Layers of Love Chocolate Brownies

My husband had a picnic for his work group recently and said that I would bake cookies for him. He sent me a couple of different recipes for ideas, although some of them wouldn’t really work for an outdoor picnic on a 90 degree day! I thought this recipe looked great and you can’t really go wrong with a good brownie. Of course, it was 90 degrees out and nearly that warm in the house, so I didn’t end up baking them for the picnic. But I made them as soon as the temperature dropped to more normal levels. Thankfully, the weather changed from 95 degrees to 75 degrees in just 2 days.

This recipe is for a deep, dark brownie with a layer of nuts, chips and caramel in the center. Yum! It’s also a good recipe to use up those half-full bags of chips you may have in the cupboard. I realized when typing up this recipe that I left out ¾ cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips for the topping, but they seem ok without them. I didn’t really measure the white chips or caramel, but I’m sure I was pretty close to the amounts given here. I thought that the 1 cup of chopped pecans called for in the original recipe was way too much; I probably used about ¾ cup.

The batter for these brownies is thick! For the topping, you add an egg to the reserved batter to lighten it and make it spreadable. It was still a little hard to spread on top of the chips and such, so don’t rush this step. I baked them for the full 35 minutes, but these brownies are just gooey. They are very rich and decadent and a little goes a long way!

Layers of Love Chocolate Brownies

3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
3 eggs, divided
2 teaspoons vanilla
2/4 cup chopped pecans
3/4 cup white chocolate chips
1/2 cup caramel ice cream topping

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8-inch baking pan with foil and spray the foil with cooking spray.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder and salt. In a large mixer bowl, cream the butter, sugar and brown sugar until creamy. Add 2 eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Gradually beat in flour mixture, mixing just until combined.

 Reserve 3/4 cup of the batter for the topping. Spread remaining batter into prepared baking pan. Sprinkle nuts and white chips over batter, and then drizzle with the caramel topping. Beat remaining egg and reserved batter in a medium-sized bowl until smooth. Spread carefully over the caramel topping.

Bake for 30-35 minutes or until center is set. Cool completely in pan on wire rack. To cut into bars, lift the foil from the pan and place the bars on a cutting board. Peel away the foil and then cut into bars.

Recipe from Nestle, via Franklin County Times

Blackberry Buttermilk Cake

This is a great recipe to use up a small amount of fresh berries that you may have on hand. I had about a cup of blackberries left from the ones that the owner of the ballet studio where I take class gave me. Most fruit desserts require a lot more than a cup so I was on the hunt for a recipe that used a small amount. I came across this cake and it was just perfect. I was in the mood to bake a cake anyway!

This cake’s batter is very easy to make, not much more complex than putting together a cake mix. Don’t skip the fresh lemon zest in the batter as it adds such a great flavor. Berries can be so fragile, too, but for this cake you just put the berries on top of the batter and the cake bakes up around them. I was thankful for that as my berries were on the ripe side and if I would have mixed them in it would have been a big blackberry mess. The cake baked beautifully and came out of the pan perfectly. I took it to work to have a nice morning coffee treat and it was really well received. It’s perfect with coffee or tea, and has just the right amount of sweet for a coffee cake.

Blackberry Buttermilk Cake

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

4 tablespoons butter, room temperature

2/3 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar, divided

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon lemon zest

1/2 cup buttermilk

2/3 cup blackberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour a 9-inch cake pan.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt and set aside.  In a large mixer bowl, beat butter and 2/3 cup sugar until pale and fluffy, about two minutes. Then beat in the lemon zest and the egg.

With the mixer on low, mix in the flour mixture in three batches, alternating with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the flour.

Spoon batter into the prepared cake pan, smoothing top. Scatter the berries evenly over top and sprinkle with remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the cake is golden. Allow to cool slightly before removing from the cake pan. Cool completely on a wire rack.

Recipe from Shop. Cook. Make.

Battenberg Cake

 

It’s my 4^th blogiversary! I wanted to make something to celebrate and I’ve always wanted to make a Battenberg Cake so I decided to challenge myself! Besides, the Battenberg cake has the 4 pieces of cake that form a checkerboard, so that is fitting for the 4^th anniversary of my blog. I found this recipe on BBC Good Food’s website and gave it a go.

For the Battenberg, you make two cakes, an almond cake and a vanilla cake tinted with pink food coloring. I’ve seen different variations where you bake the two cakes in the same pan, the batters divided with parchment paper. This recipe has you make 2 separate cakes; I chose to make them in the same pan so that I would have a better chance at cakes of equal sizes. Well, my pink cake was all domed and beautiful and the almond cake was kind of flat in the middle. They use the same method to mix so I don’t know why they were so different.

I used almonds with the skin for the ground almonds, so my almond cake didn’t have a super delicate texture. This cake is a little tricky to get all the pieces the same size. I had to do some trimming to get everything square, and it wasn’t perfectly square in the end. But that’s ok. It was my first try! I bought two packages of marzipan but you really only use about one total, so I have some marzipan left over to use another day. These cakes are really quite simple, and the different colors and the checkerboard pattern are more for show than for taste. Still, I was pretty happy with my cake and I look forward to all the recipes I will be trying in the coming years!

Battenberg Cake

6 ounces butter, room temperature

6 ounces sugar

5 ounces self-rising flour*

1.5 ounces ground almonds

½ teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs

½ teaspoon vanilla

¼ teaspoon almond extract

6 ounces butter, room temperature

6 ounces sugar

5 ounces self-rising flour

1.5 ounces ground almonds

½ teaspoon baking powder

3 eggs

½ teaspoon vanilla

Pink food color

1 cup apricot jam

Two 7 ounce packages marzipan

Powdered sugar

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with parchment and spray with cooking spray.

