C is for Cookie...

Get ready because today is another mission in achieving adorable cuteness! This adventure is brought to you by: my sister's birthday. I have now historically made several adorable desserts for her birthday including panda cupcakes and a TARDIS cake and this time, I decided to surprise her with Cookie Monster Macarons. The reasoning for this was twofold. First, I've never made macarons so finally we have something new and exciting for me to try not to screw up and second, who doesn't love Cookie Monster? I found this idea here and the tutorial is pretty excellent and includes the world's most adorable gif of Cookie Monster macarons eating a row of cookies. So cute. Let's get started!

Aaaaaaand the recipes are in metric. Huh. Now we have a threefold challenge. Now the baker must convert metric measurements to US measurements. First step is to make the macarons starting with 100g of egg whites. A quick Google search revealed that 100g of egg whites is "around 4-5 egg whites but it shouldn't really matter to your recipe." Alarm bells everywhere! I know that macarons are difficult to make and I've discovered that baking is an exact science (who knew?) so there was no way in the world that I was going to guess on the number of egg whites going into this batter. So I ended up with another first for me: using my kitchen scale to weigh ingredients! Yes, for my wedding, I (I mean, we, but let's face it, my dear husband doesn't even know it exists) received a kitchen scale ostensibly for moments like these. So there I was, weighing egg whites. I should probably also mention that it was already pretty late at night and I had a terrible migraine so all decision-making needed to follow the path of least resistance. Turns out, 100g is five egg whites minus a little bit that I scooped out with one of the egg shells. I tossed those into the mixing bowl to come to room temperature while I dealt with the dry ingredients.

Actually, let me backtrack just a moment. Do you all know what macarons are? Basically, they're meringue-like cookie sandwiches with yummy filling in the middle. They're French and apparently really easy to screw up. People have entire classes to learn how to make just macarons. I'm trying it late at night with a migraine. Oh yeah, and I'll have the added challenge of dying them Cookie Monster blue, adding eyes, filling with ganache, and adorably placing a cookie in the mouth. Sums it up, right? Ok, moving on.

The first dry ingredient instruction was to pulse my powdered sugar in a food processor. No. Not happening. What I did do was sift the sugar through a fine sieve. I didn't bother with my actual sifter because it's a pain to clean. So there I was, scraping powdered sugar through a sieve and into a bowl that was on my scale until I got to 200g. It took a while. Then I had to do the same thing with 110 g of almond meal. It took me forever to find that stuff. It was very well hidden in the grocery store. It was a little harder to sift the almond meal but the bag said it was already superfinely sifted so after about 20g, I gave up and just poured. Way way too much effort. I tossed that into a bowl with the powdered sugar and called it a day.

Back to the egg whites! I added some salt and whipped to soft peaks and then added some sugar and mixed to stiff peaks. Easy. Now I just had to stir the meringue into the dry ingredients. It was weird because I'm used to being gentle with meringue but my recipe said that the goal was to beat the air out of the egg whites at first and there was no need to be gentle. Ok! Also, I swear, it looked like it was never going to all incorporate together. I just wasn't optimistic. But lo and behold, after a bit more stirring, it magically all incorporated. Yay!

Now to turn it blue. With my fancy food coloring kit, I had about four shades of blue to choose from and wasn't really sure how to best match Cookie Monster's fur. Eventually, I went for a deeper shade of blue than was in my tutorial since it seemed more accurate and that worked out to 40 drops of blue and 1 drop of black. In hindsight, all of these measurements are for roughly 4 cups of buttercream or icing so I probably used too much dye. In fact (and I won't leave you in suspense here), they turned people's mouths blue. Very blue. Blue that persisted for several hours. Blue teeth, blue lips, blue tongue. I'd say it was a mistake but it was really really funny. Not sure how much I actually regret it.

