RECIPE: Slutty Brownies = the perfect storm of desserts!

I want to tell you about the best brownies in the whole wide world.

Brownies + Oreos + chocolate chip cookies = wheeeeee sugar WHEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

I think I have vertigo.

Disclaimer: This isn't my recipe. In fact, let me start by explaining how I create the recipes I post on here. I have no cooking skills, so I can't just "throw a few things together" in the kitchen because the outcome will usually be surprising in a really bad way. So instead, I start by Googling whatever I feel like eating ("mexican pork slow cooker") and then skim a bunch of recipes to find ingredients I recognize ("corn!"). There's usually a bit of follow-up Googling ("substitute for dill?" or "can you mix basil and cilantro?") and eventually, I come up with a list of ingredients that will, most likely, taste okay when put together. My husband gets the lucky job of lab-testing the meals ("Welcome home, honey, I put jelly in the meatloaf!") and then the ones that don't suck (in my final and overriding opinion) wind up on here.

When three or four days go by without a recipe, you should really feel bad for my husband. Send him a lasagna or something.

But when I stumbled across this recipe, I knew it was solid gold. I ran out to the store at 10:00 at night to get the ingredients. I didn't need to tweak, substitute, or simplify anything. So, I can't lay any claim to this recipe -- all I can do is bow down to The Londoner for sharing her stroke of culinary genius with the interwebs. I think she's my new girl crush, but that could just be the sugar high talking.

She calls them Slutty Brownies -- if that term makes you cringe, try to look past it, because these brownies will make you lose your moral compass.

Click here for the full recipe from The Londoner.

Short version: Line the bottom of a greased 9x13 baking pan with cookie dough batter (I used Betty Crocker bagged mix and added an extra Tbsp of water and an extra Tbsp of applesauce to the batter, like the recipe suggests). Then a layer of Oreos. Then pour brownie batter over that, and cook at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. It comes out looking like this:

Unbutton your pants because you're going to want to eat, like, five.

Breast cancer awareness never tasted so good!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, and I'm kind of a breast cancer bandwagoneer this year -- my sister, always the trendy one, was diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of October. She's doing well (and rocked a tiara in pre-op and recovery) and her "cancer afterparty" gave me an excuse to go buck-wild baking pink-themed cupcakes.

Don't worry, I resisted the urge to make boob-themed cupcakes.

The easy-peasy rating on these is through the roof, by the way. I've never attempted to bake a cupcake from scratch, and I wasn't about to experiment at a time like this -- the woman just got out of surgery and deserves nothing less than the expertise of Ms. Betty Crocker! So you can bake all of these with a few supplies from Target.

By the way, I gave my hubby a batch to sell at a BCA bake sale, and they sold like hotcakes. Wait, I guess it's a bad analogy to compare one baked good to another. They sold like SUPER DELICIOUS CUPCAKES!

CUPCAKE #1: Yellow cake mix, vanilla icing with a few drops of red food coloring, and pink sugar sprinkles.

Sidenote, I applied the icing in a spiral pattern using these nifty cupcake decorators my mom found at Christmas Tree Shop. Getting the icing into the plastic baggie is a two-man job, or a really messy one-man job. But several people asked if I made the icing from scratch, and I give all the credit to the fancy application :) 

CUPCAKE #2: LEMONADE CUPCAKES! Lemon cake mix, vanilla icing with a few drops of yellow food coloring, and pink sugar sprinkles mixed with a dash of Kool-Aid pink lemonade powder mix. When I say a dash, I mean a dash. Kool-Aid mix is potent stuff! I only used a pinch and it still gave the icing a Sour-Patch-Kid quality. 

Speaking of potent, those pink sugar sprinkles left their mark...

CUPCAKE #3: White cake mix with a few drops of red food coloring in the batter, white icing, pink sprinkles. These were the biggest hit of the three. Not gonna lie -- I had two for breakfast the next morning. 

One last note, I use Reynolds foil cupcake liners and I DON'T put them in cupcake tins -- I drop them right on a cookie sheet. I always cook for the shortest amount of time listed on the box for cupcakes -- they finish cooking a little while they're cooling on the tray.

P.S. If you want to contribute to breast cancer awareness without spending a penny, click here -- every click goes towards giving mammograms to women in need. (Fees from the site's advertisers pay for the mammograms.) It's an easy way to contribute and for our family, regular mammograms kept crappy news from being really, really, totally super-crappy news. So, click!

NOT-SO-EASY RECIPE: Pumpkin Snickerdoodle Cookies

Okay, I have to admit -- for all my shortcut-taking in the kitchen, one place I like to overachieve is the cookie department. I love cookies. Nom nom nom cookies. I don't care if it takes me three hours to bake, because the reward (face full of cookie) is worth it.

On the flip side, I hate being disappointed by cookie recipes. Which is what I've been with every pumpkin cookie recipe to date. And because my obsession with cookies is rivaled by my obsession with pumpkin, I have tried a lot of cookie recipes in an attempt to unite these two amazing tastes in my belly.

But...I'VE FOUND A RECIPE I LIKE!

This is adapted from Annie's Eats -- very, very closely adapted. Basically, all I did differently was to skip the salt and go a little light on the flour.

You'll need...

