Best Brownies

On my first finale of my first Dessert Week I will now share my first photo on this blog.  One year ago today, Jacob and I celebrated his birthday.  I drove down 1 hour away from where I lived, to where he lived at the time and made him a heart shaped brownie and a picnic dinner.  We then went to a local park and celebrated by making sandwiches and watching the sun set over the water. It was a wonderful day!

Jacob's Birthday

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 C oil or melted butter
  • 1 C sugar
  • 1 t Vanilla
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 C all-purpose flour
  • 1/3 C baking cocoa
  • 1/4 t baking powder
  • 1/4 t salt

Beat those wet ingredients until thoroughly mixed.  Add the dry ingredients. Do not over mix this batter or they won’t be soft brownies but tough ones, one tip that helps is whisk the dry ingredients together before adding them.  Place the batter in a 9×9 pan.

Bake at 350 F for 20 to 25 minutes or until brownies pull away from the pan around the edges but is still moist.  The ever-useful toothpick tip will not work here, at least if you have yummy, gooey brownies.

Peanut Butter Blossoms

I wish I could say that for this Dessert Week that I made each day’s dessert for my loving, deserving husband, but alas, he only get’s the one posted tomorrow for his birthday (I’ll make a note for his next birthday).  However, we made these wonderful, scrumptious cookies for our very first 6 month anniversary (of dating).  It was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.  We ended up with a huge 6-kiss cookie out of pure weariness.  This is one of the classic Christmas cookies from my childhood, and is a lot of fun with a group! (Be sure to buy extra kisses for snacking, they disappear like crazy!)

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 C shortening or margarine
  • 1/2 C peanut butter
  • 1/2 C white granulated sugar
  • 1/2 C brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 t vanilla
  • 1 3/4 C flour
  • 1 t baking soda
  • 1/2 t salt
  • 2 T milk
  • Hershey’s Kisses!

Cream the first ingredients, then beat in other wet ingredients. Sift dry ingredients and gradually add, try not to over mix. And finally finish off the recipe with the milk.

Roll the dough into balls. Keep them small, maybe 1″ diameter spheres.  Then toss the ball into a bowl of white sugar and coat it gently.

Bake a sheet of these in a375 F oven until the tops are slightly cracked, this takes about 5 minutes. Be unwrapping the kisses now, if you haven’t already. Pull out the batch and squish down each ball into a cookie with a kiss in the middle.  Put the cookie sheet back in for a minute and a half more. My recipe card also states that a double batch of this yummy cookie makes over 100 cookies!  Plenty for you, the family, the guests, and Santa.

These cookies are yummy to eat right out of the oven (or rather, right off the cooling rack) because the chocolate is still gooey.  But chocolate is good in any form so letting them cool and waiting until after dinner is also a good choice.  One piece of advice I have is that if you are going to take these somewhere, say a potluck or a Christmas party, I would press the kisses flat while they are cooling.  This trick facilitates stacking and compact storage in a single container of a good amount of cookies and the least likelihood of a cookie loosing its chocolate friend.

I apologize for the Christmas theme in March, I’m already getting sad knowing that the holiday is so far away.  But these cookies are just so associated with the holiday for me I almost cannot think of them in a better situation (although I’m sure there are plenty of other great celebrations to use this yummy cookie for!).

Crazy Cake

In continuation of Dessert Week for my husband, I submit an old family favorite.  My mother told me my father’s mother (born in 1910) had used this recipe because in the Great Depression eggs were hard to come by.  The name is from the fact that making a cake without eggs is just “crazy.”  The suggestion of any other kind of cake was futile around my birthday, so I guess you could say I was crazy about it, ;)

Ingredients:

  • 2 C sugar
  • 3 C all-purpose flour
  • 6 T cocoa
  • 1 t salt
  • 2 t baking soda
  • 2 t vanilla
  • 2 T vinegar
  • 10 T melted butter
  • 2 C cold water

I feel like these instructions are quite wanting without pictures but I will try to explain the amazing fun this cake can be.

Place all the first five ingredients in a 9×13 baking dish (I love that this can be so easily halved and put into a 9×9!), and mix well with a fork.  This should result in a consistently speckeled powder.  Next, carve a smilie face into the powder, two eyes and a smiling mouth.  One eye is for the vanilla, the other for the vinegar and the smile is about to be a yellow, buttery smile in need of a good brushing.  Enjoy your cute creation.

Now enjoy the destruction with the addition of the 2 cups of cold water and fluff with your fork.  Make sure all the powder has been mixed in well, as a youngster I would usually miss the corners and there would be quite a bit of unedible dry flour down there when the cake was sliced.

Now put in the oven for 30-40 minutes at 350 F.  Use a toothpick to check if it is done.  Stab the middle of your cake, when it comes out clean your cake is ready.  But be sure to be gentle when pulling it out and pushing it in while checking, this cake has a tendency to drop in the middle.

Top with your favorite fudge or chocolate icing, or with my mother’s favorite: confectioner’s sugar (a good substitute for my icing-hating hubby), and voila! An eggless chocolate cake that will not last long in almost any home.