Mother Knows Best (And So Does Martha)

Happy Halloween everyone! This weekend, I was fortunate in that I got out of CT for the great storm of snow-tober. So I am currently sitting at home in Jersey, grateful that I don't have class on Mondays because I'm 99% sure I have no power at my house in CT and that would pretty much suck. Because baking doesn't really work when there's no power. I was also very fortunate in that, despite the fact that over half the town is powerless, we made it through the storm unscathed. However, with all the downed trees, it basically looks like a bomb went off in my town. That's enough on the current events, let's get to baking, right?

So, after attending an exciting (read: I'm just grateful we won) Giants game, my mom and I decided it would be a lovely day for baking something. I perused the plethora of cookbooks we have at our house and found pretty much no books relevant to baking. However, we do have Mah-tha. Entertaining by Martha Stewart is one of the most precious books I have ever read. The pictures in the book are so dated 80s and the attention to detail is just excessive at times. Like a recipe for "tea eggs" that involves cracking hard boiled eggs and soaking them in a solution for many hours just so that when you serve them with the shell peeled, there are dark shatter lines on the whites of the eggs. That said, maybe one day I'll read the section on "How to Set Your Table" and get my little white gloves from Martha. Oh, and a slight aside for anyone who doesn't know: Martha Stewart is from my hometown, a fact she rarely owns up to. I'm not really sure why we so excitedly claim her, given her past, but we're kinda low on reputable celebrities from my town so I guess we take what we can get.

The recipe we decided on (because Martha seems obsessed with tartlets and we didn't feel like making tartlets) is for Iced Sugar Cookies. Ok, now I know what you're going to say. How many sugar cookies are you going to make for this blog? Well, I'm gonna make them till I get them right, dammit. Thus far, I've made 2 different recipes for sugar cookies and neither one tasted all that good. They looked precious but I want yummy sugar cookies. And if anyone will have the answer, Martha will.

Accompanying this recipe is a story about how Martha used to throw cookie decorating parties for her daughter's friends around Christmas so that they could bring home sugar cookies to hang on their trees. Don't know about you but those cookies never would've made it to my tree. I would have just eaten them like any normal child. There's also a picture of child decorated cookies (or at least I assume child decorated because otherwise Martha really needs to work on using a pastry bag) and a picture of a very large, terrifying, cat-shaped cookie. Last year for Thanksgiving, my family bought a pack of 50 holiday cookie cutters in order to get one turkey shaped cookie cutter so my mom and I were like, Yay, Halloween shaped cookies! Decision made, we began.

The first direction was to, of course, sift together the dry ingredients. As I'm walking to go get a bowl, my mom says "Oh no, we're so not doing that." My mom has a lot more experience with baking than I do but I trust her so I deviated from the directions and took the cheater's way out. Next was creaming the butter and sugar. Oh KitchenAid mixer, how I have missed you. You work so much better than my MixMaster. (Santa, are you listening?) Anyway, butter and sugar sufficiently creamed, we had to add the wet ingredients. You know, the egg, the vanilla, the...brandy? Oh Martha, you clever girl. This recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of brandy! To put that in perspective, it also only calls for 1/2 TEAspoon of vanilla. Methinks I found where the flavor is coming from!

Next we had to add the dry ingredients. This is where my mom got clever. The dry ingredients were 2 cups flour, 1/4 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp baking powder. She measured half a cup of flour and poured it into the full cup measure. Then she tossed the salt and baking powder in that and stirred it all up. Then she put another half a cup of flour on top of that and deemed that mixed dry ingredients. I see her point, we did save ourselves time in cleaning dirty bowls. So gradually adding that mixture, and then the last cup of flour, we had a lovely, delicious smelling sugar cookie dough. Then we tossed it into the fridge to chill while we ate dinner.

::yummy yummy dinner::

Now, we just had to roll out the cookies, cut out fun shapes, and bake. Martha suggests rolling the cookies to about 1/8 inch thick. Those are really thin cookies. We had trouble getting our cookie shapes off the floured table. Oh, I forgot to mention! You know those holiday cookie cutters we have? Yeah, there's one turkey and 49 Christmas ones. So instead of Halloween cookies, we have stars, teddy bears, wreaths (which I think could be made to look like really fluffy cats), hearts, and candy canes (which my boyfriend decided were the penis cookies. I'm not sure why, but this led to many many many penis jokes from my mom and myself). So anywho, the cookies were supposed to bake for 10 minutes at 400 degrees but I think Martha needs to check her cook time because that first batch was a batch of crispy critters. Most of the second batch flat out burned. After that, we rolled the cookies a little thicker and only baked them for about 7 minutes. The final result was slightly undercooked cookies but that worked just fine for us because boy, were they yummy. I had 3, my mom had 3, my boyfriend had about 8 and they were enjoyed by all. I'm tellin' ya, it's the first sugar cookie in a long time that hasn't made me say "Meh." In fact, we were supposed to decorate the cookies with icing but we made the executive decision that icing would ruin these already perfect cookies. So, for future reference, I'll cut them a little bit thicker, and cook them for slightly less time but overall, I am excited to make these cookies again sometime. Or at least add some brandy to whatever sugar cookie I bake next. Here's our cookies for your viewing pleasure:

