New toys for the baker wanna-be

I've been in hiatus for too long!

It has been a crazy past few weeks at work that when I get home, all I do is sleep. I also have been MIA in our kitchen the past few weeks, but not for long!!! especially with my NEW BAKING TOYS!!! :D

Remember the entry when my boyfriend and I baked cookies for the first time? How his muscles were put to test because I used him as my manual mixer? So, for my birthday, he gave me a mixer!!!

I was ecstatic. Excited. Beyond the clouds happy. I LOVE IT. I did not enjoy baking then to the fullest because of the manual mixing part. But now, here it is, I have my own mixer!!! FINALLY! It was totally unexpected.

A few days before my birthday he teased me that he got me a Minnie Mouse shoes and a pedal-type mixer. I did not know if there really is a pedal-type one. But true enough, he wrapped the mixer in Minnie Mouse wrapper, and I was laughing so hard thinking "so he did buy me a Minnie Mouse shoe?!" I was readying myself for the shoes and the pedal mixer, and instead, it's a legit mixer! He chose the Oster hand and stand mixer because I was raving about it and as he said "it's practical"! And then it was there! :)  (My KitchenAid Artisan mixer dreams will have to wait, I have to "perfect" baking first in this mixer, before I step up and spend a lot on a mixer I might not even use when baking decides I'm not for her. HAHA.)

My siblings also had the same idea. They wanted to buy me a mixer, but to their relief, my boyfriend gave me the gift first so they were spared from the trouble and "expense" haha!

Nevertheless, they bought wonderful baking goodies. ;)

When I saw the card, Gourdo's,  I immediately know what is inside. It could only be baking materials! And they were! It's Wilton's beginnner's cake decoration set. I swoon.

I'm particularly excited about these tips!!! I can just imagine the decors to do!!! GAAAH.

HAPPY BAKING TO ME!!! <3

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 :*

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

Nutty chocolate cake

Hi everyone! Last Monday was the first "monthsary" of me and my blog. :) So I decided to celebrate it with nothing less, and the most famous recipe of all time (I think), a chocolate cake!

(It was a tag team effort, my mom wanted to try decorating my baked goodies so she did the cake decoration here! Ain't it awesome? :)

I used the recipe of Ina Garten's Double Chocolate Layer Cake, only I did not make it into two layers. This is my FIRST TIME baking a cake, so please look away from all the "ugly" and "wrong" things I did. Haha! :p

The batter ---mixing the dry with the wet. Manual mixing IS TOUGH.

My favorite part -- the recipe called out for melting the chocolate! YUMMY!

See it riseee!!!! (A still very wet batter)

I left the cake and the frosting chilled overnight (unintentionally because I accidentally slept). But it was a good think because it made the frosting more thick! :)

Now to the fun part....

Spreading the frosting (which looks like Nutella)

 Grinding and spreading over the cashew nuts and garnishing with the bread sticks..

 Voila! A CHOCOLATE SINFUL CREATION!

Let's move on to THE most favorite part of all time!

 Slicing the cake

 And dunking it to the mouth!

It tasted heavenly! The cake was so moist. It's definitely worth seconds and thirds of recipe reuse. Thanks to technology, this yummy recipe was made to be shared for everyone!

The only thing I adjusted in this recipe was the amount of butter in the frosting. It can be noted that it said 2 sticks, but I only used 1 stick, for I prefer a lesser butter-y taste. I turned out just as I hoped. :)

Yay for the chocolate cake! <3

Corn muffin overload

Hi everyone!  It's a busy day in the house today. My sister is getting married tomorrow, and preparations are on the way! I'll post photos soon of the wedding and the personal details I helped them out with to make their day special. (My sister just sometimes takes it a little bit overboard.)

In the meantime, here's my new kitchen adventure! Corn muffins! And just a little bit of everything, actually WITH corn.

Last Friday at work, I had the chance to "live" in our kitchen systems. Oh, the joys of a wonderful, well-equiped, well-stocked kitchen. My officemates and I concocted a simple lunch for our group. We decided on a Kenny Roger's style of meal (complete with the chicken, mashed potatoes, corn and carrots, and of course, corn muffins!)

We followed the recipe from Gisslen's Professional baking book, which my officemate handily had, but there are also a lot of corn muffin over the net, which may be equally delectable! We were not able to buy cornmeal, so instead, we used caned corn. We added the canned corn to the mixture, but junked up a portion in the blender before mixing it in the batter to achieve a smoother corn taste.

Hand mixed corn muffin batter

Note: The corn muffin mixture needs to be baked immediately after combining all the ingredients, so the pans must be greased and ready before even starting to put anything to the mixing bowl.

Our excitement led to not noticing the YIELD part of the recipe. I know, total bummer. What we failed to see was that the recipe yielded around 30 muffins! For the lack of more muffin pans, we even used those small pans for what I guess, macaroons, and even the big 8" diameter pan for cakes! 

Little corn macaroons (or cupcakes) which we toasted a little to see if which level of "done-ness" is yummier! (I preferred the not burnt one though, but a couple of my officemates liked this toasted one)

Here's what we ended up with: corn macaroon, corn muffin and corn cake. 

In all fairness, they were good. :) My officemate sprinkled some confectioner's sugar on top of the muffins to give a little more sweet kick.

A simple, tasty treat!
 My next kitchen adventure: Chocolate cake! Can you give me some handy tips with my next one? :)

Chocolate Chip Cookies

It's Good Friday today. While idling around reflecting, I decided to take this time to start and fuel up my blog (since "holidays and vacations" like this are limited).

Two weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were battling over my "over-indulgence" in baking tools/accessories which were not really needed in homemade baking creations; case in point: boxes for cakes, cookie cutters, toppers, etc. I did not want to bake again without going all out even in the decorations, and he is so supportive even if we have been driving around (well, he IS the one driving always) and circling places to no avail. Mind you, I'm no pro in these baking, so what I should have concentrated on instead is perfecting those little sugar concoctions, as he always reminded me. In the end, I succumbed to baking again, without my little "extras". I am a newbie in baking. Before this, I only have had baked less than 10 creations. Mostly brownies from recipes I pick up in the internet like the good ol' Hershey's recipes. Well, at work I sometimes observe (or pry) from the experts. But, that is another story.

Anyway, so my boyfriend convinced (or railroaded) me to bake during one of his visits here at home, so I grabbed the one on top of my head -- chocolate chip cookies! I checked the recipe and ingredients needed, and thankfully, I got them all covered (or so I thought). Here's my first attempt at baking again! Mixing became a bump in the process because I did not have any stand nor hand mixer. Yes, I did the good old twirling motions with my friend, the spatula. (No judgements, okay. I better invest in a really good mixer soon.)

Fresh from the oven cookies - soft almost melting chocolate chips

The aftermath

 I followed Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookies which I got through my good friend Google. Why? It has the simplest ingredients I could find. And its sugar-butter-coffee-chocolate proportions seemed good enough for me. (But of course, what do I know? Haha) I tweaked a little of the recipe because of my ingredients (or lack thereof).  

  
Here's the ingredients and procedure with the tweaks I incorporated. I know that in baking you should follow the recipe down to its last detail, but I guess the changes in the flavoring does not really count, right? Or does it? Anyway, here it is.

Kitchen adventure number 1: SUCCESS!

I poured in the salt while mixing the butter and the sugars 'cause when I just sift it with flour, it sometimes tends to not be distributed evenly. Okay, blame it on my manual powers of mixing. 

Also, as mentioned, I placed brewed coffee instead of the espresso powder, but I think a stronger coffee would work out better if you want that bittersweet taste of cookies.  

My chocolate chip cookies were also limited, so I used chocolate buttons instead, which i sliced into little squares! 

 Nevertheless, my cookies turned out great! Boyfriend loved it, even family loved it (and our househelp)! They finished everything in a blink of an eye. Oh, the wonders of baking. :)

What's good to bake next? Hmm.