08.03.08
Posted in American, Chocolate, Cookies & Candies, Cuisines, Dessert at 2:12 pm by julie
I don’t often follow, or even really notice, food fads. For instance, I completely missed out on that whole molten chocolate cake craze until this past June. I made a batch of Dorie Greenspan’s Korova cookies for Christmas in 2005, without a clue that they would become popular enough to rename World Peace Cookies in her Baking book of 2006—maybe I was actually ahead of the curve on that one. And I’ve never yet made a loaf of no-knead bread, popularized by the New York Times article, though I do mean to try it at some point.
The current foodblog fashion trend was also set by the Times, and this was one I couldn’t resist for long: big, chewy, golden brown chocolate chip cookies adapted from a recipe by Jacques Torres. Even though my heart will always lie with David Lebovitz’s low-and-slow recipe, I can’t help but try out other variations.
The Torres cookies are good ones indeed, and I can see what all the fuss is about. They have that classic flavor, with tons of bittersweet chocolate and just the right balance of buttery crunch and chewy innards. I divided my dough between two baking days (after about 24 and 72 hours, respectively), some plain and some sprinkled with fleur de sel. I didn’t have quite enough cake flour, so about an ounce of that was subbed with all-purpose. I used a 1/3 cup measure for a total of 2 dozen cookies, and baked some for 19 minutes, the rest for 16.
What we thought: While warm, all I could taste was chocolate (I used Ghirardelli bittersweet chips). Once they had cooled, all the cookies stayed soft in the center, though we both preferred the texture of the 16-minute cookies, which looked very underdone coming out of the oven. I liked the salt-sprinkled cookies more than Jeremy did, since he isn’t a huge salt fan, but since I also like dipping my cookies in milk, and salt + milk = yuck, I ended up leaving the salt off all the 72-hour cookies for that purpose.
I like the advance prep aspect of this recipe, since I could make the dough while Nolan was napping and then bake at my next opportunity, but the cold dough was a pain to work with. If I use this recipe again, I’m going to portion the dough before chilling it, and then let it rest as 1/3-cup pucks, stacked in a container between sheets of waxed paper. I’m still not entirely convinced they were worth the extra trouble of waiting for the dough to rest 36 hours, however; a more scientific comparison might be in order, baking off both freshly made and well-rested batches of dough. 
Either way, you can hardly go wrong with fresh chocolate chip cookies, so I understand the wave of popularity!
Jacques Torres’ Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 C minus 2 T (8 1/2 ounces) cake flour
1 2/3 C (8 1/2 ounces) bread flour
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp coarse salt
2 1/2 sticks (1 1/4 C) unsalted butter
1 1/4 C (10 ounces) light brown sugar
1 C plus 2 T (8 ounces) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 lb bittersweet chocolate disks or chips, at least 60 percent cacao content
Sea salt
Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl. Set aside.
Using a mixer fitted with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Stir in the vanilla. Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Drop chocolate in and incorporate gently. Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate for 24 to 36 hours. Dough may be used in batches, and can be refrigerated for up to 72 hours.
When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat. Set aside.
Scoop 6 3 1/2-ounce mounds of dough (the size of generous golf balls) onto baking sheet. Sprinkle with a pinch of sea salt and bake until golden brown but still soft, 16 to 20 minutes. Transfer sheet to a wire rack for 10 minutes, then slip cookies onto another rack to cool a bit more. Repeat with remaining dough, or reserve dough, refrigerated, for baking remaining batches the next day. Eat warm, with a big napkin, or cooled, with a big glass of milk. Yield: 1 1/2 dozen 5-inch cookies.
Source: New York Times
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02.27.08
Posted in Breakfast, Cookies & Candies, Dessert, Dinner, Eggs, Lunch at 11:02 am by julie
For some reason I always have a really hard time wrapping my head around what to make with flavored chicken sausage. From time to time we pick up a package of chicken-apple or tomato-basil, and I scratch my head trying to come up with something more interesting than grilling them and sticking them in buns. Such was the case with the spinach-feta sausages we got earlier in the week, but I was able to put at least a few of them to good use in an easy crustless quiche.
