Vegan Mocha Stripes

Well that’s it kids, summer’s over! We had sunshine for a whole week and now it’s raining. Again. Here’s hoping the rain doesn’t last as long this time! I hope everyone managed to at least enjoy the sun while it lasted and didn’t get horrifically burnt like me! Having to aftersun eight times a day even when at work is not fun. I have quite a few summer recipes I really want to test so I’m hoping August will put me in the mood as today I really wasn’t feeling it so I made these cookies instead.

This is another recipe taken from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by Kris Holechek which you’ll know from reading my other vegan posts I’m blown away by! All the recipes are so accessible and if you don’t want to go out of your way to find what I consider to be unusual ingredients like flaxseeds or different oils, you don’t have to! Even if you’re not vegan, these recipes are so delicious it would be silly to disregard them purely for that. Also, eggs are often the most expensive part of baking so recipes that don’t require them must be a good thing!

Whenever I’ve made anything vegan I don’t generally tell people its vegan (unless they are actually vegan) until they’ve eaten it as I feel it can often colour their judgement. When I tell them the reaction I get is always ‘Wow, I had no idea!’ which I always find to be a slightly crazy reaction because why should the absence of dairy mean that its going to taste weird or completely different to a non vegan cookie?! But anyway, this recipe is another classic cookie recipe resulting in cookies that are almost crunchy round the edges and gooey/chewy on the inside with the added crispness of the drizzled chocolate on top, mouth-watering!

They are very simple, take minimal time in the oven and taste delicious! The dark chocolate balances the coffee flavour much more than milk chocolate would. However, if you are not a coffee fan then I’d think twice about putting 4 tbsps of coffee in as it is quite a strong flavour but as I’m a big coffee fan I love them and have eaten two already…

Here is the recipe:

2 cups flour

1tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

4 tbsp instant coffee

¼ cup warm milk

¾ cup margarine

1 ½ cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

½ cup chocolate chips melted (I used 50g chocolate)

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Line baking sheets with parchment paper

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt. In a small bowl, dissolve coffee in warm milk. In a large bowl, cream together margarine and sugar. Add vanilla and coffee mixture. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in batches until well mixed

Drop tablespoon-sized balls onto a baking sheet, about 1 inch apart. Bake for 10 minutes until the cookies spread and the edges are set. If you are baking more than one sheet at a time, rotate the sheets halfway through the baking time. Let cookies cool for 5 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to a cooling rack

Once the cookies are cool, carefully spoon melted chocolate into a sandwich bag. Make a small snip off one of the bottom corners of the bag to create a very small opening. Pipe chocolate onto cookies in thin stripes, zigzagging across all the cookies until the chocolate is used up. Store cooled cookies in an airtight container at room temperature


And don't forget to Lick Your Spoon!

Smores Cookies

WOW! These are so good!! I’ve been wanting to make these since I first started research recipes for my blog but they needed Graham Crackers which aren’t easily available over here. The closest thing is apparently digestives but they are nothing like them. However, my lovely friend Louise is currently studying at Yale (amazing!) and she kindly brought me some on her recent visit home! So here we go, Smores Cookies. De-lish!

I found the recipe on Obsessed with Baking’s blog who found it from someone else but regardless, they are very American and very tasty! The cookie dough is some of the most delicious I’ve ever tasted. To give you a hint as to just how tasty, the recipe is supposed to make 36. I made 29. I’ve also been told that the “sensation of marshmallow and tasty chocolate in and on a melt in your mouth cookie” are more than anyone could ask for. Now that, if you ask me, is praise indeed for this amazing cookie.

As with another great cookie recipe I made, this requires chilling time for the dough to become more solid so make sure you leave yourself plenty of time! The oven part is pretty short but make sure you have your chocolate cut and mallows ready to go in as quick as possible! Don’t push the mallows in too far or else they’ll make a hole in the cookie as they aren’t strong enough to hold it together. The original recipe uses Hershey’s chocolate but I just cut up some of the thin dairy milk bars. If the chocolate you use is quite thick it won’t melt very well.

Overall, I think these are great, not too sweet but deliciously indulgent at the same time. Definitely one to be made again and certainly one you should try if you can get hold of some Graham Crackers!!

Raspberry Cupcakes with White Chocolate Frosting

So my friend Lisa lent me her Primrose Bakery cupcake book and when flicking through this recipe caught my eye. I absolutely love the raspberry-white chocolate combo so this was obviously perfect for me! All aspects of the recipe are quite different to my own standard recipes for both cupcakes and icing so it was somewhat of an experiment to see how these methods changed the final result as well as the taste test!

The first thing that struck me about this recipe was that it used both self-raising and plain flour which I have never seen before in a cake recipe like this. It also involved a lot more steps than my all in one method so it was definitely a lot more time consuming! The original recipe says to cut a hole in the centre of the cupcake once its cool and fill it with jam but to add an extra element of experimentation I put a whole raspberry into the centre of half of them instead to see what that turned out like.

