Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes

I saw these cupcakes on Cupcakes Take the Cake and then feverishly searched the internet for a recipe. They are simple to make and very tasty. Give them a try!

   

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes (from The Cake Mix Doctor)

1 package (18.25 ounces) plain yellow cake mix
1 package (3.4 ounces) vanilla instant pudding mix
1 cup whole milk
1 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 roll of refrigerated cookie dough

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 24 cupcake cups with paper liners. Set the pans aside.

Cut refrigerated cookie dough into 24 equal(ish) pieces and freeze while preparing cupcake mix.

Place the cake mix, pudding mix, milk, oil, eggs, and vanilla in a large mixing bowl. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Increase the mixer speed to medium and beat 2 minutes more, scraping down the sides again if needed. The batter should look well blended. Spoon or scoop a heaping 1/4 cup batter into each lined cupcake cup, filling it about half way full. Place a frozen cookie dough piece on top of each cupcake.

Bake the cupcakes for 23 to 27 minutes or until they are golden and spring back when lightly pressed with your finger. Remove the pans from the oven and place them on wire racks to cool for 5 minutes. Run a dinner knife around the edges of the cupcake liners, lift the cupcakes up from the bottoms of the cups using the end of the knife, and pick them out of the cups carefully with your fingertips. Place them on a wire rack to cool for 15 minutes before frosting. They may sink a bit in the center.

 

Cream Cheese Buttercream Icing (from Bakerella)

1/2 cup butter, softened
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 pound confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Approx. 3 TBS milk

Cream the butter and cream cheese with a mixer. Add the cocoa and vanilla. Add the confectioner’s sugar in small batches and blend on low until combined. Scrape down the sides with each addition. Add 1 TBS of milk at a time until you get the consistency you desire. Ice the cupcakes.

Store these cupcakes, in a cake saver or under a glass dome, at room temperature for up to 3 days or in the refrigerator for up to 1 week. Or freeze them, wrapped in aluminum foil or in a cake saver, for up to 6 months. Thaw the cupcakes overnight in the refrigerator before serving.

The Cupcake Doctor says…

If you use the 18-ounce logs of refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough (instead of the 1-pound packages of frozen dough), cut them into 24 equal pieces and freeze them before using them in this recipe. It’s important to use frozen dough, because you don’t want it to bake completely and become a cookie. You want the center to be gooey when you bite into it.

Go Vote for Tenth Avenue North

My friends, former CF team members, and fellow PBA alums (minus Jeff), Tenth Avenue North have been nominated for a Dove Award! How exciting for them.

For the first time, fans can vote!

Head over to the Dove Awards site and vote for Tenth Avenue North (Best New Artist).

How Can You Not Love This Voice?

Katie Hobbie, this post is partly for you.

I introduce you (all of you) to the previously #25 song on the Top 25 Played Songs in my iTunes–You are the Best Thing by Ray LaMontagne. (It has since moved up to #16. I love iTunes.)

Enjoy…

Bruschetta Cheese Chicken

Last night I tried a new recipe from a new cookbook. The Kolkanas brought me the new King’s Academy Cookbook this past weekend and I’ve already marked tons of recipes I want to try. I would recommend this cookbook….there are over 500 recipes. It’s $25 and the money raised will go to buy new books for The King’s Academy Library. Here’s info on getting a copy for yourself.

This recipe was simple, and tasty. Try it sometime! (Sorry…no pictures. I meant to take one after it came out of the oven, but I was ready to eat!!)

Bruschetta Cheese Chicken

14 oz. can Italian style diced tomatoes, undrained
1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped
1 box Stove Top chicken flavor stuffing
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
Kraft Roasted Red Pepper Italian Dressing

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine tomatoes with mozzarella cheese, basil and dry stuffing mix; stir. Tenderize chicken breasts. Put a heaping tablespoon of mixture on each chicken breast and roll up. Place seam side down in a 13×9 baking dish. Put remaining stuffing mixture in the dish surrounding the chicken. Drizzle chicken and stuffing with about 1/3 of the bottle of dressing. Bake in oven for 45 minutes, then sprinkle with a handful (or two) of mozzarella cheese and bake 5 more minutes.

A Lilly Giveaway at The Preppy Princess!

Go check out this fun Lilly Pulitzer giveaway at The Preppy Princess and enter to win!

Speaking of Lilly…

Check out our Etsy shop for fun Lilly Pulitzer Coffee Cozies! They make perfect gifts. They’re all one of a kind and will make your coffee cup the cutest one at the mall, the office or the school pick up line.

Big News for Cora’s Playground!