The recipe hails from Baking Bites, and I chose it because it calls for similar flavorings and also because crusted quiches are my nemesis. I keep thinking the idea of eggs and cheese and pie crust together sounds great, because I love all of them, but whenever I eat it, I am bitterly disappointed by the sog-factor. Homemade pie crust is just enough work that, for the most part, I don’t consider quiche worth the risk unless it is crustless. (The single exception to that, so far, was the leek and bacon tart from All About Braising. That was deliciously sog-free, and I’d make it again in a heartbeat, presuming I had the braised leeks.)
Every so often I make a crustless broccoli quiche with feta and cottage cheese (and will post my cobbled-together recipe next time I do so). This recipe involves more flour—I used my faithful white whole wheat—and a looser batter than I am used to, but it baked up perfectly. I used a big handful of thawed and drained spinach from the freezer because it was all I had available, and similarly had to forego the sprinkle of feta on top, much to my dismay. The sausage that started it all was uncased, sliced, and sauteed briefly with the onion and spinach mixture.
The quiche gave me a new problem, however: I had an extra egg white in the fridge, though for the life of me I can’t recall now why that would be, so I used it up in the quiche and consequently ended up with an extra egg yolk that I wasn’t about to waste. I took the opportunity as a challenge to test out another chocolate chip cookie recipe that required an extra yolk: Robyn Lee’s Killer Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Breakfast Cookies, as posted on Serious Eats.
The best thing about this recipe was clearly the size of the cookies. It calls for quarter-cup scoops of dough, about twice as much as I typically use for home-baked cookies. It also makes about the most iconic looking chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever produced: perfectly round, thick, golden, and studded with big bittersweet chocolate chips (see photographic evidence). In case you’re wondering, I baked on my Silpat for exactly 23 minutes as specified, and got exactly 16 cookies out of the batch with a spoonful leftover for the baker’s treat.
Warm from the oven, these cookies tasted as good as they looked: crisp on the outside and around the edges, with a soft chewy center. Unfortunately, once they had cooled, they hardened up a bit much for my personal tastes, and required consumption with a glass of milk for dunking. That certainly didn’t stop us from polishing them off within a few days, of course!
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01.20.08
Posted in Beef, Breakfast, Cookies & Candies, Cuisines, Dessert, Dinner, Italian, Meats, Pastas, Spanish, Veggies at 7:18 pm by admin
I haven’t posted anything new on the blog in the last week or so because I’ve been holding off to give you something that wasn’t brown or white. So yeah… I really tried, but that is apparently beyond my ability at the moment. To wit:
Exhibit A: Homemade Fettuccine Alfredo
This is one of my gold-standard pasta dishes to order at restaurants, but for one reason or another (read: obscene amounts of butter and cream), I’ve never made it at home before. Well, it sounded really good, and I had cream to use up. I used Marcella’s recipes
for both the egg pasta and the alfredo sauce, and it was a surprisingly quick-fix dinner, even with making fresh pasta. Two very white thumbs up.
Exhibit B: Penne with Braised Cauliflower and Capers
I approached this meal by digging into the vegetable drawer to avoid the brown and white. What did I come up with? Cauliflower, of course: I made the pasta variation of Molly Stevens’ Braised Cauliflower with Capers and Toasted Bread Crumbs from All About Braising (the original recipe can be found online here). Do capers count as greens? I didn’t think so either. This was pretty tasty fresh from the stove, but made surprisingly delicious—and white—leftovers.
Exhibit C: Spanish Daube
I thought for sure that this entry, despite the predominance of browned beef, would be my key to returning to the world of color, with all those pretty green peas and roasted red peppers. And so it would, if the recipe (from the January 2008 Cooking Light) had been remotely worth sharing. Jeremy bravely ate a bowlful, but I found it pretty inedible. It may not have been entirely the recipe’s fault, though: my cut of organic beef was horribly butchered with the grain, riddled with fat and gristle, and rubbery as all-get-out, even after several hours of braising. Very disappointing, but I had plenty of leftover rice to make more vegetable fried rice with.
Exhibit D: Allspice Crumb Flop
This was absolutely delicious. I made a variation of my weekend standard cinnamon flop, substituting brown sugar for the white and adding a bit of allspice to the batter. Then I packed the top with the leftover allspice crumb topping from the previous weekend’s muffins, and baked for half an hour as usual. It came out extra-moist and flavorful and beige. Almost makes me want to keep a container of crumb topping on hand in the fridge at all times.
Exhibit E: Oatmeal Cinnamon Chip Cookies
Since we ran out of our gianduja gelato, it was time to make a fresh dessert, and I ended up deciding on a batch of oatmeal cookies. We are, I’m ashamed to admit, currently out of chocolate chips, so I went with cinnamon chips. Actually, I ended up just making the recipe off the back of the cinnamon chip package (sans raisins), and these little brown cookies really hit the spot.
Exhibit F: Marion Cunningham’s Yeasted Waffles
This brings us just about back to the present. I first read about this recipe on Wednesday Chef, and have been meaning to try it since seeing it again in The Cake Bible last month. It requires advance preparation, which I kept forgetting to do, but I remembered last night, so we had waffles for breakfast this morning. Besides being yet another brown meal, they didn’t work so well with our waffle iron. I think it was because the batter was so thin that it didn’t provide good contact between the top and bottom plates of the iron. The one I ate was nicely browned on the outside, yet seemed half-cooked in the middle. I’m holding out hope that that little flub will make the leftovers good toaster waffles when reheated from the freezer.
Update 1/21/08: They were indeed tastier waffles when reheated on the defrost setting of our pretty new toaster. They cooked through and crisped up perfectly, and filled the kitchen with a very yeasty smell—almost enough to be offputting to my sensitive schnozz, actually. They’re still not worth making again just to become toaster waffles, however.
Exhibit G: Saffron Fettuccine with Scallops and Leek Sauce
So this is the closest I’ve come to color lately: Homemade saffron pasta with seared scallops and leek sauce. The scallops were previously frozen, and they were so full of water that they spattered oil all over the kitchen before transforming into rubber erasers. The pasta and sauce, however, were delicious, and made a perfectly satisfying meal sans shellfish. Since it came out with an overwhelmingly pallid appearance despite the saffron (I didn’t have quite enough on hand for the saturated yellow effect), however, it didn’t quite break us out of the brown and white funk.
On the menu tonight? Some lovely white baked cod and white fingerling potatoes with rosemary and garlic. I need help.
Saffron Fettuccine
1 tsp saffron threads, firmly packed
1 1/2 tsp hot water
1/2 C unbleached flour
1/2 C white whole wheat flour
2 large eggs
In a small bowl, combine the saffron and the water and let stand 10 minutes. Place the flours in the bowl of a stand mixer with a pinch of salt. Beat the saffron water together with the eggs, and pour over the flour; use the paddle attachment of the stand mixer to beat this mixture until it forms a firm, cohesive ball of dough. It should not be sticky; if it is, add a tablespoon or two of flour at a time until it achieves the proper consistency. Divide into 4 parts and run through a pasta roller to desired thinness, then cut either by hand or with a pasta cutter. Cook for about a minute in boiling salted water, drain and serve tossed with leek sauce, below, and garlic bread.
Source: Adapted from Astray Recipes
Lele Rivolta’s Leek Sauce (Il Sugo di Porri della Lele)
3 large leeks
1 T vegetable oil
2 T butter
3 large whole garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
Fine sea salt
1/2 C creme fraice
Black pepper, freshly ground
1 recipe of fresh saffron pasta (about 3/4 lb)
Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, if desired
Cut away the root end and the dark green tops of each leek. Dice or julienne the leeks, and rinse well in a colander; shake off the excess water, but do not dry off the leeks.
Pour the oil into a 10- to 12-inch skillet, add the butter and the garlic cloves, and turn on the heat to medium. Cook the garlic briefly, stirring it, and when it becomes colored a very pale blond, remove it from the pan. (If you like, reserve the garlic, smush and finely mince it, and stir it into softened butter to make some yummy garlic bread.) Add the sliced leeks to the pan, sprinkling them with salt. Cook the leeks, stirring them from time to time, until they become very soft, almost creamy in consistency. If you find that at some point there is insufficient liquid to continue the cooking and the leeks are not quite done yet, add 3 or 4 tablespoons of water.
When the leeks are completely soft, raise the heat to high, and continue cooking them until the become colored a pale nut color, turning them over from time to time. Reduce heat to low, and sprinkle with generous grindings of pepper to counterbalance their potentially cloying sweetness. Add the creme fraiche and melt it into the leeks to form a light sauce.