Make the almond cake: put the butter, sugar, flour, ground almonds, baking powder, eggs, vanilla and almond extract in a large mixer bowl. Beat until the mix comes together smoothly. Spread the batter in the pan and smooth the top. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes and then remove from the pan to a wire rack to finish cooling while you make the second cake.

Make the pink cake: reline the cake pan with parchment. Beat all the ingredients in a large mixer bowl until smooth. Spread in the prepared pan and bake for 25-30 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan and then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

To assemble, heat the jam until runny, then strain. Roughly measure the height of the cake, then cut 4 slices each the same width as the sponge height. Repeat with pink cake.

Take 2 almond slices and 2 pink slices and trim so they are all the same length. Roll out one marzipan piece on a surface lightly dusted with powdered sugar to just over 8 inches wide, then keep rolling lengthways until the marzipan is roughly ¼ inch thick. Brush the marzipan with apricot jam, then lay a pink and an almond slice side by side at one end of the marzipan, brushing jam in between to stick the cakes. Brush more jam on top of the cakes, then sandwich remaining 2 slices on top, alternating colors to give a checkerboard effect. Trim the marzipan to the length of the cakes.

Carefully lift up the marzipan and smooth over the cake with your hands, and crimp the marzipan to seal in the cake. Trim to make the ends neat. Assemble the second Battenberg with the remaining cake pieces.

Recipe from BBC Good Food

*I make my own self-rising flour by combining 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda, and ½ teaspoon salt.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Bars

I’ve said before that in the hot weather I don’t always want super heavy, decadent chocolate cookies. But sometimes you can have the best of both worlds and have chocolate that works in the warm weather. These cookies are just that: chocolate, mixed with pretzels and peanut butter, but in a no bake cookie.

No bake cookies have come a long way from the ones I used to make as a kid. Now you can make nice layered cookies that you wouldn’t necessarily know are no bake. That’s fine by me! Nanaimo Bars (these and these) are no bake and those are some of my favorites. I though these sounded interesting as they used crushed pretzels as the main base of the cookie. So you get the richness of the peanut butter and the saltiness of the pretzels.

These come together quickly. I always measure the peanut butter by weight. I think using a measuring cup with peanut butter is just too much trouble. Make sure that you let the bars cool completely before cutting them. I found that they just didn’t get cool enough in my warm summer kitchen so I refrigerated them before cutting. This recipe doesn’t make that many, which is probably a good thing as they have that wonderful addictive quality that keeps you going back for more and more!

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Bars

6 tablespoons butter, melted

3/4 cup (7 ounces) peanut butter

1 1/2 cups pretzel crumbs, fine

1/2 cup powdered sugar

3/4 cup chocolate chips

2 tablespoons peanut butter

Line an 8” × 8” pan with foil. Spray with baking spray.

Melt the butter in the microwave or in a small saucepan on the stove; pour the melted butter into a medium bowl. Stir in the peanut butter, pretzel crumbs, and powdered sugar. Spread evenly into the prepared pan and refrigerate at least 10 minutes.

To make the topping, combine the chocolate chips and peanut butter and microwave, stirring frequently, until melted and smooth. Spread evenly over the peanut butter/pretzel layer and refrigerate at least one hour. Remove the foil from the pan and cut the cookies into squares.

Recipe from Bakerlady

Chai Tea Bread

For this round of the recipe swap I was assigned the blog Peace, Love, and French Fries and I got to choose the recipe to make. Tough choice since she has so many good recipes! Despite the fact that the Seattle area has recently had some of the hottest days of the summer, I still want to bake! We were having guests over and I didn’t have any freshly baked treats in the house. I have a reputation to maintain and felt compelled to bake something. I knew I had a container of chai tea concentrate in the cupboard, so I knew this was exactly what I wanted to bake. Besides, baking with spices makes the house smell so good and what could be more inviting?

There are many varieties of chai tea out on the market, plus it isn’t too hard to make your own. This recipe uses liquid chai tea concentrate. I used the Oregon Chai brand, which I like a lot. This recipe doesn’t use very much of the concentrate so I will be making a couple of other recipes with what I have left. The Oregon Chai website has some great looking recipes, so I will be exploring their site for ideas.

I was a little unsure of this bread in that the method for making the batter is a little different than how you traditionally make quick breads. Also, once I added the milk and chai concentrate, the mixture looked quite curdled! But it worked out just fine so I shouldn’t have worried. The texture of the bread is perfect and the flavors are just divine! This was probably the best quick bread I have ever had, and I can’t wait to make it again. (I did, in fact, make it a second time to take to work. It’s that great!)

Chai Tea Bread

½ cup butter, softened

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla

1/2 cup chai tea concentrate

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 cups flour

2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup powdered sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla

1-1/2 tablespoons chai concentrate

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Spray a 9” x 5” loaf pan with cooking spray. 

In a large mixer bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.  Beat in the eggs, 1/2 cup chai tea concentrate, milk, 1 tablespoon vanilla, and spices at low speed, scraping down sides if necessary.  The mixture may look curdled; don’t worry.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Gradually add the flour mixture to the chai mixture, stir until just moistened.

Pour batter into prepared pan.  Bake 50 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.  Cool 10 minutes in pan before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. 

Make the icing: in a small bowl, whisk together the powdered sugar, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and 1 1/2 tablespoon chai tea concentrate, stirring until combined and of a spreadable consistency. (Add some milk if you need to thin the icing.) Drizzle the icing over the cooled bread.  Cool completely before slicing. 

Recipe from Peace, Love, and French Fries