Back to baking. I had to remove a bit of the mixture to keep white for the eyes and then stir in the blue dye for the rest. That was easy. Then I had to pipe the mixture into 3.5 cm circles with a 1 cm piping tip. That sounds really small. I don't have a ruler. I am too tired to find a ruler. I am now just guessing. However, I know the recipe is supposed to make 20 macarons so I figure I'll pipe a size that makes sense to me and if they're not big enough, I'll go back and add more batter. Macarons are normally small but these seemed really really small. I ended up just making them a little bigger because I didn't think Cookie Monsters that small would be able to fit a cookie in their mouths. (More on that in a bit.)

Piping was mostly uneventful and then I had to leave the macarons to dry for half an hour. I was warned not to rush this step because if I did, I would end up with soppy, fried-egg looking macarons and I definitely did not want that. One small problem though was that the next step after drying was to add blue sprinkles for texture. But they didn't really stick! I think I should've added the sprinkles a bit earlier. Some stuck but I definitely wasted a lot of blue sprinkles. Next I had to pipe on the white eyes with my remaining batter. I got a very small piping tip for the precision work this was going to require. And it went fine! No fried eggs! The only issue I had was that I should have flattened the circles with my finger so they didn't have spikey points but I was so tired by this point and they still had to dry for another hour and then bake. Originally I was planning on completing the macarons that night (filling and assembling) but I was burned out and decided to finish baking the shells and then do the rest in the next day.

After the macarons dried, I was directed to preheat my oven to "130-150 degrees C (265-300 degrees F)" and I was so tired that I definitely thought I was supposed to bake them at 130 degrees F. Caught it at the last minute. But what the heck? Who gives a range of temperatures for your oven? If I had been very diligent, I would have cross-checked this with my America's Test Kitchen book. I know they have a recipe for macarons and I'm sure they have all sorts of troubleshooting tips but I cannot even express to you how tired I was. So, I ended up picking 275 degrees and just went with it. Well thought out macarons will apparently be for another day.

Bake. Remove from oven. Let cool. Toss in tupperware. Nite nite.

In the morning, I took a good look at my shells and they looked pretty good. They successfully grew "feet" (the sort of ridging on the sides) and they looked fine. Then I saw that I had accidentally cracked one/decided to eat one and it was pretty hollow inside. Sad. Some research after the fact suggests either underbaking or too low an oven temperature or perhaps not sifting well enough (probably that one) may have caused this but I was assured that macarons don't need to be perfect as long as they taste good. And they did taste good so that works for me!

Now I had to fill them with ganache and decorate. I started to really deviate at this point because I literally just eyeballed my ganache. I threw some semisweet and some bittersweet chocolate chips into a bowl, boiled what looked like enough heavy cream, and threw them all together. I was just hoping it would be enough ganache but I didn't want to follow a recipe and have a ton left over like the royal icing fiasco of a few weeks ago. While the ganache was cooling, I added Cookie Monster eyeballs to the eyes using an edible ink pen. I've had trouble with this pen when using it on chocolate before but it worked so perfectly on the macarons. Yay!

I also had one more problem to work out (yes, I know this is a long one but there were a lot of steps!) and that was the size of the cookie. I was too lazy to bake cookies for this purpose and I don't even know what bake times you'd use for super tiny cookies so I just bought Chips Ahoy mini cookies and Entenmann's soft cookies. I love the Entenmann's and was hoping they would be small enough but in a head to head comparison with the size of the macaron, I saw they were too large. And then when I tried the Chips Ahoy minis, even those were too large! This was not working out. Time to get creative...

I started looking around my kitchen for a mini round cookie cutter. This lasted about five minutes before I realized it was a ridiculous notion to think I would have one. So then I grabbed one of the pastry bag couplers to cut out a smaller Entenmann's cookie. Still too big. Eventually, I landed on using one of the piping tips, upside down, and then poking the cookie out of the tip with a metal skewer. To give you a sense of the scale, I could cut three mini cookies out of one Entenmann's cookie. Super. Tiny. Cookies.

