baking | Knit Cook Craft Life

I know, I know, it’s late.

We’re almost into Christmas, and here I am with bat shaped cookies.

My last visit to Larisa and Adara (read about our dining and other adventures in my last post, here) coincided with Halloween. I don’t usually do that much for Halloween – I’ve been to a couple of Halloween parties in my life, as a Guide and then later at university when one of my American friends absolutely loved Halloween and went to town with decorations and so forth every year (and if Facebook is any indication, still does. I wish I was up in York and could go!) This year, I went ghost hunting with a company called Haunted Happenings. I’ll be honest, I’m not really much of a believer in spirits and ghosts and so forth, but I went with an open mind and the understanding that for a lot of people, this is very real and important to them. It was a great evening; lots of activity and unexplainable events, and I’m definitely glad I went, even if I don’t think that you could count me as a believer now.

A few weeks prior to my visit, Larisa had mentioned wishing she had some Lofthouse Sugar Cookies, which are a ~thing in the US, apparently. I sprung into action – surely people had created homemade Lofthouse cookies on the internet? Of course they had. I decided to go with a somewhat Halloween theme…based on the fact I have one bat cookie cutter. And some vaguely Halloween colours. I used a wonderful recipe from Two Peas and Their Pod, which I halved. I also don’t have a stand mixer, but this worked just fine with my hand electric whisk and a bit of elbow grease! I don’t generally have much success with cookies, so I was very very happy when these worked, and proved to be utterly delicious. I am a new convert to this type of sugar cookie. So light and fluffy and oh god, MOREISH.

I also made a flourless chocolate cookie that I found on Pinterest. This led me through to Chocolate and Carrots and another simple and easy recipe to follow! I had a bit more trouble with the cooking of these – they spread a fair amount, and I really need to get some non-stick silicon baking mats or something, because greaseproof paper did not prove at all non stick with these…They were, however, delicious – chewy and rich chocolate and the chocolate chips, oh oh oh. They didn’t turn out glossy like the original post, but they were so tasty that it didn’t matter!

And something that was pretty much a disaster, but I am nothing if not honest here! Another Pinterest find, from Tutti-Dolci. It claimed to be a wonderful moist chocolate pound cake, but well, I burnt the top a bit, whoops, and I think I put too many chocolate chips on the top of the cake and caused to sink, whoops, but the texture inside wasn’t all that great either – it was rather stodgy, although it tasted nice. I couldn’t eat a lot of it though. I’m not sure whether this was due to a cooking issue, or perhaps my measuring of the mixture (me and cups don’t always get on brilliantly, which is the downside to using US recipes) or just it wasn’t meant to be. Sigh. I think I needed to find some icing sugar to disguise it better!