However much I like to complain about rainy days, it’s actually nice to have a stormy weekend in every once in a while. It means I have time to finally read a book, clean the house and cook some food. Boy did I take advantage of it! I’ve been meaning to make a coffee cake ever since I saw a sour cream recipe in some magazine on a flight. Can’t remember the magazine, can’t even remember the flight. But I remember craving coffee cake!
So since I had the time, I played around with some recipes. I was mostly curious about the sour cream and then added blueberries for… antioxidants. The sour cream gave it this amazing texture and kept the cake nice and moist. The best part is that this is SO easy to make! Unfortunately I didn’t have any vanilla ice cream to go with it but some berry sorbet was a different but tasty substitute. Hope you like it!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: baking, blueberries, cooking, desserts, food, fruit, recipe, recipes, snacks, sweets
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I know, I know… I’ve been a missing in action. I have been meaning to post but Winter sure does have a way of making me lazy! New York City makes me want to order delivery for every meal - delicious food at my beckoning call! It’s no excuse but I gotta say, it sure is convenient!
So it’s been warming up a bit… this weekend we had 50 degree weather. Spring is in the air and I am determined to blog more. This dreary cold has got me day dreaming of my days in sunny Sydney. One of my favorite snacks at the gazillion coffee shops I go to is banana bread, toasted with a little bit of butter. But of course I added chocolate chips to my version. YUM! I bought bananas specifically to wait until they are ripe to make banana bread. It’s definitely one of those things that you have to plan for.
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: baking, banana, bread, chocolate, cooking, desserts, food, loaf, recipe, recipes, sweets
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Yes it’s holiday season again. I feel like it hit really early this year. I heard Christmas music at Bloomies before Halloween! This year I’m so happy to be surrounded by all the amazing holiday paraphernalia. Pumpkins all over the place! Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, hams, you can’t miss it at any grocery store. Everyone gets into it. Starbucks with their special drinks, Dunkin Donuts with special holiday flavors so I figured it’s time for me to experiment with some pumpkin goodness.
We all love pumpkin pie. Those spices mixed with that rich pumpkin puree, mmmm mmm just reminds me of Fall. After 3 batches, I finally perfected the recipe for these scrumptious spiced pumpkin cookies. They’re more like muffin tops. Cakey and spongey like a moist muffin with a delicious maple icing on top. Perfect to fill the cookie jar for this holiday season!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: baking, cookies, cooking, desserts, food, holiday, recipe, recipes, sweets, thanksgiving
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Packing up and selling all my belongings has got me in a bad mood. I haven’t been able to cook dinners lately or bake things or just eat normally. I looked at what’s left in my pantry and what’s left of my cooking toys… I have just enough to make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. YAY! Finally something that won’t stress me out and something delicious to post! Can’t think of a better way to cheer myself up, peanut butter + chocolate.
I’ve been meaning to make peanut butter chocolate cookies for a while now, I think that’s why I have 2 extra tubs of peanut butter in the pantry. Luckily no one has bought my cookie sheets or mixing bowls yet. So a little whisking here, a little taste testing there… and we have peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. Since I’m a sucker for ice cream sandwiches, I had to try these in ice cream sandwich form. I think they might better than my usual snickerdoodle option! It might be a while until my next cooking experiment post so I hope you enjoy it!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: american, baking, chocolate, cookies, cooking, food, recipe, recipes, snacks, sweets
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I was really excited about my 100th post, so much so that I made alfajores to celebrate. I have been meaning to makes these for quite some time. I’ve always wanted to try Matt of mattbites.com’s version because his photos look so scrumptious I want to eat the screen! But of course I can’t find store bought dulce de leche here so I had to make my own. I did it the cheater way 
simmering a can of sweetened condensed milk submerged in water for an hour and 45 minutes gives you delicious dulce de leche. I’ve always wanted to try that method! Sure the can could explode and I could possibly suffer burns but that’s the fun right? Okay to be honest I was scared the whole time. But the key is to keep the can completely submerged so it doesn’t explode. I used the biggest pot I could find and filled the entire thing with water… just in case!
So Alfajores… a delicious latin treat with two biscuits and dulce de leche in the middle. And then of course powdered sugar on top! I actually really liked the biscuit by itself with just a little sprinkle of powdered sugar. They’re a little cakey and not your usual cookie crunch. Almsot like a little pancake… in fact the house smelled like pancakes the whole time. Mmm I’m going to have another one now.
