baking

It’s two! Two! Two desserts in one!

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…

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…

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?

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…

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!

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

You win some, you lose some…

Let me start by saying I’m not a big fan of social media.  I don’t care what your lunch looks like, what 144-character brain dropping has just emerged unbidden from your cranial cavity, or what pages you “like” if not actually like.

I realize, too, the irony of posting that on WordPress, which I believe is technically billed as a social media platform of sorts.  And yes, it’s tremendously flattering when someone likes (or at least “likes”) one of my posts – but I do this more for my own amusement than any third-party corroboration, so while a “like” is a nice bonus, it’s not my primary goal.

One of my complaints about social media, especially Instagram, is how carefully curated it can be and what a false sense of reality it provides.  After all, when’s the last time you saw an #ootd featuring sweatpants with defunct elastic and a fine coating of cat hair?  I’ve come to realize, though, that I’m guilty of the same thing.  I don’t post sunken cakes on here, or scorched cupcakes, or curdled frosting.  But we’ve all had recipes that just didn’t quite work out, right?

A little more than a month ago, I was perusing baking blogs before work – as in, at the office, but not on the clock, when a voice behind me asked what I was making to bring in for everyone.  So I showed my coworker this recipe for strawberry cookies, but voiced my doubts: those nonpareils could be murder on the teeth, and anyway, wouldn’t the cookies taste kind of artificial?  The conversation quickly turned to not being able to find more esoteric extracts at a small-town grocery store with new owners, and what ever happened to the guy who used to bag groceries there, anyway?  Construction!  Really?  And then, the clock magically turned over and I turned my attention to work, putting the whole concept of strawberry cookies behind me.

I was therefore surprised when this same coworker caught me on my way to the break room a few days later and handed me these:

Strawberry Cookies 1-2

I had honestly had no intention of making the cookies, but I had a patron of my art for the first time ever, which was terribly flattering and made it hard to say no.  How bad could the cookies be?

Strawberry Cookies 2-2

They’re pretty, aren’t they?  They’d be great for a little kid’s princess party because kids generally aren’t discerning, but they’re going firmly on my “Do Not Bake” list.  Probably.

I don’t mean to sound completely negative.  They had some bright points.  For example, the cookies themselves were nice and soft and chewy, and not at all greasy.  My parchment paper looked seriously pristine when I was done.  They’d likely be tasty using simple almond or vanilla extract.  The nonpareils really weren’t as tooth-shattering as I expected.  From a technical standpoint, the recipe worked out well.

But oh, that optimistic little instruction to stir in the gel colour?  Nothing stirs into dough that stiff – I had to knead it in with my hands.  The strawberry extract made them extremely fake-tasting, and when I put them in a container and tried to burp out the air as I put the lid on, I was caught with a blast of what smelled like a strawberry fart.  I brought in a baggie of eight to the coworker who had so kindly provided the sprinkles, and although she and her daughter apparently liked them, nobody that I usually bake for did.  After The People Who Will Eat Any Kind Of Cookie politely choked down one or two, these strawberry farts were quickly relegated to the kitchen garbage.

This isn’t meant as a general indictment of that particular website (quite frankly, her mini cheesecakes look delish, and I’ve got them on my to-try list), nor am I saying I’m a bumbling fool in the kitchen.  But as Osgood Fielding III said, “Nobody’s perfect.”, despite what filtered Instagram posts would have us believe.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Cookies for Cats!

Well…you might not want to actually feed these to your feline friends, but….

One of the local no-kill shelters had an open house and bake sale last weekend to raise some much-needed funds.  (They do this twice a year – last year, I baked Tiger Blondies for them.)  I knew I wanted to make something to help out again this year, and even booked a day off work to do so, but it took me a while to decide on a recipe.  As luck would have it, my mom had made these wicked monster cookies a couple of weeks before that yielded the perfect oversized-but-chewy snack, and she was willing to contribute to the cause the half-bags of mini M&Ms and mini Reese’s Pieces she had left over.  Sold!

meowster1

I packaged them in some cupcake boxes I had had laying around for ages, and did up snappy labels in Word.  Some co-ordinating Hello Kitty stickers sealed the deal (so to speak), and voila: a sextet of fund-raising yumminess.

meowster2

Thanks for looking!

baking

“I don’t know what gluten is, but apparently it’s delicious!”

Or so says comedian John Pinette.  I generally try to not take standup comedy as gospel, but I’m kind of inclined to agree with him on that count.  If you read this blog with any regularity, you know my feelings on gluten-free baking.  I’m certain that if I had to go gluten-free, I’d lose 20 pounds within the first month, easy.

But…remember the coworker who asked if I could find a good gluten-free corn bread recipe for her? (“A very corn-y joke“)  Evidently my baking didn’t kill her, and she decided she had to get more of what I had to offer.  *snerk*  “Here’s my Christmas wish,” she began as she appeared at my desk one morning, and spread out a recipe clipped from the newspaper.

“Pumpkin-almond cookies?” I read.  The ingredient list seemed fairly straightforward, except for the almond butter and – oh, crap! – having to spend an hour reducing pumpkin purée before baking.

“But gluten-free.”  Of course.  She went on to say that she had a big jar of almond butter at home, all-natural, from Costco, that she wasn’t using, and I could have the whole thing.  How can you refuse an offer/request like that?

When I went to the bulk store for gluten-free flour, the little information slips attached to the bin recommended adding xanthan gum for best results.  Of course, they didn’t sell xanthan gum in bulk, only in huge bags, so that necessitated a trip to another store to get a smaller package.  (At 1/4 tsp per cup of flour for cookies, a 100 gram bag will last me forever.)  Ingredients procured, I got a-baking yesterday:

2876

I have to say, they’re not half-bad.  Maybe adding xanthan gum really does make a difference!  I think part of the reason these worked is because the moisture in the pumpkin helps counteract the dry crumbliness that usually befalls GF baking…that hour spent reducing it was worth it, by the way.

My mom says that it’s the best gluten-free baking she’s ever had, and certainly the best that I’ve ever made – high praise, from someone who can eat the plain old glutenous version with impunity.

Now I just have to wait and see if my coworker thinks they were worth the wait.  I’ll be bringing a tin of them in for her tomorrow for a Monday surprise!

baking

Cheesecake is the national food of Ireland, right?

All over the blogosphere, I’m sure, crafty types are posting some wonderful St. Patrick’s Day projects.  Green sugar cookies, or homemade Shamrock shakes…maybe shamrock-shaped earrings or a tutu with orange-white-green tulle, or a cross-stitched Irish blessing.  Me?  I made Oreo Cheesecake Cookies.

I saw the recipe on Brown Eyed Baker (http://www.browneyedbaker.com/), and thought, “Hey, these would be easy to veganize!”  And they were!  Tofutti may very well be the most useful mock-product ever.

And just so you know, there is just a little Irish in these cookies.  I wore this while I was baking them:

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone!