Funfetti Cupcake

So remember how I was supposed to post all my recipes from the Crazy Day?  Well, I haven't finished posting all those recipes yet.  One of the things I made on that day was funfetti cupcakes.  They turned out surprisingly well, even though they were the cupcakes that required 3 egg whites and I typically don't do so well with recipes that require egg whites.  Anyway, I didn't take any good pictures of the cupcake and only got a picture of a half eaten one. :P  So yesterday I decided to make some funfetti cupcakes again, except with a different recipe.  Something I didn't like about the first funfetti cupcakes I made was that they were too sweet.  In fact, they were sickening sweet.  Unless you have a major sweet tooth, you will not like that cupcake.  I'm really happy with the funfetti cupcakes I made this time though.  They were soft, moist and not too sweet.  I also made some frosting that turned out alright.  The cupcakes look really cute with the sprinkles in them.

Funfetti Cupcakes
Recipe from Sweet Tooth

Monkey Bread

The first time I made monkey bread was in a summer school cooking class.  Mr. I. introduced the recipe to the students and we made the easy version of monkey bread.  We used canned biscuit dough and cut each piece of dough into four pieces and rolled them into balls.  Then, we dipped the dough balls in butter and cinnamon sugar.  This was such a fun recipe.  My family enjoyed what I brought home so much that we made monkey bread several times at home.

While surfing the web, looking at recipes, I found this monkey bread recipe that starts from scratch.  I didn't actually make the monkey bread until a year later.  The recipe was really simple and the bread was very soft and fluffy. It also wasn't too sweet. (I didn't make a glaze.  Actually, I kind of forgot about...but the bread was sweet enough already so it didn't matter.)  This is definitely a must make recipe.  Monkey bread is like the best part of cinnamon rolls - the gooey, yummy centers.

Monkey Bread
Recipe from the Brown Eyed Baker, very slightly adapted.

Black and White Cookies

I always wanted to try making black and white cookies, but I never got the chance to because these cookies are very time consuming.  When I finally made these cookies, I was a little surprised at how cake-like the batter was.  Also, the cookies were easier to make than I thought they would be.  The hard part was frosting the cookies and making the chocolate frosting.  Because of the chocolate frosting, I spent around 3 hours, hands on, making these cookies.

These cookies were pretty good.  You'll like them if you like cake-like cookies.  The only downside of these cookies was that the icing was really sweet...and I put a really thick icing on these cookies when I was trying to make sure the icing looked perfect.  So I guess if I ever make these cookies again, I will spread less icing onto the cookies.  Also, one problem I encountered was the texture of the chocolate icing.  I don't know what I did wrong, but not only was the icing not very pretty, it was also really, really hard to spread.  I spent around half an hour trying to get the icing to the right consistency, but it still ended up different from the white icing.  In the end, I was extremely frustrated and vowed that I would never make these cookies again because icing these cookies was just too time consuming.  We'll see if I keep that vow. XD

I actually made these cookies for my brother because he wanted to bring some treats for his band council.  After he came back from his band activity, he told me that many people enjoyed the cookies.  However, there was one guy who said that my cookie batter was not mixed well enough...  :(  My brother consoled me by saying that the guy who said that was a very critical person, hahaha.

Black and White Cookies
Recipe from Simply Sifted.

Actually I have the hard copy of this recipe in my America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book, but I found the recipe online already so I will just give you the link instead of retyping up the same recipe.