As soon as the pasta is done to a firm, al dente consistency, drain it and toss it immediately with the sauce. Add a generous amount of freshly grated Parmesan, toss thoroughly five or six times, and serve at once.
Source: Adapted from Marcella Says…, by Marcella Hazan, 2004 (pp. 172-173)
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01.04.08
Posted in Cookies & Candies, Dessert at 12:22 pm by julie
While we work on all that leftover lamb, here’s a recipe for one of our all-time favorite cookies, and one that Jeremy requests every holiday, if not more frequently. This year I decided to be selfish and make them after all the other Christmas cookies, so we could keep them to ourselves.
It’s your basic crumb-crusted bar cookie: half the crust gets pressed in the bottom of the pan, pre-baked, and then covered with nutty-chocolatey-caramelly goodness and the remainder of the crumbs. Very easy. I cringe every time I buy the caramel topping because it’s practically all high-fructose corn syrup, though, so for next time I’ll have to look into alternate brands or experiment with making it myself. One other note: my original recipe calls for quick-cooking oats, but we buy the thick old-fashioned kind from Bob’s Red Mill, which works just fine here. You can always pulse old-fashioned rolled oats in the food processor once or twice to make the equivalent of quick-cooking.
Oatmeal Carmelitas
2 C AP flour
2 C oatmeal
1.5 C brown sugar, packed
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 C unsalted butter, softened
6 oz semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips
1/2 C walnuts, chopped
1 (12-oz) jar caramel topping (like Smuckers)
3 T AP flour
Preheat oven to 350F.
Combine flour, oatmeal, soda, brown sugar and salt; using a pastry cutter, two knives, or your hands (which works best for me), cut in butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Firmly pat half of mixture into the bottom of a greased or nonstick 13×9 pan; reserve remaining half for topping.
Bake crust for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and sprinkle evenly with chocolate chips and nuts. In a small bowl, stir together caramel sauce and flour; pour evenly over crust and nut mixture, avoiding the edges of the pan. Cover with reserved crumb topping and return to oven for 18-22 minutes, until golden brown. Allow to cool thoroughly before cutting into squares and serving. (These make a mess, albeit a delicious one, if you try to eat them too warm; they need some time for the soft crust and gooey innards to set up.)
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12.23.07
Posted in Cake, Chocolate, Cookies & Candies, Dessert, Foodblog Events at 11:00 pm by julie
And on we forge! After filling and rolling the genoise on Friday night, around about midnight, I wasn’t able to get back to get back to the cake until the next evening. (We went and had a 3D/4D ultrasound done so my parents could watch it. Very cool!) The roll set up nicely in the fridge, and I got it all laid out with cut stumps and limbs on a brand-new platter purchased just for the occasion. The chocolate genoise was so rough and bark-ish by itself that it almost didn’t even need frosting, but where would the fun be in that?
The branches held together just fine without toothpicks, as you can see, but I took no chances and frosted all the joints first. I left the cut edges bare so that the roll itself could act as the tree’s rings. The frosting was just slathered on roughly and then scuffed up with a fork to look like bark.
Once I had the frosted log back in the fridge, I did all the advance prep for the decorations. First I made meringue for the mushrooms. Although I purchased a set of pastry bags and tips especially for the occasion, none of the tips were the right size or shape for the mushrooms, so I ended up using a snipped plastic bag after all.
It worked out alright, and I just left the meringues in the cooling oven overnight to dry out as much as possible. As you can see, I dusted the caps with cocoa powder, and when I put them together this afternoon shortly before we left for the party, I used melted chocolate for the “glue” that stuck the pieces together. The finished mushrooms came out really cute and surprisingly realistic. Half my family thought they were real mushrooms at first glance.
Next, I made homemade marzipan. Since I forgot to buy almond paste when we were at the grocery store earlier in the day, I also ended up making that, using equal parts whole almonds and powdered sugar, whizzed together in the food processor with an egg white and a bit of almond extract until they formed a smooth, uniform ball. It was much easier to make than I had expected, and tasted better than the marzipan I’ve encountered in the past. I left half of it uncolored (it was a nut-brown beige due to the almond skins) and tinted the rest a bright green. In the morning, I shaped the uncolored marzipan into little acorns and painted their caps with melted chocolate; the green marzipan was rolled out on a silpat and cut out in the shape of ivy leaves, with rolled vines and tendrils.
