Bailey's Flavored EVERYTHING

I am BEYOND excited for St. Patrick's Day this year.

I have always been a birthday person, but this year, I honestly don't care about my birthday (which is April 9, in case you were curious!). I am going in to Baltimore to celebrate this year! Which, to show my age even more, is extra exciting because this is my first St. Patrick's Day of legal drinking age! Anyways, I have a million and a half St. Patrick's Day recipes I want to bake, so I settled on these AWESOME cookies and Irish Car Bomb cupcakes, which I'll make a little bit closer to the holiday.

These little buggers took forever and a year to make! That might also be because I made about 40 of them... But whatever! :) Every single part of them was delicious. Cookie, icing, chocolate. Yum. 

I got the recipe from Buttercream Blondie and followed the directions almost perfectly... except for the waiting for the cookie dough to cool. I'm impatient. So If you're impatient like me, then definitely only bake the cookies for 6-7 minutes, not the 12-13 she suggests.

Baileys Cookies

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temp
• 1&1/2 cups sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1t. vanilla extract
• 4 cups AP flour
• 1T. baking powder
• 1/2t. salt
• 1/2 cup Baileys

1. Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy.
2. Add egg and egg yolk.
3. Mix in vanilla extract.
4. Alternate adding in dries with Baileys till combined.
5. Wrap cookie dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate a few hours to over night.
6. Roll out dough & cut out cookies using a shamrock cookie cutter.
7. Chill cookies at least 30 minutes before baking to keep their shape.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for 12-13 minutes rotating once halfway through.  Start checking them after 10 minutes.  As soon as they get a little blonde on the edges, they're done.

*This recipe yields about 80 shamrock cookies, 40 sandwich cookies.

Baileys Cream Filling

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temp
• 2 & 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 6T. Baileys
• 2t. Trablit - you can also use instant espresso powder

1. Cream butter and sugar, adding a little sugar at a time so you don't have a sugar shower.
2. Add extract and Baileys.
3. Fill cooled cookies.

Good as drink is, it ends in thirst, so drink up my friends! Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Cookie Dough Cupcakes!

So many cookie/cupcake crossovers lately! I wanted to finally venture into the world of stuffed cupcakes, so I went with these yummy cookie dough cupcakes. It's a vanilla cupcake with chocolate chips, hollowed out and filled with a cookie dough like filling, then iced with a vanilla buttercream icing, and topped with chocolate chips. Just like chocolate chip cookies!

I'm not going to lie, there isn't much about this recipe that I would change. The only alteration I made was that I halved the recipe, and even then I kept the filling at normal proportion for left overs. I ended up using all of the filling, so either I made the centers too deep or the filling just needs to be doubled if you make the 24 it yields.

I had a fun time icing them too! Don't they look like little roses!?!? :) Also, beware of breaking the cupcake between actually hollowing them, filling them, and otherwise moving them. Their structure isn't as strong as a regular cupcake. 

I got the recipe from TidyMom.net and they were so perfect! Thank you!!

Ingredients

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes
• 3 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1½ cups light brown sugar, packed
• 4 large eggs
• 2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 cup chocolate chips (semisweet or bittersweet)
Cookie Dough Filling
• 4 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 6 tbsp. light brown sugar, packed
• 1 cup plus 2 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• 7 oz. sweetened condensed milk
• ½ tsp. vanilla extract
• ¼ cup mini semisweet chocolate chips
Cookie Dough Frosting
• 3 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
• ¾ cup light brown sugar, packed
• 3½ cups confectioners’ sugar
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• ¾ tsp. salt
• 3 tbsp. milk
• 2½ tsp. vanilla extract

Instructions

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes
1. preheat the oven to 350° F.
2. Using the paddle attachment on your mixer, combine the butter and brown sugar. Cream together on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, approx 3 minutes. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl .
3. Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a medium bowl.
4. Alternating add the dry ingredients to the mixer bowl with the milk on low speed, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients, mixing each addition just until incorporated.
5. Blend in the vanilla.
6. Fold in the chocolate chips with a spatula.
7. Divide the batter evenly between 24 cupcake liners. Bake for 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Cookie Dough Filling
8. Cream butter and sugar in a mixing bowl on medium-high speed until light and fluffy(approx2 minutes).
9. Add flour, sweetened condensed milk and vanilla and beat until smooth.
10. Stir in the chocolate chips.
11. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until the mixture has firmed up a bit, (approx1 hour).
12. After cupcakes have cooled, fill the cupcakes by cutting a cone-shaped portion out of the center of each cupcake. Fill each hole with a chunk of the chilled cookie dough mixture.
Cookie Dough Frosting
13. Beat butter and brown sugar with the paddle attachment on high speed until creamy and fluffy.
14. Mix in the confectioners’ sugar until smooth.
15. Beat in the flour and salt.
16. Mix in the milk and vanilla extract until smooth and combined.

