SMiLes by Meg

Chocolate Pistachio Cookies

Fact: baking with friends makes Saturday afternoons infinitely more fun. Shout out to the wonderful Laura Bakst for indulging me in my last minute plea for company while I was pretending not to have real responsibilities.

Brownie Cupcakes

A day late, but I feel I have a good excuse – yesterday I ran the NYC marathon! So, even though I actually baked these last Friday for Halloween, you can understand that when I got back to my apartment yesterday evening, I crashed pretty hard. Like 7:30 and I was in bed hard. Thus the Monday post this week. Now, I know that Halloween is over and my cutely decorated cupcakes are no longer relevant in terms of decoration, but the base of these cupcakes in no way loses its relevance with the changing month. In fact, they are

Chocolate Swirl Blondies

November really is an awesome month to be a teacher.  I’m currently enjoying a long weekend due to the Teacher’s Convention, which I am spending in Philadelphia with my boyfriend.  However, I did bake before I left for Philly, mostly so that I could use lots of butter that said boyfriend wouldn’t want in treats baked for him.  I’ve also been on a huge blondie kick recently, which is strange because I love chocolate and they are basically brownies without chocolate, but I decided to go with it.  And thus I bring you: Chocolate Swirl Blondies.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I had a Martha Stewart day today.  I was done with all of my work for the week (finally getting the hang of this lesson planning thing), so I went to a technique class at Williams-Sonoma this morning to learn how to make pie crust.  Well, really because I know that Williams-Sonoma gives free samples at their technique classes, but the pie crust lesson was helpful, too.  Then I put together a slow cooker black bean soup recipe that is currently sitting on my counter waiting for dinner time.  Then I made cookies.  Then I carved a pumpkin.

Mexican Brownies

When I told some friends, also first year teachers, that I would bake for them if they came over to my apartment to lesson plan, their request was obvious: chocolate.  So naturally I immediately thought of brownies.  Now, I personally am a huge fan of boxed brownie mix.  I think Ghirardelli does a perfectly good job, and, honestly, duncan hines are delicious too.  But a blog post about how to add water to chocolate powder wouldn’t be all that exciting, and there was the additional request of chunks, which boxed mix doesn’t do all that well.