The Best Brownies

Hello! I just got back from a jam packed weekend celebrating Christmas with my mom's side of the family and after playing games, eating amazing food, and being around the people I love all weekend I'm a pretty happy camper. Now that I am back home, I am totally ready to share the next recipe on my 2015 Christmas Treat Guide: my favourite brownies. My mom found this recipe many years ago in a magazine and we have been making them ever since because they are just so good!
After baking cookie after cookie during my 2k15 Christmas baking spree I was so happy to whip up this batch of brownies in less than ten minutes (excluding baking time).

Ingredients

¾ cup unsalted butter

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped

2 cups sugar

4 large eggs

1¼ cups flour

2 tsp vanilla

1 cup chopped pecans

2 cups of chocolate chips

Directions

✿ Preheat oven to 350ºF.

✿ Heat butter and chopped chocolate in the microwave for two minutes and then stir until smooth. Let stand for a five minutes to cool.

✿ Whisk in sugar, eggs, flour, and vanilla to the cooled chocolate mixture. 

✿ Then stir in pecans and half of the chocolate chips (1 cup).

✿ Transfer the batter to a 9x13 pan lined with parchment paper, then sprinkle the remaining chocolate chips.

✿ Bake at 350ºF for 35 minutes until the top is dry to touch.

So easy!! And the crisp top coat is so tasty.

Enjoy.

Chocolate Crinkles and Choco Oatmeal Cookies

Up first in this year's Christmas Treat Guide are chocolate crinkles and choco oatmeal cookies!

Oh boy! There's so much to be said about chocolate crinkles. One, they're vegan. Two, they're delicious. Three, they're hella easy to make. Four, they make the perfect chocolate filling to stuff into other cookies to make the cookie of all vegan cookies! I almost didn't want to advertise these cookies as vegan because some non-vegans will turn their noses at the very thought of A COOKIE WITH NO EGGS OR BUTTER???? (I'm looking at you, Dad). But I swear that these cookies just happen to be vegan, it's not like I purposely substituted ingredients to make them vegan. Oh and they're also nut free :)

First things first, ingredients!

- 1¾ cups sugar
- 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
- ½ cup coconut oil, melted
- 2 tsp vanilla
-2¼ cups flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
- ¼ tsp salt
- 1 cup icing sugar (for topping the cookies)

Directions

✿ Combine the first five ingredients (sugar, cocoa, applesauce, oil, and vanilla) together with an electric mixer, or determination and a quick hand.

✿ In a separate bowl, whisk flour with baking powder and salt.

✿ Add the flour mixture to the chocolate mixture in three parts to allow the wet mixture to soak up all the flour.

✿ This step is crucial: Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours. You want the dough to chill up so that it's easier to scoop into cookies. I have even made the dough at night and then baked them the next morning.

✿ Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or a baking mat.

✿ Sift icing sugar into a shallow bowl. Scoop spoonfuls of dough and roll in your hands to make balls. Roll them in the icing sugar to get them nice and coated. This will give them that beautiful crinkled look!

✿ Place on the baking sheets a couple inches a part (you will need two baking sheets cause this recipes make A LOT of cookies) and bake for 10 minutes or until they have a soft brownie-like texture. Cool for a long while before manipulating.

You thought I was done right? Well think again!! Last summer, when I surprised my roommate Sara at her boyfriend Jimmy's (hey Jim, I told you I'd give you a blog shoutout!) cottage, I made a batch of chocolate crinkles to bring and I had SO MUCH dough left over that I had the brilliant idea of using it as a filling in vegan oatmeal cookies! And it worked!! Beautifully might I add :)

So here are the deets for these oatmeal cookies pictured on the left hand side of the above photo.

Ingredients
- 1 cup flour
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 tsp salt
- ¾ cup quick oats
- ½ cup coconut oil (NOT MELTED)
- ¼ cup white sugar
- ½ cup brown sugar
- 1 flax egg (1 Tbsp of ground flax seed mixed with 3 Tbsp water... let sit for five minutes)
- ¾ cups shredded coconut

Directions

✿ Preheat the oven at 350ºF
✿ In a bowl, mix together flour, baking soda, salt, and oats. Set aside.

