Quaker Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Wow, I got into quite a non-blogging rut there. I may have even forgotten I had a blog.

I still bake sometimes, but I find I get sugar headaches quite easily, particularly if I just taste icing on its own (like, even just a tiny bit to check it's not horrible before I put it on a cake), so I have to be a bit careful.

I made some oatmeal raisin cookies recently for a charity bake sale, and I think the oats do a good job of balancing the sugar content.

You can find the --->recipe here<<--- and I found the serving size was actually spot on - a neat 4 dozen smallish cookies!

And since they were for sale they were all bagged and labelled. (Sorry, planet.) Oh, also I soaked the raisins in boiling water for about 10-15 minutes before adding, because I read somewhere that that makes them plumper and reduces the chance they'll burn.

Choc Mint Oreo Cupcakes

I've made these before, but I thought they looked especially cute this time.

Partly because they were accompanied by a playing child. And then partly because I put some into a cupcake box.

I think it's extra hard to make cupcakes look bad when they're packaged in white. (Hence the fact that these now appear at the header of this blog!)

I'm concentrating on presentation here, but just in case you actually want to make these: make a chocolate cake batter, distribute in cupcake wells, stick an Oreo (or similar) in the top of each cupcake before baking, top with a little piped peppermint butter cream. Devour.

Bacon and Peanut Butter Cookies

We had a bakeoff at work recently and we were supposed to make something savoury. Not really my area of expertise. So I opted for another one of Joy the Baker's novel combination recipes. 

There's the bacon...

...and the peanuts...

Mix it all together and what've you got? Bacon and peanut butter cookies of course. Recipe here <-<- and also in the very enjoyable Joy the Baker Cookbook: 100 Simple and Comforting Recipes.

Somehow the little chunks of meat sticking out of the cookies look a bit disturbing, don't they?

They're rolled in a little sugar, but I maintain that these count as a savoury item. Plenty of salty bacon. And a little bit of molasses - the first time I've actually used it. Turns out it's nothing like golden syrup as I'd thought. Molasses is potent stuff; dark and sticky.

I didn't win the bakeoff. But I did win the weekly team award for "the bravest biscuits ever," and they were rather a talking point. One guy told me they'd be good dipped in chocolate, but I think that would just add another layer of crazy. Your biggest challenge in making them may be resisting the lure of the bacon when it comes out of the oven all baked and crispy and inviting. If you're not careful your bacon and peanut butter cookies may stall at the delicious snack of bacon stage. But be strong. The cookies are worth a try!

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 ;)

Heart Cookies (any kind will do :)

So Bakerella gave me a cute cookie idea to try (here's her post).

That's right. Squish your cookie dough into a heart shaped silicone muffin pan. It should work for basically any cookie mix I think, but beware of sticky bits - I was experimenting with whether I could put the jersey caramel on the bottom (as the underside seemed to come out with a more defined heart shape), but the caramels got all gooey and stuck to the silicone a bit. The topside is a better option.


Same old caramel cookies. Just a little bit different. And without the annoyance of cookie cutters :)

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 :)

Christmas Snickerdoodle Cupcake Duo

Thankfully it turns out that a baking project won't necessarily fail just because it starts out looking like a batch of play-doh.

Especially not if it's helped along by the wonder of cinnamon sugar. See it sparkle.


Anyway, for the Christmas bake-off at work I decided to create a Christmas version of the already-super Snickerdoodle Cupcake Duo (which I originally posted about here). I wasn't sure I could achieve a genuinely red icing without using a toxic amount of food dye, so I opted instead to colour the snickerdoodle cookies themselves. The coating of cinnamon sugar makes them look kind of dirty and gross before baking, but fear not - they rise and spread enough to fix this.


To aid the survival of Christmas party grazers I made this whole batch into mini cupcakes. Depending on how big you make them, you can get around 40 little cupcakes and little cookies out of Bakerella's recipe. (I ended up with 42 cakes and 44 cookies - pleasantly close to even!)

Here's before decorating...

...and here's after decorating! (mostly :p)


I was relieved to end up with actual Christmas colours rather than the pink and vomit-green shemozzle which I more than half expected. Take THAT pessimism.

Merry Christmas!!!

Mint chocolate cupcakes (with extras)

"Mum Goodwin's Chocolate Cake" (from Julie Goodwin's book Our Family Table) makes a nice adaptable chocolate cake base. And I find it kind of fascinating that it tastes so good when it doesn't actually contain any chocolate!

You don't add the cocoa and water mixture into the batter until the final mixing stage, so you get to see it go from what looks like a vanilla cake to suddenly very definitely chocolate!

A word of caution - if you make the full recipe as written into cupcakes you get around 40 little cakes out of it! So since this first run I've taken to halving it and getting the more respectable number of around 20, which you could stretch to an even 2 dozen if you made them a little on the light side.

It was a Friday night and I was feeling experimental so I put strawberry jam in the centre of some of the cupcakes.


In others I put little mint chocolate logs. I didn't realise until after baking that these were, sadly, a bit on the chewy side, but it still added an extra bit of pepperminty flavour.


