Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

I know there are a million recipes for chocolate chip cookies in existence, ranging from the Nestle standard to the Neiman Marcus million-dollar recipe. I found my personal favorite...on the back of Aldi brand chocolate chips. Apparently the magic comes from the hot water, as I've never seen that in any other recipe. Who would have guessed? Also, it only uses one bowl, it comes together quickly,  it's always produced the same great results for me, and it's super easy to cut in half or double. In other words: it's a winner.
I'm writing it down here so that I never lose it, even if Aldi changes its recipe. I do add vanilla, which wasn't in the original recipe.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes approximately 3 dozen cookies.

2/3 cup butter
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
2 Tbsp hot water
2 tsp vanilla
2 2/3 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375º. Melt butter (until very soft or even until completely melted), then stir in brown sugar. Add eggs, hot water, and vanilla and stir to combine. Add in flour, then baking powder, soda, and salt on top of the flour. Stir the dry ingredients together gently to make sure there aren't any big pockets of baking powder or baking soda (a fork is good for this). Then, stir the wet and dry ingredients together. Fold in chocolate chips.

Form dough into balls (about 1 tbsp each) and place on cookie tray. Bake for 8-10 minutes or until cookies are slightly golden brown on top.

Pumpkin streusel muffins

These muffins taste just like eating pumpkin pie! I like the strong pumpkin flavor.

Pumpkin streusel muffins
1 cup self-rising flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp apple pie spice mix (or 1/2 tsp each cloves and nutmeg)
1/2 tsp ginger
3/4 cup canned pumpkin
1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup oil
1 tsp vanilla

Streusel topping:
1/4 cup flour
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tbsp butter

Preheat oven to 350.
Combine dry ingredients, then add in wet ingredients. Stir until mixed. Scoop mixture into greased muffin tin.
For streusel, mix together flour, sugar, and cinnamon. Cut the butter into small pieces with a knife or fork, then use your fingers to rub the mixture together until butter is evenly distributed and mixture looks like wet sand.
Sprinkle streusel over muffin batter in tins, and bake for 18-20 minutes, or until streusel is light brown and a toothpick inserted into a muffin comes out clean.

Pumpkin crumble bars

Tis the season for all things pumpkin spice, right? Although I guess I'm a little late, seeing as it's November already.

These bars were inspired by the fact that the only cans of pumpkin puree at the grocery store were those ginormous ones. 28 oz maybe? Definitely at least 4 cups of pumpkin. Anyway, I had opened the can for another recipe and wanted the use the rest of the pumpkin for something else. I brought these to a friend's house for a football gamewatch, and they got rave reviews. They're not too sweet -- you could easily eat them for breakfast. (In fact, I'm about to do just that!)

Pumpkin Crumble Bars
Crust:
3/4 cup butter
2 cups flour (could make gluten-free by substituting oat flour)
2 cups slow-cooking oats
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp vanilla

Filling:
6 oz. softened neufchâtel cheese
1 1/2 cups pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie mix)
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp apple pie spice mix (pumpkin pie spice mix would probably be better, but this is what I had!)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9 X 13 pan with parchment paper or tin foil.
Place the butter in a large, microwave-safe bowl and head it for about 45 seconds, until softened but not completely melted. Add all other crust ingredients. Mix the butter into the dry ingredients with a pastry cutter or your fingers until butter is evenly distributed and mixture looks like wet sand. Reserve one cup of the crust mixture and pour the remaining crust mixture into the prepared pan. Press down hard to make sure the crust sticks together. Back for 12 minutes (try not to over bake).

Meanwhile, blend filling ingredients together. (Make sure your neufchâtel cheese is softened so your filling doesn't get lumpy.) Remove crust from oven and pour filling mixture over it. Top with the remaining cup of crust mixture. There should be enough to cover the filling with a single layer of crust, without any gaps.

Bake for 25 minutes or until the top crust is light golden brown. Allow to cool to room temperature before eating.

Adapted from Joy the Baker, Ambitious Kitchen, and Kraft recipes.

Ariquipe-filled Banana World Cup-cakes

One of L's favorite podcasts is called Men in Blazers, which discusses soccer, particularly the World Cup. They had a series of shows previewing the World Cup before it started, and at the end of each show the two hosts ate some World Cup-cakes and pretended that the cupcakes revealed the final score of the matches.

Well, my cupcakes definitely don't have any magical predictive powers, but I think they count as World Cup-cakes because we ate them during the US-Portugal match on Sunday. Also because I attempted to decorate them like soccer balls, but my chocolate ganache pretty much just failed. So...just stick with the banana cupcake recipe and frost them however you like. :)

The ingredients:

Flour, sugar, salt, cinnamon, butter, eggs, vanilla, baking powder, and bananas. Plus milk (not pictured). Sift the dry ingredients together: 

 Then in a separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. I don't have a mixer, so I softened the butter for about 45 seconds in the microwave, to the point that it was extremely soft but not quite melted. Then I used this fork-like spatula to try to get as much air in the butter as possible. I think it worked pretty well!

Add in the eggs, one at a time:

And then the rest of the wet ingredients. I was lazy and didn't mash the banana separately first, but it probably would've been better to do so. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry.

And portion into muffin tins! These were pretty full, but I liked how they rose nice and tall after baking. 

Once they're out of the oven, it's time to fill them! Make sure the cupcakes are cool.

Arequipe is a Colombian sweet that's pretty similar to dulce de leche or caramel. This tiny little jar is designed for schoolkids to bring in their lunchboxes to school! They even come with a tiny little spoon. So cute!

With a knife, carefully cut a circle in the top of the muffin, angling in as you cut so that you make sort of a cone shape. (You can really see how small the arequipe container is here!) Remove the cone from the muffin. 

Spoon about a teaspoon of arequipe into the hole, until it's just below the top of the muffin. Cut off most of the cone from the top, leaving just a fairly flat circle of muffin "crust."

Then, put the top back onto the muffin. Once you frost it, nobody will even notice that little mark! The arequipe helps the lid stay in place, but you do have to be a little careful when frosting it not to budge the cut-out part too much. 

I just used cream cheese frosting from a can for the top (again, I don't own a mixer at the moment, so I can't really make frosting). Then I tried to make a chocolate ganache for decoration, but it was super lumpy and runny and challenging to my not-so-good decorating techniques. So...just decorate them however you'd like. 

Enjoy, and go USA! #Ibelievethatwewillwin

Arequipe-filled Banana World Cup-Cakes

Adopted from The Betty Crocker Big Book of Cupcakes 
Makes approximately 18 cupcakes

2 1/2 cups flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp cinnamon

3/4 cup butter, softened

1 cup + 2 tbsp sugar (original recipe called for 1 1/4 cups, but I bumped it down a little because my bananas were so sweet and ripe)

3 eggs

3 mashed bananas

1 tsp vanilla

1/4 cup milk

Topping: 1/2 cup arequipe, cream cheese frosting. 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon, and set aside. Cream together butter and sugar until soft and fluffy. Add in eggs, one at a time, beating after each addition. Fold in bananas, vanilla, and milk. Combine with dry ingredients and stir well. Divide into greased cupcake tins. Bake for 22 - 27 minutes (mine took exactly 25).

To fill cupcakes, cut out a small cone shape out of the top of each cupcake. Fill the hole with about 1 teaspoon of arequipe. Replace the top of the cupcake with the top part only of the cut-out cone. (Discard the rest of the cone). Frost with cream cheese frosting.