Mascarpone Cookie Base aka the Great Festive Cookie Invasion!

Clockwise from outside top
Oreo cheesecake, green tea oreo, lemon cranberry walnut, poppyseed blondie, chocolate ginger caramel, strawberries and cream with walnut


Basic Tender / Chewy Cookie!
300g cake flour
100g salted butter (room temp)
100g caster sugar (150 for crispier version)
30g mascarpone
1 egg (whole… too lazy to separate the yolk lol)
Vanilla essence

  1. Cream butter and mascarpone
  2. Add vanilla essence, cream some more
  3. Add sugar, beat until fluffy
  4. Add egg, beat again
  5. Beat in flour (I find it works best if I beat it in in 2 to 3 parts, rather than all at once)
  6. Dump in fridge for 1 hour or so
  7. Preheat oven to 150-60C
  8. Make (large) truffle-sized balls
  9. Plop balls about 2 inches apart
  10. Bake for 20-30 minutes

>.> This recipe is less chatty than usual because really, it's my notes to myself that became a post. XD

    Edit
    Mascarpone can be replaced with 50g brown or dark brown sugar. Essentially, the mascarpone acts as a (more) hydrophilic element (than just plain white sugar) in the recipe. So if you wanna take that out, you gotta replace it with something else hydrophilic! When using 50g brown sugar, I also use 1 tsp double action baking powder.


    Subtraction.com - If it looks like a cow, swims like a dolphin and quacks like a duck, it must be enterprise software

    Funny post by Khoi Vinh! The post itself isn't particularly good (though funny), but the comments section is very long, and has some real gems.

    Since I'm now working on enterprise software, it's suddenly really, really easy to tell from the comments, who's actually been there and done that, too.

    The dynamics of power when it comes to the users vs purchasers of enterprise software was one of the hardest things for me to adjust to initially, when coming from B2C agencyland, as it were.

    These two comments really stood out for me, but if you bother to trawl through the whole lot, there are a couple more good ones. :)

    If you've worked on enterprise software at all, your head will be nodding and nodding like one of those bobbly dogs...

    Kitteh cupcakes - take two!

    AKA if at first you don't succeed, try something easier. XD

    This was only a partial success though. And by partial, I mean... 10%. >.>

    See, from sheer luck, I didn't have that much batter left in the last one. Plus I didn't stuff it with salted caramel.

    As a result, that's the only kitteh with a nice, smooth surface. XD

    So! Only fill the cups to half AT MOST for a nice smooth surface. And resist the urge to stuff the kitteh or the stuffing may leak, and result in very mutant kittehs.

    That whole plate in the background? Mutant kittehs.

    But hey, at least now I know what NOT to do!

    SCIENCE!!!!

    Grumpy cat cupcake muffin thingies! ଘ(੭*ˊᵕˋ)੭*

    Now, I'm sure someone who can actually use icing properly would get a better result... but these can be a proof of concept! XD

    So come forth, O you icing people! Make better ones!

    The usual disclaimer: I don't really measure stuff very exactly. I tend to eyeball, and go by ratio. What this means is if you have a bit more or less of any one part, as long as it's reasonably close, everything should be fine. I'm using grams, but really... if you look at it, it's parts vs parts. XD

    Note that because I'm lazy, and made equal batches of white and brown bits, there will be about 4-5 cupmuffins that are just dark brown left over. I stuffed cherry jam and a frozen cherry into those... but they're fine plain, too!

    Ingredients
    Makes about 12 cupcakes... but it's a bit weird. More on that in the actual recipe below...

    For the white bits...
    200g cake flour
    25g sugar
    50g butter
    1 tsp baking powder
    Vanilla essence
    125ml milk

    For the brown bits
    200g cake flour
    25g cocoa powder
    25g sugar
    50g butter
    1 tsp baking powder
    Vanilla essence
    115ml milk
    10ml very dark strong coffeefeefee

    For the face bits
    Pink icing (nose and mouth)
    White icing (Eye whites)
    Brown / chocolate icing (for sticking on the ears)
    Mini chocolate chips (Irises)
    Chocolate Melts, cut into quarters (1 chocolate melt = 4 ears)

    Craft the kittehs!
    Preheat oven (non fan-forced) to 180C.

