So it’s the holidays, and it’s busy, and we’re all a bit tired, but also full of sugar, which makes for a weird combination of agitated zombies..oh wait? No? You’re good? Well good for you. I almost fell off a chair yesterday because I forgot to eat lunch, but remembered to eat candy. We can’t all have our stuff together every day. Anyways, for those of you who have most of you’re stuff together but not quite everything, I provide you an easy, impressive and delicious recipe that is only half cheating. It includes a box brownie mix, and I refuse to make it any other way, because brownies are annoyingly hard and I had one good recipe once and then I tried to recreate it and they didn’t work, but Betty Crocker nails it every time.

This one adds a few extra surprises and suddenly you look like someone who not only remembered to eat lunch, but also whipped something impressive out of the oven.

The swirled white chocolate? Hides all sins: When I tried to remove the brownies from the pan in one solid piece but it wasn’t fully cooled in the centre. I left a chunk of the middle stuck to the pan. I had a square brownie with a giant whole in the middle. You know what I did? I removed the centre from the pan and smushed it back into the middle. Easy peasy, you’d never know.  The second batch I used parchment paper in order to successfully remove the brownies in one piece. Live and learn but both turned out great.  Read this article »

Christmas baking has begun and I had to try out a few new recipes to mix into the traditional favourites.  This one is an adaptation of a recipe I found from the blog Twenty-Two Pleasant. It’s an attempt to make the cake more bar-like, but sometimes a recipe just wants to stay as cake. But I was happy with the way it turned out regardless.

This should make any gingerbread lover very happy. And I should know. I am very picky when it comes to gingerbread. Just ask my mom.. She has already made two batches of gingerbread cookies for me this season, and one of the recipes involved her making a spreadsheet and averaging the amount of main ingredients from several other recipes. She’s a good mom!

Anyways, this is pretty spot on when it comes to gingerbread cake, no spreadsheet required.

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I don’t own an ice cream maker so I can appreciate the frustration of encountering amazing-sounding ice cream recipes on the Internet and not being able to make them. I don’t have the time or patience to churn ice cream by hand using some freezer baggies and ice, so seeing awesome homemade ice cream recipes always makes me a little jealous. That is, until I found out my wonderful neighbour, Joanne, has an ice cream maker and she’s willing to let me borrow it! I have the best neighbours. When I saw the recipe for Chocolate Malt Gelato in my mom’s copy of Chatelaine Magazine, I knew this was when I would ask to borrow the ice cream maker, and it was well worth it.

Joanne was generous enough to let me borrow the ice cream maker, and today Bake Me Something Good is passing along even more generosity.

You can’t make ice cream or gelato without some serious dairy purchases. Luckily, the wonderful people at Dairyland have got you covered. Dairyland produces excellent milk and cream products, perfect for making your first batch of homemade gelato. This summer, Dairyland is stopping by Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition, (or the PNE for those of you from B.C.). On Saturday, August 18, between 11am and 3 pm Dairyland will be handing out samples of their chocolate milk, so if you’re visiting the PNE this Saturday, keep your eyes open for the Dairyland van. But if you can’t make it to the grounds, Dairyland is offering another chance to try out their awesome products to one lucky reader.

*Save-on-Foods has locations in B.C. and Alberta, so this contest is limited to residents of those provinces.

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I wish I had something clever to say about these. They are not super original. I first saw this type of recipe done on the Food Network site. But sometimes food blogging isn’t about reinventing the wheel. Sometimes the wheel is delicious and we just want to eat some marshmallows without revolutionizing them.

I didn’t even include the brownie recipe (yes that’s the main part of this) but it’s because I just used this Martha Stewart recipe and didn’t alter it. It wasn’t my absolute favourite brownie recipe ever but it does the trick. If you have one you love then use it and share it in the comments!

It’s like I didn’t even try. Some days are just like that.

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When I saw this recipe from Bon Appetit Magazine, I knew I wanted to try it. In the past I have written about my dislike for substitutions, and I can be quite particular about substituting lower fat options, but yogurt and cake are not necessarily bitter enemies who should always avoid each other.  Greek Yogurt + Pound Cake= BFF. Maybe? No. Ok, well, it just sounded like it made sense so I gave it a shot.

