Blueberry Reese's Cupcakes

I told you I hadn't given up on the elusive Blueberry/Reese's combination, and I meant it.

Behold Take Two: Cupcakes.

Gourmet Yellow Birthday Cake

So a very strange thing has happened. A whole year has passed. Specifically, my freshman year of college has passed. In some ways, it feels like I just got here. I can't believe it's already over. And I do not feel old enough to be a rising sophomore in college. Ay.

But to celebrate, my friend Sadie and I hosted a Farewell Feast for all my friends. There was pasta... lots of pasta. Five pounds of pasta. Literally. There was also garlic bread, meatballs, parmesan, and sauces.

There was also cake, because this was a dinner I was hosting, and no dinner under my authority gets made without an official dessert. We also had two upcoming birthdays in the group. So this was to a be not just any old cake, but a birthday cake. A whole category of its own.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Brownies

My roommate and I want to visit our room-to-be before the year's over so we can scope it out and start planning what to bring and how to arrange, etc. We thought that the awkwardness of showing up out of the blue asking to poke around someone's room might be softened somewhat if we brought baked goods. Especially since our floor is a boy's floor this year.

Whenever you're bringing baked goods to someone whose palate and tastes you are not familiar with, the two safest bets are probably brownies and chocolate chip cookies, because they're just, well, classic. So it only makes sense that a combination of the two would be a doubly safe bet.

Chocolate Chip Scones

My mom gave me a couple boxes of scone mix she bought in Ireland (so you know they're gonna be good) that have been sitting in my room for a couple months just patiently waiting for me to get around to them.

Well, folks, today's their day! A couple friends and I are going to be having a pancake breakfast tomorrow, since classes are over so we can do things like that on Friday mornings (!), and I thought these scones would make a nice companion. Because what goes better with carbs than... more carbs?

Cinnamon Coffee Brownie Cupcakes + Peanut Butter Frosting

I'd be willing to bet that almost every baker, at one point or another in their career, takes it upon themselves to pursue The Ultimate Brownie Recipe (just like they pursue The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe). It's an ongoing process. It doesn't happen in one day. There's many, many batches of trial and error, and some will never succeed, though many will come close.

Wednesday marked my first foray into this noble tradition. 

A Tale of Two Cookies

I update this blog more often than Facebook.

If this were Facebook, my status would read: Couldn't decide which cookie to bake today, so I gave into my innate indecisiveness and made both.

It's true, I am incredibly indecisive, as anyone who's ever been in line to order something with me knows. Luckily, when it comes to cookies, this can actually a good thing. It provides me and my friends with Hot Chocolate AND Cowboy Cookies. Now I just have to decide which one to eat...

Let's be honest: It will be both.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles

These have been on my To Bake list for a while. A sudden brainstorm to add pretzels to the cookie dough (in order to help deplete the remaining pretzels leftover from the pound bag I had to buy to bake the Nutella Pretzel Cookies a while ago) and a desire to make something different than the usual cookie/bar scooted them to the top.

This is a straightforward recipe. First, you mix up a pretty standard chocolate chip cookie dough, sans egg (we're going for deliciousness, not salmonella, here; I'm sure there's enough contaminants floating around this grody dorm kitchen without consuming balls of raw eggs on top of it).