As finishing touches, I also made some sugared rosemary by brushing fresh rosemary branches with corn syrup and thoroughly sprinkling it with sugar. I used corn syrup because the alternative was egg white and I already had four orphaned yolks in the fridge. The corn syrup didn’t ever dry, though, so I’d use the egg white next time, regardless. Finally, as another decadent touch, I made some very simple bittersweet truffles rolled in cocoa powder. I’ve done these before, but ran into the unexpected snag of having warm hands. (I usually have ice-cold hands all the time, which is great for working with truffle ganache, but my hands have been really warm during my pregnancy. Weird.) Good thing they were meant to look rustic!
As you can see, I decided to play with the mushroom shapes a bit, and made some shelf mushrooms to insert on the sides of the log. They came out really cute, and were a nice detail.
Here’s the finished log in all its glory. It had a lot going on, but I think it came out beautifully, and I had a lot of fun playing around with the artistic aspects of decorating the cake. It was a big hit at my family party, too, though everyone assumed it was filled with ice cream for some reason. They also refused to cut it, so I ended up doing the serving myself, a bit of a challenge with the irregular shape. I wasn’t personally able to discern the chestnut flavor in the filling, but all the frosting was delicious and silky smooth, balancing well with the tender chocolate genoise.
This cake was a showstopper and delicious to boot. There is also a ton of room for creativity in flavoring and decorating it; so, although I might not make a yule log every year, it will definitely make an appearance on my holiday table again, in one form or another. For the full recipe, visit our gracious host, Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice. And as always, be sure to check out all the other fabulously daring creations on the Daring Bakers Blogroll here.
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12.21.07
Posted in Cookies & Candies, Dessert at 3:47 pm by julie
Jeremy and I aren’t big on sugar cookies, or most other cut-out cookies for that matter. Yet for some reason, we couldn’t resist buying a copper cookie cutter of an angel when we were at Whole Foods just before Thanksgiving. I didn’t notice the price tag, and if I had, I think we would have passed it by (8 bucks for one cutter!). Since we got it, though, I decided a batch of sugar cookies was in order to show it off.
The eagle-eyed among you are now noticing that there are no angel cookies in the photo above. That’s because I decided to include some sugar cookies with the variety we shared at work this year, and I wanted a bunch of small shapes for that. I reserved half the dough in the fridge, however, and will roll that up this weekend and break in the angel cutter while my parents are visiting. It was good forethought on my part, I have to say, because the last snowball disappeared from the last box at lunchtime today, so more cookies are definitely in order.
As I mentioned, we aren’t huge sugar cookie fans, but we both love this recipe. It’s easy to work with and produces perfect cookies that hold their shape. Mine were crisp straight from the oven, and softened up after a day or two of storage with everything else, but I actually preferred them that way. I used a simple milk-and-sugar glaze mixed to pipeable consistency, and squeezed out some very simple designs through the corner of a Ziploc. I don’t have any food coloring, but white is always classic, right? Anyway, if you use the same proportions of glaze as I did, be sure to allow plenty of drying time. I put my cookies away too soon, and a lot of the frosting got mussed, but it hardened nicely overnight; I think I was just impatient.
Alice’s Sugar Cookies
Preheat oven to 375F.
Cream: ½ C butter
1 C sugar
Blend in: 1 egg
Sift and add: 2 to 2 ¼ C flour
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
Add: ½ tsp vanilla
Chill dough (you can skip this if you are in a hurry). Roll dough to about 1/8” and cut. Bake at 375F for 8-10 minute, or until just golden around the edges.
Source: My co-worker, Alice. This is her family recipe for sugar cookies—lucky family!
Vanilla Icing
1 C confectioners’ sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 T milk (plus enough additional to bring to desired consistency)
Food coloring, optional
Mix together confectioners’ sugar, vanilla and 1 T milk. Continue stirring and adding milk by the teaspoon until desired consistency (for piping, spreading, or drizzling, etc.). Add a few drops of food coloring if desired. (This made just enough to pipe decorations on a half batch of sugar cookies. Double it if you’re baking all the dough at once, or if you want to coat the entire surface of the cookie with icing.)
