"they don't make baby food this good"

Alyssa thought it was baby food when I first asked her to try this, and that's what I told her. She agreed after trying it. It is in fact one of the most addictive healthy foods I've ever made/ eaten.

So what am I smiling about in the picture? Chocolate-chip cookie dough dip from Chocolate Covered Katie. Most of my friends will vouch for the fact that for all the baking I do, I don't eat very much of the final product. I do however, tend to eat an awful lot of the dough/batter/etc. So when I found this recipe the other day, I knew I had to make it.

I also conveniently had all the ingredients on hand:

Another convenient part of this recipe for the extrodinarily low time commitment. Which was especially good since I was procrastinating when I made it. I honestly just threw everything into my baby the bullet:

In the future I think I'm going to have to do this step in halves.. I had a lot of trouble getting all the chick peas down the the blade and eventually dumped half out, ran it and dumped that into a bowl, and then repeated with the rest. I also ended up substituting the milk with water because the milk was sour (ew). But all in all, it turned out beautifully: 

Stay tuned for a new black bean burger recipe and those pumpkin things I promised!

Well, Hello World

Wow...

I know, it's been over two months since I've posted anything. Epic. Fail. Not quite sure where the rest of my summer went. I started having adventures (Seattle, camping, moving, etc.) instead of making tasty things.

But I promise, this time I'm here to stay.

I figure the least I can do (since I know you all missed these posts), is start back up with a frickin' awesome recipe. So without further ado, I present Deb of Smitten Kitchen's red wine cake..

Probably my favorite thing about this cake was that it gave me reason to go to the liquor store FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER (after two months of belonging to the 21+ club, sad, I know). It's also a super simple cake to make. And tastes absolutely divine. And my assistant was a super awesome mixer/ stirr-er of ingredients (read: I love Sam Kap, and my friend is still babysitting my mixer).

Ingredients:

The steps really just came down to

1) mixing the wet ingredients with the sugars (minus the wine)

(thanks Sam!)

Then mixing in the dry ingredients: 

As the wine is added:

The recipe called for a round cake pan....which is probably the only kind of cake pan I don't have. I figured the 8 x 8 square one was close enough. The finished product:

Not the most appetizing picture I've ever posted, I know. But seriously, if you have a 3/4 cup of red wine in your possession, you need to make this asap.

We skipped Deb's ganache, but we did make a pretty awesome cool whip topping:

Ok, fine, so I actually just added milk to some powder in (cop-out). But it was still delicious!

I have lots of recipes on my to-make list. And it's fall (aka the season to bake pumpkin themed things until my roommate and I turn orange from eating them all). I hope to have one up by this time next week, but in the meantime- make this cake!