The Batter Thickens Update + Frozen Malted Coconut Mocha Recipe

Okay, everyone knows you can’t catch up without coffee. And you can’t have a food blog without food. So of course we’re including a coffee recipe.

For those of you who’ve been around for a while, you may have noticed that we’ve basically fallen off the map. Aside from the odd shared link on Facebook or the once-in-a-blue-moon apologetic post, it’s pretty much been crickets on The Batter Thickens since mid-2015. There’s a lot of reasons for that.

Both of us have gone through periods of pretty heavy duty transition in the last couple years. Audrey through her senior year of high school and college application process, and Molly through the tumultuous first couple years of working a grown-up job and, you know, supporting yourself like an adult.

I haven’t posted since basically the beginning of senior year. It’s been a whirlwind year. I don’t want to make excuses, but I don’t know when the last time you applied to college was. Lemme tell you, it’s quite a process.

Amidst all that transition, blogging fell to the bottom of our priority lists. We both wanted to get back to it, but with so many new responsibilities and life changes competing for our attention, it was easier said than done.

Trust me, I was (stress-)eating a lot of delicious baked goods as I thought about the impending future and all of its uncertainty. Blogging about them was hard though.

Transitions aren’t over – we’re both at points in our lives when they’ll continue to come hard and fast for a while yet – but we decided that we’re going to start making blogging a priority again. Before we get into the nitty gritty of what that will look like, we thought we’d take you on a little journey through the past five (!!) years since we first started The Batter Thickens.

In 2012,

• Our blog was hosted on Blogspot
• Our logo looked like this: 
• Molly was 19 and a sophomore in college
• Audrey was 12 and in 8th grade
• Molly was in Minnesota
• Audrey was in Indiana

A lot has happened since then…

Where We’ve Been

Molly

Since we started this blog, I have:

• Graduated college with a degree in English and Psychology
• Moved home to Indiana for a year
• Worked in a bakery and on a dairy farm (as a “dairy barista”)
• Moved to Minnesota
• Got a Big Girl job in marketing as a copywriter
• Lived in 2 (soon to be 3) apartments

And a lot of that has happened in the last two years, hence our unofficial hiatus.

As for Audrey…

I have:

• Started and graduated from high school. Got straight A’s, nbd.
• Got contacts, got rid of my bangs and braces. Expanded my wardrobe. Needless to say I am a lot cooler now.
• Ran 3.5 half marathons and ran a whole bunch of Cross Country races. I can run a lot farther now.
• Participated in more extracurriculars than I can count.
• Got a job at a smoothie place for a year. Quit that job.
• Applied to college. Got into 8 colleges. Agonized over my options. Decided to go to USC.

Where The Batter Thickens is Going From Here

So we took a walk in the woods like Hillary Clinton to figure things out. No, literally. We were on a girls weekend with our mom in Door County, and we went on an hour-long walk in the Peninsula State Park woods that we spent discussing the fate of The Batter Thickens. What did the blog mean to us? Did we want to continue it, or officially call it quits? If we did continue, what would that look like?

The walk in the woods was actually quite stressful, please do not think we reached a zen state. Molly wouldn’t stop flailing her arms at bugs and I’m pretty sure a spider crawled on my arm.

We can’t speak for Hillary, but we came up with a lot of good answers. The most important being: The blog is coming back in full force! And with a lot of changes that we think will improve it, for both us and the readers.

1. Real Food

The first and perhaps biggest change is that we are going to start posting savory, “real food” recipes on The Batter Thickens. As much as we love our desserts, we cannot subsist on chocolate alone. One of the challenges that I (Molly) in particular have faced over the past couple years is fitting extravagant baking projects into my budget and my lifestyle as a twentysomething living alone and just starting out in my career. Moving forward, the balance of recipes we share here on the blog will look more like the food we actually eat in our day-to-day life.

I (Audrey) have become the only child at home in recent years, and it is hard to bake extravagant desserts when there are only three people at home to eat them. I mean, I can, but I do it knowing full well I will probably have to eat half of whatever I bake.

Yes, we go hard on dessert and eat something sweet almost every day. But the vast majority of our diets are made up of healthy, nutritious foods with lots of veggies and lean protein (ugh, I know). We’re not going to become a paleo or gluten-free or whole 30 blog by any means, but we decided it would be a lot easier to keep up with regularly posting recipes if they were things we would be cooking and eating anyway.

When you live alone, it’s a lot harder to make a full batch of cupcakes disappear than when you live in a dorm of perpetually hungry 20-year-olds or in a house with a family of five. But a pan of lasagna that can be turned into dinner for one for over a week? No problem.

2. Bakery and Restaurant Reviews

Because both of us will soon live in very foodie cities – Molly in Minneapolis, and Audrey in Los Angeles – we thought it would be fun to start featuring some of our new discoveries and favorite standbys. If you, our readers, ever find yourself in either city looking for a place to get a tasty treat or a memorable meal, you can use our blog as a local resource!

I am very excited to be living in a big foodie city! Indy really just isn’t a wealth of exciting food places. I’ve already started compiling a list of places I want to try. My roommate told me she likes food as well. She’ll probably get dragged along on a lot of food adventures across LA.

3. Reading Roundups

When we were first coming up with the idea for our blog, we conceived of it as a baking slash book blog. The name “The Batter Thickens” actually stems from this idea. The meaning behind it is twofold: it comes from the line in many baked good recipes that describes the batter “thickening,” but also from the phrase, “the plot thickens.”

As we were brainstorming ideas for how to revitalize our inspiration and channel fresh energy into the blog, we thought we could go back to this original idea and start featuring some book reviews and reading roundups. We’re both big readers, and one of our very favorite pastimes is to savor a decadent baked good while simultaneously savoring a delicious book.

We’re not exactly sure how this addition to our blog will look yet. We’re thinking monthly reading roundups of books we’ve read during the month that are worth recommending, but if we read something particularly wonderful, perhaps we would give it a dedicated review. Let us know if you have a preference for what you’d like to see!

So we’ll leave you with the recipe for the coffee drink from the beginning of this post. The first recipe of many more to come. Kick back, sip a Frozen Malted Coconut Mocha, and wait for more recipes, more posts, more reviews, and more of The Batter Thickens.

Frozen Malted Coconut Mocha

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Ingredients

• 1 cup coffee, either frozen or chilled with ice
• 3 tablespoons Ovaltine powder
• A splash of coconut milk

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Instructions

1. Either freeze the coffee or chill it and add ice.
2. Put in a blender with the Ovaltine powder. Pour in enough coconut milk to cover the ice.
3. Blend.
4. Pour into a cup and add more ice if desired.