Duble Chocolate Cookies

Hello Everyone! This weekend I really wanted to bake something but I'm in the middle of exams week now so I didn't have much time. First I decided to bake chocolate chip cookies since they are easy, fast and delicious! But then I found some white chocolate in our kitchen and I decided to do half milk chocolate and half white chocolate. They turned out to be much better than the original ones. Here's the recipe that I used if you ever want to try them!
Chewy Double Chocolate Chip Cookies


Preheat oven to 375ºF
Yield: 24 small cookies
Ingredients:
1/3 Cup shortening
1/2 Cup brown sugar
1/4 Cup white sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 egg (beaten)
1 Cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 Cup dark or milk chocolate chips
1/2 Cup white chocolate chips

Directions:
1.In a large bowl cream shortening and brown sugar.
2.Beat egg in a small bowl.
3.Add white sugar, egg, and vanila; mix well.
4.In a separate large bowl combine four, baking soda, and salt.
5.Add the dry ingredients to the sugar mixture in 3 additions, mixing well after each addition.
6.Stir in chocolate chips.
7.Using a medium ice cream scoop, drop leveled scoops onto un-greased large baking sheet, the cookies must be at least 4cm apart.
8.Bake for 6-8 minutes, watching closely. Usually I'll leave them a little bit longer since my oven goes a little bit slowly but it depends on how your oven works.
Once they're done, let them cool down for 10 minutes and then they'll be ready to eat!

Christmas Gifts!

It's finally Christmas, it came before I knew it! For the past 2 years, I have learned a lot about baking and it has become one of my favourite things to do so all I wanted for this Christmas is a KitchenAid mixer so I can bake more and faster. I also wanted to get a couple squeeze bottles for the icing (so it looks neater than until now :))
And...... I GOT THEM!! I am soo exited to start using them!!
Here it is.......

Christmas Baking

Merry Christmas to everyone! This Christmas holidays, my family and I went back to Spain to visit our family just like we do each year. We had lots of fun and we spent most of our time with our grandparents and cousins since we had two new baby cousins that we hadn't met yet. For Christmas, we made sugar cookies with Christmas shapes and we decorated them with royal icing of different colours. We all worked together on them; as you will see on the pictures, my grandma, dad, sister, and even cousins helped us and we had a lot of fun! :)

This is the sugar cookie recipe that I used:

Vanilla-Almond Sugar Cookies(taken from Bake at 350)

3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
 2 sticks butter, cold
 1 egg
 3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp pure almond extract
(you can use any extract that you have or like since it is what gives the cookies its own taste)

Preheat oven to 350.

Combine the flour and baking powder, set aside. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg and extracts and mix. Gradually add the flour mixture and beat just until combined, scraping down the bowl, especially the bottom.

The dough will be crumbly, so knead it together with your hands as you scoop it out of the bowl for rolling. 

Roll onto a floured surface and cut into shapes. Place on parchment lined baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes. Let sit a few minutes on the sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.
This is how the finished product looked(it is kind of messy because I couldn't bring the squeeze bottles in my bags all the way to Spain so we had to use a spoon):

The Icing recipe that I used is from "I am Baker" blog and all you have to do is mix 1 cup of powdered sugar with 1 tablespoon of milk and one tablespoon of corn syrup in a bowl until it gets to the consistency that you need. Usually i'll start with 1 tablespoon of milk and i'll add more later since it is easier to add more milk than to add more sugar.
I hope you like them!

Brownies

This year I chose Foods and Nutrition as an optional class and we usually learn stuff during the week and then we cook something on Fridays. Also, once every two or three weeks we have a free cook day where we get to choose what we want to cook. This week we had a free cook day and we decided to make brownies. Personally I prefer to do everything myself and not use pre-made mixes where everything is done for you because I love to bake and cook and I don't have that much fun with pre-made mixes, but we don't have a lot of time in the classroom so we used a Brownie mix. All we did is preheat the oven to 350 F and stir together the brownie mix, one egg, 1/4 C of water and 1/3 C of milk. Then we placed it in a square or round pan and we put it in the oven for 20-25 minutes. This recipe says 15-20 minutes but ours wasn't done in that time. I hope you enjoy it! :)

Blueberry Muffins

So today my sister had the Enrollment Ceremony for the Girl Guides of Canada and we had to bring a treat to share so we decided to make some muffins. We didn't have much time so we used a blueberry muffin mix from the grocery store. You only have to mix 3 cups of the blueberry muffin mix with 1 cup of milk and 2 eggs. Then you place them in the oven at 200 degrees C or 400 degrees F for 20 minutes and you get these delicious muffins!