chocolate chip

Chocolate Zucchini Muffins

February 28, 2018

If you are a parent trying to sneak in extra veggies into your child’s diet…or just an adult who needs to sneak veggies into your own diet (like me), then this is the recipe for you!

Zucchini is one of those wonderful vegetables that can be a total chameleon. It can replace noodles, added to bread, and accompany some chocolate in these delicious muffins!

For those of you worried about the presence this green-skinned squash in your chocolate zucchini muffins, trust me, these muffins are way more chocolate than zucchini. At least in taste.

The zucchini actually has no taste or texture, really. It just makes the muffins super moist and extra delicious without a whole lot of extra fat or sugar. Okay, there’s plenty of sugar in here, but not as much as you would expect for a chocolate muffin!

How to Make It

First, break out your grater and grate 1 big zucchini. That should give you more than enough zucchini to add to the batter.

I recommend that you let your zucchini drain on some paper towels while you prepare the rest of the batter so that you don’t add too much extra moisture.

Next, assemble the dry ingredients in one large bowl. Give them a good whisking to break out any lumps and bumps in the flour and cocoa powder.

In a liquid measuring cup, combine all of the wet ingredients (except the zucchini). Mix the wet ingredients together to break up the egg and emulsify everything into one smooth liquid.

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until it forms a very thick batter.

Fold in the shredded zucchini which will immediately loosen up the batter so that it feels more like a regular muffin batter.

If you want even more chocolaty goodness, toss in some chocolate chips.

Scoop the batter into prepared muffin tins then pop them in the oven to bake.

Note: I prefer to use an ice cream scoop for portioning out my muffins because it’s a perfect size! And much easier to use!

Once they come out of the even they will have risen slightly over the edge of the muffin liner and the chocolate chips will be soft and melted.

Because these muffins are so moist, thanks to that zucchini, you definitely want to let them cool a bit before sinking your teeth into them. Otherwise, they will just fall apart right in your hands. Not that that’s a bad thing. I am just warning you so you can either grab a paper towel beforehand or just eat them over the sink.

All in all, these chocolate zucchini muffins are not a bad way to sneak in an extra serving of veggies into my diet!

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Cherry Chocolate Chip Scones

September 12, 2017

I have been buying cherries non-stop this Summer. Almost every trip to the grocery store results in at least one bag of cherries. They are a perfect snack, dessert, or filling.

Earlier this summer I added fresh cherries to my red, white, and blue pie for Memorial Day. I added them to a batch of sangria for 4th of July. So it only seemed appropriate that I toss them into the chocolate chip scones I made over Labor Day. What a fitting way to bid farewell to the Summer.

You would think that after all these cherry baking projects that I would invest in a cherry pitter.

I still haven’t learned my lesson.

I love making scones because they sort of like a fancy biscuit, but they are just as easy as making biscuits.

First, cut cold butter into to the flour until it’s basically the consistency of gravel. Then stir in the liquid ingredients until it forms a sticky dough.

Fold in the cherries and chocolate chips so they are peppered throughout the dough. Then turn the dough out onto a piece of plastic wrap and wrap up into a disc. Pop in the fridge to chill for at least an hour. I promise it will be so much easier to work with if it’s chilled.

Now, there are several ways you can form a scone. I have made them in wedges (like above) and I have also made them in rounds (like a biscuit). I have also seen them in square form. You can pick whatever shape speaks to you.

In this case, I didn’t feel like breaking out the rolling pin (the old girl needs a break from rolling out cookie dough) or the biscuit cutter so I took the disc of dough and cut it into 8 wedges.

I also sprinkled a little raw sugar on top to give it a little extra crunch.

After a few minutes in the oven, the cherry chocolate chip scones should be nice and golden brown; crunchy on the outside, and super soft and steamy on the inside. The cherries will be nice and soft and the chocolate chips will be slightly melted.

I recommend eating them shortly after they come out of the oven so that you can split one in half and melt a bit of butter on the inside. It’s the way scones are meant to be eaten. I assume.

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Peanut Butter Pretzel Chocolate Chip Cookies

August 24, 2017

Peanut butter and pretzels. Chocolate and pretzels. Peanut butter and chocolate. All wonderful combinations on their own. So what could be bad about a cookie that combines all of them!?

I’ll tell you. Not a darn thing.

I told my husband that these cookies were specially created for him. He’s not a big cookie eater (it’s the only thing we ever bicker about), but he does love peanut butter pretzels. So I thought that maybe I could trick him into liking cookies if I also included peanut butter and pretzels in them!

Fortunately for both of us, my evil plan worked. He thoroughly enjoyed these cookies thanks to those delicious peanut butter chips and salty pretzels.

