Oreo Vanilla Cupcakes

I have spent most of my life not knowing what an Oreo tasted like.  For some reason they never really appealed to me.  I just thought that they looked like a dry chocolate biscuit with hard cream in the middle.

I always remember this TV advertisement years and years ago where this little boy is sitting on his doorstep when his mum brings him some milk and Oreos.  He then separates an Oreo on his doorstep and his dog comes up and licks half of it, which doesn’t bother the little boy as he eats both halves!  Obviously those Oreos are good enough to eat dog spit and all!

Anyway, I recently decided to try those Oreos and was pleasantly surprised!  Now I just can’t get enough.  I love the little packets of mini-Oreos, I like the packets of big Oreos, and I love Oreos in cupcakes. 

Oreos in cupcakes has to be one of the coolest ideas.  I think I came across it somewhere on the web or on Pinterest. 

Absolutely sinful

Sleep deprived as I am right now, I still can’t say no to chocolate cookies!! These cookies were easy to make despite only having 2 hours sleep the night before!
Sickly Sinful Chocolate Cookies
Ingredients
½ cup unsalted butter, softened
2/3 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups self-raising flour
¼ cup rolled oats
Roughly ½ cup cocoa powder (I guess the lack of sleep is getting to me as I don’t remember exactly how much cocoa powder I used!)
Roughly 1 cup chocolate chips/ chocolate chunks (White, milk or dark. I used a mixture of milk and dark chunks)

Cream the butter and the sugar until fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla to the creamed mixture and beat well.

Add the flour to the beaten mixture and fold in lightly. Add the oats and the chocolate chips or chunks

Line your baking tray with a baking sheet and drop small spoonfuls of the mixture on baking sheet.

Bake the cookies at 180C for 12-15 minutes. Remove when slightly soft, the cookies will harden when cool.

Oatmeal cranberry cookie heaven!

All this healthy eating lately has left me with a huge sugar craving! Plus, there’s been a lot of foodie blogger baking and cookie stacking as well. Inspired by both Tigerfish and Lynn’s latest efforts, I’ve decided to go where I don’t usually go…the baking zone!

The truth is, I’m not a great baker. Hubs has suffered through lots of dry muffins and super-hard-teeth-breaking cookies! I just can’t follow recipes properly.

First of all, I don’t read properly, that is, I miss lines and forget to add ingredients. Then I get bored measuring things and end up just adding a little too much sugar or flour because I think the batter needs it!

Also, to add to the problem, I also don’t have proper measuring utensils (cups, spoons etc) at the moment and just tend to guess. When a recipe calls for 1 cup of flour, I literally use 1 cup … any cup that I find in the kitchen!

Anyway, I decided to try Lynn’s oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, it looked pretty fool-proof to me, plus she had lots of helpful advice for the novice baker like me.

You’ll find the recipe here.

A few things though. I substituted the raisins with cranberries as I love cranberries. Also, I couldn’t find vanilla essence in my local supermarket and so had to use “vanilla sugar” (never seen this before!)!

On top of that, I couldn’t find any “quick-cooking” oats and so just used the normal oats that I found in the supermarket. And, I couldn’t find any baking soda either so I used baking powder. The oven in our current apartment isn’t great so the cookies took about 15 minutes to bake. Oh, and I have only 1 tray so I had to bake the cookies in 3 batches!

The end result was fantastic (no complains from Hubs either!)! Here’s my cookie stack!

I’ve eaten so many cookies today that I think I’m going to have to go for a big loooonggg run tomorrow ;-)

Ps.
Pay careful attention to Lynn’s advice about taking the cookies out while they’re still slightly underbaked. I left my first batch in for too long and they were slightly too hard. I made sure I took my other batches out early!