Carrot Cupcakes with Vanilla Bean Cream Cheese Icing

Hello! Sorry for the week of no posts, it's be HOT here in Chicago! It's not much cooler this week, but tonight is my book club and, dammit, book club cannot happen without treats! I love carrot cake, but am not the biggest fan of cream cheese icing (I know, I know, I'm a weirdo). But what goes with carrot cake other than cream cheese icing? Nothing. That's correct. So I've developed a super-vanillay version of the classic that I find to be delicious. Also, carrot cake is made of carrots, which are a vegetable, so I declare this a vegetable, and, therefor, healthy. Comments noting the fact that the butter and sugar content outweigh the carrot content, or any other sort of science refuting my vegetable theory will be deleted, ummmkay????

Deep Dish Peach Cobbler

Some things in life are not with the time, effort, or calories. Unbalanced cobbler is one of them. Unbalanced as in either too-much-fruit-not-enough-biscuit or too-much-biscuit-not-enough-fruit. I often find that, due to fruit shrinkage when the fruit cooks, the latter occurs by accident. NOT ON MY WATCH, do you hear me?? NOT ON MY WATCH!!! Plus, when there is a lot of fruit you can pretend it cancels out the calories by being healthy and you can eat it for breakfast. :-) Thus, I make a 'deep dish' peach cobbler.

Cobblers are one of my favorite summer desserts. I love them when fruits/berries are fresh and you don't have to use frozen. (You can make very delicious cobbler with frozen fruit, but fresh fruit, in my opinion, always tastes better. That being said-- if you need to save time or the fruit is out of season, frozen is a fantastic alternative.) I've never been big on pie-- possibly the too-much-crust-not-enough-fruit problem that often occurs-- so crisps and cobblers are my favorite fruit based deserts. My recipe started as the one in the Betty Crocker 1969 cookbook featured in my sidebar, but has morphed pretty far from there over the last few years.

Biscoff Chocolate Chip Cookies

Anyone who's been trolling recipes on Pinterest in the past few months has seen the Biscoff Spread that is being used in all kinds of baked goods. I've had my eye out for it for a while, and have not been able to put my hands on a jar. I recently learned that Trader Joe's has their over version called Cookie Butter. Seeing as I have Trader Joe's in close proximity, you must know how excited I was by this. I quickly sped out and bought a jar. See???

Note: Product is delicious & addictive.

After I ate nearly half the jar with a spoon responsibly sampled the Cookie Butter, I was then left with conundrum of what to make with it. I'd seen it made into all kinds of things on other blogs, but the more I thought, the more I figured I'd start with the basics: a chewy, moist, chocolate chip cookie. They take a classic and spice it up a bit with a hint of ginger.

This recipe is based off my peanut butter cookie recipe. Since the Cookie Butter is about the same texture as peanut butter, the recipe converted over nicely.

Triple Chocolate Cupcakes

Remember that time I admitted to being obsessed with this dark chocolate cake recipe? Yes. Obsession still happening. I'm the birthday fairy at work, and we had another birthday a few weeks ago. When I asked said birthday girl what she wanted and she said, 'chocolate,' so I came up with these. In short, this is a dark chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting, dipped in chocolate. They are just as delicious as they sound. :-)


On a side note-- due to the heatwave hitting Chicago right now and my lack of a/c, I will be a bit quiet through the month of July. I hope the heat breaks so I can be back to baking ASAP!

Three Layer Irish Cream Cake + Decorating Tutorial (Subtitled: How to narrowly avoid Cake Wrecks)

I made the fantastic Layla a birthday cake. Layla has long been an aficionado of the Irish Cream Cupcakes I made for Leslie's Birthday, so I was quite certain that Layla needed an Irish cream cake for her birthday. The recipe I used is the same as the one for the cupcakes, but with the amounts adjusted to make three, nine inch layers, each about 1.5ish inches thick.

I've also included a decorating tutorial for my standard birthday cake design, which you can all thank me for because now that everyone knows it's easy, they are going to expect better cakes. ;-) I will warn you that the Baileys in the icing made the icing colors appear slightly different than if you were putting them in a white, less boozy icing. This is important in this case only because the cake I envisioned was a lovely dark teal with pastel pick letters and some very elegant pink and white sprinkles, but it became the creation you see here when the colors took differently than I'd hoped and I switched to a standard confetti sprinkle. At any rate, I figure I have narrowly avoided cake-wrecks this time, even if it be only by a small margin.

Whoopie Pies

My name is Julie, and I'm a Whoopie Pie Snob.

{Hi Julie}

For real- this is serious business.


My mom grew up in a small town in Ohio, directly adjacent to Amish country. My grandparents still live in said town, and, consequently, I grew up on a steady stream of high quality, delicious, Amish recipes. What does this have to do with Whoopie Pies, the sandwich cookie/cake confections run rampant in American bakeries and enjoyed by the masses since the trend took hold a few years ago??? Oh, LET ME TELL YOU.

(Read as: Put in your earplugs, Julie is a-goin' on a rant).

Cookie Dough Cupcakes

It appears to be a bit of a right of passage for a baking blog to feature a cookie dough cupcake recipe. I've staked a number of them on pinterest, (like this one and this one and this one), and they came in two varieties-- the kind that stuff with dough post-baking and the kind that freeze the dough and bake it inside. I opted to go the route of freezing the dough, so that it really goes in the middle and so that you can get a little in every bite. Consequently, I also went about deciding how to make my favorite cookie dough egg-less, as the dough stays doughy and I have no desire to send anyone into the grips of Salmonella, or any other brand of food poisoning. This post by The Girl Who Ate Everything gave me the idea to substitute the egg with sweetened condensed milk, which worked perfectly. I combined my newly egg-less dough with my favorite vanilla cupcake recipe, doctored up a little vanilla butter-cream to hold a more cookie-like flavor, and DONE. They are delicious.

You'll notice that this vanilla cupcake recipe is the same one I've used as a base for a lot of recipes. I like it because it is consistent and easy. I have a few other recipes I'll bust out for you at another time, but I specifically chose this one for these cupcakes because the batter is thick. It's the same one I use as the base for my cupcakes with Oreos baked inside. You need a thick batter when you want something to bake in the middle-- this helps prevent the stuff in the middle from sinking to the bottom.