Oatmeal Cookie-Topped Brownies

On an Alabama "snow day," meaning it might possibly snow and so everyone goes home, I'm attempting to do my job from my couch in PJ pants late on a Friday afternoon, and all I can think about is baking warm and cozy chocolate something. I'm thinking brownies, I'm thinking cookies, I'm thinking... brownie cookies.

Soon I move a room over to delve into my ridiculous stash of chocolate chips and butter, whip these guys up and tote them down the street ready-to-bake for a super girly night with the March girls. (Side note: If you are female and haven't read or watched Little Women, it will make you feel almost as warm and cozy as this oatmeal cookie-brownie combo.)

Verdict: The oatmeal dough makes the rich brownie not as overwhelming and adds a bit of buttery nuttiness to the extremity of chocolate. They will be made again.

Reese's Brownie Bites

For full disclosure...

Melted butter and chocolate chips erupted in my kitchen mid-afternoon one Sunday.

They were supposed to combine with peanut butter cup splendor and make it to Best Wurst Fest (think urban hipster church backyard version of a church supper with much sausage grilling).

This sequence of events did in fact happen. Like much of life, it did not happen as planned.

My Reese's babes did not want to come out of their little muffin tins until they were fully cooled.  

Cooling was taking about 10 years per brownie.
Three batches remained to be cooked.

I called in the assistance of a less cooperative nonstick tin.

 I was scooping batter. 

I was unwrapping gold foil.

 I was delicately hacking at the edges of cooked brownies only for them to melt into an ugly blob. 

I needed to shower before re-entering public. 

It was time to go.

In the end, I was clean and had half of my baked goodies to take and share. 

The kitchen was not clean. The other half of the brownies were in multiple tins, on a rack, in a container, smeared on the counter.

But my house had peanut butter chocolate decadence to keep us sane for the next few days, says the sweet-obsessed optimist in me.

This post is brought to you by Madoline's efforts to slash the idea that all things online are perfect and pretty. She knows baked goods make messes and result in imperfection. And she reminds herself that in real life marriages, children, vacations and all instagrammed and facebooked and blog prettiness are, in fact, messy, too. Oh, the lies to the contrary she subconsciously believes!

Peanut Butter Bliss Brownies

When my coworker shows the first issue of our new Vestavia Hills paper to potential advertisers, here's what happens: Flip page, flip page, flip page, flip page.... (stare at page because these babes are on it)... Coworker says, "They are as good as they look. I tried them"

Brilliant baker of Vestavia Hills submitted this recipe photoless, so of course I had to play test kitchen and bake them, make 'em look pretty for the camera and then bring them into the office.

The Formula:
Dense, chewy brownie base
Super thick layer of peanut butter icing
Chocolate Ganache

Beware, they are rich, as in the normal person can only eat a small piece (but I am not normal in this regard). And they will give you a 13x9-inch pan worth of far-from-skinny bliss, so bring 'em to  eaters of sweets.

Break 'n Bake Chocolate Chip Cookies: The Homemade Kind

I pretty much feel like a failure as a hostess if I don't have chocolate chip cookies to serve after a lunch. They just end a meal that well. But I also hate not being fully present with people at a meal because I am so busy baking.

Problem: I am opposed to store-bought dough due to my baking snobbery.

Solution: Make the dough into balls ahead of time, and pop 'em in the oven during lunch.

This go-round I prepped dough one weekend, froze it, and pulled it out the next weekend when I was hosting a girls retreat at the lake. The dough balls were still a little frozen, so it made the cookies more fat than flat (I'm convinced they turn out differently every time depending on temperatures), which was beautimous.

Because seriously, warm cookies out of the oven make everyone happy.... and they make people love you extra, too.


How To Make Homemade Break 'n Bake
1. Make Tollhouse Cookie Dough.
2. Roll into balls. You can also refrigerate the dough before making balls.
3. Lay dough balls in a single layer in a gallon Ziploc bag.
4. Put the bag in the freezer.
4. Defrost when you are close to read for cookie time.
5. When it's cookie time, bake 'em up!

