MangiaMore: THREE ingredient cookies

RER 4.29.15

They may not look pretty, but they sure are easy. These three ingredient cookies (yup, you read that right—3 ingredients!!) have that chewy satisfaction that any great chocolate chip cookie has, but has half the hassle. There’s none of that meticulous measuring, none of that creaming butter and sugar, none of that refrigerating for hours and hours; there’s just three ingredients: chocolate chips, graham crackers and sweetened condensed milk.

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The culmination of these three delicious things is pure perfection, not pretty, but pretty delicious. Crunch up 16 graham crackers (use a food processor for extreme ease), mix a can of sweetened condensed milk with your bag of chocolate chips till chips are covered, and finally stir in those graham crumbs. It can’t get much easier.

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I mixed semi-sweet, milk and white chocolate chips, since I am not always wild on straight up chocolate. And since I was doing a double batch (because little effort was involved), I added dried cranberries to half of my second batch. They are a different kind of sweet and a tartness that emphasized the chocolate and the sticky condensed milk. These cookies are super-soft and pliable, but the outside has a little crunch. They remind me of all the best parts of cookies—gooey cookie dough and that candied texture.

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What’s your favorite minimal-effort cookie recipe? Care to share? Follow the food on instagram, twitter, and facebook!

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4.29.15

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MangiaMore: S'moreScary cupcakes

RER 10.31.13

The second cupcake contender in the Halloween Cupcake Wars is s’more scary than the first. This spooky cupcake starts with a graham cracker crust, filled with devilishly decadent chocolate cake and topped with a pillow of ghostly white marshmallow buttercream. You know, S’moreScary.

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I knew I wanted to make a s’mores cupcake, and I was creating my own until my little sister found this one on marthastewart.com. Initially, this most definitely dashed my creativity, but in the end, I hardly used her recipe at all. My sister made a basic graham cracker crust by Martha’s standards, and from there, improvisation. I used my all time favorite chocolate cake recipe, as seen on the back of the Hershey’s cocoa powder container. Boom.

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 Even though I desperately wanted to go Martha on these cupcakes and do the fancy meringue marshmallow top and toast it with our non-existent kitchen torch, it just didn’t happen. The recipe was about 8 too many egg whites for my liking  (I tend to mess fluffy things up) and we were out of cream of tartar so I said “bump it!” Found a far less labor intensive (but still love intensive) marshmallow frosting, including one of my favorite things, fluff.*

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*note: In my youth (pronounced yoot), I was that girl that bought a tub of fluff from the local convenience store on my lunch break, and brought it back to school, straight up to the physics classroom. I would grab a few plastic spoons and we would pass around the container as our Finnish teacher would lecture and look at us with disgust (literal sticky notes). Shoot, looking back, I too am looking at ninth grade me with disgust.

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These cupcakes were pretty good; a fun play on childhood memories like my messy shared fluff and making s’mores in our solar oven in like the second or third grade on the roof of my school, and campfires (though, that is probably not real life, because I don’t like camping or fires, but they look nice in the movies). I love that the tasty cake and kind of crispy crust and sweet sweet frosting bring on those kinds of moments, while creating new ones. The different textures are nice, from the crunch of the graham crackers, to the spongy cake and the springy stretchy frosting, but something brings it all together. Probably it is because the flavor combination is classic, and not so easily forgotten. This is my boyfriend’s favorite of the bunch, but…

There is a third. So check back to see what the last contender has to offer!

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11.5.13

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