Critical Reception:
The iced pumpkin cookies were pretty much a big hit. As I mentioned, my officemate loved them so I left a few in the office for her to enjoy and brought the rest to colloquium. My advisor took one look at them, asked what kind they were and when I said pumpkin, he responded with "Ugh, why would you make those?" My answer: because I had leftover pumpkin. So, if nothing else, my advisor and I share a hatred of pumpkin cookies. I will admit they smell good though. The rest of the cookies disappeared in the hour that colloquium took place so it seems they're being eaten by people not attending colloquium. Naughty stat students. Oh, and my mom also agreed that the cookies are awesome so if you like pumpkin, I guess I'd recommend the iced pumpkin cookies on allrecipes.com. Disclaimer: what follows is a very long Disney Moment. It's not my fault. Fantasia is long. Feel free to skip it and/or come back to it on another day.

A Disney Moment: Fantasia

My God, Fantasia is long. I actually watched Fantasia a few years back in college at the tail end of a happy movie night (I think I may have fallen asleep before the last segment) so my memory of it was still pretty recent. Pretty recent but obviously not good as I thought Sorcerer’s Apprentice was the first segment. Anywho, I kinda spaced out during the first segment since this was the third Disney film in a row I watched that day (yes, more or less back to back to back) plus it’s kinda boring anyway. I just remember swirling colors and lights and stuff. As I’m sitting here writing this, I can’t quite remember what segment comes next. I actually have to really think about it. Oh yeah, Nutcracker Suite. I love the Nutcracker and I always associate it with the actual ballet rather than the fairies and dancing mushrooms so I didn’t much pay attention to this one either. Next was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice which is an obvious classic and I have no complaints with. However, at this point I started thinking about how many segments were left. We still had to get through Rite of Spring (i.e. dinosaurs), Pastoral Symphony (i.e. Greek stuff), the dancing hippos and ostriches, AND the terrifying segment and it had already been a good chunk of time. I was determined to get through it though.

That I think is the problem with Fantasia. There’s no real sense of being in the film as a whole. You can get into the segments just fine (for most of them) but watching Fantasia as a whole sort of feels like a chore. Anyway, I’ve always kinda liked the evolution of life segment, partially because I like Rite of Spring for its sheer crazyness, the dinosaurs always reminded me of Land Before Time (seriously, they look exactly the same!), and because I thought it was funny when the dinosaurs got stuck in the tar and fell down. That’s all on that. Oh! I forgot the “Intermission” segment where there’s just a line that vibrates differently with each instrument. I’m really not sure how I feel about that part. Probably just that it’s forgettable. The Greek mythology segment got a bit fun in my family as we tried to name all of the mythological creatures. There was some debate over whether or not Pegasus was a proper name of a winged horse or if it referred to all winged horses and there was also a debate about what the Greek god of wine was (I said Dionysus and was right. Thank you four years of Latin and freshman mythology notebook.) Now that I’m thinking of it though, does anyone else find it weird that the whole time, they’re pretty clearly in Greece but they use Bacchus for the god of wine, which is the Roman name for the god? Or am I just a dork? Yeah, probably the latter.

Sorry this post is so long already but the movie is long so blame Walt Disney, not me. The Dance of the Hours segment was fun as always and I had a ballet geekout trying to decide if the lead hippo was really going up en pointe or if she had flat shoes. I also always forget that there are evil alligators in that which is a nice surprise every time I watch because apparently I have the memory of a goldfish. Finally we come to the last segment. This is the reason that I always hated Fantasia. The last segment scares the living daylights out of me. I mean, what the hell? There’s flying skeletons and demons and nudity and fire and loud noises and graveyards and it’s terrifying. It creeped me out as a 24 year old watching this for at least the 5^th time. It makes me so uncomfortable that I am actually grateful for the Ave Maria segment once it rolls around. Though, upon this viewing, I decided that I really hate that the beginning of the song is done without the soloist. It just sounds awkward. The harmonies are nice behind the soloist but without the soloist, it just sounds disjointed and random and not pretty.

Anyway, Fantasia has some good moments and some bad ones, and while I’m not against the idea of taking famous works of music and making them more appealing to the public by adding animation, it is Just. Too. Long. So I rank it about a 4 out of 5 (reminding you that I’m only ordering the films in groups of fives or so). Last thought: I’ve always gotten a tiny thrill when Mickey comes out after Sorcerer’s Apprentice to congratulate Stokowski. It’s the best part of the film. Oh, and since this post is already too long, let me add this last last thought: Since the credits typically come before the film in these early films, my sister and I have actually been reading the credits. We even have our favorite animators that worked on the early films and we always look for their names in the credits now. We also used it as an excuse for why some segments of Fantasia weren’t as good. “Oh, well, Cy Young wasn’t working on that one so that’s why it sucked!” or “Eric Larson was supervising that one, that’s why it was so good!” We’re also big fans of Vladimir Tytla who, in case you were wondering, was the animation supervisor for Night on Bald Mountain. Even if it’s terrifying, it’s still an amazing piece of animation. In fact, maybe the horror is what makes it so amazing. 