Mini Chocolate Chip-Toffee Cookies

Hello, holiday baking.
Hello, cute little cookies.
Hello, mini chocolate chips and toffee bits, all of you that fit into teensy teaspoon-sized balls of buttery dough.

And hello,  Evil Empire (what we call Walmart at my house). Maybe you do bring good things, like tree-shaped jars for gifting, along with your treacherous lines and "customer service."

Like all things cute and little, these took way longer to form into balls, flatten and bake in many, many batches.

But cuteness+sugar+butter in a jar to gift to coworkers, that was totally worth my Sunday afternoon.

Merry Christmas!

Advent's arrival: Chocolate Cookies with (Christmas!) Mint M&Ms

It's like 70 degrees for some reason, but Santa music and commercialized holiday, to put it frankly, vomit invaded a while ago. Despite all that confusion and disgust, I have slowed my life in an attempt to reclaim the anticipation and hope of a Savior that our culture slandered somewhere along the way.

And the season got much sweeter (pardon the cheesy pun) when I walked into Publix on Advent Eve to find the holiday baking display highlight: red, green and white M&Ms. So naturally, they were in the cart and, upon arrival back home, studded in cookie dough filled with melted chocolate chips.

And then off they went to roommates, in baggies to share with family members I saw, to a plate to serve with dinner with my Monday night girls (who need a name), to the office (where I ate 5 in one afternoon-there is a reason for individual apportioned servings), back to roommates, to spread the cheer of chocolate and mint.

All that cheer paired perfectly with studying the sin in Christ's lineage in Matthew, singing hymns of Christmas, and hearing the whole story in 44 minutes courtesy of the artistry of Andrew Peterson... that and writing a heart-warming "community supports kid with cancer" story and touches of holiday at home, with cranberries on our table and words of hope (this week's Advent "word") to start our "Advent cabinet" tradition.

 Come, Lord Jesus.

Killer Salty-Expresso-Chocolate Blondies

Other blondie dough tastes like butter and sugar with a touch of saltiness — good but in my book is better eaten with chocolate chips.

This blondie batter is a candy bar in itself. You cook together butter and brown sugar, ergo caramel, and then add instant expresso powder. It's salty like caramel with a hint of coffee, and then of course you must add chocolate chips to complete the soft, thick bar of decadence.

So if you are feeling lugubrious and torpid, bringing down your physiognomy to those around you, these will make you jocose, a reprieve from the phantasmagoria of life.* And you might not be able to resist eating a huge chunk straight out of the oven; evidence of why I should not be allowed to engage in late night baking alone is pictured. (That missing chunk? All eaten by yours truly.)

The recipe I based it off of also calls for adding more chocolate and caramel on top of the cooked blondies. I skipped that step the second time I made these; it wasn't worth the effort for that much more uber-richness but it does add flair to the top.

*Remember in school when you had to write sentences with vocab words? The nerd in me just took over, because that happened with the words I looked from reading Les Miserables, getting ready for the movie (!!).

Caramel Brownies

Let me start with a confession: I judge blog posts that start like this one does, with a picture of a collection of baking goods that includes a box cake mix and candy.

I  hesitated to make these brownies for the first time in years, since my baking philosophy has evolved to make me turn up my nose up when I know caramel and cake such as these add that slight chemical taste I now find in packaged foods. They are not pure. Not pure!

BUT then I remembered how a thick, buttery German chocolate dough encases melted caramel and chocolate chips, and remembered how its gooey chocolateness is richer than a chocolate bar.

Most of all, I remembered my time was somewhat limited, and with this recipe I wouldn't have to experiment with a caramel sauce and chance a brownie recipe that was too dry or too over-the-top rich. Convenience products are just so convenient (imagine that).

These convenience-baking-with-a-twist morsels of sweentess garnered many compliments at a large group function, and also prompted this conversation:

Roommate in our House of Sweets: I want you to make these for my birthday.