But one more problem! The cookies were still too thick! I ended up creating a process where I would cut three mini cookies, squish them down gently with my fingers (thank goodness for soft baked cookies), hope they didn't crack into a million crumbs, bring the three cookies ACROSS MY KITCHEN, pipe the ganache onto the bottom macaron, gently place the cookie hanging over the edge, pipe more ganache on top of the cookie as "glue", and then finally put the top macaron with the Cookie Monster eyes on top. Whew. Now, if I were an intelligent person, I would have cut out all of the cookies at once instead of three at a time or maybe moved the macarons closer to the cookies I was cutting. But I'm apparently not. I repeated this process for all 20 macarons and my hands were a crumby, greasy mess. I really could have used some extra hands for this one. But at the end of the day, I achieved success and my Cookie Monster macarons were adorable little monsters:

Yummy and adorable success! Plus hilariously blue mouths! Happy birthday, sister and I can't wait to see what I dream up for next year!

A [Last] Disney Moment: The Top Five Six

With our mission of watching every single animated Disney film completed, we had only one thing left to do: pick the best one. We had previously agreed to pick our top five and rewatch them in a two day period so they'd all be fresh in our minds. We couldn't actually agree on only five so landed on a total of six to rewatch: Lady and the Tramp, Dumbo, Princess and the Frog, Little Mermaid, Lion King, and Robin Hood. Just barely missing the cut were Beauty and the Beast (but we couldn't justify it because Little Mermaid had beaten it in the group rankings) and Frozen (because at the time it was at the peak of its popularity and was being called the best film of all time or something).

By the way, there was no scientific system for these choices. Nor is there any real system for which one wins. It's simply whichever one we liked the best. So we hunkered down for two days and blew through these. We laughed, we cried. And we picked a winner. Stacked in order of our final rankings you'll find our results:

The winner: DUMBO! Followed closely by a two-way tie for second place between The Little Mermaid and Lion King. Fourth place: Lady and the Tramp. Fifth place: Princess and the Frog. Sixth place (and really probably shouldn't have been included but I love it so why not): Robin Hood.

We literally spent days debating the nuances of Little Mermaid vs. Lion King and just couldn't decide. But we love Dumbo and it soundly emerged the victor.

And that's it! We had highs, we had very low lows (I'm lookin' at you Saludos Amigos...), and overall we had fun sister bonding time. Now it's time to tackle the Pixar films!

Channeling My Inner Martha

I know, I know, I've been bad again. Baking has been happening, I swear! It's just that the blogging part hasn't been happening. Believe it or not, I've been actually doing work lately! Hang on, I'll wait for you to absorb the shock of that statement. Good now? Ok, good.

Like I said, there's been baking. In fact, there was baking during a very special visit from a friend who lives very far away. We made Martha's Ne Plus Ultra cookies. They were quite good but there isn't much to report besides me buying a $2 SlapChop at the Goodwill store to chop pecans because I don't have a food processor. And alas, I ate them all before I remembered to take a picture so you'll just have to take my word for it that they looked and tasted delicious. Oh, one note about these cookies: Martha seemed to think that the recipe made 8 cookies and I made about 30. No one wants a cookie that big.

So that's the Ne Plus Ultra cookie story (by the way, ne plus ultra just means "awesome cookie") and it wasn't very interesting so we'll move on to my attempt to make an Easter themed dessert. When considering what a good Easter dessert might be, I thought long and hard about what would capture the Easter spirit and then I just caved and Googled Easter desserts. Of course, Martha recipes came up with some of the most precious looking cakes ever. I decided to tackle one of her easier ones: Rich Chocolate Cake with Ganache Frosting and Truffle-Egg Nest. Yep. The recipe can be found here. Basically, it's just a chocolate cake with a precious shaved chocolate nest built on top with homemade truffle eggs in the center. Modification #1: I was not making truffle eggs from scratch. I just didn't have the energy or the drive to color egg-shaped truffles robin's egg blue. No freaking way. I bought some Cadbury eggs and called it a day on that one.

