Baker's Workshop

There are many different kinds of cookies. I love baking peanut butter blossoms, sugar cookies, and snickerdoodles, but my all-time favorite is the old fashion chocolate chip cookie. To make this cookie, you mix brown and white sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, baking soda, flour, and, of course, chocolate chips!

Maya's Tip: Melt the butter to get a chewier cookie. If you leave the butter hard and cold you will end up with a more cake-like cookie. Another way to get a cake-like cookie is to add more flour to the recipe.

Fun fact: It is said that cookies originated in 7th century AD Persia.

There are so many different kinds of cakes. There's bundt cake, pound cake, sponge cake, but favorite cake to bake is Kladdkaka. Kladdkaka is a Swedish sticky chocolate cake that is typically served with fresh strawberries, powdered sugar, and/or vanilla ice cream. The recipe for this cake calls for sugar, eggs, flour, cocoa powder, butter, and vanilla. This is the link to my favorite recipe → Click Me!

Maya's Tip: I like to add a pinch of salt to the recipe above to make it a tad less sweet.

Fun fact: January 27th is National Chocolate Cake Day.

Brownies seem very similar to cakes; however, it takes less ingredients to make brownies and twice as much of flour to make cakes. Moreover, the texture is different. Brownies are known to have chocolate but bakers like to add peppermint, peanut butter, oreos, etc to jazz up the recipe. Another common type of brownie is the blonde brownie; which is made with brown sugar and no melted chocolate. Regular brownies, on the other hand, contain eggs, flour, butter, cocoa powder, salt, and white cane sugar. Two pictures above show brownies that I made for a Fourth of July party (star-shaped ones).

Maya's Tip: If you like fudgy brownies mix the butter and sugar really well. Also, beat the eggs for about a minute. Be sure not to overbeat the batter or overcook the brownies!

Fun fact: Beating the egg helps make the cripsy, cracked part on top of the brownie.

There are many types of muffins: chocolate chip (my favorite), blueberry, walnut, etc. Muffins are typically eaten with tea or coffee and can be a nutritional breakfast if made with fruit, nuts, and whole wheat flour. The traditional recipe for muffins includes: softened butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, flour, salt, baking powder, an milk. Then, after these ingredients, you can add blueberries, crushed bananas, chocolate chips, walnut, or whatever your tummy desires :). The picture on the top left shows a muffin topped and filled with vanilla pudding and blueberries. The picture on the top right shows chocolate chip muffins.

Maya's Tip: Use ingredients that are room temperature; including milk and eggs.

Fun fact: English muffins use yeast to rise and are toasted and buttered (more like a bread).

Cream puffs are a pretty time consuming pasty to make due to the many steps, but the effort is well worth it. The cream puff shell consist of water, butter, salt, flour, and eggs. The vanilla filling can be made two ways. You can either make a pudding or whipped cream. The typical filling consists of whipping cream, sugar, and vanilla extract. In the picture above I used a pudding filling. If you want to save time you can use the instant pudding. The homemade one has sugar, salt, cornstarch, milk, butter, egg yolks, and vanilla extract.

Maya's Tip: To get a crisp, golden shell add egg wash.

Fun fact: Cream puffs are crisp, hollow pastry shells made from dough called choux (pronounced shoo).