Tag: cookie

cooking

No campfire or mosquitoes necessary!

wittychild

When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to go to camp. I suspect this is because one or two of my classmates did, and it sounded like the height of summer fun. Did the reality of sleeping in a cabin with seven randos, sharing communal bathrooms, and not having my bed or cat or toys/books/stuff occur to me? It did not, and so it’s probably better for all involved that my parents tuned out this particular passing fancy of mine. I don’t go outside…or swim…or enjoy sports…really, this would have been a terrible idea, and popular culture backs me up.

  • Hail, Hail Camp Timberwood by Ellen Conford – Melanie gets bullied by a cabinmate and her horse tries to drown her. (I’m really showing my bias here: horses terrify me, and in her place, if the drowning didn’t get me the absolute cardiac arrest would have.)
  • I Want to Go Home by Gordon Korman – Rudy can’t escape Camp Algonkian to save his life, but because I’m not experiencing it personally, I can laugh at it. Please read this one if you get the chance.
  • “Kamp Krusty”, S4 ep1 of The Simpsons – Bart and Lisa get sent to the eponymous camp where they’re fed gruel and forced to make wallets for export. This is made up for (maybe?) by a trip to Tijuana; maybe it was easier to sneak across the border with a busload of kids who probably didn’t have passports on them in 1992.
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov – Dolores is sent to camp, from which she is retrieved by her newly-minted pedo of a stepfather who kidnaps her and keeps her isolated from everyone and everything.

To summarize: very happy, in hindsight, to not have gone to camp. Who needs the colour wars, the singalongs, or…the s’mores. Sigh. The s’mores.

My baking buddy and I decided we could definitely do this ourselves, no campfire or mosquitoes necessary.

We started out with marshmallows and chocolate-dipped cookies, figuring they’d be easier to deal with than graham crackers and a chunk of chocolate. Also, the box itself exhorts their suitability for s’mores, so who were we to question that? We found a kitchen torch on sale to get that toasty outside crust on the marshmallows.

We weren’t sure how long it would take to toast them using the torch, or if they’d get soft enough on the inside, or if we’d use all our butane, so we hastened the process by microwaving them for a few seconds first, just to soften them up a bit.

We speared two at a time on a regular fork and had at ‘er with the torch. They toasted up fairly quickly (making me think we were right to pre-soften them) and absolutely caught on fire more than once.

It was a bit of a trick to get them off the fork – once the flame was turned off, they congealed pretty quickly – but two marshmallows made the perfect fluffy layer between our cookies. Unfortunately, because they had cooled a bit, they didn’t melt the chocolate so well…

…until we stuck the assembled s’mores back in the microwave for a few more seconds to soften everything up.

These were a great, no-bake summer dessert. And with most of a bag of marshmallows and a whole bunch of butane left, I think we’ll be making these again. Who needs to sleep on a cot just to get them?

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Main character baking energy

wittychild

Around Valentine’s Day, my Baking Buddy and I decided to re-watch the To All the Boys trilogy on Netflix. (Was this my idea? Yes. But was he into it? Also yes.) We were partway through the first one when I realized, with a funny pang, that no matter how cute the two leads might be, the book was so much better. The book is always better than its filmic adaptation. And naturally, that (re)discovery meant that I needed to (re)read the books, stat.

One thing they do show in the movies in a mostly faithful adaptation of the novels is Lara Jean’s baking. There’s something so relaxing about watching her very neatly go through the process of making, say, cherry turnovers or frosting a batch of cupcakes perfectly. In the third book, Always and Forever, Lara Jean, she’s on a quest to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

(Can I just say here that that book stresses me the heck out? First of all, it’s the final book in the series, so there’s the anticipation of “goodbye” which is inherently a little stressful in itself. Then, there’s the agony of waiting for university acceptances to be announced, and I am so glad that social media wasn’t a thing when I was waiting. There’s the fact that she doesn’t get in to her first choice school and the idea that her happily-ever-after might be derailed because of it. Her friends ambush her with a surprise birthday party, and her dad ambushes her with a trip to Korea without even asking if she wanted to go or had other plans for the summer. Oh, yeah, and her boyfriend’s mother is a manipulative cow. Ugh.)

