Cake Batter Blondies

Easy but a little too sweet for me and more cakey and soft than brownie/blondie-ish, but I wanted to make them so I got an opportunity a little over half a month ago. I brought these with me to San Francisco when visiting my boyfriend, so hopefully he liked them but I'm not sure. They're a good quick thing to bake but I think I'd keep searching for a better recipe--or at least find a way to make it denser, maybe with less milk or something.

Cake Batter Blondies
Recipe by Girl Meets Life, found on Sally's Baking Addition

1 box yellow cake mix
1/4 cup canola oil
1 egg
1/3 -1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup sprinkles
1/2 cup white chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine first four ingredients in a large bowl. Add the milk slowly. You want to cake batter to be as dense & thick as possible. Mix in the sprinkles and white chocolate chips.  Pour into 8 x 8 baking pan, sprinkle a few more sprinkles on top, and bake for 28-30 minutes until edges are just turning brown. Allow to cool for at least 30 minutes so the center sets, before cutting into squares.

*The blondies will look like they are not fully done because the center will be quite gooey, but that’s what you want! After about 30 minutes of cooling, they will be easy to cut using a serrated knife.

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookies (again!)

Yes, I've made these before. But I made them again. To stress the importance of how good these are.

This time I used a dark brown sugar because that's all I had, and salted macadamia nuts because that was also all I had, and I didn't increase the quality of the white chocolate chips and there were definitely a lot of them. But either way, they were just as good as the ones I made last year, so make these! This year I made them for my friend Sophie's birthday and they are so good!

Chocolate Dalmations

Okay, so I haven't baked anything new...still. Now I have an excuse other than homework! I'm sick, or I think I am, because these past few days I've had this really annoying sore throat. Yesterday I had all the symptoms of a fever EXCEPT for the actual fever...weird. Today I just have the sore throat, so hopefully it's getting better.

Also, I have like...no ingredients...and no working oven...soooo. But anyway, these were really good cookies that I made in March. They kinda tasted shortbread-y and were just perfect and bite sized, I could have eaten the whole batch except there were wayy too many so maybe not.

Chocolate Dalmations
Original recipe from Marcel Desaulniers' Death by Chocolate Cookies
Recipe adapted by Peabody

4 ounces of white chocolate, chopped into ¼ inch pieces
¾ pound unsalted butter, cut into 1 ounce pieces
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
4 cups all-purpose flour
½ tsp salt
12 ounces semisweet chocolate mini-morsels

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Melt chocolate in a double boiler over medium heat. Use a rubber spatula to stir the chocolate until completely smooth, about 2 minutes.

Place the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle. Beat on medium for 4 minutes until light(but not fluffy). Add the vanilla extract and the melted white chocolate. Beat on medium for 1 minute. Operate the mixer on low while gradually adding the flour and salt. Mix for 1 minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the chocolate mini morsels and mix on low for 30 seconds. Remove the bowl from the mixer and use a spatula to finish mixing the ingredients until thoroughly combined.

Portion the dough into 48 slightly heaping tablespoons-sized pieces. Roll each portion into a ball. Place the dough balls onto a non-stick baking sheet, fitting 12 to a sheet. Place the baking sheets in the center rack. Bake for 14-16 minutes, rotating the sheets halfway through the baking time. Remove the cookies from the oven and cool at room temperature.

Cookies n Cream Fudge

Sorry sorry sorry sorry this is really old! I made these over a year ago. I realllly wanted to try them. I do remember they were SUPER good though! And super easy to boot! So great. But anyway, school life is getting very hectic right now: I'm trying to find apartments for next year, I'm trying to finish and manage group projects, I'm trying to study for exams and I'm trying to get the rest of my homework done on the side...you know, typical college stuff. So I didn't have time to bake up anything new, but here's an old recipe I used last summer!

Cookies n Cream Fudge
Recipe from Eagle Brand

3 (6 oz.) packages white chocolate baking squares
1 (14 oz.) can Eagle Brand® Sweetened Condensed Milk
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 cups (about 20 cookies) coarsely crushed chocolate creme-filled sandwich cookies

Line 8-inch square pan with wax paper, extending paper over edges of pan.

