Coffee Milkshake

As today was meant to be warm (I am still not sure if it really was though), I decided to replace my daily cup of coffee by something more refreshing. Iced coffee, obviously, as my daily shot of caffeine is kind of a neccessity. I tried to make iced coffee a few times last year, but these prototypes were not much of a success and so I decided first to look up how it is to be done (for once). After having read through several recipes I opened the kitchen cabinet to gather some ingredients to my liking, and created a genuinely good coffee milkshake! (so, no iced coffee after all..)

If you are in need of a coffee milkshake yourself,

this is what you'll need:

50 gr vanilla ice cream

1tsp or 1 sachet instant coffee

100 ml cold water

150 ml skimmed milk

2tsp hazelnut coffee syrup (Douwe Egberts), or another syrup if you prefer

4 ice cubes

blender

Just put all the ingredients together in a blender, et voilà, you have your own coffee milkshake. Enjoy!

Skinny Cinnamon Cookies

As summer break started this week, I decided to bake cookies today. Not so much to celebrate summer, as Zeus seems to be very mad with the Dutch, letting it poor all day. No, rather because there was not much else to do. In fact, because of this lack of activity, baking cookies is one of my usual summer pass times. Sifting out blogs and writing are two of my other free time activities, and so I decided to put up a blog and share today's cookies with everyone having access to the internets! Yep.

So, the cookies I baked were inspired on Snickerdoodles, but turned out completely different as I altered the recipe. Even more so, by I altering it, the recipe became quite skinny and therefore summer and bikiniproof. They do not have a real name anymore, but Skinny Cinnamon Cookies will do.

What you'll need:

225 Gr all purpose flour

1/2 Tsp of baking soda

25 Gr stevia powder sugar

50 Gr softened butter

1 Tsp vanilla extract

2 Small to medium eggs, or one large egg.

2 Tsp grounded cinnamon

Mixer

If you like you can top the cookies with some cinnamon sugar or powder sugar, but this will make them less skinny!

Prepare

Pre-heat your oven to 190 degrees C. or 375 degrees F. Cover a baking sheet with bakery paper or baking spray.

Baking!

Combine the baking soda, stevia, butter, vanilla, eggs, and cinnamon in a large ball and use the mixer to form a smooth substance. Add the flour and keep beating with the mixer until all the flour is covered with the other ingredients and a granular mixture appears in your bowl. Now, shape this mixture to one big ball of dough and roll 20 small balls of this (1-inch/2-cm).

Divide the balls on the baking sheet, with about 3 cm between each of them. Take a glass, cheese slicer, or something else with a flat bottom to flatten the little balls. If you were planning on using the cinnamon sugar, you can put this on the unbaked cookies right now. Make sure to push the grains in the dough a little bit, otherwise they won't stick.

Bake in the oven for about 6 minutes (yes, that's fast!). Cool them on the sheet for a minute or two, before spreading them on a wire reck to cool them completely. When cooled, you can decorate them with powder sugar, but that's not a neccessity.

± Per Cookie:

Calories 73

Carbohydrates 13

Fat 3

Protein 2