FOR THE COOKIES:

• 3 3/4 cups of flour (I went a little light on each cup)
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 2 sticks of unsalted butter, softened (NOT melted!)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar (light's okay too; I just prefer dark)
• 3/4 cup pumpkin puree
• 1 egg
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

FOR THE COATING:

• 1/2 cup granulated white sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon (I went heavy because I LOVE cinnamon)
• 1/2 tsp ginger
• a shake or two of allspice

Hold on one sec...I just have to take a quick bite of the pumpkin...

...okay. Yum. Seriously, sprinkle a little brown sugar on it and it's like a tiny pumpkin pie!

Anyway.

Mix the cookie ingredients together, starting with the dry stuff, then adding the wet stuff. Use a hand mixer on the lowest setting or else you'll get powdered George Washington-style by flour. It's nearly impossible to mix. Your mixer will make sad machine sounds, and the batter will crawl up the little blade thingies, and you'll have to scrape it off, and then it'll just happen again. Stick with it!

Eff you, batter.

Once the batter is mixed, stir the ingredients for the coating in a small bowl. Roll the batter into 1" to 1 1/2" balls, then dip the balls* in the coating and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet.

To make sure they cook evenly, you'll want to smush them a little bit. In lieu of getting sticky hands, run a glass under some cold water, then dip it in the coating.

Now use it to smush the cookies. Ta-da! Love this trick -- I think I like this Annie girl.

Now bake the cookies at 350 degrees for 12 minutes. 

Perfection. Not too cakey, not too soft or mushy, not too buttery, just perfect cookie consistency. I'm bringing these to my family reunion tomorrow, so my short-term goal is to not eat the entire batch before we get there. My long-term goal is to not eat the entire batch while we're there, even if it's fair game once it hits the dessert table.

It took me longer to write this recipe than it usually takes me to prep an entire dinner, but if you ever have an hour of free time -- today's serendipity was a long nap from my two-year-old and an excessively cooperative mood from my one-year-old -- these cookies are worth the trouble.

*LOL.

EASY PEASY RECIPE: Zucchini Bread

I've never tried to grow zucchini, but it must be pretty easy because people are always complaining that they have more zucchini than they know what to do with. And I'm always like, "Send it my way! I know exactly what to do with zucchini!"

(I like to cook with it. You knew that's what I meant, right?)

But as much as I love to throw zucchini into pasta, stir-fry, wraps, and soups...I've never made zucchini bread. And I love zucchini bread! But I'm always intimidated by the idea of making bread in general.

After some hunting around, I found a recipe that doesn't call for yeast (which terrifies me) and doesn't require a cup of vegetable oil (which terrifies my bathroom scale) and uses ingredients I already had in my cabinets (woohoo!). The sad thing is, it was from a site called Simply Recipes, but I simplified it even more. Here's my extra-super-duper simple adapted version:

You'll need:

• 2 eggs
• 1 1/3 c. sugar
• 2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 3 c. shredded zucchini
• 2 tsp. baking soda
• 3 c. flour
• 1/2 tsp. nutmeg
• 2 tsp. cinnamon
• 2/3 c. melted butter*

Mix it all together. I added the ingredients in the order listed above. Grease a 5x9-ish bread pan, pour in half the mixture, and bake at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes. (Stick a toothpick in it after 40 minutes to see if it need to stay in a little longer.) That's it. Hubby and I basically polished off the first loaf within about 20 minutes, then gave the second loaf to our awesome neighbor 1) to thank him for loaning us his truck and 2) to avoiding eating two loaves of zucchini bread in an hour.

Enjoy!

* Cover the butter with a paper towel or you'll have a butter volcano in the microwave. Trust me.

DESSERT RECIPE: Braided Apple Crisp Pastry

First, about the title of this post: I concocted this recipe and then realized I didn't know what it would actually be called in bakery-land. Is it a turnover? A streusel? It's not a tart, right? (Or is it tarte?) So I decided to play it safe and go with pastry. That's my fancy kitchen jargon.

Anyway. I got inspired by this blog post on Eat Live Run, but needed to make a few adaptations to fit my own cooking philosophy.

Namely: Needs more sugar. Needs fewer steps.

So in lieu of baking my own bread, I picked up some Pillsbury refrigerated pie crusts (the rolled-up kind) and used a simplified version of my mom's apple crisp recipe as the filling. This recipe makes two braids.

FILLING:

• 5 apples, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup flour
• heaping spoonful of margarine or butter, melted
• 1/2 t. cinnamon
• 1/2 t. nutmeg

Mix everything together. Put a little bit of flour on the bottom of a baking sheet, lay the pie crust flat, and -- leaving the center intact -- cut five diagonal slits on either side, like you're drawing a fugly Christmas tree, or the Element skateboard logo. Scoop half the mixture into the center.

With the diagonals facing down and away from the center, start braiding your dough like you're lacing up a corset.(In the photo below, the starting point was the lower-right part.)

Put it in the oven on 375 degrees for about 15-20 minutes. Depends on your oven. Watch for the edges to turn slightly golden.

Last, you'll need to make a glaze to put on top.

GLAZE:

• 3/4 cup confectioner's sugar
• 1 T. milk
• 1/4 t. vanilla

Stir it up and pour it all over the braid while it's still warm. This whole recipe honestly took me about 10-15 minutes and two bowls to prepare. Not going to lie, I ate the "first draft" pretty much entirely by myself, and then took the second braid to a baby shower, where everyone polished it off. It's delish.