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12.19.07
Posted in Cookies & Candies, Dessert at 8:33 am by julie
These little cookies are notorious for the number of aliases they have. Your family may have called them Russian tea cakes, Mexican (or Italian) wedding cookies, pecan butterballs, snowballs, even Viennese sugar balls; mine called them pecan crescents, but we rarely bothered forming them into crescent shapes. I’ve decided the most straightforward name, at least in my own mind, is snowballs, because that is what they look like to me.
As with the myriad names, every recipe for these sugary confections is slightly different. Some produce a more crumbly dough than others, but through trial and error, I’ve found one that works perfectly for me every time. Since they are essentially a shortbread cookie, this year I tried making the dough in my Cuisinart, and it was ready in the blink of an eye. You don’t have to use pecans to make them—other perfectly viable options include walnuts, hazelnuts, or almonds—but pecans fit into my family tradition, so that’s what I use.
Pecan Snowballs
2 C AP flour
1/2 C confectioners sugar
1 C butter, softened
1 pinch salt
1 C pecans
1 T vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350F. Place the flour, sugar, salt and nuts in your Cuisinart; pulse until the nuts are finely chopped and everything is amalgamated. Sprinkle in vanilla and pulse one or twice. Drop in the butter and pulse just until the dough forms a ball. Shape dough into about balls about 1 tablespoon each, and place on a cookie sheet. (Gosh darn it, if that wouldn’t have been another use for a 2-tsp cookie scoop! Ah well, next year!) Bake for 20-25 min or until lightly browned. Cool on a rack, then roll them or dust them heavily with confectioners sugar. Makes 2-3 dozen.
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12.18.07
Posted in Chocolate, Cookies & Candies, Dessert at 11:12 am by julie
I’ve been making these brownie cookies periodically for the past three years, and they don’t look like much, but they’re always delicious. They stay nice and chewy for several days after baking, and are eye-rollingly delicious if you zap them in the microwave for a few seconds. I found the recipe online somewhere, but realized after having made a batch or two that the recipe was identical to the one on the back of a box of Crisco sticks. Go figure. This year I tweaked it a little in a bare nod to healthy eating habits, and find the fact that I used organic Spectrum shortening instead of Crisco more amusing than perhaps the situation warrants. My other tweaks included the use of Wondercocoa (which is fat-free and virtually caffeine-free), and (surprise!) the inclusion of some white whole wheat flour. I then dumped in a bag of Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate chips, which probably negated my meager attempts at bringing down the caffeine, but I prefer to concentrate on their antioxidant properties. In any case, they tasted just the same as always, and Jeremy declared them his favorites out of this year’s cookie crop.
The only important thing to know about these cookies is that when they come out of the oven, they will be (and should be) still very soft and gooey. DO NOT try to move them off the cookie sheet for several minutes. The original recipe says 2 minutes, but I use a baking stone, and a few extra minutes of rest works better for me. If you try to move them or eat them too soon, all you will get is burned fingers and a molten chocolate cookie mess. (There are worse things that could happen in a kitchen, I know.) Give them a chance to cool on the sheet, then on the foil, and everyone will be happier. Or dig in sooner at your own risk.
Brownie Cookies
2/3 C shortening
1 1/2 C firmly packed brown sugar
1 T water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 C AP flour
1/2 C white whole wheat flour
1/3 C unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 C bittersweet chocolate chips (1 12-oz bag)
Preheat oven to 375F. Place sheets of foil on counter-top for cooling cookies. (I wipe down my counters just before laying the foil, even if they’re clean; the slight dampness prevents the foil from sliding around.)
Combine shortening, brown sugar, water and vanilla in bowl of stand mixer. Beat with paddle at medium speed until well blended. Beat eggs into creamed mixture.
Combine flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt. Mix into creamed mixture at low speed just until blended. Stir in chocolate chips.
Drop by rounded tablespoons 2 inches apart onto a baking stone or ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 375F for 7-9 minutes, or until cookies are just set. Do not overbake! Cookies will appear soft and moist, and will need to cool for at least 2 minutes on the baking sheet before being transferred to the foil to cool completely. They do puff up a bit during cooking, and benefit from a flattening tap to their tops when they come out of the oven, as discussed here.
