Cookies and Books

Today I made my special chocolate-cranberry-oatmeal cookies, which are made with all healthy ingredients and are also delicious! This time I even made them with white chocolate chips, which is an interesting twist.

Chocolate-Cranberry-Oatmeal Cookies (or Goddess Cookies, because according to Jena, they are what keeps me young, blonde, and strong. [or something.] )

(adapted from Quaker Oats' Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies recipe--you can basically mess with the proportions/ingredients as you like, but this is what I do)

1/2 cup + 6 Tbsp apple sauce (or butter)
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1+ tsp vanilla (my general rule about vanilla: always add more.)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (or, you know, whatever kind of flour)
1+ tsp baking soda (add a little more because of the apple sauce)
1+ tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
3 cups oatmeal (I use only about 1 1/2 or 2, but it's just preference)
1 cup craisins

Combine apple sauce and sugars; add eggs and vanilla, beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt; mix well. Add oats and craisins. Blah blah blah toss onto a cookie sheet in absolutely perfect spheres weighing exactly ten grams each blah blah blah and bake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes. Makes enough cookies to share with your friends or hoard over the course of a week.

I also read this book:

Which was a very beautiful, human book about ten people who are trapped in an Indian visa office in an American city after an earthquake, each sharing one amazing story from their life as they wait for death or rescue. Read it.

Still, despite all this, my weekend has been excruciatingly boring. Sigh. :-/ I need to do something legitimately exciting next weekend. Like seriously.

Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Muffins!

I made these muffins yesterday in an attempt to bring some sunshine back into an otherwise dreary day. And it worked! They are freaking delicious, perfect with their dense but not too sweet flavor, fresh strawberries, and just enough chocolate! Yum!

So, without further ado, MAKE THESE MUFFINS!

Chocolate-Covered Strawberry Muffins

Ingredients:

2 cups flour (I used all-purpose, but there's no rule against whole wheat!)

1 Tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt 

1 egg

1 cup sugar

4 Tbsp (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

1 1/4 cups sour cream or natural Greek yogurt (I used the yogurt with no problems)

1 cup(ish) fresh strawberries or thawed frozen (I used fresh and you can just kind of guestimate based on how much strawberry goodness you want in each muffin)

3/4 cup chocolate chip of your choice (semi-sweet was nice)

Chocolate drizzle:

     3 Tbsp chocolate chips

     1/2 Tbsp butter

Directions:

Oven: 425F

Pan: Large muffin tin, lined and greased and ready to go! (Although honestly I always do this last...hehe)

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in your largest bowl. This shall henceforth be known as the "dry bowl". 

Now in your second largest bowl, whisk (ahem, I definitely just used a wooden spoon) the egg until yolk and white are just combined and lightish yellow. Dump in the sugar and combine. Add the butter in three additions, whisking together sloooooooowly. Then gently add in the sour cream/yogurt and mix until just combined. Do not overmix! This is very important. I don't know why, but it is. This is henceforth known as the "wet bowl".

Add the strawberries and chocolate chips to the dry bowl and mix up until the strawberries look weird all covered in flour. It's okay. That's good. Then slowly dump the contents of the wet bowl into the dry bowl in three additions, and fold slowly and carefully until all the dry ingredients are wet. Again, don't overmix. This batter will be quite thick. 

After that, you know the drill--spoon batter into muffin tins, but this time make sure you fill them all the way up. The batter won't rise an incredible amount so you want the tins pretty full. Then bake them at 425F for 5 minutes, then lower the temperature to 350F and bake for another 20-22 minutes. Let them cool for five minutes while you melt the butter and chocolate together (I had a stupid amount of trouble with this--shut up) and then drizzle (or plop) the mixture over the muffins. When they've cooled a bit longer, invite your friends over and eat them all! It'll probably make about a dozen muffins. 

Enjoy!

302 cal/muffin (1/12 of recipe)
With healthy substitutions (butter > apple sauce, fat-free sour cream, sugar substitute, no chocolate drizzle) = 169 cal/muffin (1/12 of recipe)

(From Sally's Baking Addiction)

(Thanks Mom for successfully melting the chocolate and putting it on the cupcakes.)

