The only thing I was concerned about those was the atrocious amounts of red colouring needed to achieve a bright red colour. As I’m not a big fan of additives, I didn’t put by far as much as I should have, so mine ended up on the brown side. If you decide you want them super red, you have to add enough red colouring to the mixture that it looks like blood, as it darkens a bit later. My cupcakes are covered with a delicious cream cheese frosting, which goes so incredibly well with them. On the inside there was a hidden surprise: a caramelized piece of white chocolate, which gave a lovely complex texture to the cake. But enough of me yapping, there’s the recipe:

Red velvet cupcakes

Red velvet cupcakes recipe

(makes around 9)

For the cake:

1 cup sugar

1 egg

½ cup oil (I used sunflower seed, it’s very good because it’s tasteless, don’t use anything rich in flavour like olive or sesame seed oil!)

½ cup milk with a couple of drops of lemon juice in it

½ tsp. apple cider vinegar

½ cup brewed coffee (room temperature, otherwise it will scramble the egg)

1.25 cup flour

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. salt

1 tbsp. cocoa-plain

1 packet of vanilla sugar/ 5-6 drops of vanilla flavouring/ 2 tsp. vanilla extract/ 2 vanilla pods

Red food colouring (depends how much you need to use on the type you buy, just read instructions on the packaging)

Around 9 pieces of white chocolate

Cupcake/muffin baking tray

Cupcake paper wrappers

For the cream cheese frosting:

½ cup cream cheese

½ cup sifted confectioners’ (powder) sugar

2 tbsp. softened butter (no margarine!!!)

½ packet of vanilla sugar/ 3-4 drops of vanilla flavouring/ 1 tsp. vanilla extract/ 1 vanilla pod

Preparation:

1. Preheat the oven to 165 C/325F

2. Beat the egg with the sugar until creamy (with a mixer) then add slowly while mixing the oil, milk, vinegar, coffee, flour, baking soda and powder, salt, cocoa, vanilla.

3. Add the food colouring, as mentioned before, if you’d like a bright red cupcake, your dough must look very very bright red, as it darkens with baking.

4. Pour the mixture in a jug, so it’s easier to pour in the cupcake shapes.

5. Put your cupcake wrappers in the holes of the cupcake baking tray.

6. Pour the mixture in each wrapper, so it fills up to 2/3 of the wrapper. Add one piece of white chocolate (if you don’t have white, just skip it, other chocolate won’t fit as well with the other ingredients). The white chocolate will drop to the bottom and caramelize, making for a lovely rich milky caramel. If you’d like something different, you can also put a white chocolate truffle or a Lindor chocolate covered in flour, in the middle of your mixture (poor half of the needed mixture for 1 wrapper, put the chocolate, poor the rest of the mixture). This way your chocolate won’t drop to the bottom and make for a nice surprise in the middle.

7. Bake for about 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes clean.

8. Wait for the cupcakes to fully cool down before you put the icing on top, otherwise, it will melt.

9. For the icing just beat together all the ingredients and with a butter knife spread it on top of each cupcake. I used a piping bag for a cleaner effect, but don’t expect to be able to make any shapes with it, as the mixture is a little on the runny side. If you’d like to decorate with the icing, you have to put more icing sugar, so the mixture stiffens, but then it won’t be as silky, light and delicious.

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2 tbsp. honey

1 tsp. baking soda

2 eggs

1 cup caster sugar

1 cup sunflower seed oil

700-900 g/25-32 oz flour

2 tbsp. powdered cinnamon

Preparation:

1. Heat the oven to 200C/390F.

Proof of temperature choice :D

2. Mix well the honey with the baking soda in a small bowl or cup until it gets pasty.

Honey and baking soda mix

3. Mix the eggs with the sugar until fluffy (preferably with a mixer), add the soda and honey paste; then slowly while mixing pour the oil little by little. Next, slowly start adding the flour and cinnamon while mixing. It depends on the brand how much flour you need, could be different every time. You might need to switch to the spiral looking whisks of your mixer and even start mixing with a big wooden spoon as the dough gets tougher. By the end you’ll need to knead it to incorporate the last bits of flower. It is important that you don’t overwork the dough as it will get too tough and the cookies will be too hard to bite on. The consistency of the dough you are looking for is play-doh like, it shouldn't be neither sticky (you won’t be able to cut it) nor too hard.