And it was good. Very good.

Now I actually had never made my own pound cake before. But comparing this recipe to store-bought ones I found that the texture was a bit different, but not bad-different. Just different-different.  It’s not quite as sweet, which was surprising since it has an entire cup of sugar.  It’s just got an overall lighter feel. Everyone who ate it though wouldn’t have known it was mostly yogurt if I hadn’t told them…but I’m the kind of baker who always tells her secrets. I would say this is such an easy recipe, and nice to know you’re getting something a bit healthier, that I would certainly use this again the next time I’m looking to make pound cake.

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I started going to the gym about three times a week, starting about a month ago. My arms are getting some nice muscle tone, and my cardio endurance is up. I weighed myself today and found I had actually gained weight since starting the gym.  I told myself that I weigh more because I’m gaining muscle. But now that I’m writing this post, I’m starting to question the actual source of weight gain.

Muscle mass or Nutella Brownie Cups?

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.

Guess I better hit the gym.

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Vanilla cake is not as easy to accomplish from scratch.  Not the way chocolate cake is. It’s easy for vanilla to seem bland or dry.  However, these cupcakes received a very good seal of approval. “I think this is the best vanilla cake I’ve ever had from scratch that didn’t come from a bakery.” I’ll take it.

But my favourite part of this recipe is the frosting. It’s half whipped cream so it’s light and fluffy and it perfectly complements the strawberry flavour.

Oh my other favourite part? These adorable cupcake wrappers, making them the perfect treat for Mother’s Day.  We gave them to my mom early since it was her birthday yesterday (Happy Birthday Marm!) and she thought they were adorable.

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Sometimes I want to bake treats that will make the people who eat them think I’m awesome.

Sometimes I want to set things on fire.

S’more cupcakes satisfy all three of these criteria.  These cupcakes are a project (albeit not a difficult one), there was lots of fire involved, and I think I achieved a solid level of awesomeness.  One person actually said these were the best cupcakes he’d ever had.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re almost bakery-worthy – these things are that good.

While I adapted the proportions and a few ingredients, all credit for this concept goes to Cookies and Cups.  The cupcakes, the icing and the assembly are all from them, so go take a look.  For the chocolate cupcakes and marshmallow icing, see this post.

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I love a good Chai Latte. Heck, some days I will even settle for a bad Chai Latte. But a good one just seems to hit a sweet spot inside me that makes me happy.  And if I have a cold, a Chai Latte is the first thing I go for.  Since I love them, and my husband also loves them, we typically pick up a package of Tazo Chai Latte Concentrate from Costco over the winter, but inevitably, we end up heading to Starbucks anyways, and the last carton seems to sit in the cupboard for too long. But I found something else to use up the last of the concentrate! Cupcakes, of course!

I went looking for a recipe for something special to make as a birthday treat for a friend. I wanted something a bit more interesting than plain old vanilla. And since that friend also loves tea, Chai seemed like a good one to try.

Most recipes I found use a combination of spices or 4 tea bags steeped in milk, but I wanted to use the actual concentrate and this is what I came up with: a light, but flavourful cupcake, and a tasty buttercream using more concentrate for extra zip.

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And they were very delicious.

In my ongoing battle between peanut butter and Nutella (at some point I apparently starting pitting these two against each other), peanut butter has made its move in the cheesecake round. I guess I already declared peanut butter the winner in the toast round (which basically only existed in my head, not in any real recipe). And while Nutella was holding its own in the dessert world, in all its delicious hazelnut and chocolatey glory, peanut butter has made a daring move to strike down Nutella once again.

In the words of my husband, “I like the peanut butter ones better than the Nutella”

Does that declare a winner? I don’t know. Perhaps you will have to make both and decide for yourself. (And if you do, I would be very interested in hearing your own feedback. I am yet to declare a winner in “Nutella vs Peanut butter: Cheesecake Round. It’s just too close to call.)

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