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Ok, this recipe needed a “do over.”  A huge part of the online bak­ing com­mu­nity is about shar­ing, that’s a large part of why we do this: a shared love of food and cook­ing it.  We all see recipes and foods online or in cook­books that we like and it’s per­fectly fine to go ahead and make them and then to write about your expe­ri­ences.  But, and here’s the point… I saw this recipe for yummy cook­ies on Caroline’s Choco­late & Car­rots blog and thought I’d see how they turned out since I have more than one friend these days who has a reac­tion to flour prod­ucts but still likes a sweet, baked treat.

In my haste yes­ter­day to:

1. Gather up two dogs to take them to the vet for shots
2. Wash my car and vac­uum the inside in 105 degrees
3. Go to the post office, video store, bank, City build­ing, library
4. Get Star­bucks
5. See what Hobby Lobby had on sale
6. Buy lunch
7. Gro­cery shop for our healthy eat­ing lifestyle change
8. Go to the gym
9. Do some work for a client or two (need money from time to time…LOL)
10. Remove the cov­ers from both air con­di­tioner con­densers to clean them and help Hubby(and about destroy both in the process),

I hit the “pub­lish” but­ton on my Word­Press post instead of “save draft” which inad­ver­tently posted a half baked arti­cle which didn’t give any credit to Car­o­line and her recipe at all.  Luck­ily for me, she was very under­stand­ing and polite about it… Sorry Caroline..

Any­way, here is the recipe and they are really great cook­ies so you must bake them!

One of the first things I do before I bake is set all my ingre­di­ents out and all of the equip­ment I’m going to be using… This is called mise en place or putting every­thing in it’s place. You can read more about that term here…

Ingre­di­ents: 3 Cups pow­dered sugar ⅔ Cups of dark or Dutch Processed cocoa powder ⅛ Tea­spoon salt (we use Kosher) 3 to 4 large egg whites (room temperature) 1 Table­spoon of GOOD vanilla (I use Madagascar) ½ cup choco­late chips (I used good ‘ol Nes­tle Semi-Sweet)

Method

• First off, pre­heat your oven to 350°F (180°C) (F to C temp con­verter here)
• Pre­pare your bak­ing sheets with sil­i­con mats or sprayed parchment
• Com­bine all dry ingre­di­ents into a bowl (flour, cocoa pow­der and salt)
• Fold in 3 egg whites and then vanilla
• Only beat until mix­ture is moist and fudge brownie like.  If it’s too dry then add an addi­tional egg white.
• Fold in choco­late chips
• Using a table­spoon, place cookie mix onto pre­pared bak­ing sheets, leav­ing room as they will spread. (I got 12 on a half pan sized bak­ing sheet)

Bake for approx 14 mins or until the tops begin to crack. They will have a shiny gloss fin­ish to them.

Haha… my first embed­ded video..

 

Points to consider:

If you are using a con­vec­tion oven adjust the tem­per­a­ture down by about 25 degrees and you can usu­ally reduce your bake time by a minute or two.  Keep an eye on your cook­ies as all ovens vary a little.

Many vari­ables can affect your bak­ing… humid­ity, alti­tude and the age of your prod­ucts.  For exam­ple, the older the flour  is the drier it can be, there­fore often requir­ing the addi­tion of more liq­uid than nor­mally called for just to get it to the right con­sis­tency… don’t panic, there is NO FLOUR in this par­tic­u­lar recipe, this was just an exam­ple of a variable.

Enjoy and happy baking!

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My hus­band men­tioned that he’d seen a Paula Deen recipe for pink lemon­ade cake.  I thought that sounded really nice and would be a great Sum­mer­time dessert.  After look­ing at Paula’s recipe online and the com­ments by users who had found it “too dense” “too this” or “too that” I decided to run with her basic flavour idea but to tweak it and hope­fully turn out some­thing really nice.

This is what I did.  It’s really easy and very tasty.

I took a box of white cake mix and pre­pared it as directed on the box except that I don’t like to use oil in my cakes so I replaced the 1/3 cup of oil with an equiv­a­lent 1/3 cup of nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce.  To the mix I then added three heaped table­spoons of the Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix and also added a dash of Mada­gas­car Vanilla and about a table­spoon of lemon zest.  I decided I wanted my cake to be more pink than the pale colour it was cur­rently so I added a dash of pink food colour­ing until it was pink enough for me.