How to knead

4. If you don’t have a rolling pin and cookie cutters or you just don’t feel like all the hassle, you could make little balls out of the dough and bake them like that. Otherwise, flour your clean smooth surface (table) very well and flatten the dough on top. Sprinkle some flower on top of it and on your rolling pin so the dough doesn’t stick (do that every time the dough gets sticky) and start rolling from the middle out on all sides (vertically, horizontally, diagonally). The easiest way for me to roll (with a normal rolling pin like the one on the pictures) is to have my hands in the middle of the pin and slide them to the sides as I roll. Make sure the dough is the same thickness everywhere or some parts of the cookies will burn and others will be raw. You are looking for 0.5 cm/0.2 inches thickness.

How to roll

5. Sprinkle some more flower on top and smooth it with your hands. Now, you can cut out your shapes. If you don’t have cookie cutters, you can use glasses that have thin rims. This way you can make circles, crescents and all sorts of variations. A cute idea is to cut a little rectangular shape at the bottom of your cookie, so you can hang it on the rim of your coffee cup. Once you’ve cut your shapes, just re-knead your dough and roll it again, until finished. Don’t forget to flower the table or working surface, otherwise you won’t be able to remove your shapes from it.

Not yet baked cookies

6. Put your unbaked cookies on some baking paper-laid baking tray (if you don’t have baking paper just oil and flour the tray) and bake for between 5-10 min depending on the thickness of your dough. You are looking for golden brown.

7. Decorate your cookies if you like. You can sprinkle them with powdered sugar; stick them together with butter cream, chocolate, jam, etc. I went for encasing them with marzipan, which I coloured and rolled and decorated them further with icing. I used Dr. Oetker for all the decorations.

Honey Cookies

The ready cookies

By the way, look at these crazy old scales I found in my apartment! Funny huh! Next to them is the recipe for the cookies; love it when they looked all loved and used!

Would you make these lovely cookies at home?

If you want to go in for the kill, you can make it into a mocha if you have both chocolate and coffee. Conversely, if you can’t find pumpkin/ pumpkin puree, skip it and you have yourself gingerbread latte.

Anyway, enjoy it with some home-made cookies! J

Pumpkin Spice Latte

Home-made pumpkin spice latte/ hot chocolate recipe

(makes 5)

4 cups milk + some for frothing (optional) – I used 3.5% but you could use any kind, including soy, rice, etc.

1 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. dried ginger

¼ tsp. nutmeg

¼ tsp. powdered cloves

1 tsp. vanilla extract/ a couple of drops vanilla flavouring

8 tbsp. pumpkin puree (or butternut squash) - check out how to make it here.

5 shots of coffee or 5 tbsp. Nutella (if you are an instant coffee fan, you can use that instead)

Sugar to taste

Whipped cream (optional)

Preparation:

1. Pour the milk, spices, sugar, pumpkin puree and nutella (if you’re going for a hot chocolate version) in a pot and bring almost to a boil over medium high heat, while stirring constantly.

2. Sieve if you want the latte to be super smooth.

3. Pour a shot of hot coffee (if gone for the actual latte version) and then pour some of the pumpkin spice milk, leaving a little space for the topping, if you’d like some.

4. Make the topping of your choice. I have 3 offers. Either froth some of the pumpkin spice milk, normal milk, or top with some whipped cream. If you decide for the pumpkin spice milk, it will be orange-brown. If you have a milk frother, you can froth your drink up straight in the cup you are serving it. If you are going for the milk version, froth it up in a separate cup and spoon the froth on top. If you don’t have a frother, you can use a stick blender; just have the liquid that’s being frothed up be the same temperature as the other parts of the drink (almost boiling). Also, you could top your pumpkin spice drink with some marshmallows, smarties or powdered cinnamon.

5. Serve with some cookies! 
                                        

When I was a kid I got a recipe for those cookies and I quite liked it, so decided to make them again; however, once I started making them, I realized that I was missing a lot of the elements, so I substituted them with what I had on hand. The new cookies were amazing! So much better than the original! Unfortunately, I had forgotten what and how much of each ingredient I had used. So, for years, I was trying to remember and I believe I finally made them the way they accidentally had turned out.

I made those last week for some friends and classmates, and two girls from my class claimed that I should start selling them, as they were utterly delicious. So, if you don’t want to wait for the I-Scream-Kitchen-branded cookie line, the recipe is below!J Also, they are super easy to make if I could pull them off when I was around 8-10!

Oatmeal cookies

Oatmeal cookies recipe

(makes 18 cookies)

3/4 cup brown sugar – I used demerara

100 g/3.5 oz softened butter

1 large egg

1 tsp. vanilla extract/a couple of drops of vanilla flavouring

1 tbsp. milk

1 cup flour

½ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. baking powder

½ tsp. salt

1.25 cup chunky oatmeal

½ tsp. cinnamon

100 g dried cranberries/ dried cherries/raisins

1 tsp. lemon rind

Preparation:

1. Set the oven to 180 C/ 355 F. Mix the butter and sugar well, until creamy. Then add the egg, vanilla and milk and mix until homogenous. No need to use a mixer, you can use a fork instead.

