Recipes of the week

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls

From Joy the Baker

My first taste of cookie dough was in Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream, and ever since then, I've been hooked. Most of the time they taste delicious, albeit artificial, (like Kit Kat Cookie Dough) and sometimes I can't get over the rawness of it. When I tried Baskin Robbins' chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in Sydney, it had a really eggy taste to it that put me off. Still, I like the sound of cookie dough and any recipe with it always catches my eye.

Nutty White Chocolate Blondies

From Chow

In five words: big chunks of white chocolate.

Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins

From Jamie Cooks It Up

What attracted me to this recipe was the use of mayonnaise to make these sweet muffins. I've heard of zucchini, chili and bacon used in chocolate recipes, but not mayonnaise. Apparently the mayonnaise gives the muffins a moist texture. The recipe even says you can substitute mayonnaise for salad dressing if you don't have a tub of mayo handy. 

Banana Caramel Cupcakes

From Bakers Royale

Continuing with bananas, these cupcakes look and sound absolutely delicious. There are a number of ingredients involved but these are readily available in your pantry (with the exception of heavy cream for the filling). This recipe seems similar to the banana cupcakes Natalie and I baked that were meant to be accompanied with a toffee icing. But this one is a lot harder to assemble, but I would presume to be a lot tastier. 

David Leibovitz's Chocolate Chip Cookies

From Serious Eats

Chocolate chip cookies so famous it needs an equally famous chef's name in front of it. But I don't know who David Leibovitz is (although his name sounds familiar). I may have heard of him from watching Top Chef or this recipe has been circling around the food blogosphere. I think it's the latter. Everyday a recipe for chocolate chip cookies would feature on FoodGawker or TasteSpotting, with posters claiming theirs is the chunkiest, richest, sweetest, chewiest chocolate chip cookie. On the same site, there is a taste test to see which are the best chocolate chips to use for chocolate chip cookies. To me, chocolate chip cookies are plain and boring, and are not something I would bake. But if it's David Leibovitz's Chocolate Chip Cookies, I just might.

Food supply

My aunt and uncle will be away for awhile and I've been requested to bake some muffins for my cousin so that he would not starve for the duration of their trip. While I find this highly amusing since my cousin is 20 years old and very well capable of making his own food, I gladly took the opportunity. Any reason to bake!

My aunt had an old pack of Craisins sweetened dried cranberries and asked me to use it as one of the ingredients for the muffins (that will be kept in the freezer while they're away).

A quick Google search brought me to this recipe:

Craisin Muffins

(Recipe adapted from CD Kitchen)

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup milk
• 1 1/2 cups Craisins sweetened dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 cups stirred flour
• 2 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 cup white chocolate buttons (optional)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
2. In a large bowl, whip eggs, oil and milk until liquids are frothy.
3. Stir together flour, baking powder and sugar; stir gently into liquid mixture.
4. Add Craisins all at once, and optional white chocolate buttons. Stir gently but do not overmix.
5. Spray muffin tins with vegetable coating, covering very well. Heap batter to top of cups.
6. Bake 30 minutes or until muffins are light brown and a toothpick comes out just moist.

Makes 12 muffins.

The muffins came out with a ring of brown sticky gloop around the edges. Either there was too much oil in the recipe or the white chocolate buttons were too close to the top of the pan that it seeped out of the muffins.

The original recipe didn't use white chocolate, but from this recipe, mixing white chocolate and cranberries seemed like a great idea.

And it was! Aside from the sticky ring, the white chocolate chunks complemented the tang of the dried cranberries. I just have to figure out if aforementioned gloop is congealed oil or white chocolate residue. Here's hoping it's the latter.

Update: The muffins turned out hard in the morning. I think I may have overmixed the wet and dry ingredients. I think I'll be giving this recipe a miss!