Sunday 16 October 2011

Two Bite Brownies

   After a long long week of studying for the first round of tests, I felt that something chocolaty and delicious was much needed. Therefore, I decided to bake some two bite brownies. While looking for a simple recipe I stumbled upon a good one through Google which lead me to a recipe done by Canadian Living. Being a busy student, I am usually pressed for time so the recipe provided is excellent as the total time, including both preparation and baking time was under 30 minutes. This recipe called for basic ingredients of flour, butter, sugar, chocolate chips and the like, all in which I purchased at NoFrills. After mixing all the required ingredients together and placing them in a mini cupcake pan to bake, I placed them in the oven for roughly 15 minutes to bake. When they were all done, it was time to let them cool and wait for the best part; icing them! Although this recipe used candy cane icing, I decided to take the easy route and purchase a basic whipped vanilla icing by Duncan Hines. This was a basic white icing to which I added some red food colouring to make it a pink colour. I decided to pipe the icing on and add sprinkles afterwards, seeing as everything both looks and tastes better with sprinkles.
     These two bite brownies definitely satisfied my post midterm chocolate fix, and it was a very simple and cheap recipe to follow. I would use this recipe again, and also look for other recipes posted by Canadian Living, as this one proved to be a success and Christmas baking is just around the corner. Canadian Living - Two Bite Brownies

Monday 10 October 2011

Thanksgiving Cookies

   Seeing as it is Thanksgiving and everyone is in the festive spirit of cooking turkey dinners with all the frills involved, I had decided to make Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies for my family. I would soon learn that this was a horrible idea. Before my terrible baking experience, I went onto Google to run a search on Thanksgiving cookie recipes, after finding a rather simple one I went to the nearby grocery store to buy the required ingredients. This specific recipe called for rather basic ingredients as noted below. Although I personally do not enjoy the taste of pumpkin as in pumpkin pie and the like, I had decided to give it a try and hope that my family would enjoy them. After mixing up all the required ingredients together, I dropped them on a baking sheet and placed them in the oven to bake.      
   One of my favourite things about baking is waiting for them to cook and smelling that delicious scent, except this time there was no delicious scent but instead the only scent coming from the oven was a mix of pumpkin guts from when you carve a pumpkin and burning. After taking them out of the oven I hoped maybe they didn't taste as bad as they smelled, boy was I wrong. Before I myself had tried one, I asked my mom to be the guinea pig and give it a try, she tried her hardest to eat the entire thing but it was clear that that was not happening. Her exact words were as followed, "I didn't think there would ever be a dessert that I could turn down, until now." With that said, it was evident that those bad boys were going straight into the garbage.
   Although these cookies went straight into the garbage, I decided to decorate just one, seeing as that's always one of the best parts. Well that and eating the left over icing. With all said and done, it's safe to say that this was not an excellent recipe, unless you enjoy the taste of pumpkin guts.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe