Red Velvet White Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recently, I was lucky enough to be able to attend Coachella! It was an amazing weekend with some of my best friends and I was especially grateful to my friend Katie for letting us stay at her house in Palm Springs! She's the one on the right!

Her parents were so generous to let us stay and so Coco and I wanted to thank her by baking her something! We decided on these red velvet cookies that turned out really good! I was not always a huge fan of red velvet because it tasted like a whole lot of red dye to me, but I have made it a couple of times (which you wouldn't know because I haven't been updating...) and I have gotten used to it! My mom also bought me gel colorings instead of liquid so there definitely isn't as much dye in these than normal!

They originally were for Katie's parents but they headed home to Minnesota before we could send them, so Katie got to enjoy them instead!

Thanks for an amazing weekend Katie!!

Red Velvet White Chocolate Chip Cookies: from thecurvycarrot

1/2 cup butter- room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 + 1/2 all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup cocoa powder (and if more gets in... so be it)
red food coloring (I used the gel, around 4 toothpicks)
1/2 cup white chocolate chips


Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder.
Cream together butter and sugars until light and fluffy. At this time, add in the food coloring. Then, mix in the egg and vanilla making sure to mix well.
At low speed, gradually add in the flour mixture. If you feel the need, add in more food coloring. But, be careful if you are using liquid coloring to make sure it doesn't get too liquidy.
Fold in chocolate chips.
Roll into balls around two inches apart on lined baking sheets.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until slightly golden.

(Don't eat too many)

Chubby Hubby Bars!

 

so, that is a bowl full of pretzels and peanut butter cups.
and those are the ingredients to the next recipe. Can't go wrong with that right?

A couple weeks ago, Coco and I made these delicious bars and I knew that my brother would love them! My brother was notorious in my family for loving the Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor of Chubby Hubby. I remember when I was little I hated it and thought it was disgusting just because he liked it and the sibling rivalry ran deep. But, when I finally gave up my grudge I realized how amazing it was. His birthday was coming up so I made these again to send to him!




You just bake together all of the ingredients and then layer on some chocolate for the top!

 Unfortunately for me, it got a little hard in the fridge and was quite a struggle to cut up. So after a good half an hour of sawing with various kitchen knives..

I had a couple of bags to send to my brother!

He finally got them a couple days later and he said that they were good, so I guess it was a successful birthday present!

recipe: cookiesandcups

More Halloween Festivities!

Before Halloween, Katie decided we should do more Halloween themed baking so we had a baking extravaganza at her house! I haven't had time to post in a while because of the death that is midterms and papers, but here it is!

so yea... this happened.




we made a chocolate bark and put candy corn, pretzels, oreos, and swirls of peanut butter in it.

obviously some of it got eaten before we were done...

Katie really wanted to take an outdoor picture on the patio, but seeing as all of these lovely pictures come from my iPhone, it didn't turn out as artsy and nice as we'd tried...

But it was delicious!

While that was cooling, we made brownies!


Originally the plan was to make those little ghosts on top with marshmallows and frosting, but then we also decided to make some monsters and pumpkins!

Everything was obviously amazing and it was fun to bake with a ton of people!




I'm sad that Halloween is over but this means its time for Thanksgiving and then CHRISTMAS



so many themed recipes are awaiting...

Halloween! Rice crispy treats!

So Isla Vista's favorite holiday is fast approaching, so we decided to make a Halloween themed post to start the festivities! Coco came up with the idea for these rice crispy treats filled with cinnamon cereal, wafer cookies, and candy corn! We chopped everything up,

(ignore the menacing butcher knives..)
while we seperately melted all of the marshmallows together...

and then mushed it all together!!

We put it into the pan when it was all done and had to wait for it to cool before we could cut them up!

It was kind of difficult to wait when it looked this good...

Once we had waited long enough, we used some Halloween cookie cutters and made them into fun shapes!

In case you can't tell.. thats a pumpkin on the left, then going clockwise, its a ghost, cat, and a bat!
We melted white chocolate and milk chocolate and used dye to make them all into fun colors!

(I of course made one ginger cat instead of all black cats!)
The chocolate was just frosted on the top, so you can still see how pretty the actual crispy still is!

They turned out so cute!

The Start of an Era?

So I began this blog all by myself and it was quite lonely so now that school has started, Coco is back in life and we can bake together! She makes amazing cake balls and other delicious treats, so we decided to start doing this blog together! So it won't just be me bothering you with butter and sugar loaded desserts.. For our first joint venture, we decided to use my overripe bananas that weren't doing much good sitting on the counter. After foodgawking some banana recipes (normal), she came over and brought some butter (I was awkwardly excited about the butter seeing as it's not normal how much butter I buy these days...) and cute cupcake liners! We decided to make brownie bottomed banana muffins and it all started with a bang when I almost lit the microwave on fire (who knew her butter came in foil liners?).