When she’s not being pressured five ways from Sunday, she’s baking batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies, and encounters Jacques Torres’ take on it during a trip to New York. I was pleasantly surprised to see that his recipe is readily available online, and decided I had to try it. These are supposedly the ne plus ultra of cookies, and perhaps that’s why the recipe thinks it can get away with its extreme fussiness. In no particular order:

  1. It uses two kinds of flour: cake flour and bread flour. For some of us, this means a trip to the grocery store for five-pound bags only to use ~2 cups of each. What happened to all-purpose flour?
  2. The dough must be made 24 – 72 hours in advance, and allowed to rest in the fridge before baking. While I have made dough the night before in the past just to expedite the baking process the next day, there’s a big difference between deciding to do it as a gift to your future self and being told you have to do it, thereby necessitating even more planning. (Hope you’ve got the flours!)
  3. It calls for chocolate discs instead of chocolate chips, and then (annoyingly) provides a weight rather than a volume measurement. Luckily I found some lovely dark chocolate discs at Bulk Barn; less luckily, a modestly sized bag of them cost $15. I will admit that they were good, though – I don’t even like dark chocolate, but couldn’t tell that’s what these were.
  4. A petty complaint, but, per the last step in the recipe: “Best eaten warm.” Do they think I’m baking for a party, here?
  5. Step 3 of the recipe urges us not to overmix, but to mix only until the dry ingredients are incorporated, 5 to 10 seconds. My guess is that they don’t want to overdevelop the gluten (then why use bread flour, seriously?), but that is not enough time to work four cups of flour in.

Despite the misgivings brought on by the above, I gamely bought my ingredients and planned ahead so it had about 40 hours of resting time before baking, which is pretty good, I thought.

We tried to use a cookie scoop for maximum uniformity but the dough was so stiff from its time in the fridge that we quickly dispensed with that and grabbed two spoons instead.

They still wound up uniform-ish.

The recipe advises pushing in any discs that stick out of the dough for a better aesthetic once baked. Does it sound silly? Yes, but we dutifully did it anyway.

I was surprised by how much these spread, considering how long the dough had been chilled and that it didn’t really get a chance to warm up that much – I guess that’s what using butter will do for you.

We didn’t use flaked salt as recommended, but sprinkled a few grains of kosher salt on top to contrast against the sweetness of the cookie.

Overall? These weren’t bad, but I don’t know that they were worth the hassle, either. They were a perfectly OK cookie, but the flours, chilling, and pricey chocolate didn’t necessarily elevate them to superstar status. One interesting thing the discs did is melt and streak throughout the cookie, giving the inside a really neat appearance. And just like the recipe says, they truly do taste better warm. My test audience liked these well enough, so these may be a “sometimes” bake. (Or perhaps a more frequent bake until I use up the rest of the special flours I bought.)

Thanks for looking!

baking

Ich habe einen Hassen…er, ein Kreis

wittychild

I can’t remember when I first encountered them, but every Easter the German bakery near me makes these…well, I’m not quite sure how to classify them. (Oh, this post is off to a great start!) They look like they could be cookies – they’re sized to be held in one’s hand and not so complicated that a fork is required – but they’re thick and puffy and in cross-section almost look like a small, not-very-moist, sturdy cake. And one of the staff members once commented on them using a yeasted dough…does that make these bread? The bakery itself coyly calls them “Bunny Faces”, and they usually get consumed so quickly that no one’s taking the time to reverse-engineer them to put a label on them.

