Hershey's ultimate brownie

Love.

Finding love..




Accepting love..
 


Staying in love...
 

Oh, what a great feeling....
To love and be loved.
To cherish and be cherished.
 To admire and to be admired.


I came home to an extraordinary amount of flowers in the house. They were so many that it felt like my dreams of "lying on fields of flowers". But no, it was no dream. It was real. And they weren't for me. ('Duh). It's for my sister. *winkwink.


My older sister finally has a boyfriend! 

I am so happy. And thrilled. And ecstatic. And overjoyed for her. HAHA. She has been this girl who "loved and lost" before, and finally, she learned to open her heart again. YAY!

I think every girl who is in love tends to develop an inner liking to the kitchen. And my sister was no exemption. This guy she is with is into sweets --- a lot.I tease her that her boyfriend might be a girl disguised in a guy's clothing, 'cause hey, only a few guys are into the whole cakes, chocolates and ice cream thing that girls are notoriously known for. Right?

So anyway, she approached me one night to ask for a go-to recipe of a brownie for his boyfriend. Of course, I immediately recommended Hershey's. It's real easy AND it REALLY is GOOD. So here are the products of her (with some assistance from me) baking-for-boyfriend experience:

These are the second and third pans that we made. In the first one (no photos, sadly), we followed the buttercream frosting, but for these next two, we let the frosting go, and instead, drizzed the brownie with Hershey's chocolate syrup, and topped them with chocolate chips.

Also, we added 1/3 cup of cashew into the mixture before baking. CHUNKY NUTS inside a CHOCOLATE BROWNIE with drizzle of CHOCOLATE SYRUP on top is HEAVEN ON EARTH.

Kudos to my sister, for her new relationship and the interest in kitchen hits and misses :*

Mangoes with vanilla cream

The Philippines is widely known for its freshest and sweetest mangoes! And once again, it is the time of the year again when mangoes are aplenty, harvests seems endless. ;) Here in our home, we actually have a lot of mango trees. It's exciting when I get to pick fruits, and eat them. They feel and taste so fresh! It really is different when they are grown from your own backyard. Speaking of which, we have a lot of vegetables thriving in our backyard soil, I love it except for the bitter gourd, I pray for its demise. But that is another story! ;)

Now, going back to the mangoes...... 
Pardon the very low-res photos. They were taken through my iPad. :(

My officemate, Ara, learned a vanilla cream recipe when she tasted a dessert offering from one of the fast food restaurants here in Manila. She mentioned that they had this dessert with suman (rice cake?) topped with mangoes, and has this yummy sauce. 

So she ended up calling the restaurant, asking what the sauce was, and they obliged to mention that it was vanilla cream sauce.

So we did our very own version, minus the suman of course! 

I'm telling you, it IS yummy. It's perfect for desserts or even snacks! 

Sharing the recipe with you guys:

-----

 Sooo, this was what we came up with. Ara did her own research and experimented on the recipes online, and she shared this recipe with me:

1 and 1/2 cup of whipping cream

1 cup of sugar

2 tablespoons of flour

1/2 of butter

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Instructions:

Over medium heat, beat the whipping cream, sugar and flour until smooth, add the butter and continue mixing until it starts to boil. Remove from the heat source then stir in the vanilla extract. Serve chilled or warm. 

Enjoy!!!

Happy summer!

 That's me and Ara , in matching outfits! :} 'Til then!

Nutella-filled chocolate cake with melted marshmallow frosting

Hello guys!


How was your Mother's day? I was never the affectionate daughter (or person for that matter). But last Sunday was supposed to be a "special day". Soooo, my sister and I ended up doing our own chocolate cake for our Mom! ;)

Ina Garten's chocolate cake is now definitely my go-to recipe when baking a chocolate cake! My sister was not ssatisfied with the sweetness level though of my first cake, so we added more cocoa powder into the batter. The recipe calls for only 3/4 cocoa powder, we ended up putting 1 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. TRUE ENOUGH, the fudge was deliciously chocolate-y!!!

We did the double layer this time, and while debating what to put inside as the filling, we ended up deciding on a melted marshmallow frosting  on top and sides.

After several browsing through the net, I decided on this recipe -- it's simple and very much easy to understand. The only problem we encountered was when to know and decide that the egg whites have been beated until "thick".

Also, note to self: this frosting is VERY hard to accomplish without a hand nor a stand mixer. As I previously mentioned in my other posts, I have yet to own a mixer, THIS MARSHMALLOW RECIPE banged my head to the door and urged me to buy one asap! Egg beating is hard, I must say.

Our frosting was a mess.

Our frosting did not turn out quite as expected. :( Somebody help me!

I believe we were not able to "mix until thick" the egg whites before adding the syrup and everything else, but our arms could just do so much. Still yummy though! Oh, and we used brown sugar instead of the white sugar (due to health reasons of our parents), but I am not quite sure if this change merited a change also in the composition.


We topped it with chocolate chip cookies....

And voila! A Nutella-filled chocolate cake with melted marshmallow frosting! :)

 Well, again.... EVERYTHING is BETTER with NUTELLA.

Til next time!

N