Baking Extravaganza

I just wanted to share some impressions from my recent baking extravaganza... detailed posts and how-tos to follow over the next weeks.

Spiced & roasted chickpeas - an easy hostess gift

Spiced and roasted chickpeas: curry and cayenne pepper on the left, cumin and pepper on the right.

I said it before: I try to avoid coming empty-handed when I'm invited over to someone's house for an evening of eating/drinking/playing games/whatever - especially if I don't know them too well. I do it often enough (more often than not) but at least I feel slightly to quite uncomfortable about it. 
(My boyfriend can attest to that: 9 out of 10 times when we meet up to go anywhere it goes like this:

Me: Oh gosh. I don't have anything for them.
Him: That's ok.
Me: ...I just didn't have time to bake anything!
Him: Don't worry about it, no one expects you to.
Me: Well, I expect myself to.
Him: ...)

So when I was supposed to go to my boyfriend's friend's brother's birthday, I panicked. I had subzero time for baking or anything of that sort. In times like this, I turn to one of my favourite food items: chickpeas.

Chocolate biscuits with a zesty, caffeiny and crunchy kick

Espresso beans and orange chocolate biscuits

Hello everyone. I originally intended to post once a week - which I still *want* to do but, oh well, life gets in the way sometimes.
I didn't have time to bake the last weeks, so I have to use my notes on a recipe which I baked shortly before I started this blog. The reason I didn't post this earlier is just that it was only today that I rediscovered my notes under a pile of paper labelled "important stuff"... ooops. 

Right. What did I bake? Cookies. Or rather biscuits. As a German who studied Linguistics in the UK, I have my own, although somewhat vague, notion of what is a cookie and what is a biscuit. Cookies for me are chewy and/or chunky. Biscuits are smaller and crisp (though I suspect I may not be alone with this notion).

Choc-choc-chocolatey Chocolate Cookies with Coconut Oil

Very chocolatey crunchy chocolate cookies with all kinds of chocolate and coconut oil

Since I started baking, I find that I can't eat many store-bought cookies, cakes, brownies or cupcakes anymore. There are only few I can tolerate... the rest just tastes so artificial and full of preservatives. So when a box of uniform-looking chocolate cookies appeared at work, I was suspicious. But - whoa. They tasted SO GOOD. So unlike other store-bought cookies... crunchy, chocolatey (but not too much), not too sweet and a hint of coconut. Delish. In fact, they were so delicious that I only remembered to take a picture when I had already eaten approximately 65% of the cookie. So, apologies for that. This is what they and the package looked like:

Zebra cupcakes with vanilla and chocolate buttercream

A few weeks ago I came across a recipe for zebra cupcakes. I had made a lovely zebra cake once before (of which no record exists... so I have no choice but to rebake it one day. It is a tough life.) and it had been quite a hit (mostly with myself. I loved it.) so of course I had to try a cupcake version. As a bonus, I topped it of with vanilla and chocolate cream cheese frosting - to keep in line with the zebra theme.