I pressed Oreo cookies into the top of some of the cupcakes, because you can't really go wrong with the chocolate cake and Oreo pairing.

I tried out a "marshmallow icing" trick that I'd read of on a blog ages ago. When the cupcakes were nearly baked, I took them out and placed a marshmallow on top of each one, then finished baking them. Finally I put them under the grill for a few minutes to brown them a little... but these turned out to be a bit of a mess! Not at all how I imagined they would go, but maybe I baked the marshmallows too long, and they tasted fine anyway.

I had been meaning to make peppermint icing for a very long time, and finally I did it. Yum! Just add peppermint essence to your buttercream instead of vanilla or rosewater.


I enjoyed adding random extras to my cakes, but these basic swirls of peppermint on chocolate definitely looked the classiest.

I added just a dob of icing to the ones with jam or Nutella baked in (did I mention Nutella? I didn't end up eating one of them, but Nutella can't really fail as far as I'm concerned).

This chocolate cake recipe is going on my list of staple bases, and now I have 3 standard buttercream flavours (vanilla, rosewater and peppermint) to mix and match with :)

Brown Sugar Cookies

Any recipe that contains brown sugar and cinnamon immediately grabs my attention.

Also, I'd been on a bit of a "cupcakes and nothing but cupcakes" roll, so I thought some simple cookies were probably in order.

As I reported to a friend, these brown sugar cookies that I found at Joy the Baker's blog (<<< link here) are kind of a lighter, lazier version of snickerdoodles, with the sugar and cinnamon (plus a little ginger) on the inside.

I didn't read the recipe very well and accidentally put in baking powder instead of soda... so then I added a little baking soda as well for good measure (about a teaspoon on top of the original two of powder). This no doubt contributed to their lightness. Next time I'll try the suggested amount and see whether it makes much difference.

Although I expected darker, moister cookies, these were cute and very more-ish. In the future I'd probably make them bigger so people (aka. me) don't feel the need to eat a few at time!

Snickerdoodle cupcake duo

I know I've said this before, but this really IS my new favourite recipe. And once again it comes from Bakerella. The Snickerdoodle Duo (link to Bakerella's post here) is a delicious combination of cupcake and cinnamon cookie with frosting and cinnamon sugar to hold them together and decorate.

Snickerdoodle cookies were made known to me by my friends Rachael and Tim, and all the people who kept talking about Rach and Tim's Snickerdoodles. Amazingly this was the first time that I made them myself. They puff up really nicely and the texture is great.

The cupcakes pulled away from their cases a little (anyone know what causes that?) and they seemed a bit soft, so I thought maybe I under-cooked them, but they went perfectly with the cookies and icing.

Speaking of icing, Bakerella made a meringue icing, but didn't highly recommend it, and I have an aversion to recipes that use only parts of eggs. Seems like such a waste. So, using my growing knowledge of Australian ingredient equivalents (aka. baking nerd status), I fashioned a nice firm buttercream icing instead, using a magical ingredient... Pavlova Magic. The main ingredients are sugar and egg whites, and it seems you don't need much to get fantastic results :) (much cheaper than ordering purpose-made meringue powder from the US!)

This is my new, Australian-ified buttercream recipe that holds its shape beautifully. It makes enough to ice about 3 dozen cupcakes (or 6 dozen mini cupcakes). If you have some left over you can keep it refrigerated in an air-tight container and re-whip to use it later, but I'm not sure exactly how long it's good for (I used the last of mine within 5 days).

Semi-firm Buttercream Icing

(based on Cupcake Gal's recipe and an eHow post by Shelby Winchell)

125g unsalted butter, softened

125g cooking margarine, softened

6-8 cups icing sugar, sifted

1/2 cup of milk

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 tablespoon Pavlova Magic powder

1. Beat the butter and margarine in an electric mixer until smooth and creamy (roughly a few minutes).
2. Add 4 cups of icing sugar, the milk and vanilla. Mix on low speed until combined.
3. Add 2 more cups of icing sugar and mix until light and fluffy. Only add the last 2 cups of icing sugar if you need to.
4. Add the Pavlova powder and mix on low speed for a couple of minutes. You'll see it start to thicken.
5. Use without delay (or get it into an air-tight container to store).

My cupcakes didn't rise right to the top of the patty cases, but I like how the cookies looked kind of like muffin tops and they're kind of compact and neat like this. Also really delicious. Really.

See? So pretty.

Yum. Thanks Bakerella.

Caramel Cookies

OK, so I've been slack with blogging. But not with baking. In fact, a few times I've thought about blogging and then decided to bake instead. Now it's time for some back-blogging.

I think Jersey Caramels (along with most things caramel) are fantastic. So when I saw Donna Hay's recipe for Caramel Cookies (<<- link) in a newspaper a couple of years ago I was slightly dismayed that I hadn't dreamt these up myself.

They're very simple and never fail. Seriously - I hideously overcooked them one time and they were still worth eating.

This is how the cookies begin their life, in a saucepan.

Cool and combine that with self-raising flour and you can make these...

...then add these...

... and bake, to end up with these. Delicious caramel goodness! And cute too.

This lot of cookies (a double batch) was for a fundraiser, so I put them into this handy jar for display.