Update 12/21/07: I should add a note that a friend of ours tried to heat up his cookie in the microwave on my suggestion, but put it in for a minute and it burned to a crisp even on low heat. Please note that these are small and just need a few seconds. I think I’ve done full power for about 5-10 seconds on mine. If you see smoke, you’ve left it in too long. 
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12.12.07
Posted in American, Cookies & Candies, Cuisines, Dessert at 7:04 pm by julie
Last night rather unexpectedly marked the beginning of the Christmas cookie train for me this year. It all started innocently enough: Freyja was being a pill, so I made her up a peanut butter Kong (natural peanut butter mixed with some of her kibble and packed inside one of her Kongs). She spent a few hours trying to suck every bit of peanutty goodness out of the Kong while we watched our new copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on HD-DVD. The unintended side effect of doggie distraction was that the entire room smelled like peanut butter, and all of a sudden I found myself craving peanut butter cookies.
Foodie bride to the rescue! I remembered having just seen a perfect-looking peanut butter cookie recipe on Shawnda’s blog, so I whipped up a batch, and they really hit the spot. My very minor adjustments: I replaced half of the AP flour with white whole wheat, used natural peanut butter because it was already out, doled out smallish rounds of dough with my cookie scoop onto a preheated baking stone and pressed 3 milk chocolate chips in the top of each cookie. They were perfectly baked at 11 minutes, golden brown on the edges and still soft in the middle.
I was planning to start my official holiday cookie-baking marathon this weekend, and I don’t want to let this impromptu baking session throw me off. The bigger concern is the doctor’s appointment I had this morning: I took the glucose test for gestational diabetes, a standard test at this point in my pregnancy. Yes, I see the irony of making a fresh batch of peanut butter cookies the night before taking my glucose test. The bad part is that if I do end up having gestational diabetes, I’ll find out just in time to disrupt all of my Christmas dessert plans. Wish me luck!
Update 4/14/08: My first shot at baking since Nolan arrived was another batch of these cookies. They came out great, and I got most of them baked off before it was time to go pump again. Added semi-sweet chocolate chips to the dough upon request, and didn’t bother chilling the dough before baking—on my hot baking stone, they stayed nice and puffy. I baked 10 minutes, and tapped them down with the spatula before cooling slightly and removing to a rack.
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11.16.07
Posted in Cookies & Candies, Dessert at 8:46 am by julie
Well, Jeremy has already made short work of the amaretti and I took care of the buckwheat cookies, which, I have discovered, pair perfectly with a glass of spiced apple cider. So, as promised, I baked up a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies night before last.
When we first moved to Colorado, I was 4 years old and we lived in a rented ranch-style house with a huge weeping willow in the front yard. It was on a U-shaped street, within sight of the elementary school where I went to kindergarten, and lots of neighborhood kids around to play with. I remember rousing games of Candyland, which was what we called a made-up Capture-the-Flag-ish game where all the girls personified yummy candies (I was Baby Ruth) and all the boys were evil vegetables. Good times.
Anyway, the couple who lived across the street from us loved children, but were having troubles conceiving one of their own. We visited with them a lot to eat cookies and play on the swingset in their backyard, which had been erected by the previous owners. I believe they did eventually have a baby (who is now likely a college graduate—how time flies!), and we moved to a different neighborhood a few miles away, on a culdesac with no more weeping willow tree. (The next owners of that house incidentally cut down the tree because it had a huge root system that wreaked havoc with plumbing.) But I think about it every time I make these cookies from our neighbor lady’s recipe… which is every few months, because these really are the best oatmeal chocolate chip cookies ever.
Yum Yums
1 C shortening
3/4 C granulated sugar
3/4 C packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp water
1 1/2 C AP flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 C oatmeal (I use Bob’s Red Mill)
1 C walnuts
1 C semi-sweet chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 350F. Cream together shortening and sugars. Add eggs, vanilla and water, then remaining ingredients. Scoop by tablespoons onto a baking stone and bake for 12-15 minutes, or until puffed and golden brown. Makes about 3 dozen. cookies.
I always use the back of the spatula to flatten them down slightly when they come out of the oven; somehow it helps them stay chewier, and David Lebovitz agrees. Oh, and eat them with milk, but that’s a given.
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