So anyway, to escape the infernal cold of CT, I ended up back at home for the weekend which meant more baking with mommy! In choosing a recipe, I knew it would have to have chocolate. It's just been way too long without chocolate in my baking, don't you agree? My mom found a recipe in the Food and Wine Cookbook for Milk Chocolate Cookies with Malted Cream. We partially chose this recipe because it had a picture (and we all know how much I love pictures!) and kinda looked like modified Oreos. Plus, it didn't look too hard. So off we went to our friendly neighborhood
Anywho, enough about Ovaltine. Once we got back to the house, we proceeded with the baking. Step 1: Preheat oven. Step 2: MAKE THE COOKIES. Yup, taken verbatim from the book. Ok, so after "Make the Cookies" were actual directions but I found the first sentence of the step to be kind of obvious, don't you? So after creaming some butter and sugar (because that's just what you do when you bake), we had to melt some chocolate. We very nearly had a big fail here. Despite the fact that we went to the store, we decided that there was no reason to buy milk chocolate because Halloween was such a fail this year and we had tons of leftover chocolate. Not a problem. Except that when my mom and I are together, our combined IQ plummets. We needed 6 ounces of chocolate. We had a 3 oz bar of Ghiradelli's, a 1.5 oz bar of Ghiradelli's, and an assortment of 0.5 oz bars of Hershey's chocolate. So, my mom did the math and laid out the appropriate collection of chocolate to be melted. We were rapidly unwrapping until my mom paused and said, "Wait, are these 0.5 oz bars or 0.25 oz bars?" Well, how should I know? You were in charge of that! So we had to fish the bag out of the garbage to get our answer and found out that they were indeed 0.5 oz bars and my mom had somehow gotten confused and had almost put just about double the number of Hershey bars in. Fortunately, we hadn't melted the chocolate yet so we just picked out the unwanted chocolate and ate it. So I guess there's a bright side to everything.
The ingredient adding part from then on was uneventful so I won't bore you with it. The only thing of note is that the chocolate took extra long to melt because it's minus a zillion degrees in our kitchen. The next step was to roll the dough between two pieces of parchment paper to "a scant 1/4 inch". That wasn't terrible exactly but the dough was pretty tough to roll and the parchment paper kept sliding around when I tried rolling it. This time, after the overly thin cookies of last week, we actually took out a ruler to measure 1/4 inch. How precise of us, right? So we chilled the dough and went hunting for a 2 inch round cookie cutter. Hmm. The holiday pack we used last week doesn't have a round one. The plastic bag of cookie cutters that I found in the basement did not have one, though it did include several Halloween themed cookie cutters. I guess I could've made Halloween cookies last week but have an inability to find things that are right in front of my face so oh well. Hmmm. My mom is endlessly more creative than me though so she found a 2 inch round porcelain espresso cup that we could use as a cookie cutter. Of course. Don't know why I didn't think of that. Possibly because it was absurd but whatever.
I wish I could include a soundtrack in this blog to capture the frustrated screeches and curses that can be heard while I'm baking. It would be even more comical on days when my mom and I bake together. We had some problems with using a cup to cut deep enough through the dough, and then there were some problems with getting the cookies off the parchment paper and onto the pan, and sometimes there were issues of the cookie getting stuck inside the cup and then cracking in half as we tried to pry it out. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly the smoothest operation. And the whole time we were kinda like "we have to do this HOW MANY times???" But anyway, into the oven they went.
That scant 1/4 inch was either a load of crap or the cooktime is a load of crap because the first batch was rather burny. We tried cutting the cookies thicker but this just led to bigger cookies so the next batch was also slightly burny. After that, we reduced the cooktime and had better cooked cookies. The last thing to do was to make the filling since these are basically cookie sandwiches. We decided to half the recipe for the icing because of how many burny cookies there were and because the recipe suggested an inch of filling on each cookie and that felt excessive. The filling is really just sugar, butter, and chocolate malt powder. It was an extremely thick filling. We were told to put it in a pastry bag with a 1/2 inch tip. We did and then could not get the stuff to budge out of the pastry bag. ::insert comical grunting here:: However, by removing the tip, the opening was wide enough to start piping. Using an icing spreader tool (which my mom informed me was actually an oyster opener. Whatever works, I guess.), we managed to fill some of these cookies. This took a great deal of care because the cookies are less like cookies and more like crisps and as a result are quite brittle. However, we figure out about halfway through that we were going to run out of filling. So much for halving the recipe. So, rather than just make more, we milked that filling for everything it was worth, including scooping out the filling that was stuck in the previously rejected tip and the folds of the pastry bag. Those feats were accomplished using the wrong end of a spoon and a tiny wooden stick. I wish I could adequately explain how ridiculous this was but I think you kinda had to be there. Suffice it to say, you would've laughed had you seen it. So anyway....ta da! Cookies!
These cookies are good but we can't quite think of what they remind us of. They're almost like Teddy Grahams but not quite because they're much crispier. Neither my mom nor I quite know how to describe them. They're yummy though and that's what matters I guess.
Critical Reception:
The Martha sugar cookies were well received I think although they didn't keep as well as I had hoped and were pretty hard by the time I gave them to other people. There weren't many cookies left anyway though and people didn't talk about them much because all anyone was talking about this week was the lack of power. They disappeared by the end of colloquium though so I guess they were well enough liked.
A Disney Moment: Dumbo
Time is a funny funny thing. I hated Dumbo when I was a kid. Like, really didn’t want to watch it. I was fully dreading having to rewatch Dumbo. Well, I don’t know what happened but it’s my favorite of the first five films. The first thing we noticed was that it looks so flat compared to the other early films. A Google search told me that this was due to a lower budget. Really though, you can see the difference. There’s just such an absence of detail in Dumbo, especially compared to something like Pinocchio. That said, the story is still just charming. I don’t even know why but the story has a nice flow and you really feel Dumbo’s sadness when his mother is taken away even though he never says a word (Damn you, Walt Disney for tugging at our heartstrings!). I also love Timothy Mouse as the slightly more sassy Jiminy Cricket character. He’s just terrific.
One of my favorite things about Dumbo is its plethora of well-crafted songs. I remembered the standards like “When I See an Elephant Fly” and “Baby Mine” and obviously, “Pink Elephants” which I thought was the trippiest scene in any movie ever until I saw some of Walt Disney’s “Lost Films” as I’ll call them (but that is a story for another day). There are so many others too though that are all equally impressive. The whole movie is pretty much a series of lovely songs with very little dialogue, to be honest. What I had really forgotten though was the gem of a scene where they’re pitching the circus tent and singing about how they’re happy-hearted roustabouts. Roustabouts! You just don’t hear words like that in kids’ films anymore and I love it. There was a higher expectation of intelligence back in those days. Just the sheer number of clever puns in “Elephant Fly” is amazing. Seen a peanut stand, heard a rubber band! Love it love it love it.
The final thing I’ll note before I gush too much about how much I loved Dumbo is that I didn’t realize that it takes Dumbo until like, the last 4 minutes of the movie to fly. Which is so funny since everybody knows Dumbo will fly and that’s the dramatic climax and all. That said, it was still so satisfying when he did. Do yourself a favor and go be a child for a little while and rewatch Dumbo. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
I'm a roustabout.
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