2. Slowly add the flower, baking soda, baking powder and salt, while mixing.

3. Add the oatmeal, cinnamon, dried fruit and lemon rind and mix well.

4. Put some baking paper on a baking tray (if you don’t have baking paper, butter the tray and cover with a dusting of flour) and put a tablespoonful of the mixture per cookie. Set the cookies at least 7 cm/ 3 inches away from each other, so they don’t become one big cookie. You don’t need to worry about the shape as they will start looking more like cookies rather than wet blobs as they bake.

5. Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until golden brown. You will probably need to bake in 2 go’s unless your oven is quite big.

If you are not a fan of the old cookie and milk combo, next recipe is a pumpkin spice latte one, that would be perfect to go with any cookies.



Would you make those at home?

The recipe I’m sharing is for a double-layered pumpkin cheesecake (half vanilla, half pumpkin pie flavour), which has a little bit of a funny story behind it. I made this for dessert for a Halloween party this year, but as I got a bit overzealous on the tequila, I might have ended up in bed while my, also quite “spirited”, guests were nomming it up from the baking tray, while standing up. They liked it quite a bit so I ended up making it again and it’s quite a festive one to try out for the holidays, as it has loads of wintery holiday-like spices in it.

I prefer making it with butternut squash instead of with pumpkins as butternut squash is a lot more flavourful and a lot sweeter. Actually, if you buy a canned pumpkin puree, it is usually indeed butternut squash inside. However, I couldn't find a canned puree in my country, so I made it myself (which is super easy) from an awesome fresh squash. Read on for instructions.

I would suggest baking it in a spring form, so you can put it in a serving dish later, if you’re making it for others. Otherwise, you can use anything that is ovenproof. For this recipe, I used individual cups.

Just have in mind that, even though the baking takes only about 40 minutes, you have to allow for it to cool off for several hours. So, prepare this a bit in advance, so it can set. If you make it in individual cups, like me, you can pull it off with shorter cooling time, as you eat it straight from the baking dish.

So there it is:

Double-layered Pumpkin Cheesecake

Pumpkin Cheesecake

(serves 6-8)

600 g/ 21 ounces cream cheese

200 g/ 7 ounces Greek yoghurt

2 large eggs

Several drops vanilla flavouring

1 tsp. lemon rind (optional)

½ cup caster sugar

½ cup pumpkin puree (about 200 g pumpkin or butternut squash)

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1 tsp. ground ginger

¼ tsp. ground cloves

¼ tsp. ground nutmeg

2 tbsp. soft butter

200 g/ 7 ounces whole-grain biscuits/crackers (the crunchier, the better)

Preparation:

1. Crush the biscuits/crackers in a blender. I had no blender, so I put them in a plastic bag, wrapped the bag in a towel and hit them with a thick glass bottle until they got powdery (use a rolling pin, if you have one, instead). This is great for anger management…

Preheat the oven to 160 C/320 F.

2. Melt the butter and pour it over the crushed biscuits/crackers and mix them well. Put the mixture in the baking tray you will be using to bake the cheesecake in. Press the mixture well with your fingers so it sticks to the bottom and put the tray in the fridge so it hardens.

3. Mix cream cheese, yoghurt, eggs, sugar, vanilla and lemon rind with a mixer until fluffy. Don’t leave any lumps.

4. Spread about half the mixture over the hardened biscuit/cracker crust.

5. Add the pumpkin puree and the spices to the leftover cream cheese mixture and mix well.

If you don’t have pumpkin puree, like me, clean and peel some pumpkin (better butternut squash, as it is sweeter), chop it in small pieces and put it in the microwave with the tiniest amount of water in a microwaveable dish with a lid for about 8-10 minutes. Remove the leftover water and blend well with a stick blender, or whatever blending kitchen appliance you have. If you don’t have one, pass the boiled pumpkin through a sieve or a muslin cloth.

6. Spread the pumpkin cream cheese mixture over the white one and put in the oven for about 40 minutes. Then, switch off the oven and let the cheesecake sit for at least 30 more minutes in the switched-off oven (the oven door slightly open). If you have more time just leave it in until the oven completely cools off. To lower the chances of the cake cracking, run a knife on the edges of the cake so they separate from the baking dish. Next, take the cheesecake out and let it cool slowly first and then, put it in the fridge, covered with some cling film.

7. Serve completely cold. You can add some whipped cream. Bon appetit! 



Would you make this at home?