Red velvet sandwich cookies, blueberry crumble bars and ramblings about my baking day with Katie

As you may know from previous posts I was back in North Yorkshire the last two weeks for the Easter break, two weeks isn't long and flew by a little too quickly to get much baking revision done but I did have a wonderful baking day with my best friend growing up, Katie. We chose a recipe each, raced round Tesco buying only own-brand ingredients - she too is a poor poor student - and spent the afternoon baking and jibber jabbering about when we were 9 year old twin mermaids drawing up rotas so we could coordinate outfits (right down to the hair bobble), how ridiculously priced the socks with the frilly lace
around the ankles in Topshop are (<-- look I made my own, sorry about the funny angle of my foot and the poor quality I took it on my phone!) and how easy it would be to make them ourselves, the obscene £1 an hour library fines for recalled books at Katie's university and the typical 'oh my gosh how am I going to get the first class degree I desperately want when there AREN'T ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY TO REVISE ALL THIS STUFF!' panic that sets in when exams are looming.

Anyway onto the baking!





The recipe Katie chose:

Blueberry Crumb Bars

Source: The Smitten Kitchen

Ingredients

For the crumbly cake mixture:

1 cup white sugar
1 tsp baking powder
3 cups all purpose flour
8 oz unsalted butter
1 egg
zest of 1 lemon (I left this out because I didn't have a lemon but I'm sure this will be a lovely addition!)

For the blueberry middle:

4 cups blueberries (the recipe calls for fresh but I used frozen as they were cheaper and the bars still tasted delightful)
4 tsp all purpose flour (the recipe called for cornflour I didn't have any but my substitute worked just fine!)
1/2 cup white sugar
5 tbsp lemon juice (I used bottled lemon juice but juice of an actual lemon will work fine as well)

Directions

Pre heat oven to 170 degrees C and grease/line a 9" x 13" baking tray with sides at least 1" deep. Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder and lemon zest if using then blend in the butter and egg until you have a crumbly mixture like in the photo below.

Add half of this mixture to the baking tray, spread out evenly across the whole tray. In another bowl add the sugar and flour and mix together into a paste with the lemon juice then gradually stir in the blueberries.

Spread the blueberries out evenly on top of the layer of crumble.

Then add the other half of the crumbly mixture evenly on top of the blueberry mixture.

Bake for about 50 minutes until the top looks golden brown and crunchy like a good crumble! Leave to cool completely before cutting into approximately 24 squares. (Note: the greasing/lining part is REALLY important, I failed to do this as Katie and I had so much catching up to do and realised the full extent of my actions (or lack of) when I spent half an hour scraping the bars out using 4 different utensils)

Eat, share and enjoy! :)

The Recipe I chose:

Red Velvet Sandwich Cookies

Source: Inspiration from a photo of biscuits I saw a long time ago that I may or may not have remembered the recipe for correctly but with a little improvisation and a few alterations along the way we obtained the
desired biscuit!

Ingredients

For the biscuits:

1 red velvet cake packet mix
2 eggs
1/3 cup sunflower oil

1/4 cup icing sugar

For the cream cheese filling:
4oz cream cheese
4oz granulated sugar

Directions

Pre heat oven to 170 degrees C and line a baking sheet. Combine the red velvet packet mix, the two eggs and the oil and mix together well until you have a gloopy mixture.

Place 1 tsp dollops of mixture on a lined baking sheet (teaspoon TEASPOON definitely not a tablespoon a tablespoon produces HUGE cookies - which you can see stacked below - which you just cannot sandwich, well I'm sure you could sandwich them but whether or not you could eat one of those monstrous sandwiches in one go is another question all together!

Bake for about 10 minutes until they keep their shape when you gently poke one (with clean hands). Leave to cool before you peel them off the grease proof paper.
Once cool dip the 'right' side of each biscuit into icing sugar (I later read online that if you do this before you cook them it creates a cracked biscuit which is very aesthetically pleasing, - see the best snickerdoodles for an example of a cracked biscuit - however, thinking about it the mixture was too gloopy for me to do this without getting messy and cross but if you have more patience than me and don't mind getting a bit messy then I think it is worth doing!). Next combine the cream cheese and sugar in a bowl and mix well. Add a teaspoon sized dollop to half of the biscuits then place the other half on top of the dollops squishing the cream cheese filling down. Gobble up and enjoy! :)