Some careful googling took me down a rabbit hole (ha!) to this recipe. Sure, the ones in the picture had clearly used a different bunny-shaped cookie cutter, but these were them! Finally, I could make these, and…uh, what’s quark? I had never heard of it (much less seen it in a grocery store), but every person I spoke to who was of German or quasi-German descent knew immediately what I was talking about and pronounced it differently than I had been. (Because I know you’re curious: I had been saying the last part of the word like “orc”, but it’s really like “arc”, or “ark”, depending on whether you’re doing geometry or building a boat of epic proportions.)

That all changed this year, when a chance detour down the dairy aisle yielded this:

“Quark makes you strong!”

I twisted my Baking Buddy’s rubber arm to help me with these. We took our task very seriously and even broke out his kitchen scale to follow the recipe as accurately as possible. Yes, you can search online to discover that 150 g of sugar is approximately 3/4 of a cup, but that’s not a very precise approach.

Even after mixing the wet ingredients together, the batter looked like no other cookie dough I’ve seen.

Once the flour and baking powder have been added, it needs to rest for half an hour or so before kneading it briefly and rolling it out. It might not be a yeasted dough, but it sure behaves like one.

It’s already puffy before being baked! I didn’t have a bunny cutter, so we started out making little cats before deciding circles were easier.

I was a little skeptical about brushing them with melted butter before baking, but they didn’t appear greasy in the slightest after coming out of the oven.

The bottoms got a beautiful golden colour, though!

We opted to skip the step of brushing them with more melted butter before turning them into the sugar, but still got plenty to stick because they were still hot when we did this.

Look at that inside! Is it a cake? Is it a cookie? Who cares – it’s tasty as all get-out!

They don’t have as much colour on the tops as the bakery version does, and we think if we make them again we might try an egg wash to combat that. The prepackaged vanilla sugar we used didn’t seem to have a lot of kick, either, so this may require homemade vanilla sugar.

All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with how they came out for a first attempt. It’s nice to have an at-home version for when they’re out of season at the bakery.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

It’s two! Two! Two desserts in one!

wittychild

Does anyone remember the old Certs commercials? (“Two! Two! Two mints in one!”) I just thought that my local stores had stopped carrying them, but apparently they’ve been discontinued altogether. Sigh. In other news, I’m still working on that time machine…

Speaking of a blast from my past: when I was a fresh-faced recent university graduate, I had a less-than-stellar job. I know, who would have imagined? Graduating and not waltzing into six figures and a corner office? I also had a terrifically inappropriate and un-PC nickname for it, but I’ll settle here for calling it “the Farm”, which is the version that won’t get me sent for sensitivity training. There’s not a lot of good that came from my time at the Farm, except for two recipes that the other farm girls shared with me.

One of those recipes was for chocolate brownie cookies. I hadn’t thought about that recipe in years, but when I stumbled across it again recently, I couldn’t not try it.

First, gather the following:

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 cup real mayonnaise
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 6 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped *
  • 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

* I used half a bag of semisweet “chips and chunks”, for interest and texture

Preheat oven to 375o F (190o C). Grease two cookie sheets. In a large bowl, stir together flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda. In another bowl, with an electric mixer, beat together sugar, mayonnaise, eggs, and vanilla for 2-3 minutes until well mixed and creamy. Add the mayonnaise mixture to the flour mixture, stirring just until the flour is incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chunks and chopped walnuts.

Drop batter by heaping teaspoons onto prepared cookie sheets, at least 2″ (5 cm) apart. Bake for 10-12 minutes until cookies have puffed up and are dry on top but rich, moist, and gooey on the inside. Remove to a rack to cool. Makes 4 dozen cookies.

I recruited my baking buddy, and we were on our way!

It took a goodly bit of wrist action to get everything incorporated. When I first added the wet ingredients to the dry, the dry just kind of coated the wet, like a flour-y, cocoa-y blob. (Which sounds like the most delicious horror movie ever, if I’m being honest.)

Clearly my farm-girl friend had never heard of parchment paper. I assure you, the cookies turned out fine despite not using greasy cookie sheets.