Just your standard sugar cookie, right?

For today's adventure, I attempted basically a standard sugar cookie with a twist.  During my labor day weekend trip home, I picked up (i.e. borrowed from my mom) some supplies and cookbooks.  I brought with me the Death By Chocolate cookbook which, if you're familiar with it, you know that just reading the recipes clogs your arteries.  I also brought the "Favorite Brand Name Bake Sale Cookbook".  I've had this cookbook for many years and have tried a couple of the recipes in it and they were yummy so I figured it'd be a good starting point.  Plus there are pictures. I like the pictures.

I found a recipe for "Watermelon Slices" which doesn't tell you anything about the cookies at all.  However, in the picture the cookies look like watermelon slices so that was enough incentive for me.  After reading the recipe, I realized that these cookies are sugar cookies but preciously decorated with food coloring and sprinkles.  The one problem with this cookbook is that it uses brand name products.  As in, the recipe called for "Duncan Hines Golden Sugar Cookie Mix".  Using a cookie mix feels like cheating to me.  So I hunted through the book for a sugar cookie recipe and found...nothing.  So I looked in the cookbook I used last time and found...nothing. Then I thought, "Aha! I own the Joy of Cooking like every good beginner chef!"  In Joy of Cooking I found a recipe for "Roll Cookies" which seemed right to me because the recipe looked like it would yield a sugar cookie and I needed to roll the cookies.  Score.

Now at this point you must be thinking "any idiot can make sugar cookies so what will make this post interesting?"  Merely my ineptitude in the kitchen, dear readers. First of all, combining two recipes is somewhat confusing, particularly when one recipe yields a different number of cookies than the other. That was not insurmountable though. I was feeling pretty confident. I combined my butter and sugar, followed by my flour, eggs, etc etc.  However, the dough wasn't mixing very well at all. It was all clumpy and crumbly and not good.  I decided that the problem was the fact that I was using a hand mixer and a Pyrex bowl instead of a serious mixer.  Fortunately for me, my mom gave me her old Mixmaster mixer (since she has the far superior KitchenAid mixer) and I dragged that out.  The thing looks ancient but it was functional.  Its age shows though.  It doesn't mix at a steady pace.  Instead it sort of sputters and goes fast and then slow in no discernible pattern.  At one point, it actually sputtered and died for a few seconds.  Santa, I would like a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas. K thanx.

Back to the point, the dough was still crumbly and poorly combined even after switching to the better mixer.  Hmm.  A Google search informed me that other people have had this problem with the Joy of Cooking recipe.  Way to go, Rombauer and Becker. Google also told me that I could add a bit of water or milk to the dough to get it to the right consistency.  Question: how do I know it's the right consistency? Google answer: it feels like Play-Doh. Ok, back on track! I've played with Play-Doh lots of times! Adding a bit of water didn't really do the trick but after a splash of milk, I got the dough to where it needed to be.  Then I had to make some of the dough green and the rest of it red.  Here is a picture of my red dough and my *awesome* mixer for your entertainment:

Then I had to roll the red dough into a 12 inch roll with one side flattened. Easy enough except I didn't exactly have a ruler and anyone who knows me knows that my sense of distance is severely skewed. But hey, rulers are for suckers! Being a nerd, I know that a standard sheet of paper is 8.5x11 so I eyeballed it based on that. Baking isn't an exact science, right? Then I had to roll the green dough into a 12x4 inch rectangle.  Again eyeballing it (and thanking my mom for giving me a rolling pin) I got that done easily.  Now here we have a discrepancy in the recipes.  JoC says that the dough should chill for 3-4 hours.  The watermelon slices recipe says to chill for15 minutes.  I decided to chill for the time it took for me to go to the weekly stat dept colloquium and come back.

After returning from colloquium where I pimped out my cookie dough truffles (more on that in a bit) I had to assemble the doughs to look like watermelon slices which was pretty straightforward.  Then I added some chocolate sprinkles to the slices to look like watermelon seeds and voila! Bake and eat. The cookies look completely precious but I'm not too wild about the sugar cookie recipe. The cookies are a little bland so the small hits of chocolate sprinkles are welcome.  Next time I need a sugar cookie recipe I'll try the "Rich Roll Cookie" I think. That said, the cookies look cute enough that I would make these again sometime.  Here are a couple pictures:

I also used the excess dough at the ends of the roll to make this cookie:

Precious, right?  Anyway, now we come to the feature I like to call "Critical Reception" where I look at how people enjoyed the previous post's dessert. 

Critical Reception:

After realizing I would never eat that many cookie dough truffles in my life (seriously, I can eat maybe two a day as a maximum), I took a container of them to colloquium to share with the stat dept.  After about half an hour, all but two of the truffles were gone. The most common reaction was bugged out eyes and "You made these?!?"  My favorite part of all of this was my advisor eating at least five of the truffles.  And when I say at least five, I mean that I only saw him eat five.  I consider this a great success and will continue bribing members of the stat dept with baked goods.