Chocolate Chip Sugar Cookies

Happy Late St. Patty's Day everyone!  I'm guessing many of you are shaking off your hangovers with a pot of coffee and some bacon and eggs.  But I am recovering by putting up my cookie post for the yummy treats I made yesterday for the occasion.  All kinds of possibilities were running through my head, thin mint cupcakes (that could happen soon), mint green cookies, Bailey's Irish Cream frosting... 

But since I was going to an afternoon barbecue with a lot of kids involved, I decided to go with something simple and festive. I've done sugar cookies with shaved chocolate before, which were yummy, but still lacking a bit in the chocolate department.  I came across some mini chocolate chips in the grocery store this week, and I thought they may just be small enough to roll out in my standard sugar cookie dough.  The only other change I made was to use all butter instead of half butter and half shortening.  Butter is my friend.

Initially I was going to make them all shamrocks, but my shamrock cookie cutter is mildly enormous.  So I also did some little 1.5 inch circles so I wouldn't be bring, like, 10 cookies to the party.

Into the oven at 375 for about 6-7 minutes.  As the cookies were baking/cooking, I whipped up a quick decorating frosting:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup shortening
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/3 cups powdered sugar
3-4 tablespoons milk
gel food coloring

Basically, beat together the shortening and vanilla, then gradually add in the powdered sugar, and milk, alternating each.  Blend until the frosting is a good piping consistency, then mix in your food coloring to the desired shade of Shamrock Green :)

I was in kind of a rush to finish these guys up, so they're not the most delicately decorated cookies I've ever made, but after a couple of paper towel practice runs I decided to just go for it....

These cookies were very well received!  And the more beer we drank, the yummier they got.  Haha! In fact the night concluded with several inebriated men trying to convince me to open a bakery.  They were already divvying up the investment shares.

I hope everyone had a debaucherous, yet safe, St. Patty's Day!

Homemade Oreos with Sprinkles

This weekend I had the pleasure of celebrating the 7th and 8th birthdays of my nieces and nephew, at the Barrile Hacienda. I wanted to bake up something festive and kid friendly (and saw a cool decoration idea on pinterest) and I came up with these yummy little sandwich cookies on the fly.  My thought at first was more of an oreo knock off, but the flavor was more like a whoopie pie.  Kinda like an oreo met a whoopie pie and they fell in love and had sprinkled multi-color babies.

Brown Sugar Waffles with Maine Blueberry Jam

Happy March Everyone! Now it's time for an oddball post.  I made waffles from scratch this morning for brunch, and even though they don't really count as a dessert, they still involve the usual baking ingredients for cookies, muffins, bars and the like.  I figured I'd throw up a quick blog post about them, since they were yummy and I make them so infrequently.

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 3/4 cup milk
1/2 up vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
2 heaping tablespoons brown sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

First up, whip together your eggs.  Then add in the milk, oil and vanilla and mix until well combined.

Then it's time to add in your dry ingredients.  I actually ended up going  a little heavier on the salt here.  The brown sugar and vanilla make these really sweet, so it needed a little balancing out.

Attempt one.

Fail.  Attempt 2, 3, 4 and 5.....

Success.

Add some real maple syrup, Maine blueberry jam and turkey breakfast sausage, and you've got yourself a fine Sunday Brunch.  Now if I only had a mimosa. 

Happy weekend!