Look! At! These! I think I squealed when I saw the dry, crackly brownie top these got. This might be a good spot to mention that we only set the oven to 350o F – as one typically will for cookies – and averaged 8-9 minutes per sheet instead of the 10-12 in the recipe. They came out perfectly moist and brownie-like, not undercooked at all. I can’t imagine what 10-12 at the elevated temperature would have done.

It made me a little sad, thinking of all the years I could have been eating these but wasn’t. Imagine the best brownie you’ve ever had, but in a cookie form – and with a way better edge-to-centre ratio. This will definitely be in regular rotation going forward.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Just like Grandma used to make…

wittychild

I’m not kidding, guys. The bake I’m sharing today is my grandmother’s recipe. I can’t share the actual recipe here under penalty of haunting, but here’s one that’s relatively similar. Just, you know, not as good (of course). 😉

These were the sugar cookies I remember growing up, and they’re different than most. I was…pretty old…before I realized that when most people say “sugar cookie” they mean some weird, buttery cutouts decorated to the nines with icing that’s very pretty but makes my teeth hurt to look at it. The cookies I knew used Crisco, giving them a beautiful, neutral flavour; they were sprinkled with coloured sugar before baking, giving them a pleasing crunch. They’re never too sweet, but sparkle prettily on a plate. When I was a kid, my mom used to get out her shaped cookie cutters at Christmas and enlist her helpers to sprinkle sugar in artistic and realistic designs – but when I got older, I learned they taste just as good cut out in plain circles with a little red-white-green sugar on top for colour.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I got the idea to cut them out into heart shapes and use a variety of coloured sugars to try and recreate a conversation heart aesthetic. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll know that I’ve got a bit of a thing for conversation hearts.

And look at them, sparkling prettily!

The big cookie cutter was bigger than I realized, so I soon switched to an antique one (with a wooden handle and all!) to churn out some smaller cookies.

“But wait!” I hear you say, “What’s conversational about these?”

I did prepare a batch of bright-pink royal icing, ready to pipe all sorts of sweet and snarky sentiments, but…it wasn’t to be. I used a recipe from a pretty well-known baking blogger, and although it came together perfectly – and stiffly – in the bowl, it was a mess on the cookies. It might be OK for flooding the entire surface with icing, but not for detailed work. Would I use that recipe again?

About the only positive thing I can say, besides the fact that it dried glossy and gorgeous just like the recipe said, is that it might be handy for people who are bashful about declaring their feelings and don’t want to put themselves out there too much:

“‘Be mine’? No, that says, uh, ‘Mr. Mint’.”

So while I did not wind up with my bevy of conversation hearts, I did wind up with a really delicious batch of sugar cookies to show for it, which is a victory in my books.

Thanks for looking – Happy Valentine’s Day!

baking

Twice as good as uno cotto…

wittychild

When I was a young ‘un, I understood that “biscotti” meant “a rather hard, crisp cookie found in hipster coffee shops”. While that definition wasn’t necessarily wrong, it didn’t tell the whole story, and it wasn’t until many years later that my language-loving self learned that it came from the Italian for “twice cooked”. “Bi” = “two”; “cotti” = “baked”.

The twice-baked nature of biscotti makes them a little fussier than just making a drop cookie, but when I found myself craving a very specific flavour combination a couple of weeks ago, I knew it was going to demand those crispy edges, that texture. I managed to find the recipe I used the last time I made them (about, oh, four jobs ago) and altered it to suit my needs: about 2 Tbsp orange zest grated into the batter, and 1/2 cup chopped pistachios instead of the chopped cherries called for.

It’s hard to tell from the picture above, but that bowl smelled of orange zest and almond extract at that point and was making the whole kitchen smell good.

Once the chocolate chips and pistachios were mixed in, I shaped the dough into two loaves for the first bake (prima cottura?) After the loaves were slightly golden and set, they cooled off for ten minutes before slicing diagonally into 1/2″ slices.

