When I asked on Facebook about what people were baking this past weekend, it seemed like a lot of people didn’t want to turn on the oven because it was so hot. If you’re caught in a heatwave right now, try a batch of Car-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookies, which won’t require you to turn on your oven. And if you feel like you can handle a little heat in the kitchen, there are plenty of other recipes out there to try, too.
- Baking Joy‘s Peanut Butter and Caramel Cookie Bars are a great choice for lovers of fudgy, gooey desserts. The soft peanut butter bar cookies are packed with peanut butter, milk chocolate and white chocolate chips. They are quite indulgent on their own, but that is taken to a new level by adding a layer of rich caramel peanut butter and a drizzle of chocolate on top. These bars definitely need to be stored in the fridge to keep them from getting too sticky, and you might want to have some napkins on hand, too.
- If you want something more chocolaty than peanut butter, Gluten Free Canteen‘s Big Fat Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies are a good choice. These jumbo cookies are made with Nutella, cocoa powder and are packed with chocolate chunks so that you get a big hit of chocolate in every fudgy bite of cookie. They’re gluten free, but do use a gluten free flour blend to give them some substance. Serve these with big glasses of milk.
- The Chocolate Pinwheel Bread from Little Box Brownie is another recipe that uses Nutella. This bread is an excellent brunch item, and looks like a batch of cinnamon buns at first glance – but is made with a filling of Nutella inside buttery swirls of yeast bread instead of a cinnamon sugar filling. These will be slightly less sweet than a regular cinnamon bun and will go perfectly with a cup of hot coffee.
- A “dirty chai” is a chai tea drink that has coffee in it. It’s called dirty because it gives you an extra boost of caffeine, but incorporates a flavor into the tea that was never meant to be there. Surprisingly, however, it is a good flavor combination and On Sugar Mountain made some Dirty Chai Doughnut Muffins that use those same flavors in the batter. Doughnut muffins are baked then rolled in butter and sugar – chai spice mix, in this case – to give them the look and feel of a deep fried donut without any deep frying.
- Use Real Butter also used tea in a recipe this week, but green tea instead of chai. Her Green Tea Creme Brulee is an elegant and easy to make dessert that is made with matcha powder, giving the silky custard a subtle green tea flavor. Creme brulees are easier to make at home than restaurants would have you believe, and you can make them well in advance, so they are actually a terrific dish for entertaining when you don’t want to do more than caramelize some sugar with a hand torch just before serving.
What do you think?