Melt white chocolate squares with sweetened condensed milk and salt in heavy saucepan over low heat. Remove from heat; stir in crushed cookies. Spread evenly in prepared pan.

Chill 2 hours or until firm. Remove from pan by lifting edges of wax paper. Cut into squares.

Chocolate Panda Cake with White Chocolate Frosting

Before I arrived at college this year I think I had baked 4 cakes in my life, and that's a stretch. The first one I remember was in 9th grade, a recipe for La Galette des Rois for extra credit in my French class. Although it good, I was in 9th grade and it was hardly baked by me any more than my parents.

The second cake I remember was a cake-mix cake. I think my mom made the frosting. I cut it into a fish. At least, I think that was me...

The third cake was my first actual cake-from-scratch! My friend told me to make her a carrot cake, and using a recipe my mom found for me (and the carrots she processed for me in her food processor), I made the carrot cake almost all by myself! My dad kind of helped me take it out of the pans, which didn't really work, and I ended up mushing the cake up as the bottom layer...and I didn't take any pictures.

The fourth cake was actually a cake recipe that I made into cupcakes. A very dense, very chocolatey cake recipe from William Sonoma. The frosting was good, but was too soupy at first until I chilled it overnight. It definitely should have stayed a cake, not cupcakes.

And then I came here, didn't bake another cake until Lucy's strawberry birthday cake with a cakemix base, then made David's cake which was delicious but still not great, and then...wow, I just made a lot more cakes than I ever thought I'd make.

This one I made on Saturday for my friends who have summer birthdays, but namely for my friend Steven (aka "Panda"), who requested that I make him a cake. And I think that this one, out of all the cakes I've made so far, is my favorite. I just wanted to use ingredients I have here since I'm almost done with the year and didn't want to stock up on new supplies that I couldn't store over the summer. I didn't even know if chocolate and white chocolate would go together. But I really enjoyed this cake. The filling is a store-bought mix, but that's the only thing I cheated on! For real!

Panda Cake

Grand Fudge Cake
Recipe from Ghiradelli

3/4 cup Unsweetened Cocoa
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 1/3 cups milk
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Grease and lightly flour two 9-inch round cake pans.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, and set aside. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes. Reduce speed to low, and add vanilla and eggs one at a time, scraping bowl after each addition. Alternately add flour mixture and milk (starting and ending with the flour mixture), while mixing on low speed. Continue to mix until smooth.


Pour into prepared pans. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes or until a cake tester inserted in the center of cake comes out clean.

Filling
Any white-chocolate mousse. I bought mine from the Tops supermarket. It made 2 cups, but I wish I had more, as I'll explain below.

I added 4 crumpled oreos to the 2 cups of mousse, and chilled it for 2 hours.

White Chocolate Frosting
Recipe adapted from Lisa Yockelson's Chocolate Chocolate
You can find the recipe here


My frosting turned out much too soupy. I added some more confectioners sugar but then chilled it. It makes about 4 cups of frosting, which was definitely enough to cover the outside of the cake and probably could have been in the center as well if you didn't want to make the white chocolate mousse, but I really enjoyed the mousse at the center, it was a nice different texture for the cake.

Assembly

At least 11 oreos, 4 used for mixing into the mousse filling.

Take your bottom layer and cover it in chilled mousse filling. Then place the second layer on top.

My cake layers crowned and I should have leveled at least the bottom layer off, but didn't. I had about 2 cups of filling, which left a lot of space, but luckily I improvised by crumpling up 4 oreos and pressing them into the sides to fill up the cracks:


Cover the rest of the cake with frosting. I decorated it like a panda by taking an oreo apart, making sure all the "white stuff" stayed on one side, and taking a crumb and making that the pupil. I did this twice to make two eyes and two ears, and took another cookie apart to make the nose and mouth, like so:

And again, there was a lot of leftover frosting...

So yeah! Definitely try this cake! It was perfectly moist and there was just enough frosting! The combination was perfect!