How I make fresh pasta

Browned Buter Chocolate Chip Cookies

I was searching the web for "the best chocolate chip cookie recipe" and I came across this blog. Her recipe looked really good, so I decided to try it out.

As I was reading through the ingredients, I came across something a bit strange.. and I was intrigued. Turns out the recipe calls for yeast and browned butter.

The cookies came out nice and the yeast gives the cookies a nice soft texture. You can taste the browned butter, it gives the cookies a nutty flavor.

The person who originally created these cookies claimed that they were the best chocolate chip cookies ever... they are very good.. but I've tried enough chocolate chip cookie recipes out in my day and I wouldn't call these the best.

But these cookies are quite the beasts!

"Best" Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
 
1/2 C melted browned butter plus 1/4 C butter room temp (FOR LATER USE!)
2 1/4 C all-purpose flour
3/4 ts baking soda
1 ts active dry yeast
1 ts salt, plus additional for sprinkling
1 C brown sugar
1/2 C sugar
2 eggs
2 ts vanilla
1 C chocolate chips

Bake on 375 for 10-13 minutes

Make your browned butter.

While the browned butter is cooling a bit, sift your dry ingredients (flour,baking soda,yeast, and salt)

In a larger bowl cream the room temp butter that hasn't been browned and sugars until crumbly.

Add the melted browned butter that you made earlier and cream for about a minute.

Add the eggs and vanilla and cream until smooth.. the mixture will look nice and silky at this point.

Gently add dry ingredients and beat until incorporated.

Fold in chocolate chips.

Put the dough in a zip lock and chill for an hour, the zip lock is good because the bag doesn't take up as much room as a giant metal bowl.. and you can do all of the dishes while the dough is chilling. It also makes it easier to scoop the dough,after it's chilled.

I used 2 scoops of dough from my cookie dough scoop in order to form one cookie, then I flattened the dough down a bit and sprinkled some sea salt onto the cookie dough.

 Room temp butter and sugars.

 Added the liquid browned butter.

 Added egg and vanilla

 Results of egg and vanilla added to the sugar and butter mixture.

 Finished dough, before chilled.

 Chilled dough.

 Ready for the oven.

Browned butter cake with a cream cheese frosting and strawberry cream cheese filling

 

Here is a cake that I made for my brother, for his Birthday.

My brother, Michael has been obsessed with strawberry cake for as long as I can remember... and for the life of me.. I have no idea why. I don't think that he has ever even had a strawberry birthday cake and I know this because I have celebrated every birthday with him, seeing as how we are Irish Twins, I was born in August of 1987 and my brother was born in September of 1986, making us the same age for almost a whole month. We were in the same grade and had a few classes together and shared teachers, so the teachers assumed that we were twins.

Anyways, so here's what I made.

I made a browned butter cake, that is very much like a pound cake. Since my brother loves strawberry cake or something along the lines, I made a cream cheese frosting, for the filling, I added some chopped strawberries to the cream cheese frosting. 

The cake was really good, very rich and the filling tasted like cheesecake. This was a very good cake. Just very time consuming.

So for a browned butter cake, you need to make browned butter and this is how I did that.

Melt 3 sticks of butter on medium low

 Simmer butter on low until the butter browns, before careful not to burn the butter

 This is what the browned butter looks like in liquid state, pour the butter into a container, and chill until the browned butter is in a solid state

 Solid browned butter

Browned butter cake
3 sticks browned butter (the chilled butter that you made)
1 2/3 cups sugar
2 ts vanilla
2 whole eggs plus 4 egg yolks, room temperature
2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups milk, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Butter and flour two cake pans.

Beat chilled butter with electric hand held mixer or stand mixer for about 1 minute until it softens and becomes creamy.

Add sugar and beat until the mixture becomes fluffy and almost beige in color, about 8 to 12 minutes.

Add in vanilla and eggs and egg yolks one at a time, beating between each addition until fully incorporated and and the mixture looks smooth and glossy, about 1 to 2 minutes.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.

Add the dry ingredients to the butter in 3 parts, alternating with the milk.

Beat the batter on medium speed until just incorporated, about 20 seconds.

Divide batter among the two pans and bake for 35-40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Remove and place on wire racks. Allow to cool for 20 minutes.

 Cream the chilled browned butter until fluffy

 Creamed browned butter

 Add sugar and cream 

 Creamed butter and sugar mixture

 Add the milk, then flour mixture to the butter and sugar mixture and repeat until all is incorporated

 The finished batter

 Cream cheese frosting

6 ounce cream cheese room temp
1 stick butter room temp
1/2 pound of powdered sugar (a little less than 2 cups)
3/4 ts vanilla

Beat cream cheese and butter until smooth,beat in powdered sugar until smooth and then add vanilla and mix in.

An English Toffee Tutorial

This English Toffee recipe has been in my family forever, and it's very good. 

I've tried to make toffee a bunch of times with great success and other times with no success at all. Pure and simple... I'm a terrible candy maker. Candy making is very dangerous. So you just have to take one step at a time and watch boiling sugar very closely.

Here's a tutorial on how to make toffee without burning the house down.

