The Food Site

First of all, my apologies to those who may have checked here daily for any latest post. I’ve been quite remiss in posting as regularly as I used to due to one reason:

I am way in over my head with a new project I am undertaking, thus I hardly have time for this blog and my personal blog.

In these few weeks, my postings have been irregular and though I did cook up a storm and bake loads of stuff and pigged out at restaurants, I hardly have time to put it all up. Sigh. I am really, really overwhelmed and I can only wish I have 36 hours a day to do everything!

Anyway, I sorta won a gift over at The Life and Loves of Grumpy’s Honeybunch when I left a comment at her Pay It Forward post. SO. It is now my turn to pay it forward.

Pay It Forward

Okay, for those of you who don’t understand how it works or have not seen the movie ‘Pay it Forward’, let me explain the nitty gritty of this in one simple sentence:

I go out of my way to help three strangers and each of these strangers will in turn help three strangers respectively and on it goes.

Now, in blogland, it is slightly different. You just leave a comment here and I will use one of those online number randomizer to pick three people who commented and I will send them each a homemade gift. And yes, you can be from anywhere in the world and I will send the gift to you within the next 365 days. Honest. No tricks.But if nobody commented here…I guess, I will have to beg you nicely to let me pay it forward. So, please, can you please, pretty, pretty please leave a comment here? There, I did ask very nicely. I promise I will send over very nice handmade gift for the three chosen ones.

Now for the catch. The catch is for these three people to have blogs and to do the same. They will have to pick three people each and send the gifts to those people. That’s what we call Pay It Forward.

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Now, on to an award I received from Gera of Sweets Foods. Let me proudly present to you my latest award….

Thank you so much to Gera for thinking so highly of my humble little blog. Makes me even more guilty for my lack of regular posts in recent times.

Anyway, here are the details of this award:

The deserved Uber Amazing Blog Award is a blog award given to sites who:

* inspires you
* makes you smile and laugh
* or maybe gives amazing information
* a great read
* has an amazing design
* and any other reasons you can think of that makes them uber amazing!

The rules of this award are:

* Put the logo on your blog or post.
* Nominate at least 5 blogs (can be more) that for you are Uber Amazing!
* Let them know that they have received this Uber Amazing award by commenting on their blog.
* Share the love and link to this post and to the person you received your award from.

So, now, I have to find five Uber Amazing Blogs to pass this award to (why do I have this strange inkling as if it is an e-chain letter? lol..don’t mind me, I love passing on links to great blogs out there…)

Now, the 5 blogs deserving this award are…..*insert drumroll*…

1.  Nick, The Peanut Butter Boy (heck, who doesn’t love peanut butter and a blog exclusively on peanut butter?!?! Enaf said.)

2. Gretchen from Wasabi Bratwurst (her pictures are so beautiful and yes, her recipes are great too)

3. Foongpc from My Very First Blog (okay, so his blog is not exactly a food blog but I love his blog because he always post up quite interesting stuffs and informative too.)

4. Tartelette (I am a silent stalker of her blog. I simply LOVE, LOVE, LOVE her pictures! Go check her blog out and you will see what I mean)

5. Peanut Butter and Julie (I also silently stalk her blog. Like I said, who doesn’t love peanut butter? And Julie sure do have loads of PB posts too!)

So, there. Some blogs I think deserve the Uber Amazing Blog award.

Before I start, let me first tell you one great news. I submitted a proposal to Foodbuzz for this month’s 24, 24, 24 event and my proposal was accepted! It was for a cookie recipe I’ve been trying out (and will probably perfect this weekend before the actual 24, 24, 24 day on Dec 31), so keep your eyes peeled for this year end to get a load of the cookies I was working on. It was not easy, I can tell you that.

Anyway, I must have been bitten by the baking bug or something because I can’t seem to stop baking up cookies recently. And eating them too. Heh.So, do you remember the chocolate filled peanut butter cookies I made a while back?

Well, I made them again but this time, instead of using creamy peanut butter, I used chunky peanut butter and instead of chocolate, I used nutella. This is what I got:

Peanut butter cookies with nutella filling

The reason I used chunky peanut butter is because I wanted some crunchy nuts in the cookie and I wanted to try if it’d turn out okay. And since I simply love Nutella, I thought, heck, why not use it as filling?

So, here’s the slightly different recipe for:

Peanut Butter Cookies with Nutella Filling

Ingredients

For the dough:

1 1/3 cup fine flour

1/3 cup oat bran

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1/2 tsp salt

6 tbsp butter, soften

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

6 tbsp chunky peanut butter

For the filling:

4 tbsp chunky peanut butter

5 tbsp Nutella

3 tbsp icing sugar

3 tbsp granulated sugar

1 tbsp malt chocolate powder

For the coating:

4 tbsp almond nibs

4 tbsp chocolate buttons

a dash of cinnamon powder

3 tbsp sugar

Instructions

1.Place the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl and cream it with a mixer

2. Add in the egg, vanilla essence and peanut butter and beat well

You should get this type of mixture with chunks in it due to the chunky peanut butter

3. In a separate bowl, sift your flour, soda and salt and add in the oat bran

4. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the peanut butter mixture

5. Combine the mixture well and you will get a sticky dough.

6. You can place the dough on baking paper and roll it like this.

7. You can then refrigerate the dough for about 2 hours or until it is firm enough to shape.

In the meantime, you can prepare the filling:

1. Place all the ingredients in a bowl and mix it together with a spoon

Once mixed, the peanut butter-nutella filling should look like this

And yet in another bowl, you mix together the ingredients for the topping except for the chocolate buttons.

Now, when the dough is firm enough, remove it from the fridge and cut it horizontally into about 20 pieces. Then you wrap about 1/2 inch balls of the filling with the dough and roll it into a ball. After that, just roll the ball around the topping and press two chocolate buttons on top.

Flatten the dough ball with a flat bottomed glass and place it on the cookie sheet.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and bake the cookies for about 6 minutes or so. Again, let me remind you that I used a fairly high-wattage (900 to 1200W) microwave cum convection oven so my cookies bake faster. You will need to adjust the temperature and baking time to suit your oven.

Once done, you will get these:

Peanut butter cookies with Nutella filling

These peanut butter cookies with Nutella filling are really great as a homemade Christmas gift or just for your own consumption. They are extra crunchy due to the chunky peanut butter and the Nutella filling is as good as the chocolate filling. Those chocolate buttons sure do add a burst of chocolaty flavour to it.

Have a Merry Christmas everyone!