Me: I think we can find an excuse to make these again before your birthday.

Roommate: No, you don't understand. I want the entire pan to myself.

(Roommate got them for her birthday, and she even shared them.)

Easter M&M Cookie Bars

The latest in my chocolate chip cookie obsession: Add a heaping cup of dark chocolate M&Ms to a cup of semi-sweet chips in Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars.

 

You might just have to bake another batch to replicate that perfect gooey texture in each square that you can't get with round spoons full of dough, no matter how much chocolate you add. Then you can pack them in a pretty tin, carry them onto a plane and share with friends in a far off land like Texas for  sugar power to survive, quite joyfully, hours of bridal shopping.

 

But first, take food photos in your backyard, even if their beauty might prevent you from being able to face a kitchen table shoot again.

Happy Easter week! May yours be filled with the darkness of the crucifixion and the hope and power of the Resurrection.

More Easter treats:
Friday Brownie Bites, Sunday Blondie Bites 
Easter Cupcakes

Chocolate Chip Double-Doozie Cookies

Presenting this week's iteration of the [homemade] chocolate chip cookie: the kind filled with icing a la the Great American Cookie Company "double doozie."

Like last year, the sea of St. Patty's Day green in the bakery at the grocery store sang the siren song of festive baking. And what temptresses of sinful sugary delight it inspired!

When you combine the best of the simple-from-scratch sweets, Tollhouse cookies and buttercream icing, how can you create a treat that lasts longer than 24 hours? It's quite impossible if you share at all.

Update: I took these to a family who had a recently had a baby and got a report that they were eaten for breakfast, minutes after they got dropped off with dinner for that night. This is also the dessert that one of my interns has most often referred back to as being "really good." 

Oreo-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

(One of these days, I will take a break from my sweet obsession and blog about something savory. But that day is not today.)

If you ever want to make friends, put Oreos in chocolate chip cookie dough. Ooo, lala, baking brilliance inspired by the Oreo-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookie phenomenon of 2011. Only they are even easier to make and yield a bigger batch. Win and win.

It's the kind of recipe you make on Sunday, where they are poof! gone at a chili cook-off, and then find the need to bake another batch to share for Tuesday night dinner.

Adults find the Oreo stuffing thing delicious, but kids, they find it fascinating. One girl who lit up my life tonight had to take the cookie around to other people to show them how there was an Oreo inside, and then came back to inquire how exactly the Oreo got there and how it was sliced like that.

More Tollhouse Cookie Love:
Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars/Cookie Cake
Oreo-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies

Outrageous Brownies

These might look like ordinary brownies.

 They might go into take-to-friends containers like ordinary brownies.

But they are certainly not ordinary. They come from scratch, not a box.

And they are filled with a sea of rich, dark chocolate, with only a sprinkling of flour.

They come from Ina Garten, only I made my version in a 13x9-inch pan unlike her special 12x18x1 pan (hello, I don't have a professional kitchen), and I did not let any nuts to mess with my chocolate.

Unlike  my delectable Chunky Chocolate Brownies, these are a little more cakey than uber-fudgy, like a box mix, yet you can still taste the butter/chocolate goodness from scratch. Mmmm.

Memphis Mafia Bars

It started with a doughnut in Portland. A Voodoo doughnut. A doughnut so wonderful that it became my friend Ellie's Facebook profile picture.

Commenting ensued. It looked amazing. Banana. Chocolate. Peanut butter. It was called the Memphis Mafia. Hey, Memphis, do you know how many shared college memories are there? It needed to be replicated. We were reuniting in five weeks: excuse to invent a Memphis Mafia bar.

So for those of us who didn't get to check Portland off our destination wish list, we got the goodness of Memphis Mafia to snack on at the lake house.

Banana cake.
Chocolate frosting.
Peanut butter drizzle.
Peanuts.
Chocolate chunks.
Yum.

I even made it dairy free for a friend who can't have the best food group of all for now, and to my surprise, it was still as decadently delicious as that doughnut looks.

Game Day M&M Blondies

What's a girl to do when invited to an Auburn football-watching party when she could care less about football? Whip out some butter and sugar and use her type-A specialty to sort out team-colored M&Ms from the bag.

I truthfully didn't even think to wear team colors to said party but did show up with team-themed blondies...at least as far as they could see. I so thickly layered all the War Eagle colors from my package of candies that I had to put assorted remaining colors on the part of the blondies that didn't travel to the party.

In fact, I used so many M&Ms that it created a crust on top that crumbled when I cut the blondies up. You might use less than me if you want more perfected looking treats, but they stayed together well enough with the amount of chocolate I felt they needed. I choose chocolate over presentation.

I might only have allegiance to an SEC team because I lived in a state where it is forced, because I like not be ostracized from culture and because I feel I should support a sibling's educational institution. But I have decided that I like to be a fan of a team whose colors appear in standard M&M bags. This tends to coincide with having colors that are decent to wear, too. What a silly girl.

More Blondies:
Blondie Bites with Reese's Pieces Eggs
Blondies with Reese's
Chewy Chocolate Blondies 

Oatmeal-Butterscotch Cookies

My brother is on his way to start a new adventure for a season of life in Jackson, Wyoming, home of those breathtaking Tetons...

where he will be capitalizing on all powder potential possible.

Rough, right? But he might not have any of these, his favorite cookies with oatmeal and butterscotch chips, for a while.

 

So I sent a batch of them, the cookies that make me think of my grandmother because she always made them when we were little, and some Chex Mix along for the three-day drive.

Two women the car together all day can manage to chit chat for hours on end, but two men, maybe not so much. They are probably playing on their phones and tying flies in between snack breaks at the moment.

I'm slowly learning to more fully channel my bakaholism into a love language. Maybe I'll have to ship some baked love out to Wyoming, too, or maybe I'll catch a flight and deliver them myself so I can get in on the Western wilderness action.

Insta-Cookie Cake

May is always crazy, finish-school-take-exams-go-to-parties-do-a-million-things, celebration time of year. Graduations and showers and birthdays and festivals and general springtime merriment. So there's lots of excuses for cookie cake.

Plus, cookie cake is easy peasy. As in, you don't have to drop dough by spoonfuls, bake in multiple batches, and lift each cookie off to cool. Simply spread (trickiest part- I usually use my hands), bake, slice, bang, done.

You cheaters out there can buy cookie dough, but I always whip up the best cookie dough ever, the Tollhouse recipe on the chocolate chip bag. At this point in the game, I can beat-butter-sugars-add-eggs-vanilla-then-flour-mixture-then-chips in my sleep. Tollhouse cookies are just so good that you have to shut down the devilish temptation of break-and-bake-are-easy and get out some ingredients and dirty a few dishes for the real deal.

My cake was for a college graduation celebration for my brother (Way to go, Patrick!). I squeezed some store-bought sugar cookie icing in a bag with a writing tip into a very basic design. It didn't last long. You can also skip the decoration part and slice 'em into bars.

So, ready, set, go find an excuse to bake one yourself.

Friday Brownie Bites, Sunday Blondie Bites

Those who know me well know I think far too much. So when my church small group decided to make cookies to help people stay awake for six hours of Bible teaching Friday night at a Secret Church simulcast, my mind went crazy thinking of ways to let Easter symbolism, along with butter and sugar, be the inspiration of my confections.

I couldn’t quite fit the full symbolic explanation onto the note card that labeled my baked goods at Secret Church, but the ever-gifted expositor David Platt’s teaching on the complexity and mystery of crucifixion and salvation took to all 50,00 of us listening to spiritual depths even my over-thinking mind had never been.

Friday Brownie Bites
I put my mini muffin tins to work by making uber-chocolatey brownie bites (no mint icing this time). They’re dark and heavy, just as was the sorrow of the mocking and brutality Christ humbly took on Friday. But chocolate is also really good, you know, like Good Friday—the beauty of the love God so showed by putting all the sins anyone ever does or thinks on his son and by sacrificing him for crazy humans like me that will never ever, ever even begin to measure up to his goodness and grace.