English Toffee

2 C + 3/4 C Brown Sugar

4 Sticks Butter 

1 C Pecans, Walnuts, Almonds, Peanuts.. whichever you prefer

2 C Chocolate Chips 

 Lay down a piece of Parchment on a cookie sheet and add your nuts in a single layer

 

 Melt brown sugar and butter on medium

 I used the ice water method to figure out when my toffee was ready, if you don't own a candy thermometer, you can use this as well. You want the candy to come to a hard crack stage, which is when you add a bit of the candy to the ice water and the brittle candy stiffens quickly and you can hear a snap when broken. 

 

 When the butter and sugar is completely melted you want to boil on low medium heat until the candy reaches hard crack. You want to constantly stir this with a wooden spoon.

 

 I used a timer on my phone to give me an estimate on how long the candy would take to get to hard crack stage, for the future. It took about 18 minutes.

 This is what your candy looks like when it has reached hard crack stage is has officially become toffee.. yay. 

 Carefully pour the toffee over the nuts on the parchment.

 Lay the chocolate chips over the hot toffee so that they will melt

 Wait a moment before you spread the chocolate over the toffee, you want the chocolate to melt and you don't want to get burnt.

 Top with crushed nuts, let the toffee sit for about a half of hour to an hour and get stiff and then when stiff and chocolate is hard, break the toffee into pieces.

Chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

Ah yea, if you could just go ahead and make these, that would be great, mmkay?

Seriously one of the best oatmeal cookie recipes that I've made. This recipe is too good. So go ahead and make them... right now!

You could probably add raisins and walnuts or pecans to this recipe and some cinnamon, nutmeg and clove as well. I haven't tried the recipe with any of those spices because today I just wanted a nice and chewy cookie, with not really anything healthy in it... just butter and chocolate and I wanted an oat cookie for a bit of texture.

I don't know about anyone else, but most of the time that I try to make an oatmeal cookie, the cookie batter doesn't spread much and the cookie is just this dried out lump of spiced dough. For that reason, I'm always a bit worried to try an oatmeal cookie recipe, but I think I have finally broke that oatmeal cookie curse.

A quick tip if you are trying out a recipe for the first time and are not sure if you are going to like it and end up with a million cookies hanging out in your house. I always halve my cookie recipes. So, for example.. this recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter, I would use only 1 stick and instead of 1 C of brown sugar.. 1/2 C and ect... just do a little math. Baking has helped with my fraction skills likes whoa. 

Chewy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 Sticks of Butter (Room Temp)
1 C Brown Sugar
1/2 Sugar
2 Eggs
2 ts Vanilla
1 1/2 C Flour
1 ts Baking Soda
1 ts Salt
3 C Oats
1 1/2 C chocolate chips

If you want an oatmeal raisin cookie, instead of chocolate chips add raisins and add 1 ts of cinnamon and subtract 1 ts of vanilla.

Preheat oven on 325

Cream butter and sugars until smooth

Add egg and vanilla and mix in, until smooth

In another bowl, sift your dry (flour,baking soda,salt)

Add your dry into the butter mixture.

Fold in Oats and Chocolate Chips.

Bake for 12-14 minutes.

Lofthouse cookie copycat redo

So a while back I tried to clone the ever so famous lofthouse cookie. The recipe that I used didn't really serve the cookie justice.

I tried another lofthouse cookie recipe clone and they actually taste almost exactly like the real cookie. They are very good. I over baked these cookies just a tad,so mind the fact that the cookies aren't perfect. So here's the recipe. 

Cookies

1 French vanilla box cake mix
1/2 cup plus 3 t. flour (mix well into the cake mix)
3 large eggs
1/3 cup oil  

Preheat oven to 325

Mix the above with an electric beater until all ingredients are incorporated.  

Form one inch balls of dough and bake for  12 minutes. 

Icing

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp
1/3 cup shortening
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons milk (this varies somewhat depending on how thick you want your icing.)
4 cups powdered sugar 

Beat the butter and shortening with an electric mixer until smooth, add the powdered sugar and mix until crumbly and then add the vanilla, milk and food coloring and mix until smooth. 

hydrangea cupcakes

I just moved to Boynton Beach, from Port Saint Lucie. The move was terrible. Four moves in less than a month. So here I am, feeling far from settled. I haven't really been in the mindset for creating awesome and delicious things, my create vision has been lost lately haha.

But I work with a florist and my sister works for the florist and it was the owner's birthday the other day. So after a talk of what we should make him, we decided on just simple cupcakes. The cupcake is hershey's chocolate cake recipe and the frosting is this really nice dark chocolate that I got from Beantown Baker. I made the hydrangeas out of white gumpaste, colored the gumpaste with purple food coloring and used pink petal dust for the center of the flower and brushed a layer of pink glitter petal dust over the whole flower.

Hershey's Chocolate Cake Recipe

2 cups sugar
1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup HERSHEY'S Cocoa

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup boiling water

350

Mix all your dry in one bowl, stir until combined. Then add your eggs, milk, oil and vanilla, mix to combine. Then add your cup of hot water and beat for about 5 minutes.

Bake time varies. For average size cupcakes, they took about 20-22 minutes. A round cake would take around 35-40 minutes.

Dark Chocolate Frosting

6 Tbsp butter
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups powdered suga
3/4 cup dark cocoa powder
1/3 cup milk

Cream butter and vanilla.

In a separate bowl, combine powdered sugar and cocoa powder. Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture.

Slowly add milk until frosting reaches desired consistency, then beat another 5 minutes creamy.