My brother, who is a less than picky eater said these were his favorite cupcakes I've made so far. But the best feedback I got was from my dad! He's not a dessert person, but he claimed these are the BEST cupcakes he's EVER had!!!! :)

I love baking for people...

Date Night

My Facebook (and real life) fiancé, Ashley, came over this afternoon for a date night! She brought the dinner, DELISH pizza, and I made the dessert! We are the cutest couple on the planet so I made her the most romantic dessert I could think of, chocolate mousse!

The recipe I found was really easy to adapt, which is exactly what I did. One of the wineries by my house, Linganore Winery, makes the most incredible raspberry wine. So instead of using water in my mousse, I replaced it with wine! Chocolate + raspberries = yum. Yum + wine = fantastic! The recipe was fantastic and incredibly easy. I think I over whipped it, but it was still delicious. 

The recipe is from Diamonds for Dessert, which is definitely a blog worth checking out. I pretty much want to make everything that she posts. Again, I over whipped, so it came out a little bit more solid than it should have... still tasty!

Chocolate Mousse

9.35 oz (265 g) bittersweet (70% cocoa) chocolate 
1 cup (240 ml) water
4 tbsp sugar, optional

cold water & ice

Place ice and cold water in one of your mixing bowls. Then place the other mixing bowl on top to chill. Chop up the chocolate and place it in a medium sized saucepan. Add the 1 cup water (and sugar if you decide to use it) and place the pan over medium heat, whisking the mixture occasionally.

When the chocolate is all melted, take the pan off the heat and pour the mixture into the mixing bowl that's been chilling (the one on top of the ice and water). Take your whisk and start mixing until the mixture starts thickening and resembling softly whipped cream.

Continue whisking until it thickens more and can be scooped up by the whisk (video below showing perfect texture). At this stage it is very easy to over-whip the mousse, so watch the texture carefully or else it will end up grainy.

Divide mixture into serving containers, garnish (if desired with whipped cream and chocolate hearts), and serve.

And voilà! 

Super Epic Smoothie

My yummy tropical-ish smoothie that isn't as weird as the ones I normally drink on a daily basis.

1 kiwi

7 small straberries

about 17 blueberries

1 mango Chobani yogurt

1 banana

about a cup of orange juice

about a cup of Naked Juice's Green Monster

It makes about two smoothies, and I drank them both. It was delicious. :)

Cookies and Cupcakes!

I apologize for the lateness of this blog. Here it is, Monday and I baked these on Friday. I decided that my whatever cupcakes I was going to make on Friday needed to have something inside them, it was either going to be chocolate, fruit, cream, or candy filling. So as I'm researching (yes, it is technical research) recipes, I stumble upon this beauty from Confection Ink. It has an Oreo baked into the bottom! What better combination?!

I felt like such a child baking these, and couldn't help but eat most of the cookies as I baked them. :)

Over all, they came out pretty awesome. A few changes I would have made would have been putting a thin layer of batter in the cupcake liner before adding the Oreo. It would have made the cookie softer and a little bit less intrusive than it was sitting rock hard on the bottom. Still, I liked taking the cookie off and eating it first anyway :) The other change I would make is in the icing... I think just a simple vanilla buttercream recipe with crushed Oreos in it would have been a little bit easier and taste better. The Crisco in the icing threw me off a bit. Emma Jean helped me make the icing, and she was not a fan of it either. Either substitute butter for Crisco or make a different icing.

The cupcakes themselves were AMAZING!! So rich and moist. A total win. I am saving this recipe for the chocolate cake recipe. YUM.

So, without further ado, Oreo Cupcakes!

CUPCAKES
2 cups sugar
2 cups flour
3/4 cups cocoa
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 package instant chocolate pudding
3 eggs
1cup sour cream
1/2 cup oil
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water (or strong brewed coffee – I would have used this but my coffee maker isn’t working!)
24 Oreo cookies, with one side twisted off and reserved for the frosting.
Preheat oven to 350. Line cupcake pans.
In a large bowl whisk together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, salt and pudding mix. Add oil, eggs sour cream and vanilla. Beat on medium speed until well blended (about 2 minutes) Continue beating while slowly adding in the boiling water. Beat about 30 seconds after adding the water.
Put the Oreo with one side twisted off cream side up and fill cupcake liners about 1/2 way. Bake 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out mostly clean. Let them cool completely on cooling rack.

