Butterscotch Chocolate Chip Walnut Blondies

What's baking? 

I had butterscotch chips, mini chocolate chips and walnuts in the cabinet and wanted to bake something sweet.  I adapted Mark Bittman's Butterscotch Brownie recipe in his cookbook How to Cook Everything. This is one of my favorite cookbooks for straight-forward, adaptable, how-to-do-it recipes and this one is no exception. It's a simple one bowl recipe and came out great with what I had on hand. The mini chocolate chips just melted in and the walnuts added a little crunch to the otherwise fudgy consistency.

Practice

What's Baking?
Mini 4" cake to practice.

I needed to bake a cake for my last Wilton Course 1 class.  I used Mark Bittman's recipe for Simple Chocolate Layer Cake to make a mini 4" cake to practice and a larger cake for class this week with Wilton classroom buttercream icing.  The whipped cream would have been much better, but this was to practice decorating!  I cut the little cake into two layers and brushed them with Creme de Cacao and mixed some strawberry jam with buttercream for the filling.  I'll post pictures of the larger cake with the dreaded Wilton rose later.