Day 30: Rough Seas and Red Lions

After sleeping in almost ridiculously late and finishing my book (I'll get to that later) my father and I went scuba diving off Maenporth Beach. Sort of. We swam 200 meters out into the sea (in the rain, in the frigid water, each with what felt like my entire weight in equipment, and getting tossed around by rocking waves), went under for a few minutes and saw, oh I dunno, three different kinds of fish and lots of algae and lots of seaweed and lots of sand, but mostly just murky water, then proceded to fight the tide back into shore (a long swim) after deciding that it wasn't worth it in these rough conditions. Also, neither of us had enough weights on our weight belts to get us all the way down. Oh, it was exhausting! I'm glad we did it, because we've never been successful in scuba diving in England before, but god was it tough going. By the time I got out onto the beach I was lugging around an extra thick layer of water all around my body as well, and my too-big shoes were completely bloated and my fingers didn't work because of the cold water. But maybe tomorrow the weather will be better and we'll get back in our astronaut suits and dive down at Pendennis, which is supposed to be better diving. Maybe.

Then we came home and I tried to rest but instead ended up making Easy Bars and Flapjacks, two Australian snacks which are delicious. I will include the recipes, because recipes are one of my things.

EASY BARS

3/4 cup brown sugar
200g butter
1 1/2 cup flour
1 egg
1 cup chopped dates/dried fruit

Melt butter and sugar in a saucepan. Remove from heat. Add flour, eggs, and dates. Spread in a greased pan and bake at a moderate temperature (maybe 350F?) until they look edible.

FLAPJACKS

6 tbsp Golden Syrup
200g butter
12 oz oats

Melt butter and syrup in a saucepan. Add to oats and mix to coat. Spread in a greased pan and bake for a while at a good temperature until they look edible. Haha.

But seriously, both these things are delicious and worth making for easy picnicking.

Blah blah blah then we eventually went to dinner with some friends of my grandparents, Mike and Sheila Golding, at the Red Lion, a really neat old restaurant that was built in 1500 or some such ridiculous year a million years ago. It had a lot of ambience,, and some really nice candles that made for wonderful entertainment, until I stuffed it out on accident. But food was good. Lots of olives.

Now I'm in bed and I desperately want to go to sleep and I want all this orientation nonsense to sort itself out because, no, UNT, I will not be attending both Orientation 5 and Orientation 6, and I would like it very much if you would realize that before I "miss" the first one and you freak out on me. Also, I wish you would save all the classes I need for me, but I doubt you will, so blah.

All of this nonsense is so confuuuuusing. :-/

Oh, and I was going to talk to you about Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger! Overall I thought it was okay - not nearly as good as The Tie Traveler's Wife, but Niffenegger is clearly a talented writer with a very distinctive style that I happen to love. While this story was less...I dunno...charismatic? than her first, it certainly wasn't a waste of a novel. But it was more depressing, and not in a the cathartic, life-affirming way of TTW. Just straight up depressing. As in, it will make you depressed. It was one of those books that kind of leave you feeling ill because of the complete moral ambiguity and the horrible dilemmas and ultimately the decisions that the characters make that, despite the element of fantasy (ghosts/afterlife), are so prevalent in real life, even if they are kind of hidden (because they suck). So yes, it was a valuable read. But not an uplifting one and kind of a stomach-curdling one, too. And I don't usually like ghost stories, so I don't know if this is something a ghost-story lover would enjoy, but just...have caution. I didn't really like any of the main female characters, either. I kind of loved the main male characters, each for different reasons, but they were ultimately disappointing (in an entirely human way - I'm not blaming the author for this). The girls, on the other hand, all had that weird mental/personal feverishness that made them hard to connect to and almost repulsive, as if their personalities are diseased. I'm not sure if that makes sense here, but if you read the book you'd know what I mean.

I don't mean to sound so critical - the book was legitimately good, a fascinating look at some of the weirdest kinds of relationships, from twin sisters and their twin parents, romances with massive age differences, dead lovers, spouses struggling with OCD. It was truly absorbing, just incredibly hopeless. So, read with caution. But do read.