Black Forest Cookies

Black Forest Cookies

1 cup margarine
1 box chocolate instant pudding mix
1 egg
2 cups flour

1/4 cup white sugar

approx 66 maraschino cherries

1/2 cup chocolate chips
3 tbsp margarine

Preheat oven to 325 F. Beat softened margarine and pudding powder together. Add egg and beat well. Add flour slowly, beating between additions. Beat until no dry flour remains. Roll into 1 inch balls. Roll each ball in a sugar. Place each on a cookie sheet and dent. Bake for 5 minutes, remove from oven and press the dent in again. Bake
for another 10 minutes. When they have cooled slightly put a cherry in the center of each dent. Heat chocolate chips with margarine, until melted. I like to do this in the microwave. Drizzle melted chocolate on the top of each cookie. If you want to do this to look really fancy, put the chocolate in a icing piping bag with a small circular tip attached.

Calzones!

I love pizza. I even quite enjoy pizza pops even with all the chemicals. And when I found a mold that could be used to make home-made pizza pops I was thrilled!

So this was another Williams-Sonoma find, its a Calzone Maker!
Start with your favourite pizza dough recipe. My family quite likes this one that came with our bread machine.

1 cup water (warm if your machine doesn't have a pre-warming cycle)
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 3/4 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp yeast

Put all the ingredients in the bread machine in the order they are listed in. Set to 'Dough' setting. Press start.

When your recipe is done use the calzone maker as a guide to cut a circle of dough about 1/2 inch wider around that the base of the mold.

Place the circle of dough in the mold and add 1/3-1/2 of a cup of your favourite pizza filling. Cheese, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, vegetables, whatever you like! Don't forget to mix in the sauce.


Then, very carefully close the two sides of the mold together. Press hard to seal.


Remove the calzone, brush the top with melted butter or oil. Sprinkle with parmesean cheese. Fresh grated or the shaky stuff from the can.

Bake at 500 F for 10-12 minutes. Its helpful to label who's Calzones are whose if you are making them for multiple people.
Enjoy your tasty tasty homemade calzone! You could even probably make a few extras and freeze them for later, if they don't get eaten.

Mini Cheesecakes!

I love cheesecake! They are fairly tricky to bake because they tend to crack, they are very rich and not something you make on a regular basis. But a few months ago I discovered this recipe for mini cheesecakes and I was really excited to try it out.

Cheesecake

Its super simple, so long as you can count to 2. :)

2 bricks of cream cheese (softened)
2/3 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla

Crust
This is my new favourite cheesecake crust recipe, courtesy of Bakerella.

3/4 cup Biscoff* cookie crumbs (or regular graham cracker crumbs)
3 tbsp melted butter

Topping
Your favourite fruit
Your favourite corresponding jam or syrup

* Biscoff cookies make an AMAZING cheesecake crust. But they are a little hard to find in Canada, although I've discovered that London Drugs stocks them but I haven't found anywhere else that does. If you can't find them, just use graham cracker crumbs or chocolate cookie crumbs, or whichever kind of cookie crumbs you like.

Prep: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line prepare about 18 muffin cups.
Crust: Take your cookies and put them in a food processor. Run until the cookies have become fine cookie crumbs. Add melted butter. Stir until all the cookie crumbs are well coated. Press crumb mixture into bottom of muffin cups.
Cheesecake: Beat cream cheese on its own until it looks whipped. Add sugar, beat some more. Add eggs and vanilla beat, until smooth. Spoon batter into muffin cups until each cup is almost full. Bake for about 15-20 minutes.
Topping: When cheesecake has cooled microwave the jam just a little so that it is just a little more liquid-y. Then top each cheesecake with fruit and spoon jam over top.

I love, love, love this recipe. It makes the perfect size of cheesecakes for a dessert. Also, it looks really elegant, and if you serve them at a party or something people will think you spent a lot of time on them. :) In fact, they are so elegant, that a few weeks after I tried the recipe for the first time, I ended up making over 100 of them for a semi-formal Christmas banquet.Unfortunately, I was a little busy helping run the banquet, so I didn't manage to get a really good picture of all of the mini-cheesecakes. But it was pretty crazy. Also, note the cute little Christmas-y muffin cups, I really loved those.

One of the other reasons I love this recipe so much is because its so flexible. You can experiment with toppings (for the banquet, one of the toppings was pecans and caramel sauce, those ones disappeared pretty fast) or with crusts (like chocolate crumbs!) or you could even try playing with the filling, such as adding chocolate or raspberry sauce.

