Blue Velvet Cookies and a Quiet Weekend

Morning everyone!!!! Hope you all had wonderful weekends! Ours was quiet and we watched a ton of random movies. It was pretty fun! All of us had had pretty busy work/school weeks, so it was really nice to be able to just relax and spend some time together. How was your weekend? Busy or quiet? 


Remember how Friday was my sister's half birthday? Well, I couldn't post then what I was going to make, but I'll tell ya'll today! We had chicken cooked w/ onion and bell peppers in a chipotle marinade. I made some pasta and homemade cheese sauce to go with it. Simple, but yummy. The best part though, was dessert! My sister's faaavorite cake is red velvet, but since we didn't have any cream cheese with which to make the icing, I decided on cookies based on this recipe, specifically because they are cake-y cookies. I didn't make the cookie sandwiches, and instead of red, I dyed them blue because its my sister's favorite color! Here's my recipe:

Blue Velvet Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 2/3 cups flour (our flour is really fine here, so I needed to add more to make the dough the right consistency)
• 2 T cocoa
• 2 t baking powder (we don't actually have baking soda here...)
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 T buttermilk
• 2 t apple cider vinegar
• 1 t vanilla extract
• 1 T blue food coloring

Directions:

1. Combine flour, baking powder, cocoa powder and salt in a small bowl.
2. Cream together butter and sugar until light, add eggs one at a time, stirring after each until fully incorporated. Beat in buttermilk, vinegar, vanilla and food coloring. Add dry ingredients to wet, stir until fully combined. 
3. Drop batter onto baking sheet, making 2 inch rounds. Bake at 375 for about 10 minutes, or until cooked through. These cookies should be cake-like and fluffy. 

After baking, I drizzled some sweetened condensed milk on some of them and left the others plain. These really do taste like red velvet cake!!! Cool, huh? hahahaha 

Now, I have a question for all you runners out there. How do you plan you runs??? I have a couple of treadmill workouts that I found online that I like to do, but I really don't know how to put my own tempo, speed, hill, etc run together. How do I know how fast to run so that I get a good workout in without exhausting myself either? 

Well, that's about it for today...off to study! :D 

Have you ever made a baked good that was supposed to taste like another baked good? 

It was really fun for me to make cookies that tasted like cake, because they're a little bit easier and faster than making a whole red velvet cake!