✿ In another bowl, cream the sugars and the coconut oil, then add the flax egg and vanilla.

✿ Add in the flour mixture and once combined, add in the coconut.

✿ Let the dough chill in the fridge for about 30 minutes, then when it has chilled create a sort of patty with the oatmeal dough and then place a ball of the chocolate crinkle dough in the centre of said patty. In the palm of your hand roll the two cookies into one. Place on a lined baking sheet.

✿ Bake for 13-15 minutes.

Enjoy!

In other news, I hope every single one of you has listened to the first episode of Serial Season 2!!! When I was studying in France, a bunch of my friends would pile into one of our tiny (I mean TINY) residence rooms and drink tea and not move an inch or blink an eye as we listened ever so intently to what Sarah Koenig found out that week about Adnan Syed, a high school student in Baltimore that she suspected to have been wrongly convicted of murder fifteen years ago. The podcast EXPLODED and soon everybody and their brother was listening in! So flash forward a year, my friends and I are no longer cuddled up listening to a podcast on a crisp fall day in France, but thanks to good ol' Facebook the tradition continues, as we are all weighing in on the new season that is exploring Bowe Bergdahl's case.... I'm so excited I can hardly wait for the next episode this Thursday.

(Picture of girls listening to radio from Tumblr)

Christmas Treat Guide

Hello! I am super excited to share my favourite christmas treats with you guys. Before I travelled home for the holidays, I did some heavy duty searching and compiling and after many hours spent on blogs and Pinterest as well as looking through family cookbooks and my camera roll, I came up with four of my favourite cookie (slash one brownie) recipes that I haven't already posted here on Breakfast at Midnight. My top picks are great on their own, or thrown together to make a goodie bag. The outcome will have people praising your glory and kissing your feet... you can thank me later. 

I just happened to make the batch of baked goodies pictured in this post in the midst of exams because there's nothing that soothes my exam jitters better than a little baking with a cup of tea, some huge slippers, and dancing around the kitchen listening to Pascale's alterna Christmas playlist (yes, my bff is 8tracks famous). For those of you that are still in exams, or that need a little pick me up, I strongly suggest you head out the door this instance to grab your weight in butter and sugar and start preheating the oven!!

I also put my Martha Stewart-ness to good use to make these cute gift bags with little mittens drawn on cards. It was so easy to do and cheap too! I picked up the red bags at the dollar store and you can get the boxes at any bakery (for a small price) or at a papery/card store.

In the next couple of days I will be posting the recipe for each of the goodies in the pictures, and eventually they will all be linked to their corresponding pictures below. Happy baking!!

Appie Hack

Hello! I am home for the holidays and ready to get cooking, baking, eating, and photographing up a storm. One of my favourite food brands, President's Choice, just came out with their holiday collection and I'm so excited!! When I was in studying in France last year, I did a project and presentation on President's Choice for my brand marketing class and fell even more in love with this trusted Canadian brand. I love how all their products are always of excellent quality and so on point with food trends, as well as being affordable for a starving student. Plus their new website design includes tons of recipes and analytics on trending foods around the country... basically my dream come true! So when I was on their Instagram page the other day and saw that they were looking for people to try out their new collection I jumped at the opportunity faster than you can say "the PC cookie butter is on sale for three dollars!".

The post was making a call for appie hacks and recently I've been obsessed with pomegranates so I figured my recent cooking motto, "when in doubt, add pomegranate seeds" would apply to appetizers too!



I then headed into the nearest store that sells President's Choice products and went ham on buying fresh fruits and veggies to make the tastiest appie for the holidays. I settled on this mango salsa recipe I posted a little while ago but with a little twist... I added pomegranate seeds!! They're honestly the best way to spice up any dish, whether its dressing up a cheese plate, topping your yogurt and smoothies, or tossing a few into dips and on hors d'oeuvres.



