Chocolate Cupcakes with Speculoos Cream Cheese Icing

I'm always a bit peeved about recipes when they require too many bowls or utensils and such. It seems kind of trivial, but with a gazillion other things piled on the dishrack, sometimes adding another dish just makes the entire thing look like the leaning tower of Pisa. Normally there's at least two mixing bowls involved when baking cupcakes: one for wet ingredients and another one for dry ingredients. Among the numerous measuring spoons and spatulas that I end up wielding, that is.

I opted for Robyn's chocolate cupcake recipe over at Add a Pinch since it involved a grand total of one mixing bowl. Like all cupcake recipes, it's quite simple. However I thought it was very interesting that it involves a half cup of boiling water. I raised an eyebrow when I saw the ingredients list, but I was boiling a kettle of water for tea already, so what the heck let's do it. And yes, just drop in the wet ingredients one by one into the bowl of dry ingredients. As Robyn mentions, it's a very runny mixture - but when baked it gloriously rises and has a wonderful moist and soft texture.

Speculoos cookie butter is my most recent find. I fancy ginger snap cookies, and was head over heels after discovering Speculoos at the local Trader Joe's. I look at it as a substitute for nutella or peanut butter, delicious on bread or crackers or in crepes. Speculoos icing is the next best thing I tell you.

Speculoos & Cream Cheese Icing
(http://www.speculoos.us/dessert2.html)

1/2 cup Speculoos
8oz pacakge of cream cheese
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Add all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and use a hand mixer to whip the icing. Put in a piping bag or slather on with a knife. Enough for 12 cupcakes.

Carrot & Walnut Muffins

I confess that I don't bake very often, although I've decided to do so more often this year. I love carrot cake and had a bag of carrots lying around leftover from a veggie dish. I followed the recipe from Chocolate & Zucchini, substituting the pecans with walnuts and baking them for 30min in a muffin pan. The recipe was very simple enough for me to make this twice in a span of two weeks. They were not too sweet, moist, and delicious with a bit of bite. Perfect for a quick afternoon snack with a cup of coffee.

Afternoon Tea & Matcha Cookies

In general, I love matcha. It has a mellow flavor with a slight bitter undertone which makes it a suitable ingredient for beverages and desserts. Although I'm not much of a baker, I decided to try making these matcha shortbread cookies courtesy of Clotilde's recipe at Chocolate&Zucchini. Her dessert recipes are fantastic since she tends to dial down the amount of sugar she uses. I've made them twice already, in fact.

I paired a few cookies with some sweetened Thai tea for a lazy saturday afternoon...