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: Other, baking, food, mmmm, random, recipes, travel
Tags: baking, cookies, cooking, food, latin, recipe, recipes, snacks, sweets
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I made a cheesecake!!! A very patriotic red, white & blue cheesecake to be exact. Okay so it’s more like yellowish instead of white but you get the idea. Now for a disclaimer: I generally don’t like cheesecake. I usually only eat the crust and the little bit of cheesecake that touches the crust. So that said, I actually liked this cheesecake! Biased? Well of course because I made sure the crust was nice and thick and there was enough berry topping to balance the cheesecake-ness.
This cheesecake was made with a graham cracker crust, the most important part! Note, for the Aussies that read this, you cannot find graham crackers here! Although I think a good alternative would be crushed up Anzac cookies! Definitely going to try that soon. I actually had my mom ship us some graham crackers so I can make this. Well worth the extra shipping and handling. I adapted this recipe from Martha’s Blueberry Topped Cheesecake. Now this cheesecake is note quite as cheesy as a traditional New York style cheesecake and it’s also not as tough. It’s got a bit more lemon to it as well. Hmmm might be why I liked it? Hope you like it too!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: american, baking, cheese, cooking, dessert, desserts, food, lemon, recipe, recipes, sweets
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Happy Fourth of July!!! I can’t think of a better dessert than apple pie to celebrate independence day. (Actually that might be debatable, I will post the red white and blue cheesecake I made as the other dessert option in a bit.) But really though, there’s nothing that speaks more American than the traditional apple pie, it’s right along there with baseball, red white and blue, bbqs, stars and stripes, and the pledge of allegiance.
To make sure I had enough, I bought an extra large pie dish just in case. I made mine a day before serving so the juices had time to settle but if you want to serve the same day, I suggest letting it cool for a few hours. The juices won’t be piping hot but it’ll still be warm on the inside. And you must serve with ice cream, it’s the only way.
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: american, apple, baking, cooking, dessert, food, pies, recipe, recipes, sweets
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I’ve been craving some blueberry muffins lately but I’ve been sick so I haven’t had the chance to cook or bake much the past week. Now that I’m about 99.9% better, I had to make some blueberry muffins right away! These muffins are very very very berry. I figured blueberries are jam packed with vitamins they’ve gotta be good for me. You could cut down the amount of blueberries if you want more cake.
Depending on how you like your muffins, you can add about another minute to the baking if you like it a bit more brown. I like to take it out a little before then so the insides is still incredibly moist. Test it out, see what you like! Enjoy!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: baking, cooking, food, recipe, recipes, snacks, sweets
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Mmmmm, chocolate chips with chocolate?! OH YEAH! I was thinking about making it a triple chocolate cookie by adding white chocolate chunks as well but the store was out! Double chocolate it is!
Vini’s coworker’s birthday is this weekend so I insisted on making some cookies for him to bring to work. I was told he likes chocolate, so here’s double the chocolate for ya! I hope they like it!
I played around with my chocolate chip recipe and came up with this. You might want to do a test on your first batch to see how you like them to come out. I did 11 minutes for the slightly chewier one and then 12 minutes was perfect for the completely cooked through ones. Test it out, have fun!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: baking, chocolate, cookies, cooking, food, recipe, recipes, snacks, sweets
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I always thought red velvet cake was overrated. Well up until I had Sprinkle’s red velvet cupcakes several years ago. I basically fell in love with the idea of red cake. I mean it’s just food coloring but it makes this chocolate-vanilla cake absolutely magical. And then there’s the cream cheese frosting… I generally only like cream cheese on a bagel but for some reason the red cake makes it so irresistible. YUM!!
So instead of cupcakes, I figured it was about time I tried a layered cake. Not too shabby! I had to cut down the top of one of them so that it fit nicely on top of each other but all in all, a success! It’s not exactly wedding cake perfect… definitely far from that… but it held together and tasted great. I even cheated and skipped the crumbing layer during the frosting!
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Posted by: Maggie Ha
Category: baking, food, mmmm, recipes
Tags: baking, chocolate, cooking, food, recipe, recipes, sweets
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