Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Why Are My Hands Always Covered in Chocolate?

Greetings! This week has been a lazy week (plus my homework started to get the better of me) so this adventure was restricted to whatever ingredients I already had at my house. There were a few possibilities in my usual go to cookbooks but I started idly flipping through Joy of Cooking while watching Glee last night. I came across the section on icebox cookies and was intrigued. Icebox (or refrigerator) cookies are similar to the watermelon slice cookies I made previously in that the dough has to be rolled into a log and chilled for several hours. However, the recipe for vanilla icebox cookies seemed boring. Fortunately for me (and probably for you, dear readers), there was a picture next to the recipe for Pinwheel Icebox Cookies. If you couldn't tell by now, I'm a sucker for anything that is accompanied by a cute picture and two-tone cookies with a spiral pattern seems right up my alley.

For the loyal readers who religiously check this blog for my next great adventure (or who I bully into reading), you'll probably remember that I had a few complaints with my last Joy of Cooking cookie recipe. Most importantly, the cookies were way too bland. Anxious to avoid this disappointment, I compared the two recipes before beginning (because as far as I can tell, icebox cookies are still basically sugar cookies). The recipe for Vanilla Icebox Cookies calls for more butter, more sugar, and more vanilla so I interpret that to mean more flavor. Plus, the second color that is spiraled into the dough is colored by the presence of chocolate. Win. Let's bake!

Step 1: Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Wait, really? Whisk that together? It can't possibly be necessary for me to dirty a whisk just to blend three dry ingredients. So, instead I used the knife that had been used to level the flour in the measuring cup. Yup, stirred stuff with a knife. And you know what? It worked just fine, thank you very much. Sadly, my ability to dismiss stupid directions did not continue through this entire recipe. You'll see.

Step 2: Beat unsalted butter (softened) and sugar. Last time I did this, I don't think that I softened the butter enough and that's why I got the lumpy, crumbly dough. This time, I made sure the butter was soft and successfully got fluffy butter/sugar. Step 3: Add the rest of the ingredients and then stir in Step 1's flour mixture.

Step 4 is where things got interesting. Herein lies the pinwheel part of the recipe. I had to divide the dough in half (that part was easy!) then I had to knead 2 oz of melted semisweet chocolate into half of the dough. Remember how I said I wasn't going to melt chocolate in the microwave anymore? I lied. Since I was only melting two of the little squares of baking chocolate, I figured the microwave could handle it. And it did! It was super exciting that I didn't end up with burnt chocolate. Now that I had melted chocolate, I just had to knead it into half the dough. Uh, knead it? Like with my hands? I've kneaded dough plenty of times before but not with melted chocolate. Now, I don't know what in the world I was thinking when I decided it would be a good idea to follow these directions. A better idea probably would have been to use a spoon, or a mixer, or ANYTHING BUT MY HANDS. However, I'm an idiot so I started to knead half the chocolate into the dough. It made a freakin mess. The chocolate stuck to my hands, the dough stuck to my hands, the chocolate and dough stuck to the wax paper I was kneading on, and it wasn't really blending at all. About 30 seconds into this disaster, I thought to myself "I probably should've coated my hands in flour so it was less sticky" but hindsight is 20/20, now isn't it? I tried everything I could think of to blend the chocolate into this dough including (but not limited to) pulling the dough apart and putting it back together many times, tossing the ball of dough from one hand to the other, and throwing the ball of dough onto the wax paper dramatically. I don't think that last one helped blend chocolate but it made me feel better. Finally, I managed to get a fairly even shade of brown in my ball of dough. Yay! And then I realized that I had only used half the chocolate so far. Awesome. So I coated my hands in flour to diminish the stickiness. It did not help. At all. Stupid Joy of Cooking.

After the frustration of the chocolate, during which time I had to work extremely hard to get all the chocolate off of my hands, I had to roll the 2 balls of dough into rectangles 11 inches long. That was a bit challenging as well as I rolled the dough a bit too thin and got a big hole in the middle of the dough. Sigh. Eventually, through a great deal of effort and cursing, I managed to get two reasonable rectangle shapes. Then I had to put the chocolate rectangle on top of the plain rectangle so I could roll them up together. Given my previous difficulty, I was correct in assuming that I could not accurately place one rectangle on top of the other. Stupid stupid Joy of Cooking. Eventually I had pretty much layered the two doughs and just had to roll them up. The picture shows two disembodied hands picking up the wax paper on one end to magically roll the dough perfectly. HAHAHA. This would've been easier if the dough hadn't been so thin that it stuck to the wax paper. After peeling the dough off the wax paper and filling in the holes, I wrapped the dough up and stuck the damn thing in the fridge overnight.

The morning brought fewer malicious feelings toward these cookies, although I did have a nightmare where the cookies didn't pinwheel properly and were just a white and black mess. The final step was just to cut and bake the cookies. I was supposed to cut the log into 3/16 inch thick slices. That's less than a quarter inch which seems really thin to me. However, I followed the directions and kinda burnt the first batch. The later batches were cut thicker. Oh hey! Apparently I WAS supposed to grease the cookie sheet! Whoops. Oh well, the cookies came out ok. They have more flavor to them than the last JoC cookies but I don't know, maybe I'm just not wild about sugar cookies. And they didn't come out as cute as I hoped. They kinda were flattened and didn't get as many spirals as I wanted. However, you be the judge:


Overall, not the best, not the worst, but probably the most irritating. Oh well, I'm sure they'll be gone at colloquium within less than half an hour.

Critical Reception:
The Chocolate Insanity cookies were amazing. I literally don't care what anyone else thought about them because I thought they were so good. However, I sent some to a friend far away, and I brought some to another friend far away, and I brought some to my sister and her roommate and they seemed pretty much loved by all. The leftover cookies are also in my office. Or at least they were the last time I was there and they may very well be gone by now. They were really yummy. I'd definitely make those cookies again. Maybe I'll make them around Christmas time. Hmm. Now I want one of those cookies...

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