Sunday Blondie Bites
Likewise, I made light and bright-colored blondies to contrast the beauty and hope of Sunday with the dark despair of Friday.

Over the past few months I’ve been contemplating just what hope and power there is in a God who raises a very dead, very buried man to life again and what hope I can take in knowing he is shaping my life and whatever crazy things are going in the world. It’s that hope that pastel-colored peanut butter eggs stuffed into buttery cookie dough represent.

As I’ve walked with friends through periods of waiting and waiting and waiting for a job (thanks, economy), a move, life direction, healing—just as people were waiting and waiting for the first Easter Sunday—God has so revealed “Sunday” moments with direction in unexpected ways, gifts that point so obviously to their giver. In dark times, I always like to think on: “It’s Friday, but Sunday is coming.”

Truthfully, these were a case of desperation leads to innovation. I simply wanted to make “Sunday” cookies with pastel Easter M&Ms, but they were nowhere to be found. Reese’s Pieces eggs were the next best thing on the Easter candy aisle, and even without chocolate, they were quite delectable like the Blondies with Reese I based them off of.

Double Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies are my friend Haynes' specialty: peanut butter cookie dough stuffed with chocolate chips and peanut butter chips. In our college apartment, she baked a rotation of these and her pumpkin bread, and I filled in the gaps with Tollhouse cookies and chocolate cupakes with buttercream icing. Our other two roommates observed how baking crazed we were, invited friends over to help rid of temptation to eat all of what we baked ourselves, and have since picked up baking in their own way.

My version of Haynes cookies used a chewy peanut butter dough that isn't too powerfully peanut buttery and the Hayzian chocolate and peanut butter chips. Anyone with the slightest taste for peanut butter and chocolate could easily scarf down this whole stack of delish.

I gave away lots of the cookies but, being the selfish baker I am, saved some for my 3 p.m. pick-me-up at work. Bananas leave a weird aftertaste in my mouth, and I gotta have some sugar to wash it down.

Chewy Chocolate Blondies

I know I should spend less time with my laptop and more time with real people. I like to rationalize that all that screen time provides fodder for baking creativity and hence better quality time with people afterward; butter and sugar always make things better. Because I spend too much time online, I discovered how much of a baking goddess Dorie Greenspan is. And because I spend too much time online, I found this blondie recipe and knew must-bake because it's Dorie's. Now I just need to buy one of her baking books.

Essential ingredients in these babes are the semi-sweet chips, flaked coconut, and chopped pecans. The texture of all those goodies makes each bar a bit crumbly, distinct of the way thick and dense Reese's-topped blondies I made before. Like any good variation on the chocolate chip cookie, they also have that irresistible flair of buttery dough. Even ye who fear nuts (which is sometimes me) and coconut tainting your dessert should try them.

I added these treats to Sweet as a Sugar Cookies' Sweets for Saturday #10. Lots of yummies there!

Update: My friend Amber at Domestic Wannabe baked a chocolate-peanut butter variation on this recipe that looks equally amazing.

Mint-Iced Brownie Bites

Don't go into the grocery store a few days before St. Patrick's Day. The bakery section will grab hold of you and force you to adjust your productive plans for the day to make something green and sugary.

I skipped the clover art and went for a green that had a culinary purpose beyond green dye. Okay, the frosting had food dye in it, but it felt more legit with peppermint flavor.

I had feared these guys wouldn't match up to the Brownie Bites with cream cheese frosting sold at fine natural grocery stores. I was doubtful when cutting a super hot brownie out of the tin led to a crumbly yet deliciously chocolatey mess. Then, once I remembered this thing  called patience and let them cool slightly, a perfect shape popped out and tasted even better because it wasn't burning my tongue. They've got crispy edges for you strange outer brownie eaters, and gooey insides for we enlightened inside brownie eaters.