Walnut crispie cookies

Easy cookie recipes are my favourite, especially when friends decide to host a last minute party. I baked these yesterday morning and took them to a housecooling (as in the opposite of a housewarming) at night. Between the kids and adults, these things disappeared faster than the Easter eggs they were hunting earlier! Here are three cookies I set aside for a friend who didn't attend the event:


What I liked about the recipe was that it did not call for anything too unusual. I didn't have brown sugar or walnuts in stock, but didn't mind buying them because I knew the leftovers would be easy to use up. As for the rice crispies? They'll make a delicious breakfast over the next while!

• Walnut crispie cookies
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• 1 call-purpose flour
• 3/4 tspbaking soda
• 1/4 tspsalt
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• 1/3 cunsalted butter
• 1/2 cbrown sugar, packed
• 3egg yolks
• 1 Tbspsoy milk
• 1/3 cwalnuts, coarsely chopped
• 1 crice crispies
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• Sift flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside flour mixture.
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• Cream butter and brown sugar. Add egg yolks and mix well. Fold flour mixture into batter and mix. Stir in chopped walnuts and rice cripies.
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• Place each tablespoon of cookie dough 2" apart on lined cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 14 minutes.
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I chose vanilla flavoured rice crispies for these cookies and the scent held long after the cookies were done. Although regular rice crispies would have worked fine, they wouldn't have smelled nearly as heavenly. Here is a photo of the cookie dough:


I used a cookie scoop for the first time while working on this recipe and can't rave about it enough. It standardized the size of the cookies and made scooping a breeze! The only thing I forgot to take into consideration was that the dough was pretty solid and wouldn't spread a lot. Here are before- and after-baking shots of the domes:



And here's a close up of a cookie... The chopped walnuts were about the same colour as the rice crispies, but they're both there:

Coffee caramel crisps

Before today, it had been about three months since I last baked. There was just no drive or interest until out of the blue, I felt the desire to make something easy and delicious. My only condition was that whatever I made had to use coffee (no idea why) so I found a recipe and modified it to fit my requirement.

Here's a picture of the finished cookie:


And here's the recipe...

• Coffee caramel crisps
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• 1 3/4 call-purpose flour
• 1/4 calmonds, finely chopped
• 1/4 cground coffee beans
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• 3/4 cunsalted butter
• 1 cgranulated sugar
• 1 tspvanilla extract
• 2 Tbspsoy milk
• 1 Tbsphoney
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• Sift flour. Mix in ground coffee beans and almonds. Set flour mixture aside.
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• Cream butter and sugar. Add vanilla, milk, and honey and mix well. Fold flour mixture into batter and mix. Chill dough for at least 30 minutes.
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• Dust working surface with flour and roll out a portion of chilled dough to 1/8" thickness. Cut shapes with cookie cutter and place 1" apart on lined cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 12 minutes.
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The 1 c sugar and 1 Tbsp honey were a substitute for 1 c brown sugar, which I had forgotten to pick up after baking honey cupcakes. I found a really neat app on my iPod Touch called Food Sub and it has helped me make numerous substitutions, but I can't seem to locate it in iTunes at the moment for some reason.

Anyway, the most time consuming parts of this baking project were when I chopped up the almonds and when I was cutting the cookies. I poured out two handfuls of whole almonds onto a chopping board, which appeared to be about 1/2 c. However, it ended up being 1/4 c once chopped. This amount seemed to be just perfect - not too much crunch and not too little either. As for rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies, I found chilling the dough helped immensely because it needed to be relatively stiff to cut and transfer onto the cookie sheet without ruining the shape. If I didn't have the patience to use a cookie cutter, I could have rolled the dough into a log, frozen it, and then sliced it for a haphazard look. My scalloped round cutter gave the cookie a nice, elegant finish and I wouldn't change a thing next time.

Here is a picture of the cookie dough, which smelled like coffee ice cream and tasted just as heavenly:


And here are a few of the cookies resting on a cooling rack:

Butterfly cake

It's a brand new year, but before I focus on January and my upcoming trip to Hawaii on the 12th, I want to post some pictures of a cake I made for the Christmas party at the fitness studio I go to. Rachel, the owner of Inner Fit Studios, knew all about my cake decorating classes and has been incredibly supportive, so I offered to bake a cake for her party. This post will have pictures from the decorating process along with recipes for the individual parts under the links.

I made a chocolate cake with raspberry cream filling and dark chocolate icing (recipe below), covered with raspberry flavoured fondant. It was topped with roses and a butterfly:


The preparations included making the roses ahead of time since they had to be dry when attached to the cake. I used leftover fondant from my bow cake and the flowers turned out beautifully! Once the flowers were made, I prepared my fondant by giving it a raspberry flavour using extract and then dyed it a deeper burgundy than the flowers. Fondant has to be stored tightly sealed or it will get hard; however, I have discovered that it is possible to revive slightly hardened fondant by using a little water and/or microwaving it in 5 second intervals. Here are six of the seven finished roses and the fondant wrapped in plastic:


Here is a close up of a rose:


I also prepared the butterfly ahead of time, but this could have been done anytime because it was really easy to make. Actually, it took a little trial and error to get it right, but when I figured out the method, it was easy. I attempted to make a butterfly using real chocolate at first, but couldn't get it liquid enough to pipe without seizing. Instead, I got a package of Wilton candy melts in "dark cocoa" to simulate dark chocolate. This stuff is great for piping because I just put some in a plastic decorating bag, stuck it in the microwave, and it came out melted! So how did I do it? I drew butterfly wings and taped them down on a cake board and topped it with wax paper like so:


The cake board made the entire project portable and the wax paper was great because it was see through and made it easy to peel the wings off after. I traced the wings using the candy melts and the only difficult part was making sure my hands stayed steady:


I could have left the piped wings out to harden, but I was impatient and stuck the entire cake board in the fridge for a few minutes. Then, I pulled it back out and propped them up using a plastic straw cut in half. The reason for this is so the finished butterfly won't be completely flat. Here is what the wings looked like on the straws:


And then I piped a head and body on top:


Once the cake was torted and covered with fondant, I attached the roses in the center with gum glue and used some more candy melts to make the butterfly stick. Lastly, I added little white fondant balls at the bottom to hide the "hem" of the burgundy fondant and here is another look at the cake:


As for the dark chocolate icing I used just before putting on the fondant, it was very thick and I had to slightly melt it to spread it. But it was really good and I would definitely use it again! Here's the recipe:

• Dark chocolate icing
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• 1/2 cunsalted butter
• 1/2 tspvanilla extract
• 2 cicing sugar
• 4 Tbspsoy milk
• 1 ccocoa powder
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• Cream butter and add vanilla and soy milk.
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• Sift icing sugar and cocoa powder together, mixing well. Add to butter and mix well.
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