These cookies start out as a normal chocolate chip cookie, with a few minor tweaks.

The obvious tweaks are the addition of the peanut butter chips and pretzels, which I mixed into the dough at the very end. However, there are also some not so obvious tweaks I made to this recipe. I added some extra brown sugar and an egg yolk to help make these cookies extra rich and soft. While I love a good crispy cookie, I wanted these cookies to be extra soft so that the crunchy pretzels really stood out.

I like to refrigerate my dough before I form them into balls and bake. It not only helps all the flavors meld together, but it helps the cookies stay nice and thick instead of flattening out into one flat disc.

If you like your cookies on the chewier side, remove the cookies just at the point the cookies are golden brown around the edges but still a bit soft in the center. They will continue to cook a bit after you take them out of the oven.

The resulting cookies are a little crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy in the center. As far as I am concerned, its the perfect cookie.

But seriously, this is a darn good cookie. How can you not like peanut butter, chocolate, and salty pretzels are packed into one little convenient cookie package? You can’t. I dare you.

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Kitchen Sink Cookies

January 13, 2017

In case you didn’t hear, this past weekend the South got hit with a bit of snow. If you live in the North East or Midwest, you would laugh at what we consider snow. But here in the South, we go a little crazy.

I stopped by the grocery store the night before the impending snow to stock up on some essentials: butter and eggs. If I am going to be stuck inside all weekend, you better believe I will be doing some baking!

I made a lot of things that weekend, but my favorite were these amazingly random cookies! I didn’t have enough chocolate chips for a full batch of chocolate chip cookies, but I did have a little bit of everything else. I pretty much threw everything except the kitchen sink in these cookies…

…coconut flakes, oats, milk chocolate, white chocolate, and peanut butter chips.

Hence the name.

I used my favorite chocolate chip cookie as a base, then added in all the goodies and hoped for the best!

Because these cookies needed a little something more (obviously), I added some flaky sea salt to the tops them. All chocolate chip cookies should have some sea salt on top, if you ask me. There’s nothing better than that salty sweetness.

And despite the the completely random mix of ingredients in these cookies, they turned out amazing! Somehow all those flavors actually go together. Who would have thought!?

I will definitely be making these cookies again. Probably tomorrow.

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PIN NOW, MAKE LATER

Milk and Cookie Cups

December 12, 2016

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish these milk and cookies were more portable!”. Well I can think of one person who probably has. Santa! Think of all the time it takes to sit down and eat all those cookies. The dunking, the chewing, the drinking…that time could be better spent delivering presents! 😉

Even if you aren’t Santa, these milk and cookie cups are a fun alternative way to drink your milk! Or whatever else you like to drink with your cookies – eggnog, chocolate milk, espresso, Schnapps (there’s no judgement here).

Cookie cups are actually pretty easy if you have a cookie cup pan. I picked mine up from Michael’s, but I imagine you can find it anywhere. And if you don’t have a cookie cup pan, I have also made the same cookies in a popover pan.

I made my cookie cups chocolate chip cookie cups, but the dough isn’t your typical chocolate chip cookie dough. Its much drier and has a similar consistency to pie dough. Classic chocolate chip cookie dough would puff up too much, distorting the shape of the cup. This dough only puffs up a bit, but still retails the cup shape that I want.

And instead of chocolate chips, I used very finely chopped chocolate so that it wouldn’t make the dough lumpy and hard to fit into the pan. It ended up working perfectly because the chocolate melted perfectly.

To the fill the pan, I took a big of hunk of dough and pressed it into the cavity, then I pressed the cup mold into the dough and cut off the extra with the knife.

If I were making these in a popover pan, I would press the dough up against the wall of pan and use a shot glass to form the cup cavity.

Once out of the oven, I painted the inside of the cup with some melted white chocolate. This is to that the milk, or other liquid, poured into the cup won’t make the cup a soggy mess.

All that’s left is to pour in the milk and put them out for Santa!

These milk and cookie cups are not just a great treat for Santa, but they would be great for kids! Or even adults (maybe if you add a spiked beverage inside). I have also seem something similar filled with espresso. How fun would that be for a holiday brunch? And you don’t even have to limit yourself to liquids. You could fill it with pudding, ice cream or whatever you like.

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

August 19, 2016

Is there any better flavor combination than peanut butter and chocolate? Seriously! Name one that’s better! I dare you!

Even though I don’t eat as much peanut butter these days (damn you, Whole 30!), every once and a while I get a serious craving for peanut butter and chocolate. What do I do to satisfy that craving? Make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies! (Or one of the Reese’s Eggs I store in my freezer after Easter. You know…if I’m in a pinch.)