I had…issues…with the slicing part. While I admit that I did not have a ruler handy to ensure perfect 1/2″ intervals, the recipe didn’t exactly tell me what kind of angle I was supposed to use. If I tried to cut them thin-ish (i.e. 1/2″-ish), they’d be so thin that they’d break and crumble; if I cut them thicker, they’d…break and crumble, but also be really thick. No way was I getting the projected 18 slices out of the first loaf. On the second loaf, I thought I was smart when I started by cutting it in half, thinking it would be easier to sub-divide each half into 9 slices. Oh, how wrong I was.

Once the loaves were hacked into as many viable slices as possible, in they went for their second bake. The recipe specifies “cut edge down”, as though there are a bunch of home bakers out there who try to balance them on edge. After 8-10 minutes on one side, and then flipped for 5 more minutes, they were a delightful golden brown colour.

They weren’t going to be winning any beauty contests, but don’t judge a book by its cover: my test audience loved these. They had a much more sophisticated flavour combination than your garden-variety chocolate chip cookie and provided a nice palate reset after weeks of rich holiday baking. I have no idea how to get around my slicing issues (but am open to suggestions!) but haven’t counted this recipe out yet.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

What’s more portable than a peanut butter and jam sandwich?

wittychild

When I asked my dad what kind of dessert he wanted for Father’s Day, he replied, “Cookies.”

Of course.

He didn’t care what kind, as long as they were cookies. That kind of carte blanche is a little overwhelming – the least he could have done is given me some ideas for flavour profiles, key ingredients, that kind of thing.

After leafing through my extensive cookbook collection, I happened upon the Peanut Butter and Jelly Cookies from The Vegan Table by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. I had made them once, years ago, and remembered them being good. I also really liked that they weren’t just peanut-butter, but also didn’t involve chocolate. It’s been done.

The dough came together wonderfully! The one thing I did differently from the recipe was to use plain all-purpose flour rather than the pastry flour called for, and frankly, I don’t know how much of a difference it makes. These weren’t heavy or tough in any way.

One other elevation these got from the last time I made them was that I used my homemade strawberry jam to fill them. Perfect, local strawberries with no preservatives? Yum!

These ones bake at 375 degrees (and not 350 like, oh, every other cookie out there), which freaked me out a bit, but…10 minutes per batch at 375, and these looked absolutely perfect. The bottoms were browned but not overdone, and the moisture was baked out of the jam and left a dense, fruity gem in its wake.

Fun fact time! If, when you’re attempting to transfer freshly-baked jam-filled cookies from the cookie sheet to cool, you drop one of them face-down (of course) on the table, the second-worst thing you can do is try to pick up the jammy blob with your bare fingers. The worst thing you can do is then try to lick your fingers to get the hot jam off them.

Despite this hot, sticky contretemps, these turned out beautifully! They’re tiny and tender, and wouldn’t be out-of-place at a tea party. The man of the hour was suitably impressed, so this was a win for everybody.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Snicker, snicker…

wittychild

I don’t bake quite as much as I used to; fifteen or twenty years ago, I was a regular Lara Jean Covey (minus the Korean heritage, tiny body, and jock boyfriend), and one of my signature recipes was snickerdoodles. I used to make them all the time, from a recipe plucked from Reader’s Digest of all places, and one of my dad’s coworkers was especially enamoured of them. I’d send a tin of cookies to work with my dad, and a couple of days later, it would come back, presumably to be refilled. Don’t tell me that’s not an ego-stroke.

My initial plan was to re-introduce them to my cookie-consuming public this holiday season, but Christmas kicked my callipygian backside, and like so many other things it just. Didn’t. Get. Done. But when we had a blustery, blizzardy weekend a few weeks back that precluded doing much of anything that involved leaving the house, I had my chance.