We lined the bottoms with the brownie batter before piling on the banana cupcake batter in the cute animal print liners!

You can sort of see the brownie bottom in this picture! We also made a cinnamon glaze to add a little extra sugar (there can never be enough). They smelled amazing and of course tasted amazing also :]

... our diet starts tomorrow. miss you larso!
recipe: howsweeteats

Chocolate Oreo Chunk Cookies

Being in a sorority isn't a lot of work until you get to rush. My chapter and I spent long hours preparing the house and getting ready for the most important week all year. One of my best friends, Coco (who will soon be making manyyy more appearances!) decided to make everyone treats during one of our long nights! We made these oreo chunk cookies (which made us a bit late, sorry Pillar night committee) for everyone to enjoy!

 You can see the oreo chunks in the batter!

Unfortunately, they were gone pretty fast so this is the best picture I've got. I have learned through this blog that the faster something is gone, probably the better it tastes? Or that's what I'm going to tell myself.

recipe: howsweeteats

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Peanut butter, oats, AND chocolate chips in one cookie? Sounds good to me!

I haven't made something in a while, so I made these in my break between classes!

I think they are already half gone.. so I guess that's all I have to say!

recipe: browneyedbaker

Brownie Cupcakes (mini mini)

As I mentioned before, my mom and brother came to visit me. I asked my mom to bring me the mini muffin pans from home (I am slowly stealing the entire kitchen) so that I could make something mini! I decided to make a simple chocolate cake with my favorite vanilla frosting. I ended up stumbling upon this chocolate brownie cupcake and decided to give it a try. The mini muffin pans ended up being even too mini for the mini muffin liners that I bought (How many times can I say mini?). So the first batch I tried to make with just cooking spray, and it was kind of a struggle to get them out in just one piece. For the second batch, I used the liners I bought, so the cupcakes were a bit bigger.

Just for comparisons, here is a regular liner, the mini liner, and the brownie from the mini pan.

It is definitely a brownie cupcake and not a regular cupcake. The frosting is the same frosting I used when I made the cookie-bottomed cakes! I added a big dollop onto each one! yumyum

recipe: howsweeteats

Lemon White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

That sounds like a whole lot of flavors, but they blend together amazingly. The lemon created a "WEEEEE" flavor in your mouth, according to Kelly Kusumi, or as Natalie Ziegler said- swangy (tangy and sweet). I wish the white chocolate could be tasted a bit more, but it really created a light, fresh frosting, which was perfect for my delicate vanilla cakes :]

Zak, one of my housemates wanted to use my piping bag and frost a cupcake, which turned out just lovely!

I used my new pearl sprinkles to make them look prettier :] So since this made manyyy more cupcakes than are acceptable for me to eat, please come by and take one!

recipe: pieceofcakeblog

Vanilla Pudding Chocolate Chip Cookies

I think it's safe to say that everyone likes chocolate chip cookies. But the problem with making these cookies is that everyone has a preference: some like them crispy while others like them chewy or gooey. For me, I like the softer variety but have never quite found the perfect recipe. Today I found a recipe that included instant pudding mix, which intrigued me. So of course I had to give it a try and the results were amazing! The pudding mix made the cookies soo soft and I'm pretty sure I have found my staple chocolate chip recipe!

Stay tuned because I have some vanilla bean and extra white chocolate I plan on trying to use some time this week!

recipe: confessionsofacookbookqueen

Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

I always forget that buying groceries for one person is muchh different than buying groceries for a family of four. So, as usual, I had some pretty brown bananas on the counter pretty soon after moving in. But, my mother always said that these are the best for baking, so I of course made some muffins! Banana chocolate chip muffins remind me of freshman year because that was the only thing my dining common did right. But they were yummy and gone pretty soon after I made them- success!

recipe: howto-simplify

Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

I'm not sure what my parents think of my baking fascination, but I think my mom may have appreciated me cleaning out the pantry a bit? She had these peanut butter chips in the pantry for a while so I used them to make these chocolate cookies! I just used the recipe on the back of the package.

Cake Batter Chocolate Bark

While deciding what to make in the shortest amount of time, this chocolate bark definitely made it to the top of the list. I knew I wanted to bring some back to school and share it in the pledge room (which everyone knows is my favorite place in Kappa). Adding just a couple tablespoons of yellow cake batter to the white chocolate portion was GENIUS and made it that much more special. After almost ruining it with "blue sprinkles" (who knew my house had fish rocks when we haven't had a fish for 10 years?? Thanks for stopping me Mom!), it made it safely back to Santa Barbara with me and hopefully was appreciated!

P.S. I swear the quality of the pictures gets better if you click on it?

recipe: howsweeteats