Still Alive and Dulce de Leche Thumbprint Cookies!

I can’t believe how long it has been since I’ve been on here. Once I started my fall quarter I just didnt have a moment to stop and think about the blog. I’ve been juggling school and travel. I spend Monday through Thursday with my nose in a book, and then I jump on a train to San Diego for the weekend where I forget about school, books, emails and other technology of that sort. Having a long distance relationship is tough but we are lucky enough to be only be 2 hours away. That’s why I’ve been traveling every weekend, and blogging fell by the wayside in the process. But now I’m back! At least kind of… I’ll be back more fully on Dec. 8th, once I’m done with my first quarter at UCLA!

Now to the important stuff: COOKIES!!!

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A very tall chocolate cake

I’ve always loved to read food blogs and that is what inspired me to start my own. The Smitten Kitchen was the first food blog that I started reading. Seeing her beautiful pictures and delicious recipes really pushed me to a whole other level of cooking. I found myself with dozens of tabs open, all of recipes I was dying to try. In the last two years I have made a large number of the recipes seen on smitten kitchen and I have rarely been disappointed by them. Since I’ve been writing my own blog I’ve been seeking food inspiration in other places aside from the blogs I typically read. I want to find my own style and try new things aside from those that I see on other people’s blogs but every once in a while I see a recipe that I can’t resist. This chocolate cake was one of those. Sam and I made this right around the time of his graduation. We figured that the momentous event deserved celebrating, and what a better way to celebrate than with a huge chocolate cake with peanut butter cream cheese filling, yeah you heard me correctly.

Yoghurt Pancakes

It’s Monday morning of finals week for Sam, and the ants have invaded, very unfortunate timing. They devoured our leftover baklava and everything else edible that was on our dining room table. I feel like I’m in Nicaragua again. So many ants. Back there we kept everything in the fridge: spices, pancake mix, flour, baking soda, pasta, you name it and it was in the fridge. Anything that would typically would be found in a pantry had to live in the fridge to avoid ant infestation. Only cans were immune to the ants.

I thought this was a perfectly normal practice until I came to the states. No flour in the refrigerator here. Silly me, but I easily got accustomed to leaving things out without fear.

Fudgy Brownie Cookies

These are amazing, and yet one of the strangest cookies I have made recently. The cookie dough is more like the consistency of a cake batter, but it tastes like chocolate mousse and somehow when they get cooked they acquire the texture of a brownie. Weird, I know. But they are worth it, all 16-oz-of-chocolate-worth it. I made these because as I mentioned we are moving out of our apartment soon and I am trying very, very hard to eat our way through a very well stocked pantry. Our transportation will be very limited, so there won’t be much room for food items. So using a whole pound of chocolate in one batch of chocolate sounded like a good idea, and oh boy it was.

All of this moving out craze has gotten me into a food frenzy. I’ve made more baked goods in the last couple of days than I have in the last few months put together. Our cookie tins are overflowing, and our tummies are full but we will soldier on until its all gone! After running out of flour yesterday we have finally put the baking on pause. Only a temporary pause.