Another food hack?? Using President's Choice products! For this recipe I used PC Market Trio Tomatoes for the salsa and then threw some PC Appetizer Flatbreads topped with PC Soft Unripened Goat's Milk Cheese into the oven. I then loaded the fresh juicy salsa onto the crisp cheesy flatbread and cut it into strips for a quick and easy appetizer. It was refreshing to have something that wasn't dripping with grease, when the holidays are definitely a time for heavy foods.

The recipe is posted in my Crostini with Mango Salsa post, but I snapped some pictures today for fun  to show just how good PC products can make any classic family recipe.

Enjoy!

Banana Ice Cream

Sorry for dropping off the face of the earth but this has been the busiest semester of my life!! My current stress level is somewhere between the time I got lost in the middle of rural Holland in a field on my bike in the pitch-dark and the time I thought an ax murderer was hiding outside my window... except the stress I'm living right now has lasted months instead of mere hours. But only two short weeks until I'm done (!!) so I'm holding on for dear life until then.

If you would like something simple and utterly delicious to satisfy a classic mid-study session craving (what, I'm sure I'm not the only one) without indulging too much I have the perfect snack for you! You're going to go BANANAS for this "ice cream" because it is completely vegan, gluten-free and as you might have guessed it's made of just bananas. Also, for those that don't love the taste of bananas don't fret because freezing the bananas makes them taste less banana-y.

Very appeeling, am I right??

Everybody and their brother has probably made this before but there's a small chance that a few of you haven't, so here is the recipe! I basically live off this stuff in the summer time and I think it's about time I share my secret obsession with banana ice cream.

Also if you don't have a good food processor they are the number one thing sold at garage sales, church basement rummage sales, and on kijiji, so drop what you're doing and go get a $5 food processor.

One Ingredient Ice Cream

Ingredients

- 2 Bananas

Directions

✿ Slice the bananas and place on a parchment lined plate or pan.

✿ Freeze for at least 5 hours.

✿ Blend the banana mixture in a food processor. At first it will look crumbly but just keep blending away as the ice cream magically starts to look like soft serve ice cream.

✿ You can add some milk of your choosing if it is hard to blend together but try to keep at it without milk to get that optimal ice cream texture. 

It should be thick enough to do the Dairy Queen blizzard flip test, so if you flip it upside down and it runs everywhere then I hope you have some napkins near by...

✿ Enjoy COPIOUS amounts of this stuff because it's more addicting than crack cocaine but it is literally just bananas, so just a few less side effects.

Use the pictures below as a guide because I clearly wasn't born to write recipe directions.

You know what's also fun?? Toppings and add-ins!

Here are a couple options to change up your regular banana ice cream:

1) Cocoa powder! Add 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder to your banana mixture for chocolate ice cream.

2) Mango gelato! Add 1/3 cup frozen mangoes to your two bananas and blend away.

3) Vanilla! Add a teaspoon of vanilla to your banana mixture for yummy vanilla soft serve.

4) Choco-peanut butter! Yes, you can probably guess by now... just add a tablespoon of peanut butter to your chocolate banana ice cream.

5) There are millions of other options that I won't take time to name here, but basically just throw some sprinkles, fruit, nuts, yada yada yada onto your banana ice cream and you'll be thanking me forever and always.

6) You can even go cray cray and make a banana ice cream layer cake with raw vegan cookie dough and your coworkers with strict diets will cry. True story.

Happy exams!

Apple Spice Cake

Hello and happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

I'm back in Ottawa for a hot minute and since my parents had a sudden urge to be good citizens and work at the advance election polls all weekend, I've had a lot of time to do some baking, see relatives and friends, and get outside to admire the beautiful trees changing colours this time of year.

On Friday evening, I went to my aunt and uncle's house for Thanksgiving dinner and I brought along this wonderful apple cake. I had made it a couple weeks ago with hand picked apples and it was so quick, delicious and easy (i.e. Breakfast at Midnight blog post prerequisites). The last time I made this cake it was in a bit of a different context...