Kati and I are new at this whole Etsy thing, but apparently this is a pretty big deal…

An article about the Cora’s Playground project was featured on Etsy late last week and now even more people are joining in to help! The project will “officially” continue until what would have been Cora’s first birthday (March 5). There are well over 100 193 sellers now participating (and nearly 500 600 items listed right now). Stop on over and check out the Cora Listings on Etsy.

We have a couple are sold out of Cora Coffee Cozies left, and would be glad to make more.

We also added a couple of new cozies supporting my favorite college team. Go Gators!

The Fourteen Layer Cake

I saw pictures and a recipe for a fourteen layer cake on Bakerella earlier this week, and was rather intrigued. It looked simple enough and quite delicious. I have a 12ish page paper due on Monday, and friends coming in town for the weekend, so I decided once the paper was done I would celebrate by making the cake. Last night I doctored up the reference page of my paper and submitted it to my professor–four days early! Cake making time!

I didn’t take pictures of all the steps because Bakerella’s already done that, and who can do it better than her? So, if you want the play by play, check it out here. She also provides a few different recipes, and I ended up kind of combining bits and pieces of a few different recipes. Stick with me…here’s what I did.

The Fourteen Layer Cake Recipe

for the cake (from Group Recipes)

2 Duncan Hines yellow cake mixes
2 cups water
1 cup oil
8 eggs
2 instant vanilla pudding mixes (4 serving size)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 14 round cake pans (It’s easiest to use the 8.5″ size throw away aluminum pans).

Mix all above ingredients together as you normally would for a cake. Put 1/2 cup of batter in each pan and spread evenly over the bottom. Bake for 12-13 minutes. Watch closely. (I was able to bake three at a time.) Cool before icing.

The cakes ready for assembly.

 

for the first layer of icing (from Oprah.com)

3 cups sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, cut up
1 can (12 ounces) evaporated milk
1 TBS vanilla extract

When the last batch of cakes go in the oven it’s a good time to start making the icing. Bring the sugar, cocoa, butter and evaporated milk to a full boil in a large saucepan. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook until the icing has thickened slightly (it will resemble chocolate syrup but will thicken as it cools), about 3 minutes. Stir in the vanilla. Let the icing cool until thick enough to spread, but still pourable.

 

for assembling the cake (from Bakerella)

Bakerella recommends that you: place the cake on a cake board. Place the board on a wire rack. And place the wire rack over a jelly roll pan to catch any icing that drips. I improvised and made it work with a pizza stone and some trays to catch the mess.

Put the first layer down and cover with about 1/4 cup of icing. It will drip. Lots. Repeat until you have all fourteen layers assembled. With any leftover icing, cover the top and sides of the cake. Then, let the monster of a cake rest for a little bit while you make the amazing buttercream icing.

 

for the cream cheese buttercream icing (from Bakerella)

1/2 cup butter, softened
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 pound confectioner’s sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Approx. 3 TBS milk

Cream the butter and cream cheese with a mixer. Add the cocoa and vanilla. Add the confectioner’s sugar in small batches and blend on low until combined. Scrape down the sides with each addition. Add 1 TBS of milk at a time until you get the consistency you desire. Ice the entire cake.

ENJOY!

The cake before the cutting.

Pretty impressive.

Well Said, Mr. Batterson.

I had to repost this from Mark Batterson’s blog. I can’t take any credit at all for it, and I’m simply copying and pasting what he wrote because I just think it’s that good. It looks long but it won’t take you more than five minutes to read. Promise. Read it. It’s good stuff.

Trust His Timing

Time is relative.

What I mean by that is this: the way we experience it is subjective. It depends on what you’re doing. Ever been on a date with someone you love? Time flies. Ever been on a date with someone you didn’t like? Speed dating isn’t fast enough.

The way we experience time also depends on how old we are. If you’re six years-old, summer break is 4% of you life. If you’re twenty-five, it’s 1%. If you’re fifty, it’s .5%. The older you get, the faster time seems to fly because relatively speaking it becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of your life! By the way, that is why when you were a kid, a two-hour trip in the car seemed like an eternitybecause relatively speaking, it was much longer for you than the adult who was driving!

So what?

Well, I think most of us have a hard time handling a bad day. We have a very low threshold for circumstantial uncertainty or spiritual discontinuity. We need answers. And we need them now. I would suggest that we need some biblical perspective. When we look at our lives through the lens of Scripture, our perspective on time changes.

We have a hard waiting for God to fulfill His promise. But what about Abraham and Sarah? They had to wait 15 years before Isaac was born. We have a hard time suffering for a season. But what about the invalid in John 5 who was in that condition for 38 years. And that’s when the average lifespan was 20-30. We have a hard time waiting for God to make sense of our circumstances. But what about Joseph? He was a slave and a prisoner for 17 years before becoming Prime Minister of Egypt. Or Moses? He was a fugitive for40 years! And we have a hard time waiting to fulfill our calling. But even Jesus didn’t transition from carpentry to ministry til he was 30.

