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!

Rhubarb crumble

 

When I found a bag of rhubarb in my freezer I felt like making that amazing buckle from two summer ago. There’s just something about rhubarb that makes me feel like spring. The weather’s been really nice here lately as well, warm and sunny. So I’m sure that had something to do with it as well. The crumble turned out really great. I swapped the cake recipe from the original post for a simple pound cake one. I made a little less – cause my family wasn’t up for eating a whole buckle. Instead I used my favorite round cake dish. It turned out really lovely and super yummy. Great for a cold night with some tea.

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!