The next adventure, so to speak, was the search for the 7 inch cake pans. To give you some context, a standard round cake pan is 9 inches. We had one 8 inch pan (and several 9 inches) but no 7 inch. Oh, and a 6 inch is about the size of the top tier of a wedding cake. So off I went to hunt for the elusive 7 inch cake pan. I asked a neighbor to start with but alas, no 7 incher. I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Kohl's, AC Moore (on the day before Easter, mind you) and nothing. So before even beginning to bake, I was already frustrated. Not cool, Martha. Not cool. I decided to pick up two 8 inch pans for my collection and resolved to watch the cakes carefully to adjust the bake time.

Here's one cool thing about this cake: it's made entirely in a pot. Seriously, all you need is a pot and a whisk. Nothing too interesting to report in the baking process except that I perhaps should have whisked more vigorously in the last step to fluff the batter up more. Anywho, baked up the cakes and left them to cool for a while. Now, here comes another point of confusion: the recipe called for both a whipped ganache frosting and then another ganache topping but I did not realize that upon my first reading. Or second. Or third. By the time I did figure it out, I realized that I didn't have enough chocolate or heavy cream for the second ganache. Maybe I'm just stressed out but this was an extremely frustrating discovery. Eventually I got over it and iced the cake with the whipped ganache frosting and covered it with the thinner ganache. The cake itself came out looking quite professionally done, if I do say so myself (and I do.) I was initially saddened by what seemed like a waste of perfectly good ganache (I pretty much had to pour ganache over the whole cake and let the excess run into the bottom of a pan) but then my mom saved the day by scraping the ganache into a container for later use in strawberry-dipping.

Now, all of this is well and good from a baking standpoint. But now we get to the Martha-ness of the recipe. Anyone can make a simple chocolate cake. It takes a real pro to make a bird's nest out of chocolate. Here are the directions: "using a chef's knife, scrape milk chocolate bar at 90 degree angle, forming enough curls and shards to measure 1 1/2 cups." Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It took three masterminds to figure out that scraping down the chocolate only created tiny chocolate confetti. Eventually (and I do mean to imply that this took some time and some staring at a chocolate bar and some experimentation with potato peelers on chocolate), I discovered that instead of scraping, I could just chop thin slices of chocolate which yielded much better results. Then the last step was to build the nest. I was bad at this. My "nest" didn't look at all like a nest. My sister had to fix it for me. But whatever, I'm not the artistic one of the family. It came out pretty precious looking in the end. Here's a picture for your judgement:

As for the taste, it went over very well with my family on Easter. I thought it was a bit denser than it should have been but maybe that's just a personal preference. I bet having a 7 inch pan would have made it better. Stupid 7 inch pan.

A Disney Moment: Oliver and Company
I love Oliver and Company. I think it's adorable. And anyone who disagrees is wrong. Again, we see my affinity for cartoon cats and dogs coming out but I think it's a pretty well structured film. I like the pacing. I like the referrals to Oliver Twist. It's certainly not an original story but it's fun nonetheless. Certain moments really stuck with me. Small things like how Dodger struts every time he walks. And to me, a four-legged strut is a bit of an accomplishment. "Why Should I Worry?" is a really fun scene with a truly terrific song. The other musical high for me was "You and Me Together" which is just one of the sweetest things in the world. I may be biased because the girl is named Jenny but I just find that whole song endearing.

Let's see, what else? Oh, I was a bit surprised to discover that I didn't mind having the characters voiced by famous people. Bette Midler voicing the overdramatic show dog was especially perfect to me. Overall, I was just left with a happy feeling when the movie ended. I also really enjoyed the opening and closing landscapes of NYC. That all said, I'm still only giving this movie a 3/5. Why, you ask? Well, because, my friends, we are on the cusp of the Disney Renaissance! Great things to come. But Oliver and Company is still ranking a lot higher than the likes of Fox and the Hound, for example, despite its low group rating.

