Monthly Archives

January 2017

FOOD

The BEST Chocolate Chip Cookies

January 21, 2017

These are literally the BEST chocolate chip cookies! This is the first recipe I have ever made that didn’t turn out flat, pathetic, and unappetizing. Instead, these are SO thick, a little crunchy when they first come out of the oven and if you have enough self control to not eat the whole batch in one night, the next day they are chewy deliciousness!!!

I adjusted the recipe to make it more to my taste…more chocolate chips and cinnamon! You can never go wrong with a chocolate/cinnamon combo. I feel like the difference between this recipe and others I have made is the fact that you are using melted butter rather than just softened. That is literally the only thing I can think of that could be the difference between the flat cookies of the past and these delicious thick ones. Hope you give them a try because they are seriously too good not to!

What you’ll need…

  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter (melted)
  • 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 12oz. bag semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Directions…

  • Preheat oven to 375 degrees
  • Sift together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt
  • Mix together the sugars, melted butter, egg and vanilla
  • Stir together the wet and dry ingredients just until incorporated
  • Stir in the chocolate chips
  • Spoon mixture into tablespoon sized balls and place on cookie sheet
  • Bake for 13-15 minutes (depending on your oven so check them around 11 minutes just to be safe!)
  • Transfer cookies to a cooling rack and enjoy! Even better tasting the next day!
DECOR

Kitchen Renovation

January 12, 2017

Our kitchen remodel is finally done! We started the first weekend of December. My husband decided to take a few days off of work and try to get as much done in a 5 day stretch as possible. While he did get quite a bit done in that time, there was still so much more to do! Hence why it is just now finished….a month later.

One of the biggest time consumers was the cabinets. We went back and forth whether or not we wanted to rip the old ones out and start fresh, or keep the original set and repaint. While new cabinets would of been nice, we ultimately decided to keep the originals and sand them down and repaint. The biggest factor behind this decision was the fact that because the kitchen is so small we didn’t really have the option to change the layout at all so it just made more sense to keep the original cabinets, especially since they were real wood and were still in really good condition (other than the multiple layer of thick gross-colored paint…) Since we were keeping the cabinets we wanted to make the new paint look as nice as possible, so we sent all the cabinet doors to a local company to be completely stripped down to the bare wood so we had a nice fresh surface to paint over. This took a couple weeks, so we lived with an almost complete kitchen without cabinet doors for a bit. Not only did the stripping take some time, the actual painting was lengthy as well. We ended up using Valspar Cabinet Enamel and had it tinted to with a couple Valspar colors. For the top cabinets we went with Valspar Cool Grey and for the bottom cabinets we went with Valspar Autumn Fog. I know some people take a ton of time deciding on paint colors, but my husband and I walked into Lowes, and picked these out literally in 5 minutes. I knew what I was looking for so I suppose that helped.

Overall we did quite a bit of work in the kitchen. We stripped and painted the cabinets, installed a new checkerboard black and white floor, white subway tile backsplash, butcher block counters, a new farmhouse sink and faucet, painted the walls, put in new baseboards, and got all new appliances. While it was a lot of work (thanks to my husband!) we are so happy with how it turned out. My vision for a modern farmhouse style truly came to life and I couldn’t be happier!

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