Mint Magic

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you all have some great food this holiday season, because besides the sleeping and being with family - that is the best part! So I started my holiday eating festivities a little early, but I promise I didn't go too crazy! This recipe is a great theme for this wonderful holiday season, it is warm and melty at the same time. I tried to use a classic recipe and then add in my little twist... and surprisingly, it worked! A lot of holiday season cookies call for peppermint extract or some sort of weird things that you can really only use once a year at max... my twist was something you can find year round and I know my family would eat even if it wasn't the holiday season.
Ingredients:
2 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup melted/liquidy butter
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking power
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
a HUGE handful of chocolate chip (whichever kind you want, I happened to use semi-sweet)
a HUGE handful of mint M&M's
*you might need a little milk to make the dough a little firmer, but definitely eyeball how much you'll need - I used about 2 teaspoons*

Preheat your oven to 350F and while that is going, get your butter in a bowl and throw it in the microwave to melt it down a little. In a large bowl, add your two types of sugar and then slowly start to add in your butter. Add in the vanilla extract.. and first, take a second to smell the mixture because that is actually liquid gold - I wish you could just eat that smell. Then add in your baking soda, and baking powder. Mix all that together and then start adding in your flour. After adding about half of it, make a judgement call on whether or not you are going to need the milk or not. Then continue adding in the flour. Once its all added, make another judgement call whether you need milk - you do not want a runny dough - these are cookies not cupcakes. But you want a dough you can play with in your hands without it being rock hard.
Once everything is mixed in to your liking, add in the chocolate chips. Feel free to break up the m&ms whether you use a spoon to just mash them around or throw them in a food processor really quick. Throw them into the mix - before you start making your balls for your cookies make sure your cookie sheet is greased!!!! Grab a glob of dough and go to town, make them as big or as small as you want for these cookies... just make sure you have enough chocolate and mint in each one :)
Set them in your oven at 350, for about 8-10 minutes - make sure to check on them! If you want gooey cookies, pull them out at around 8-8 1/2 minutes.. for crispier ones, wait until the 9 minute mark and then leave them out on a rack to crisp up. 

American Desi

Happy fall! It is officially feeling like fall around Happy Valley; the trees are looking bare, the wind is picking up and the amount of girls wearing uggs holding Starbucks cups has risen significantly (no shame, I am one of those girls). A week ago as per a bonding activity with one of my e-board members - we decided to go a little crazy. A huge part of my life at Penn State is the South Asian Student Association. Not only have met some of my best friends through this organization, but I have received the most amount of requests for the link to my blog. Jason (shoutout!), is one of the events chairs on E-board with me this year and for our bonding date... we decided to get a little taste of both worlds.
After showing everyone in the board my rainbow cupcakes (sorry guys, those were before I had a blog), everyone was entranced. Jason and I decided we were gonna show everyone how a bonding date should really be - and make cupcakes for everyone. Little did we know, our rainbow cupcakes were going to turn into India cupcakes...just because Jason was very excited by the fact that the box of dye said that 52 drops of yellow and 4 drops of green made orange.
Although we took the easy way out and used a box mix... the pictures are definitely worth looking at!

Ingredients:
1 box mix of vanilla cake (you want white batter so you can dye it!)
-follow the instructions according to the box. If you are vegetarian (whaddup!), feel free to add yogurt, diet soda, or apple sauce instead of the eggs to keep the cuppycakes moist.

In order to dye the cupcakes, grab some food coloring at your local supermarket. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, just your ordinary primary colors. Using plastic bowls or cups, anything that you don't mind throwing away - portion out the batter to however many colors you want to make. Go crazy. Add the dye, mix away and just see what colors you can come up with. 

a little dye crazy..showing off our India pride, in a delicious little cake.