When these cravings hit…and they hit hard…I don’t ~~have time~~ want to take the time to try to come up with my own recipe. So I turn to the wonderful Internet and it’s plethora of recipes to find one that a) looks good, and b) doesn’t require any ingredients I don’t already have on hand. I have tried quite a few and for some reason have been a little disappointed. The recipes I have tried are often WAY too dry. I know peanut butter cookies are often on the drier side, but there’s got to be a sweet spot where they are still a bit crunchy, but also not a cracker!

Well, I was determined to figure it out.

After some trial and error, I found that the trick is brown sugar. Brown sugar helps keep the cookies moist so they are a lot softer than your average peanut butter cookie. Brown sugar also reacts with the baking soda so that they rise a little bit more making them more soft and less dense.

My other new trick that I picked up from my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, is a sprinkle of sea salt on top. I think a sprinkle of sea salt should be mandatory on just about all chocolate chip cookies. It takes them to a whole new level!

[amd-yrecipe-recipe:69]

Chocolate Chip Cookies

June 15, 2016

There are a whole lot of chocolate chip cookie recipe out there. I mean, I have a whole Pinterest board dedicated to chocolate chip cookies. Despite the vast quantity of recipes, they are pretty much all the same, maybe just a few tweaks in the amount of ingredients or the quality of the chocolate.

I have been on a quest to find the best chocolate chip cookies for a while. Actually, don’t be surprised if you see a whole challenge in the future where I pit one recipe against the other for total chocolate chip cookie supremacy (hence the chocolate chip cookie Pinterest board). But I recently whipped up a batch of cookies using a very familiar and classic chocolate chip cookie recipe as my guide. Of course, I made a few tweaks to it, because that’s what I do, and the cookies turned out incredible.

I didn’t use any fancy chocolate or extremely expensive or exotic ingredients. My special ingredients are two things you might already have in your pantry: sea salt and coffee extract. Other than that, my fancy shmancy chocolate chips cookies are basically the Nestle Tollhouse cookie recipe.

[Side Note: does this not remind you of the Friends episode where Monica is desperate to get Pheobe’s “grandmother’s” famous chocolate chip cookie recipe?]

While I am known to change things up a bit and make a recipe my own, I did follow strict instructions to freeze my dough. I let the dough chill for an hour before I scooped it onto the baking sheet, then I chilled it again for another 15 to 30 minutes. Not only did this improve the shape of the cookies (they didn’t spread as much) but the flavor was better, too.

The resulting cookie was crispy around the edges and soft in the middle, just how I like them. If you like really soft slightly gooey cookies, then I would recommend baking then just a few minutes less so that the center are just a tad under baked but the edges still have some structure to them.

I couldn’t stop eating these cookies. They tasted like a better version of the chocolate chip cookies I would eat as a kid. They were sweet and rich. The chocolate flavor was accentuated by the coffee extract. But the sea salt is what really put these cookies over the top. I will never again make a chocolate chip cookie without a sprinkle of sea salt. It just takes them to a whole new level.

Since I couldn’t stop eating them, I got the out of my house and brought them into my office where my coworkers gobbled them up as well. Even though at that point they were a couple days old, everyone raved about them.

I wanted to tell them they were this very complicated recipe using expensive gourmet chocolate, because they would have totally believed it. Instead I told them the truth: it’s pretty much just a Nestle Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie. Can’t beat a classic!

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Chocolate Chip Whole Wheat Muffins

November 2, 2015

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a muffin recipe, hasn’t it? I was all about muffins back in the day. It is definitely one of my favorite breakfast food items to make because you get so much bang for your buck. Make one easy batter, fill it with what you want, and you end up with a dozen delicious muffins. Whenever I have to bring a breakfast food for a large group, I make muffins.

Which is exactly how these came about! For Sunday School this past week, I volunteered to bring breakfast. I wanted something crowd-pleasing, but also a bit healthy. So I balanced the chocolate chips with whole wheat and bran flour in the muffin. Life is all about balance, right?

I started with my basic muffin batter. I replaced some of the all purpose flour with whole wheat, and added in a touch of bran. Just a touch, because bran flour can throw off the texture of these whole wheat muffins. But for some extra crunch on top, I mixed together a little strussel topping with bran flour, sugar, and butter. I crumbled that on top and let it bake until golden brown.

These definitely have a bit of a bran, whole wheat flavor. But the chocolate chips add enough sweetness to make you forget you are eating something mildly healthy. If you don’t like the flavor of whole wheat, just reduce the amount by half and replace with AP flour. It will be diluted enough that you will barely taste it, but still get some of the benefit of the whole wheat.

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