Peanutbutter cookies

Hi everyone. It’s been a long, long time. But life happened. More precisely: I got a job in the middle of June. It’s been hard trying to juggle everything. It’s my first real full time job, so I’m still trying to figure out how to divide my free time. It’s not that I haven’t been baking at all, but I haven’t been taking pictures and editing them so much.

I really want to get back in the swing of things and these really delicious peanut butter cookies are the first attempt to get back at it :) they’re easy to make and so yummy. You can find the recipe right here! I hope to be updating again soon, so keep an eye out for it!

Peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies

 

Sometimes what a person really needs is a cookie. Sometimes, after a tough job interview, what a person really, really needs is a peanut butter chocolate chip cookie. I got this recipe from a Sainsbury’s magazine with 20 quick cakes and cookies.  And yeah, not only were these really quick, but also super easy to make. And so good. 300 grams of Calvé peanut butter, and three different kinds of chocolate chips. Yeah, this one really hit the spot, I must say.

The original recipe (by Lorraine Pascale) didn’t have chocolate chips, but lightly toasted peanuts on top. I made one with peanuts on it for my mom (she’s a big nut lover). I think the combination of chocolate and peanut butter is a sacred one, though. So I decided that the only way these cookies could and would get any better was with chocolate!

Easter cupcakes

My mom came home with these marshmallow chicks a couple of weeks ago. She was completely over the moon over them. “You can use them to decorate some cupcakes,” she said, “When Easter comes around.” But how could she not love ’em? Look at them. They’re adorable. That’s probably one of my favorite things about Easter, baking things and making them look and feel all spring-y. All the colors and all the chocolate. Amazing!

I’m hoping to bake a couple of more things this week to celebrate Easter. We don’t really have a big family thing planned this year, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make the most of it! I’m thinking Easter Egg shaped (and decorated) cookies. Maybe a pie? I’ll keep you posted! But for now I hope you enjoy the pictures I took of these cupcakes!

Two tier chocolate cake

 

I’m making a tiered cake tomorrow for my aunt (more explanations, and pictures, will follow soon!) I’ve never actually made a tiered cake before, actually. Not really, with the different size cakes stacked on top of each other, and such. So I thought I’d test it out first, make a test cake, if you will. I needed to check to see if this particular chocolate cake recipe would be solid enough to take another tier (it was). This cake worked out beautifully, and I could finally try my hand at the rose-icing technique I’ve been wanting to try forever.

As luck would have it, my friend came by that evening so I gave her the cake and told her to take it to work with her. The text she sent me the next day saying “my coworkers are big fans!” made me smile all day.

One dough – three cookies

I have such a weak spot for big, gooey cookies. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise, seeing as my cookie tag contains 23 posts – a really big share of them being gooey chocolate chip cookies. There’s just something so comforting about biting into a big, soft chocolatey cookie. Now I’ve made M&M cookies before – an adaptation from my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe that uses brown butter, yum! – but when I saw this post down at the Pinch Of Yum blog I knew I had to try that recipe as well.

While I was making these cookies it soon became clear that I didn’t have enough M&Ms to make sure the dough had enough pieces of yumminess in it. I decided to go through my cupboards and see what else I could put in these cookies. It was all quite adventurous! I ended up going for, aside from one batch with M&Ms, a batch with Reese’s mini peanut butter cups (white and milk chocolate) and a batch with chopped up Geisha chocolate. These cookies suddenly got very international. I’d bought the M&Ms in Sweden, because the package was so cute, and I really like their logo and M&M mascots. The Geisha chocolate was a gift from a friend that she got in Finland. The Reese’s peanut butter cups I’d bought in the UK a while back.

All three kinds were extremely good, and I packed up a lot of them to take with me on my weekend trip to go see a friend who had her birthday the previous day. It was the perfect travel snack during my train ride, where I saw the landscape woosh by while I snacked on chocolate.

Chocolate layer cake

 

One of my brother’s friends is having a birthday party tonight. Every guest is supposed to make  something sweet; of course my brother took the easy route by asking me to bake something. He said I could make whatever I wanted. It can get a bit overwhelming, when you get complete free range like that, can’t it? There are so many things I want to bake, and sometimes it’s hard to decide. Especially when you’re not the one who will be doing the eating. What if my brother’s friends – and the birthday boy! – don’t like what I chose? In the end I decided to go with chocolate. Because, honestly, who doesn’t like chocolate? I’m very pleased with the end result and, to be honest, slightly bitter that I have to give this whole cake away without being able to have a taste!

I took this Devil’s Food cake recipe from this post; I decided to go with a vanilla butter cream instead of the meringue frosting they used. I got some inspiration for the decoration from this lovely post but ended up using (store bought) meringue to top off the cake instead of piping even more butter cream on top of the ganache. I was afraid it’d be a bit of a butter cream overkill!

Moelleux au chocolat (lava cake)

If you’re still looking for a Valentine’s Day recipe to please your girl/boy/person, a friend, the members of your family – or yourself: look no further! This chocolate cake with a gooey center is the perfect thing. It’s very easy to make and it’s chocolate. Pretty much a guaranteed success!

Chocolates!

 

It’s been way too long since I last updated! It’s been gnawing at me these last couple of days – not only the guilt over neglecting my little baking blog, but also the urge to get in the kitchen and make something – bake something. I thought it would be best to start by getting rid of that first feeling, the guilt, by finally posting these pictures that I took at the end of December (yikes, talk about procrastination!) These chocolates are made using Nigella Lawson’s recipe found in her book Nigella Express. I’d opened a can of evaporated milk and I didn’t want to let the rest go to waste, so I made these tried and tested favorites of my friends and family. They’re made with a very bitter chocolate and peanuts.

Since this is my first post of 2014 I would like to wish everybody a very belated happy new year. I hope everyone had a great end of the year, and amazing New Year’s Eve and Day. May 2014 be beautiful for you :) Next up on this blog: chocolate chip cookies. Again. (They tasted lovely though, so I hope you’re excited!)

 

Chocolate (and pecan) pie

 

I have one rule when it comes to baking: my family and friends don’t get to dig in until after I’ve taken pictures.

As you can see from that beautiful, chocolatey pie above – that didn’t quite work out this time around. My mom and brother’s best friend gave me the puppy eyes on Saturday and wanted me to make them a pie. A pecan pie. A pecan pie with chocolate. (Later it turned out there was a lot more chocolate than pecan to this pie.) The puppy eyes were accompanied by some whining, and eventually I gave in and made it. It was too late to take pictures, by then though, because all the day light had given way to night time. And isn’t it weird how fast the days seem to shorten once September 21st has rolled by? So I told my mom “You can have some, but make sure I have some left for pictures.” This is what I had left the next day. Quite the feat, if you know that this one of the richest pies I have ever made – basically it consists out of chocolate on top of chocolate. Oh, and there’s some nuts on there as well.

Cookies and brownies

Last weekend we had the international Customer’s Day in Belgium. On this Saturday in September customers get treated with a little gift from (small) business owners. I baked brown-butter and vanilla, triple chocolate chip cookies (pffew, quite the mouthful) and brownies for the people who came into my parents’ restaurant on that Friday.