ICING
1 cup milk
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup butter -at room temperature
1/2 cup Crisco
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
24 Oreo cookie tops -crushed
 Place milk in a small saucepan.  Sprinkle the flour over the milk, 1/4 cup at a time and whisk until smooth.  Place the saucepan over low heat and stir constantly until the mixture becomes thick pulls into a ball.  Remove from the heat and put ball into a bowl. Place plastic wrap directly on the surface of the mixture and tuck around it to make sure there is no exposed parts.  Refrigerate until cooled to room temperature or colder (at least 30 minutes). In a large bowl, cream the butter and Crisco.  Add the cooled flour milk mixture and beat until well blended.  Mix in the vanilla.  With the mixer on medium speed, gradually add the sugar and then continue to beat the icing a
fter adding the sugar for an additional 10-12 minutes until noticeably whiter and creamy. Add Oreo crumbs and mix until just blended.

York Peppermint Brownies

Seriously, who doesn't like York peppermint patties?! People who don't have to be absolutely insane. So making brownies with a peppermint frosting and chocolate topping can't be anything short of heavenly.

I took the Baker's chocolate recipe for ooey, gooey brownies and kind of tweaked it a little bit because I'm lazy and did not have any unsweetened chocolate at the house. So I just used a 1/2 cup of mini chocolate chips instead. I think either way would give delicious results.

Also, it's really difficult to resist the urge to eat all of the peppermint frosting. Just a friendly warning.

So, without further ado, my first adapted recipe!

York Peppermint Brownies


Brownies


3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup mini chocolate chips
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup flour


Frosting


2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup butter, melted
2 Tbsp milk
1/2 tsp peppermint extract


Topping


3/4 cup mini chocolate chips
3 Tbsp butter


Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 9x13 pan. Microwave chocolate and butter until the chocolate melts, stir occasionally to keep chocolate from burning. Once mixture is completely melted stir in the rest of the ingredients. Mix until blended. Pour batter in pan and bake 20-30 minutes.


Once the brownies are completely cool to the touch you can ice them. Melt butter in bowl and add milk and peppermint extract. Slowly add powdered sugar and whisk until smooth. Spread over the cool brownies and wait about ten minutes for the frosting to harden. It shouldn't be sticky if you touch it.


Melt the rest of the butter and chocolate chips in a small bowl and mix until smooth. Pour over the frosted layer and smooth over with a spatula. 


Refrigerate until until hard, use a knife run under HOT water to cut when ready to serve. ENJOY! :)

This is how you start your day right! Or at least this is how I start my day right... 

I enjoyed this lovely smoothie which contents include raspberry Chobani Greek yogurt, LOTS of spinach, strawberries, blueberries, a banana, and some orange juice while sitting out on the deck this morning. Most of its ingredients are proven to increase your metabolism, which is a great kick start for your body.

To counteract the healthy that was my delicious smoothie, I ate a cute little concoction that I made last night. Bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit muffins! So bad, but oh, so good!

I failed pretty epically about making them look even remotely like muffins. But that's what happens when you don't follow the recipe and assume what the next steps of the recipe call for. The recipe (another Pintrest find) was from Cooking with My Kid. It was super fun and even though mine didn't come out looking pretty, they are still yummy! I used turkey bacon instead of regular bacon, and I super regretted it. Regular bacon would have given it an added salty taste and probably crumbled better. Anywho, here's the recipe!

Bacon, Egg & Cheese Biscuit Muffins

Prep Time: 5 mins  Cooking Time: 20 to 25 mins

Ingredients:
1 package biscuit dough (10 biscuits)
3 eggs
3 tablespoons milk
1/3 cup of shredded cheddar
4 slices bacon (we used turkey bacon and veggie bacon)
salt and pepper

Cook the bacon in a pan or in the oven until it’s almost done. Chop into small bits and set aside. (Note: if using veggie bacon do not cook it ahead – simply defrosted it and chopped it up.) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Whisk together eggs and milk, a pinch of salt and some cracked pepper to taste and set aside. Meanwhile, roll out each biscuit until it’s slightly bigger than the circumference of your muffin tin. Grease the muffin tin with cooking spray and push one biscuit into each muffin cup being sure to push it all the way down and to the sides. Leave the ridge hanging over the edge. Divide the cheese evenly in each of the biscuit cups and then pour egg in, filling each cup only 1/2 way. They will look empty but resist the urge to top them off. You must account for the biscuits puffing up – otherwise you’ll have a mess on your hands. Sprinkle bacon atop of the egg and bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until biscuits are golden and eggs are set. Use a butter knife to loosen each muffin and serve warm.

Note: if your egg does overflow, just let it bake the rest of the way and then remove the extra egg when you are loosening the muffins. They’ll still taste terrific.