The day I went apple picking just happened to be when the red moon made its appearance. So when my friends and I decided to sneak onto our campus golf course and watch this rare occurrence, I had the (not so) brilliant idea to bring along an apple cake... in an extremely heavy cast iron pan... in the pitch dark... where I ultimately had to jump a fence. Needless to say not my brightest moment, but it tasted even better after the job and a half it was to get to eat it. And I can say that the second time I made it it was just as tasty!

I found the recipe on Joy the Baker (love her!!) and I knew I couldn't go wrong when she suggested making it an a cast iron pan. I mean how fall-ish does that picture look?

Apple Spice Cake

Ingredients
✿ 1½ cups all purpose flour
✿ ¾ tsp baking powder 
✿ ¼ tsp baking soda
✿ ½ tsp cinnamon
✿ ¾ tsp salt
✿ 6 Tbsp butter (just under 1/2 cup)
✿ 1 cup white sugar
✿ 1 egg
✿ 1 egg yolk
✿ 2 tsp vanilla
✿ ¾ buttermilk (you can make this by adding ¾ Tbsp of white vinegar or lemon juice to regular milk, then letting it sit for a minute)
✿ 4 apples, sliced into thin rounds and cored
✿ ¼ cup sugar and ¾ tsp cinnamon for topping

Directions
- Preheat oven to 375ºF. Once this is heated put a little butter in a cast iron skillet and stick it in the oven to melt it. Then spread it around with a paper towel to grease the pan.
- Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Set aside.
- With an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until well incorporated and lighter in colour (roughly 3 minutes).
- Add the egg and yolk and beat for 1 minute, followed by the vanilla.
- Turn your mixer to low and add in half of the flour mixture.
- Add the buttermilk and then the remaining flour. Beat until just incorporated.
- Spoon the batter into the greased pan and then top with ALL THOSE APPLES!!
- Sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar mixture onto the apples.
- Bake for about 35-40 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean from the centre of the cake.
- Preferably paired with vanilla ice cream and enjoyed under a cozy blanket, while listening to soft acoustic music.

Enjoy fall, my lovelies!!

xox

Roasted Veggies

Hello sweet readers!

I hope I haven't lost you all :) I am working on a bigger post about everything cake, buttercream, ganache, truffles, tiers, toppings at the moment, but in the mean time I am itching to give you a little trick I used yesterday when roasting some cauliflower and sweet potato. 

I wanted a quick but filling dinner between classes, so I biked home and scavenged around a bit in my fridge and cupboards to throw a meal together that could get me through a three hour lecture on the changing trends in labour relations (i.e. something that would also keep me awake!!). 

And guess what I discovered? The best seasoning for roasted veggies in a pinch is.................... taco seasoning! It makes sense, in most taco seasonings you have chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder, red pepper flakes, oregano, paprika, cumin, salt, etc., so basically what I usually sprinkle on my cauliflower before roasting it, but this was just so easy!! Especially if you're a student like me and most meals you make need to be made in about 10 seconds while brushing your teeth and finishing up a reading. Also, if you don't have a stacked spice rack you can just buy a pack of taco seasoning for a couple bucks and voila!

So here are the deets on the steps I took to achieve crispy mouthwatering roasted vegetables:

Ingredients:

✿ One head of cauliflower

✿ One sweet potato

✿ One package of taco seasoning

✿ Drizzle of olive oil

Directions:

- This is very simple, so follow closely :) 

- Preheat the oven to 400ºF.

- Cut up the roasted cauliflower and sweet potato into bite sized pieces (pictured above).

- Place on a baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil.

- Sprinkle a little taco seasoning on the veggies. You don't need to use the whole pack.

- Bake for 30 minutes or until golden and crispy.

- Serve on toast with hummus, in a salad, in a wrap with fresh vegetables, or shove it in your face because it's THAT good.

 

I'll be back soon with more goodies to share!!

xox

G