A Foray Into Creativity

This week's double dose of baking is brought to you by wanting to share cookies with friends (and, of course, viewers like you). I'm going to visit a friend this weekend and wanted to bring him some cookies that I made but it seems that I have none left at all in my possession. Also, my office is out of emergency "My God, why are my students' Minitab answers so wrong?" cookies. So I wanted to make something easy but delicious and at the same time not make the same thing twice. Well, the Death By Chocolate cookbook comes to my rescue again. Recall I made the Absolutely Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies a few weeks ago. They were delicious, beloved by all, and are a good traveling cookie. But obviously, I couldn't make the same thing again. So I decided to add some twists to the original recipe. The first twist is that I've had about two cups of dark chocolate chips in my cupboard for a few weeks and want to get rid of them. The recipe calls for 3 cups of semi sweet chocolate chips (which I totally skimped on last time) so I will substitute two of those cups with dark chocolate chips. I literally have no idea how this will turn out but I figure more chocolate can't be a bad thing, right?

Speaking of more chocolate, the second modification I'm making actually involves a separate recipe. The cookie recipe notes that if you're feeling ambitious, you can dip the cookies in some chocolate ganache. Hmm, apparently this blog doesn't recognize ganache as a real word. That's annoying. Well, ganache is real (is properly spelled) and is delicious. The cookbook points out that there are "several ganache recipes to choose from" but when I checked there were only two. Liars. Two doesn't qualify as several. Everybody knows that several is generally more than three! Regardless, I needed to decide between the Semi-Sweet Chocolate Ganache and the Ultimate Chocolate Ganache. I'm still laughing at the fact that I just presented that as if there was a choice to be made. I'm already making Absolutely Extra Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge cookies (the Extra because of the dark chocolate chips which should make the cookies even more deep dark) so I might as well take the next logical step to make them the ULTIMATE ABSOLUTELY EXTRA DEEP DARK CHOCOLATE FUDGE cookies. Or maybe we'll just call them Chocolate Coma Cookies. Or how about Chocolate Insanity Cookies? Perhaps Friggin' Chocolately Cookies? I'll keep thinking on what to call these things.

So, this being the 2nd time that I'm making this basic recipe, I got a little lazy. But only lazy in the most practical of senses, I promise. For instance, I did not sift together the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda like last time. Way too silly. I also knew that I should get the chocolate melting first so that I wouldn't be stalled halfway through the recipe waiting for chocolate to melt. I'm learning! This was a very smooth recipe with one (hopefully) small exception. I kinda ran out of brown sugar. I was only about a tablespoon short in a recipe that calls for a cup and a half of brown sugar so I'm hoping it's not too big a deal. I know baking is an exact science and I even googled brown sugar substitutes but as I don't have any molasses, I was kinda stuck. And there was no way I was going out in the pouring rain to get ingredients. No way. So, let's all hope they turn out ok, shall we?

As I was baking the cookies (they take quite a while), I got started on the Ultimate Chocolate Ganache. By that, I just mean that I measured out all the ingredients and got stuff ready to go because ganache takes approximately 5 minutes to make. I did take a moment to marvel though at all of the chocolate going into this recipe. I decided to cut the recipe in half since I don't really think I need a quart of ganache in my life at the particular moment in time. After some super difficult division, the recipe called for 3 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, 2 ounces of white chocolate, and 6 ounces of semisweet chocolate. It just looked like so much chocolate.

Oh, and while I'm waiting for the cookies to bake, allow me to share this gem from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. "Why an ultimate ganache? Why drive an automobile capable of going 120 miles per hour when the speed limit does not exceed 65 miles per hour? The answer is that when you need it -- it's there. Quite simply, this is a supernal food. Just imagine a mountain cabin, a mellow fire, chilled Iron Horse Blanc de Blancs, and great big California strawberries to dip into a bowl of slightly warm ultimate ganache." Ummmm...what? The first time I read that it just boggled my mind. I want to make fun of it so badly but the words won't quite come. No wait, yes they will. There is never a need to go 120 miles per hour. Ever. It's unsafe, you crazy drivers. Next, while I'm loving the idea of strawberries dipped in ultimate ganache, the author seems to have an oddly specific scenario in mind that seems to imply that there is someone else in that mountain cabin. Or at least I hope so. Otherwise, it just feels kinda sad. All of these recipes have little "chef's touch" sections that are filled with practical and helpful tips and occasional anecdotes about where the recipe comes from but I'm pretty surprised that this particular chef's touch made it past the editor. That's all I wanted to say on that but dear readers, feel free to jump in with your own thoughts on this mysterious passage in a cookbook.