We need to zoom out and get some biblical perspective. We think in days. But we might need to think in years. Here’s what I know for sure: those that God wants to use the most have to go through the longest season of preparation. You might have to struggle a little bit longer so you can learn some more lessons or develop some more character. You might need to suffer a little bit longer so God can reveal a little bit more of His glory in your life! 

What I’m getting at is this: trust His timing. He is never early. He is never late. As we grow spiritually, I think we take a different perspective on time. It’s less about chronos–time. It’s more aboutkairos–timing. And for the record, He is far more concerned aboutwho you’re becoming in the process than when you arrive at your destination. Maybe you need to quit praying for deliverance andstart praying for revelation. 

One last thought from Acts 1: “You don’t get to the know the time.Timing is the Father’s business.”

Not much has changed has it?

Written by Mark Batterson on Evotional.com

Cora’s Playground

It’s so interesting to see how the blogging community connects. My friend, Katie, wrote about that over here on her blog about a month ago, but now I am seeing this reality play out for me with people I’ve never even met or spoken to.

A few weeks ago, I wandered over to the McClenahan’s blog because Meg at Whatever (a blog I read) said their little girl Cora was in need of prayer. During what they believed to be a “typical” visit to the doctor for an ear infection, it was discovered that Cora had cancer. This little almost-one-year-old fought hard, and so did her parents. But about two weeks ago, she went to be with Jesus. I found myself thinking about her sweet family often, and of course, not even beginning to imagine the loss they must be feeling. See? It’s funny how that happens in the blog world…

The family has decided to build a church playground in Cora’s honor and I was excited when Julie at Joy’s Hope came up with a great idea to help. She suggested we create items and post them in our Etsy shops and then give a portion of the proceeds to Cora’s Playground! I thought, “Hey! We can do that!”

So, Kati and I got busy cutting, sewing, photographing and posting the Cora Coffee Cozy. We’ve already sold a handful and we’re excited about today’s big Etsy fundraiser launch.

Head on over to Etsy….check out our store: Two Florida Girls…check out all the Cora Paige Listings…check out this link for all the stores participating…and grab a gift or two to help a great cause. Think ahead: birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, boss appreciation, teacher appreciation, favorite blog writer appreciation (hint, hint).

Top 25 Most Played Songs in My iTunes

The other day I noticed a playlist on my iPhone entitled, “Top 25 Most Played.” Now, mind you, I’ve had a iPod (and iTunes) for more than three years so I’m not sure why I haven’t taken note of this little list before now. At any rate, I thought it was an interesting little list and thought I might share at my own risk of embarrassing or humiliating myself by some of my teeny bopper song choices.

Oh, and another thing…I’m not sure how often this list gets updated. So, I’m not sure if this is the Top 25 Most Played Songs this month or this year or in the history of the world. Anyone know?

Top 25 Most Played Songs in My iTunes
(as of February 12, 2009)

1.  I’m In Peace by Justin Nozuka (this is a favorite right now, so this is obvious)
2. I’ll Do Anything by Jason Mraz
3. Lovebug by Jonas Brothers (iTunes has played me out)
4. Rain Down from The Ascent Live Worship Album
5. Waiting on the World to Change (featuring Ben Harper) by John Mayer
6. All Because of Jesus from The Ascent Live Worship Album
7. Be Back Soon by Justin Nozuka
8. Belief by John Mayer
9. Island in the Sun by Weezer
10. You Are from The Ascent Live Worship Album
11. I Saw by Matt Nathanson
12. Our God Reigns from The Ascent Live Worship Album
13. American Boy (featuring Kanye West) by Estelle
14. Golden Train by Justin Nozuka
15. After Tonight by Justin Nozuka
16. Come On Get Higher by Justin Nozuka
17. Slow Dancing in a Burning Room by John Mayer
18. Mr. Therapy Man by Justin Nozuka
19. Love Story by Taylor Swift (iTunes plays me out again…)
20. Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It) by Beyonce
21. Say by John Mayer
22. Good Love Is On the Way by John Mayer
23. Heartbreak World by Matt Nathanson
24. Nine In the Afternoon by Panic at the Disco (a new favorite thanks to Rock Band)
25. You Are the Best Thing by Ray LaMontagne

So, there you have it. The Top 25 Most Played Songs in my iTunes. I thought it would be fun to “tag” some other people to do this. So…I tag: Katie, Kathleen, DOB, Chad and Matthew.