Double Chocolate-Chip Muffins

INGREDIENTS:

1/4 cup oil
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup of all purpose flour
2 tbsp Hershey's unsweetened coccoa powder
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1/4 cup Hershey's semisweet chocolate morsels
1/4 cup mini morsels

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 400 F. Line muffin pan with paper liners. In large bowl mix the eggs, oil, milk and vanilla. In other bowl mix the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, and chocolate chips. Add dry mixtures to the wet ones and fold gently until just mixed. Don't beat. Pour the batter into prepared pan and sprinkle mini morsels on top of each muffin. Bake at 400C for 12-15 minutes. Remove from pan and cool on rack.

This recipe is adapted from http://www.food.com/recipe/double-choc-chip-muffins-302004 I have halved the recipe. The above recipe yields 6 regular size muffins.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Cookies

We had been to Disney World, Orlando last week and really had one of the most amazing vacation!! While roaming around in one of the Disney stores in Disney downtown, I happened to see these cookie cutters and immediately grabbed it. I knew the cookies would look "perfect" with these ones as they looked so cute in the package too. The recipe I tried out for the cookies is originally a Wilton Sugar Cookies recipe to which I made some changes and had cut the recipe to half. The cookies came out very good and tasty.

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 cup Crisco shortening + 3 tsp water
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp nutmeg powder (optional)

DIRECTIONS:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. In a bowl, mix the shortening, water, and sugar and beat it till it becomes fluffy and light. Then add the egg, vanilla essence, and nutmeg powder. To this add flour gradually as required and knead into dough. On a wax paper spread some flour and roll out the dough until about 3/4 inch thick and cut out the shapes you want. Bake at 400 degrees F for 5-7 minutes. If you cannot roll out the dough, refrigerate it for about 15 minutes and then proceed.

I frosted the cookies with the royal icing, the recipe for which will be found in the blog. To get the perfect red for the mickey mouse, you will need to add a good amount of red color to the white royal icing. I used the ready made black buttercream icing for the ears, so they are a little bit uneven on the surface. Using royal icing should be the best way to get it smoother. For the minnie mouse, I used the pink royal icing with the white polka dots. The cookies do look cute, don't they??