{Baking Tip 4}

When you bake, you should not change the temperature of your oven. During one of the first times when I tried baking cookies, I preheated my oven, but as I was putting the cookie sheet into the oven, I thought that the oven was too hot. I changed the temperature of the oven, and the cookies came out really under baked.


Also, try not to open your oven door numerous times so that you can look at what you are baking. This is because cold air from the outside might quickly go inside your oven. If you do this while you are baking a dessert like a cake, your cake will sink.

{Baking Tip 3}

When you use an electric mixer, stop the mixer from beating the batter a few times so that you can scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. This way all of your ingredients can combine with each other better.

{Baking Tip 2}

Baking Times

Bake your cookies for 2 to 3 minutes less than the recommended cooking time from your recipe.
Cookies that are not so cooked are softer and not as dry as over baked ones. Take the cookies out of the oven when the centers do not look that cooked yet, because once you take the cookies out of the oven the cookie sheets will continue to bake them.

{Baking Tip 1}

Always have your ingredients at room temperature - especially the butter and the eggs. Your ingredients will incorporate better. Try to avoid melting butter in the microwave, because the butter usually gets exceedingly soft and wet, and this will give you a different result when you bake. You can try cutting the butter into pieces so that it may reach room temperature faster.

{Baking Tips}

From the time I forgot to buy butter for a recipe (which gave me a disastrous result!) to the time when I baked cookies that were so big that they stuck to each other, I always learn something new whenever I am in the kitchen. Every few days I will post a tip to help me remember what I have learned from baking, and I hope that you will be able to learn from and remember these tips so that your baking will become more successful. I learned most of these tips the hard way (I guess you can describe these tips as trial and error), but I am glad that I have learned these things to help me whenever I am in the kitchen.

{A Different Kind of Chocolate Chips}

The cookies that I bake usually consist of semisweet chocolate chips. While I was in the grocery the other day, I decided to try using dark chocolate chips instead of my regular semisweet chocolate chips (I have been wanting to try using dark chocolate chips for a while).




To see the recipe that I used, click here. Just substitute the semisweet chocolate chips with dark chocolate chips.

The first thing I noticed when I bit into one of these cookies was that they were not as sweet as the cookies that I make with semisweet chocolate chips. For me, dark chocolate is always delicious, whether it is eaten by itself or with other food and desserts, like chopped up with bananas or drizzled on cake.




Usually we try to limit the amount of chocolate that we eat all the time, but here's some good news: dark chocolate can actually be healthy for you (sorry, but milk chocolate and white chocolate do not apply to this). It has health benefits such as lowering high blood pressure, and containing numerous antioxidants (even more than some fruit). Keep in mind that although dark chocolate is healthier than other kinds of chocolate, we should not eat more chocolate than the recommended amount.

If you would like to try a cookie that is not as sweet as your regular chocolate chip cookie, try using dark chocolate chips!

{Halfway Through Summer and a Small Update}

I was able to take some pictures while we were at the beach recently. I really loved being able to just lie on the beach and soak in some vitamin D by basking in the sunlight. It was really tranquil - the waves lazily chased each other, and I could feel embraced by a gentle breeze from time to time. The weather was just the way I like it - not too sunny, with a slight drizzle as nighttime approached.

It got very cloudy near the afternoon.

Nothing like cooling off with a delicious, sweet, ice-cold chocolate shake!

A necklace that I purchased recently.

Some cute gold leaf earrings that I wore to the beach.

To celebrate the start of July, my family and I went to relax at the beach. I still can not believe that half of my summer vacation is over!

I also just want to thank you all for reading my blog. I hope that you have enjoyed it so far, and that you have made a few of the recipes that were posted here. I would just like to inform you about a few things that I have fixed onto my blog. At the top right, you can see three buttons. They are labeled Home, About, and Archives. I have added links to the About and Archives buttons, so now you are able to view a list of all the treats that I have made.


I will be making some fruity treats soon, such as banana ice cream (which uses just one ingredient!) and key lime pie (which uses just four ingredients!). I hope that you have all had a great summer so far!