Oven baked salmon with foaming hollandaise sauce

It may sound strange to you, but ever since I have been eating dessert confectioners’ sugar has baffled me. “How so delicate, white powder?”, I would ask myself, watching my grandmother dust it onto little crescent moon shaped butter cookies. Some may say I was just a strangely curious child, others might agree that this was a question a foodie in the making would wonder about.

Now that I am older the answer to my question is quite simple: confectioners’ sugar, also known as icing sugar, is the finest grade of powdered sugar. It is ground granulated sugar to which a very small amount of cornstarch has been added to prevent clumping. The fineness to which the white sugar has been ground is reported using an “X” with a number in front of it. For instance, 14X is finer than 12X, and so on. 6X is the most commonly used and 4X is the coarsest powdered sugar.

Technology of the 19^th Century made it widely available, but food historians tell us that European bakers were using it as early as the 18^th Century. Not coincidentally, cake icing made an appearance during this time.

I love how you can use this type of sugar to make a variety of different icings for cakes and cookies; butter cream, glazes, etc. But, there is just something so fun about eating desserts with powdered sugar on them. Here are a few I like to indulge in.

I love my sugar just as much as the next dessert queen, but sometimes it gets old. I love my butter cream and white sugar laden cakes and light brown sugar rolled snicker doodles, but lately I have been on a sort of health kick. I went from eating probably a sweet thing almost every day to a couple times a week in moderate portions. As you can see I am a dessert fiend. I have taken to researching substitute sweeteners aside from Splenda, because chemicals are no good for you.

There are endless options and countless bloggers creating recipes using such sweeteners, in addition to substituting white flour for almond flour, and so on. The thing with these sugar substitutes is that they are natural sweeteners. They are not empty calories, contrary to refined sugars that make up my favorite baked goods. I still think it is okay to have them once in a while, but these are some unique and nutritious options. And no, it is not an excuse to eat unlimited sweets. Sorry!

After successfully baking up a batch of chewy Nutella blondies, I was excited to try other flavors. Blondie recipes are versatile and you can put different mix-ins. So this time I added crushed Oreos to make cookies and cream blondies.

These didn’t have much of a chew, which was surprising since I used the same recipe for the batter as the Nutella blondies. I prefer more chewy blondies so I wasn’t as happy with these. They didn’t taste bad. They basically tasted like soft cookie bars.

I’ll have to keep fiddling with this to create chewy cookies and cream blondies. Though if you don’t like chewy blondies, this recipe may be for you. I do like that these didn’t sink as much in the middle as the Nutella blondies.