spending less, earning and saving more and paying off debt.
Overall it's good that we did this, but it wasn't as successful as the first round.

Summary
Grocery budget = $240. Actual = $284.02 (we did have an extra adult to feed for 7 days)
Daily exercise = hell no haha
No takeout = pizza and several shwarmas. Only about $30, less than usual and we walked to get it.
Indulgent purchases = 27" iMac. (it was refurbished at least!)

We both feel like we didn't get much accomplished, even if we did. Our energy levels have been low from crappy sleep for the last two weeks. During the day we can't focus on any chore or project without constant harassment from Alice and when she actually sleeps we can't do anything because we have to be quiet.
That tiny jerk.

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!