Woot! Ganache time! Ganache is actually quite easy. It's just boiling sugar, butter, and heavy cream and then pouring the boiling mixture over the three types of chocolate I have in a bowl. Although, the recipe did recommend a stainless steel bowl which, of course, I did not have. I figured Pyrex would suffice. Considering I haven't heard any glass explode yet, I think we're good. After letting it sit for 5 minutes I stirred until smooth and now I have to let it cool to room temperature before dipping the cookies. I guess I could've planned this a little better but I was watching Big Bang Theory. Which is NOT crappy tv and I'm only now starting to get into the show. Which is odd because I'm a huge dork. And I get almost all of their nerd jokes. See why I needed a hobby?

Ok, so the ganache is cool enough now and I began methodically dipping the cookies into the ganache. I figured that covering half the cookie would be most reasonable and would look cute. So I got into a nice rhythm of moving the cookies from the cooling rack to the wax paper covered cooling rack by way of bowl of ganache. At one point I got a little ganache on my knuckle and gave it a taste. Oh. My. God. I just wanted to curl up and die because nothing could possibly ever taste that good again. Anyway, I got so into the rhythm of this that I actually missed the first 10 minutes of Grey's Anatomy (there's your bad tv!) which isn't exactly a disaster but it was more that I found the whole process so relaxing that I completely lost track of time. Not a bad way to spend an evening. Now I'm just waiting for the ganache to harden before I can taste one. Waiting is painful. Oh, and I had way too much ganache, of course, so now the extra is sitting in a plastic container in my fridge just waiting for a rainy day.

I grabbed a cookie out of the fridge before the ganache even really finished hardening because it's getting close to my bedtime and I really wanted to try one of these cookies tonight. Holy. Crap. It's the most amazing cookie I've ever tasted. The ganache works perfectly with the extremely ultimately chocolatey whatever cookie and I don't even quite know how to describe it. Maybe I'm just a chocolate fiend but these cookies are incredible. I actually want another one but I know I probably shouldn't since I have to sleep in order to teach my students how to do statistics tomorrow but wow. I know my gushing over these cookies is probably getting annoying so I'll wrap it up. Here's a picture of the Incredible Amazing Ultimately Absolutely Deepest Dark Chocolate Fudge Cookies:

Disclaimer: I will not be held responsible for any residual drooling that may or may not land on readers' keyboards.


Critical Reception:
Well. Apparently nobody had the same objections to the cheesecake triangles that I did. I brought the triangles to the stat dept, stored them in the fridge because I was there a bit early, went to my office to do some work, and almost immediately was asked where the cheesecake triangles were. Not that I minded being interrupted, mind you, because my probability homework is way hard this week but I was impressed that someone discovered what treat I had made within a couple hours of my blog post going up. So when it was colloquium tea time, I took the cheesecake triangles out of the fridge and people immediately jumped on them. I estimate I brought about 50 triangles with me (they were somewhat small). Even with a smaller than usual pre-colloquium socializing group, I'd estimate about 20 of the triangles were gone by the time the talk actually started. By the way, that means people were eating more than one. I saw someone eat 4 of them. Which is fine, I'm happy people were enjoying them. After the talk, I walked back to the conference room thinking there'd be at least 20 or so left and I'd have to put them in the fridge with a sign telling people to eat them or something. I walked in and my jaw actually dropped as I looked at a completely empty plate. I believe I actually exclaimed "No way!" and made the couple of people working in the conference room stare at me like I was crazy (which I'm not denying). So I'm going to go ahead and assume that people liked them because they're gone now! A+ for the cheesecake triangles.