Ingre­di­ents so far:

1 box of Moist White Cake Mix

3 egg whites (no yolks)

1/3 cup nat­ural, unsweet­ened apple sauce

1 & 1/4 cup of water

3 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time Pink Lemon­ade drink mix pow­der (not diluted)

1 tsp of Mada­gas­car Vanilla or Vanilla Essence

1 table­spoon of fresh lemon zest

Pink food colouring

 

(Bak­ing purists are prob­a­bly rolling their eyes at my sug­ges­tion of using a box mix and then the addi­tion of pink food colour­ing.  It worked for what we were doing here so I’m ok with it.  If you aren’t, there are plenty of from scratch white cake recipes out there to delight your pure lit­tle baker’s hearts.)

Even though I have a pas­sion for bak­ing we try not to keep too many good­ies in the house because we both could stand to lose some weight.  So we send our good­ies off to work with my hus­band and I’ve heard his cowork­ers think this is ok.  Since they are headed for the office I decided to make cup­cakes as they are far more man­age­able than need­ing to find a knife and plates for carv­ing up a larger sin­gle cake.

Next I cre­ated a tasty com­ple­men­tary frost­ing.  I pretty much always go for my basic cream cheese frost­ing and just change it up a lit­tle to suit what it is that I’m making.

Frost­ing:

Crust­ing cream cheese buttercream

5 heaped table­spoons of Coun­try Time  Pink Lemon­ade Drink Powder

After the cup­cakes came out of the oven and cooled I frosted them with a gen­er­ous swirl of but­ter­cream and some sugar sprin­kles just to make them shiny.  So that’s it folks.. really a quick and easy recipe and per­fect for sum­mer meal­times or snacks.  Enjoy!  And remem­ber if you have any ques­tions don’t hes­i­tate to email me.  I try to answer all emails even if they may take a cou­ple of days to get you your response.

~ Colleen

 

 

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Some peo­ple col­lect stamps, oth­ers like me, col­lect recipe books.  But what’s the good of own­ing all these glo­ri­ous tomes if I don’t actu­ally pull them off the shelf and try out some of the recipes.  I’ve made lemon bars before but this time I’m going to be using Ina Garten’s recipe.  Noth­ing says sum­mer more than lemon flavoured desserts.

Ina Garten’s Lemon Bars
Ingre­di­ents Crust: 1/2 pound unsalted but­ter, at room tem­per­a­ture 1/2 cup gran­u­lated sugar 2 cups flour 1/8 tea­spoon kosher salt Fill­ing: 6 extra-large eggs at room tem­per­a­ture 3 cups gran­u­lated sugar 2 table­spoons grated lemon zest (4 to 6 lemons) 1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice 1 cup flour Con­fec­tion­ers’ sugar, for dusting	Ina Garten’s Lemon Bars
Method Pre­heat the oven to 350 degrees F. To make the crust, cream the but­ter and sugar until light in the bowl of an elec­tric mixer fit­ted with the pad­dle attach­ment. Com­bine the flour and salt.  With the mixer on low, add to the but­ter until just mixed.   Dump the dough onto a well-floured board and gather into a ball. Flat­ten the dough with floured hands and press it into a 9 by 13 by 2-inch bak­ing sheet, build­ing up a 1/2-inch edge on all sides. Chill. Bake the crust for 15 to 20 min­utes, until very lightly browned. Let cool on a wire rack. Leave the oven on. For the fill­ing.  Whisk together the eggs, sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and flour. Pour over the crust and bake for 30 to 35 min­utes, until the fill­ing is set. Let cool to room temperature. Cut into desired sized bars or tri­an­gles and dust with con­fec­tion­ers’ sugar.

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Ok, so I like this recipe. My daugh­ter thought they got a bit “rub­bery” after being refrig­er­ated overnight but when you are try­ing them at a 2am fridge raid, who knows what they taste like? I found that if I microwaved a lemon bar for around 20 sec­onds, they were returned to their “warm out of the oven” state and were still very tasty and enjoyable.