    White bits

    1. Dump dry ingredients in food processor
    2. Whir around in food processor for a bit, if you're too lazy to sift. I never sift. XD
    3. Cut the butter into vaguely cuboidal shapes
    4. Dump butter into food processor too
    5. Whir stuff around in food processor until the mix looks kinda coarse and you mostly can't see any butter lumps anymore
    6. Dump white bits in a bowl
    7. Make a well in the white bit dry ingredients
    8. Dump vanilla essence into milk, stir until you can't see the essence anymore
    9. Dump vanilla-essence-milk into well you made in white bit dry ingredients
    10. Fold white bits into milk stuff until just combined. The consistency you want is thick, almost-becoming-liquid paste, sort of like a very rich, thick shake. The kind that is a bit of work to suck through the straw. So add milk until you get that consistency. 125ml is just an eyeballing figure...

    Brown bits
    Really, this is the same as white bits except that you have the coffee. XD

    1. Dump dry ingredients in food processor
    2. Whir around in food processor for a bit, if you're too lazy to sift. I never sift. XD
    3. Cut the butter into vaguely cuboidal shapes
    4. Dump butter into food processor too
    5. Whir stuff around in food processor until the mix looks kinda coarse and you mostly can't see any butter lumps anymore
    6. Dump brown bits in a bowl
    7. Make a well in the brown bit dry ingredients
    8. Dump coffee and vanilla essence into milk, stir until you can't see the essence anymore
    9. Dump coffee-vanilla-essence-milk into well you made in brown bit dry ingredients
    10. Fold brown bits into milk stuff until just combined. The consistency you want is thick, almost-becoming-liquid paste, sort of like a very rich, thick shake. The kind that is a bit of work to suck through the straw. So add milk until you get that consistency. 125ml is just an eyeballing figure...

    Assemble the face-base

    1. Fill half the cupcake cups (around 9 of them) with white bits. If you have more left over after 9, by all means fill more... but I didn't.
    2. Use a teaspoon (or something else small) to get the brown bits that will be behind the grumpy eyes. Use a smaller blob than you think will be needed, as it'll spread a bit when baking.
    3. Plop vaguely semicircular brown bits side by side onto the white face base.
    4. Repeat until you run out of white face bases.
    5. Plop leftover brown bits into the other cupcake cups. You should have something like 5 brown cupcakes, and 7 catcakes. The catcakes will be smaller than the browncakes.
    6. For the pure choc cupcakes, I filled half the cup with the batter, plopped some jam in the middle (about half a teaspoon), plopped a frozen cherry on top of that, and then covered it with the other half of the batter.
    7. Shove in oven and bake for 25m or so. Or until the usual stab it with a toothpick and the toothpick comes out clean happens.

    Put the face on the base

    1. Let the face bases cool for about 30min or so - you can eat the pure chocolate ones first though! ;) There's a reason they don't even show up in these photos...
    2. Pipe the nose and mouth with pink icing - I used the normal 'line' type nozzle.
    3. Pipe the eyes with white icing using the ummm 'flat' type nozzle. Hopefully better than I did...
    4. Stick a mini chocolate chip into each white icing eyeball to make the iris.
    5. Cut a chocolate melt into 4 quarters - I used a butter knife.
    6. Pipe some chocolate icing (again using the 'line' type nozzle) on each side of the face, roughly where you think ears should be, and of roughly that length. This is the 'glue' for your chocolate melt ears.
    7. Stick chocolate melt quarter onto the chocolate icing... ears!

    That's about it really.

    The rest is optional, and involves cackling, and pretending to be a zombie, and making cats say sad things as you eat off bits of their heads...

    ヽ(”`▽´)ﾉ