Turns out, I totally do not like this recipe! The cupcakes are much denser than I personally like and somehow seem to wet as the cases seem to peel themselves off after a day… The frosting however was delicious and I will be using that again! I also really like the idea of the mixture having jam in it to give it that extra raspberry flavour so I think I will try adding it to my own cupcake recipe next time and see how that goes.

While this was definitely not the best recipe I’ve ever followed (or maybe it was me who did it all wrong) I have at least learnt that when I want to experiment in future, just change one thing at a time instead of ending up with a disaster! You have to admit, they do look good though!

Mocha Pecan Brownies

Happy Birthday Dad! I made these delicious brownies for my Dad’s birthday as he loves chocolate, coffee and nuts! Normally I buy him chocolate covered brazil nuts so I’m sure this was a nice change for him. This is a Waitrose recipe I found in store featuring Starbucks VIA. Now I love Starbucks, love everything in there with my all time favourite being their peach and raspberry muffin, so obviously this recipe appeals to me too and my hands still smell like coffee, yum!

For this recipe you have to prepare three elements separately before bringing them all together. First off is melting the chocolate and the butter together so you have time for it to cool while doing the other elements. Personally I prefer melting it in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water so you can keep and eye on the mixture the whole time but unfortunately I broke my big glass bowl so I had to use the microwave in this instance.

Next mix all the dry ingredients together and put to one side. Finally, whisk the eggs and sugar with an electric mixer for ages! Basically until it’s grown in size and is thick and mousse like. The same technique as used to make Death by Chocolate. Then you add the chocolate, followed by the flour mixture and then the pecans and then you’re ready to bake! After reading the intro to my vegan baking book, it says to bake brownies in a glass dish to stop the outside getting too cooked. Don’t ask me how but if you can, use a glass dish just in case!

Personally I don’t really like pecans but when smothered in chocolatey coffee brownie goodness, it’s hard to remember why! Amazing brownies and I’ll definitely be making these again, maybe with white chocolate chunks instead of pecans next time…

Present Birthday Cake

So those of you who know me know that it was my birthday about 3 weeks ago and I’ve finally got around to posting about the cake I made for my birthday! After seeing some cakes online that were decorated to look like presents I’ve been dying to make one so my birthday was obviously the perfect opportunity. My lovely friends gave me some Lakeland vouchers for my birthday and so I used some of them to buy this great square tin with moveable sides so you can make it any size square/rectangle you like, pretty good huh?

While I may have splashed out on a tin, I did not buy myself any icing as I had some odds and ends in my baking cupboard so I used them up. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough white to cover the whole cake so it’s very thin and patchy so ignore that in the pictures but the main thing I wanted to do was the bow on top. I watched a quick online tutorial and found out that it’s quite straightforward and you get a great result with a simple method. This is the bit that I’m most pleased with and as it was my first attempt, it can only get better!

The cake itself was just a plain Victoria Sponge mix using 6 eggs in total which made an 8in square cake. I also bought a cake leveller which I used to slice my block of cake in half to put jam in the middle and also to level off the top slightly so that it wasn’t so domed. The cake took a lot longer in the oven than anticipated so unfortunately the edges got a little dry so I’ll have to work to improve that next time but I was very pleased with my first present cake.

My work with regal ice and sugar paste is definitely improving through practice and I’m starting to love celebration cakes more and more. The next one you’ll see here will be a champagne cake which a lovely lady at work has asked me to make for her husband’s 50t birthday. Eek!

Chocolate Peppermint Cupcakes

The mint chocolate combination has always been a classic pairing of flavours and one that is definitely popular in our household! This little combo is one I’ve been meaning to try for a while but just have too many on my list of things I’m dying to make. Hopefully one day you will see them all up on here. I am very fond of making cupcakes as the decoration and icing of them is fun! Plus the making of the cupcakes has become almost second nature so for me it’s all about the experimentation and presentation.

For these cupcakes I used my basic chocolate cupcake recipe which is the same as the one I used for my Chocolate Orange Cupcakes but with out the orange of course! I enjoy the speed of this recipe as once you've put all the ingredients in the bowl and mixed them you’re done! This mixture makes 16 cupcakes in standard sizes of 12 if you’re using slightly bigger than standard cupcake size like I did here.

I again, used my standard buttercream icing recipe for these cakes. I added a few teaspoons of peppermint flavouring to the mixture and found the more I added the more it affected the consistency meaning I needed to add more icing sugar to make in ‘pipe-able’ again. The flavouring I used wasn’t as minty as I would have perhaps liked it to be so I might look around for a better quality flavouring to use next time! I added a couple of drops of green food colouring to the mixture to make it look pepperminty.

While my cupcakes were cooling I melted some chocolate and put it in a piping bag and made some chocolate shapes to use as decorations. Simply pipe your desired shapes onto a tray lined with greaseproof paper and put in the fridge to set hard. Then all you need to do is use a small palette knife to remove them from the paper and voila! Your own handmade chocolate decorations. Delicious!