Homemade Turtles

Everyone loves Turtles... you know those chocolate-y caramel-y pecan-y treats that come in a flat box at Christmas. And you know what's better than the turtles from the store? Turtles made at home of course!

And it helps that they're not too hard to make!

So first you unwrap a whole ton of caramels and put them in a bowl with some milk.
Then you microwave them in 30s-1min intervals stirring in between until they are all melty
Then you throw in a few handfuls of pecans
Then spoon the pecan caramel goo onto a PARCHMENT PAPER lined cookie sheet (not waxed paper, I discovered that using wax paper was a very bad idea)
Then freeze the carmel blobs for an hour or more. While you're doing this microwave some chocolate according to package directions. Finally, take the caramels out of the fridge and drop them in the chocolate.
Cover them in chocolate. If they start to get too soft put the caramels back in the refrigerator. Drop the chocolate covered caramels onto another parchment paper covered cookie sheet and put them back in the freezer.
A few hours later you will have the most amazing homemade turtles, just be sure to let them thaw a bit before you bite in. :)

Colourful Sugar Cookies!

These photos are pretty old... as in from Halloween... which was three months ago-ish. But they are just so fun I had to post them!
We were having a chili dinner for 'All Hollow's Eve' with the church group on campus. So we were expecting a lot of people. And so we made a lot of cookies...
I really mean a lot of cookies. Mostly sugar cookies, and a few shortbread ones.
Then a bunch of friends and I decorated them...
It was a lot of fun and I wish I'd managed to take a picture of every decorated cookie because no two were the same!
It was great, and it gave me a chance to use some of the nearly three dozen cookie cutters I bought in Seattle in October. And it also made me not want to make rolled cookies again for a good long while...

Zambia, Paper Bag Princess and Mario Cakes

So I haven't posted in several months... oops. I was super busy this past semester with school and even when I got a chance to bake I didn't have time to write up a post, and half the time I forgot to even take pictures.

But I'm back at work now so I now have time to both bake and post!

I'm going to start with a few of the cakes I made over the past few months. No new recipes, just my usual standbys.

I made this one just last night, for some friends who are off to Zambia to do their final nursing practicums.

This was one of the ones where the reaction was the best part. I was already super happy with how it turned out and then when I saw how the girls reacted to it, it really made this one of my favourite cakes I've ever made.

This next one I can't take credit for really, my brother's girlfriend did pretty much all of the work on it but I just had to show it.
We made it for a girl who's favourite colour is grey and who was going as the paper bag princess for halloween. And, as an added bonus, inside was a rainbow cake!

And finally, I made this one for my cousin, and I know I have more photos of it but I can't figure out which camera they were on. So I'll probably write another post for it when I find them later.
I was using a new icing recipe which didn't turn out to be very good for piping and decorating, so I did a last minute grocery store run and improvised. Jelly Bellies are a little different to work with than icing, but I'm still happy with how it turned out.

Pinwheel Cookies

I've made these twice now and I'd have to say they are really not my favourite to make. There's a lot of rolling out and chilling and rolling out again. It takes a long time, too long in my opinion.

The recipe calls for them to be made into corners which is how I made them the first time. The second time, however they were for a fundraiser at my dad's work and so I dyed them the colours of the fundraising organization.

1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1 egg

3 cups flour
1/4 tsp salt

Optional:
1/3 cup Irish cream flavoured coffee whitener (I didn't add this)
1 tbsp cocoa

Beat butter and icing sugar. Stir in egg. Then add in 1 cup of flour and the salt. Mix well. Mix in the second cup of flour until is is completely incorporated, then add the final cup of flour. Mix in the rest of the flour well.

Divide dough into two or more sections. (I'm going to just use 2 for an example but extras are easy to add in) If desired, mix coffee whitener and/or cocoa into one portion. Mix until evenly coloured. Shape each portion into a log, wrap in plastic and chill for 2 hours or so. Roll out between two sheets of wax paper until it is about a 4x24 inch rectangle. Do this for each portion of dough. Then stack the sheets of dough on top of each other. Roll the stack of dough-sheets together. Roll the dough from the short end (if you're making corners, if making circles, roll from the long end) like a jelly roll. Wrap in wax paper or plastic wrap and chill for 6 more hours or overnight. Cut roll into 1/4 inch slices. Then, if you like, cut each slice into quarters. Bake at 350 for about 10 minutes.

If you wish you can make a chocolate coating to dip the quarters in.

Melt 1 cup milk chocolate chips in the microwave (or however you prefer). Toast some almonds and/or coconut. Dip the rounded edge of the cookies in the chocolate and then in the nut mixture.