Sweet Potato and Chocolate Chip Cookies

Joy the Baker has one of the prettiest baking blogs around so I was a bit excited when I found out she'd released a book. Joy the Baker Cookbook: 100 Simple and Comforting Recipes is as pretty as can be and I like it well enough just to flick through. Now that I've actually made something out of it I like it even better! If you want your own copy you can find it here on Book Depository, or probably somewhere else.

I like the oddness of this combination, but I'm also a sweet potato person in general. And everyone's a chocolate chip person, really.


This is the sweet potato after I baked it, peeled it and mashed it. Sweet orange starch.


Chocolate to dough. Ready to go.


The recipe said to space these 2 inches apart. Inches are not my area of expertise but that sounded like a lot of space so I expected these to rise monstrously. They didn't, so next time I'll just ignore that bit.


I ate one of these warm and declared it objectively awesome. Plus, these sorta add to your vegetable count ;)

Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Swirl Cupcakes

Cream cheese and chocolate chips - never a bad way to start anything. This is the beginnings of chocolate chip cheesecake swirl cupcakes, another of Betty Crocker's creations from the Big Book of Cupcakes.

This fizzy mess (reminiscent of rabies froth if you want to think of it like that) is what you get when you add baking soda to the vinegar in your cake mix. Bubbly.


With filling and cake batter prepared, it's time for cupcakes.


The recipe, which incidentally you can find in full here, says to fill one third of the cupcake well with batter, spoon in filling and then top with more batter. Which, I must say, does not promote any kind of cheesecake "swirl" as the recipe name suggests. The cupcakes you end up with following the recipe don't look much like the photo that they display with the recipe! Next time I will attempt some kind of swirling to make my cupcakes look a bit grander.

Monkey seemed to like them anyway. The main con is that they need to be stored in the fridge because of the cream cheese.

But look inside...


To make your cupcake extra awesome, heat it up in the microwave for 10-15 seconds just before you devour it. It gets all gooey and fantastic.

Double Chocolate Turkish Delight Cookies

Like chocolate cookies? Chocolate chips? Turkish delight? Why not combine all of these elements to make an epic double chocolate turkish delight cookie? I did!

Find a double chocolate cookie recipe (by "double chocolate" I just mean one that makes chocolate flavoured cookies with chocolate chips in them) and add about an equal amount of turkish delight as chocolate chips. Or more, or less... whatever you feel like. I cut the turkish delight into fairly small pieces and covered them in a little icing sugar so that they didn't stick together too badly (although I can think of much worse things than finding a big hunk of turkish delight in your chocolate chip cookie!).

I wish I had photos that adequately captured the gooey insides of these cookies, but alas, they were eaten too quickly to be well documented. You'll have to make some of your own if you want to see inside.

Serve them warm and watch them disappear before your very eyes :)

Banana-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

I happily received a number of new baking books for Christmas, one of which was Betty Crocker's The Big Book of Cupcakes - a collection of over 175 cupcake varieties and decorations.

My first conquest from this book was the Banana-Chocolate Chip Cupcakes. You can find the recipe online here, but interestingly only the packet mix version. I guess if you want the "secrets" to Betty Crocker cupcake success you need to get the book! Anyway, I made these from scratch, not from a packet.

Banana and chocolate. Such a good combination.

This was my first use of chocolate buttercream. It didn't come out nearly as dark in colour as it was in the book, but it tasted good :)

I got some Runts for Christmas too (childhood nostalgia) so I could go to town on the fruit-themed decorating. This particular box only had 4 bananas in it so I had to diversify.

Bananas!


Not bananas... but still cute.

I thought the candy decorations might be hard and annoying to crunch through, but it turns out that they soften once they sit on the icing for a while. Even better :)