Giving Baked Goods

I love to bake for other people! I bake birthday cakes for my friends, I bake cupcakes for my employees birthdays, I bake cookies or cupcakes for my DnD game, and I bake Christmas cookies and give them to my co-workers, family, friends and neighbors. When you make something from scratch, with your own hands and give it to another person it is truly appreciated.

I am currently at the Outer Banks on vacation with my friends, and I brought quite the array of baked goods. My new and improved key lime cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, and I baked a pie for the family of one of my friends as a thank you for letting us tag along on their family vacation (yes, all the baked goods I posted previously). It's fun to bake, but for me, the best part is giving the goodies I made to the ones I care about the most!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The second part of this blog's title; cookies! I really love baking cookies. It something my sister and I would do together when we were kids (with mom supervision) and later on when we were teenagers. We would quite often argue about each other's methods of baking. I am a stickler for precise measurements, baking is a science after all, and my sister looks at baking as an art, usually measuring by eye rather than by weight/volume. Despite these arguments, the cookies would always turn out well, and we'd have fun doing it.

I've played around with chocolate chip cookie recipes. For the longest time I used the recipe found in the Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book. This used a 1/2 cup of butter and 1/2 cup of shortening. This recipe made a nice crispy cookie. I'm usually wary of recipes found on chocolate chip bags, because most chocolate chips aren't tasty. However, one recipe that I use religiously is the one found on Ghiradelli brand chocolate chips. This recipe uses 1 cup of butter (2 sticks), less flour than the Better Homes and Gardens, and delicious Ghiradelli Chocolate. These cookies are also chewy, which is the type of cookie I prefer.

When making these cookies, I prefer the 60% cocoa Ghiradelli chips. For one thing they're much bigger, and they pack a rich chocolatey punch, making these cookies much more decadent than your average chocolate chip cookie.

I also prefer to use a scoop to dole out cookies rather than the "drop method." This gives each cookie a uniform shape, thus allowing each cookie to bake evenly with little to no cookies melting into each other.

Well....almost!

Key Lime Kick

So, I discussed key lime cupcakes yesterday, and I mentioned pie. Key Lime Pie. This confection screams tropical shores, summer fun, and sweet, sweet citrus. This is something I

decided I wanted to make after a trip to Florida when I was 18.

My grandfather, and now my sister, live in St Pete Beach Florida. As kids we would go visit grandpa, swim in the pool, go to Busch Gardens, and frequent the beach. Grandpa would also indulge us by treating the family to dinner a couple of times during the week. When I started college, we went for a visit during Christmas. Grandpa decided we should go to Snappers, a seafood restaurant down the road a few miles, so we thought "why not?" The food was great, but what I remember most was the dessert. Key Lime Pie. I had never had it before, and I was intrigued. I still had room, and so did the rest of my family, so we all ordered a slice. This pie was made with an oreo cookie crust, with a raspberry drizzle and homemade whipped cream. No meringue, no traditional pie shell. This pie, was amazing...so naturally I had to recreate it!

Here's the Recipe:

1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

3 egg yolks

1/4 cup key lime juice

1 drop of green food coloring

1 (9-inch) Oreocookie piecrust

Whipped cream, to garnish

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

In a mixer on low-medium speed, blend the milk and egg yolks at low speed until smooth.

Add the key lime juice and finish blending.

Gently pour the mixture into the piecrust and bake for 15 minutes. Remove the pie from the oven and let cool for another 15 minutes before refrigerating.

Refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours before serving. Serve cold and top with fresh whipped cream.

I hope you enjoy the recipe, and please let me know what you think! I'd love to hear from you!

Key Lime Cupcakes

I love cupcakes. They're fun to bake, they're fun to eat, and they're fun to give out to people. No one frowns upon receiving a cupcake. I've come up with a few recipes over the years for cakes, and cup cakes, and for the summer I decided I wanted to make a Key Lime Cupcake. I've made Key Lime Pie before, and it's always been a hit. But, it's basically a custard, and can be heavy on the palate. I wanted to make something light and fluffy, so I consulted the internet!

First I googled "key lime cupcakes" and the first link was for a recipe on Bon Appetit.

I love this magazine, and I used to have a subscription. Lately I've been thinking of renewing it. The link for their key lime cup cakes recipe can be found here.

Their recipe uses freshly squeezed lime juice and lime zest, no key limes at all. I just so happened to have 2 bags of key limes that I bought last week, so I used what I had. Let's just say that grating 2 tablespoons of key lime zest is much harder that squeezing them, but the flavor was perfect. Much lighter and sweeter than regular lime. I brought these to work, and everyone loved them. However, I thought they were a little too heavy; dense. Maybe I over mixed it, or maybe it was because of the lack of baking powder and soda.

The Bon Appetit recipe used 1 cup all purpose with 3/4 cup of self rising. Very easy, a lot of home cooks have these on hand and it's convenient. There's also the chance that my self rising flour is older (I don't use it very often). I felt that these cupcakes needed that extra chemical reaction so I used 1 and 3/4 cups all purpose flour with baking soda and baking powder. I also reduced the amount of sugar by 1/4 cup hoping that the sweetness of the key limes would be more pronounced. The resulting tweaks left me with a cup cake that was much lighter and fluffier, and with a good key lime flavor.

Tim enjoyed this new batch, and I hope you do as well!

The first cupcake image is from bonappetit.com, as well as the original recipe.

Welcome!

Hello! My name is Mahria, and I've tried this whole blogging thing before: once about teaching knitting to kindergarteners and twice about running role playing games for 6th graders. Having made my second batch of Key Lime Cup Cakes and posting about it via Facebook, friends of mine suggested that I start a blog about my baking adventures! I bake a lot, and the goods I make are appreciated by my friends, family and especially my boyfriend, Tim.

With this blog I hope to show you guys the recipes I make as well as the end results. Maybe I'll get a chance to talk about the local food scene in Albany (that's where I live). Thank you for visiting my site, and hopefully you'll enjoy what you see, and more importantly what you taste!