The recipe says to make your dough and then chill it for an hour or so, but the smartest thing I’ve done recently was making it the night before, then wrapping the whole shebang in waxed paper and sticking it in the fridge overnight. Sure, my cookie scoop was useless on it the next day, but it shaped into balls so nicely without coating my hands in dough residue.

Bonus: that extra chill time meant they didn’t spread hither, thither, and yon as soon as they hit the oven. I was a little nervous, because the recipe called for a 400-degree oven, and I never, ever bake cookies higher than 350. Much soul-searching – and shockingly, no Google-searching – prompted me to split the difference, and 375 turned out to be the perfect temperature. They were just started to turn golden on the bottom, and the outsides had crisped up nicely while the insides were chewy and lovely.

It was comforting to know that that old recipe withstood the test of time. I think I’ll be adding to my semi-regular rotation (mainly to use up the two bottles of cream of tartar in the spice cabinet, but still).

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

How do you spell “fun”? F-e-t-t-i!

wittychild

Back in the spring, I had made some cookies to share with my coworkers in celebration of what was admittedly a rather arbitrary anniversary. Oh, I didn’t make a big deal of it, plastering “Five Years Since I Accidentally Took the Elevator to the Wrong Floor” banners across my cubicle walls, or anything like that. I packaged them unceremoniously in a Gladware container, scrawled “Funfetti Chocolate Chip Cookies” in green Sharpie on a folded piece of notepaper, and dropped the whole works in an obvious place in the communal kitchen. Free food always moves, and by eleven o’clock that morning, they were gone.

Do you want to know the difference between a “normal” person and a social committee member? The “normal” people instant-messaged me to say thank you, or how much they enjoyed them. Awww. One of the social committee members led with an instant message that started out like that, but turned into, “You should make some for our bake sale! I’d totally buy some! My kid’s two favourite things are chocolate and rainbows.” And so, it came to pass that I was going to be part of the sale.

I’m not going to torture you with a long and complicated recipe, insisting that you not overmix and taking a tape measure to your prepared cookie sheets to determine exactly how far apart your portions of dough are. I’m going to KISS (Keep It Super Simple; or Keep It Simple, Stupid – depends on how surly you feel).

Are you ready?

Take your favourite chocolate chip cookie recipe. In this case, the tubes of dough from the refrigerator section of your local superette does not count as a recipe.

When you get to the point where you’re about to stir in the chocolate chips, add in half a cup (or more, depending on the size of your recipe and your own aesthetic preferences) of rainbow sprinkles – jimmies, not nonpareils.

Bake as prescribed in the recipe.

Enjoy your colourful homemade treats.

I used my grandmother’s recipe, which yields a not-overlarge batch of cookies, and which bakes up nice and chewy, with just the slightest crispiness at the edges. They proved just as popular at the bake sale, even when people had to pay for them – by ten o’clock, only one package was left.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

That old black [cat] magic has me in its spell….

wittychild

While most crafty/cook-y bloggers are no doubt posting homemade cornucopia centrepieces or locavore turkey and stuffing recipes this weekend, I decided to bypass Thanksgiving entirely in favour of Halloween, which is frankly far more fun.

From the instant I first saw the recipe for Black Cat Cookies in Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts, I knew I had to make them.  Because…OMG…cats and cookies?  That’s pretty much a whole-package dessert right there.  And yeah, I realize it’s just a jazzed-up chocolate cookie, but I loved the inclusion of black cocoa powder to get that deep colour.

I vant to suck your blood...

I probably should have used a metal cookie cutter instead of a plastic one with little details etched right in, since I found the dough just a tad sticky and difficult to use with the cutter I chose (my fault – I added more liquid than the recipe called for when my dough wasn’t coming together as nicely as I had hoped).  But any headache I may have had while rolling and cutting paid off later when I didn’t have to frost-in any features.

Okay, so they’re not quite black, but a deep brown.  But I found a no-frosting-necessary way to make them look darker:

Flip the background fabric around!  Score one for innovation!

Happy Thanksgiving!