Peanuuuuuts...(I'm Quoting Duck Soup Here)

Ok, well, not really peanuts. Peanut butter. I was just thinking about the scene with the peanut vendor in Duck Soup (that's the Marx Brothers for anyone who has not yet experienced the glory of that film). That's right, I've returned to the Cake Boss cookbook and resumed baking with Peanut Butter cookies. Recall, I have made peanut butter cookies in the past. They were good. They even had chocolate drizzle on them. These cookies, however, do not have a million tiny Reese's cups that I have to unwrap and chop up. These have milk chocolate chips and peanut butter chips. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's backtrack.

We start the baking with some peanut butter and Crisco. Last time that I worked with sticky stuff, I lined the measuring cup with wax paper. Now, while this was effective, I was too lazy to do that this time. Instead, I just used two spoons: one to scoop and one to scrape. This worked pretty well, with one exception. I almost ran out of peanut butter! Who runs out of peanut butter? It's a staple in every household! And I certainly was not going to go out to the store and buy more. Ludicrous. So, it took a good deal of scraping the sides of the jar but I ended up getting juuuuuuust enough peanut butter. Next, I had to scoop in some Crisco using the same method. Not a problem. Here we run into another small problem though. I had been using the 1/4 cup measure for the peanut butter and the Crisco. The third ingredient to be mixed in was 1/4 cup of brown sugar. I didn't want to clean the 1/4 cup. I know, I know, I'm super lazy. You're right. So what did I do? Why, I filled a 1/2 cup halfway, of course! Specific measurements be damned, I was not cleaning that 1/4 cup.

After that, I had to add in one [extra large] egg. Easy. The book recommends periodically scraping the sides of the bowl during mixing and even specifies when scraping should be performed. And it's good advice. Scraping the bowl revealed all sorts of non-combined stuff. Good call, Cake Boss. My praise of the Cake Boss ends there though. You'll see why in a minute.

But first, a story about opening a can of sweetened, condensed milk. I got out my church key can opener and poked two holes into the can. This caused the condensed milk to ooze aggressively out of those two holes in the process. Ok, not the end of the world. But then I tried pouring. It's like trying to pour honey. It's slow and I'm impatient. So, I got out the real can opener. After carving off the top of the can (and of course, making a mess), I poured the contents into the bowl and scraped it with my spatula. And made a mess. Why am I always making messes out of simple tasks?

After adding the rest of the ingredients (flour, baking powder, chocolate chips and peanut butter chips), I had to divide the dough into cookies. Hmm, I just noticed that there wasn't any salt in this recipe. How unusual. Anyway, I was instructed to flour a work surface (which is never a good sign), divide the dough in half, and roll half the dough into a 20 inch long cylinder with a 1 inch diameter. Sure. Because I'm so good at that. Oh, and did I mention that the dough is sticky? Because, you know, it's peanut butter? Good stuff. To make things even more complicated, these cookies have a very high chip to dough ratio. Meaning, once I started to roll the dough, it would break apart and chocolate or peanut butter chips would come tumbling out of the middle of the cylinder. I legitimately don't know how I could have avoided this. There were just too many chips. I shudder to think what would have happened if I added the optional 1/2 cup of peanuts!

Anyway, eventually, I got a cylinder-like shape that may or may not have been the dimensions specified. As we know, I am not a good judge of lengths. From there, I had to slice the cylinder into 1 inch slices (like slice and bake cookies). Then I had to roll the slices in my hands to make a ball, press down to flatten to half inch thickness and put on the baking pans that had been previously prepared with parchment paper. Wow, tongue twister. Say it three times fast: previously prepared with parchment paper. I wonder if any of you just tried.

Bake cookies for approximately 8 minutes until edges are a light golden brown. I'm sorry but I think the cooktimes in this cookbook are way off. I ended up baking the cookies for 12 minutes and not only did the edges never brown but the bottoms were only slightly brown. Recall, I ran into this same problem with the double chocolate chip cookies. I know that the Cake Boss is used to baking in bulk but I'm starting to suspect that the conversions are not quite working out for home baking. I'll stick with it a little while longer but be it known: I'm wary of these recipes.

On the bright side of life, the cookies ended up tasting pretty good (for peanut butter cookies, which I'm not overly fond of) but they weren't as good as the other peanut butter cookies I made. Also, for once, the recipe made cookies that were not gigantic! Admittedly, I made them a little smaller than the recipe suggested but they're very cute bite-size cookies. See for yourself:

A Disney Moment: Sword in the Stone
Ugh. 5/5, 5/5, 5/5. I wish I could rate it lower. It was awful. I honestly can't find any redeeming qualities. People talk about the battle being a triumph in animation and maybe it was, but by then I felt like I was trapped in some sort of animation torture chamber. Every time the kid turned into another animal, my sister and I audibly groaned. We started inventing new directions the story could have gone in. I think it would've been better if he pulled the sword out of the stone about halfway through the movie and we got to see his attempt to rule a kingdom as a child with Merlin's help. But he didn't. Instead we got an hour of "education is important! You should be educated!" which was a lesson that had sunk in for the kid after the first iteration. This movie is actually in the running for my least favorite Disney film of all time (though, I'm sure that title will be challenged when we get to the more recent stuff). Awful.

Another Sticky Situation

In this week's episode of "things that are really annoying to measure" I bake cookies that involve peanut butter. The technical name for this recipe is "Canned Peanut Butter Candy Cookies" from the Favorite Brand Name Bake Sale Cookbook.  This will require some explanation.  The idea for these cookies must be that they make a lovely gift for someone because the recipe calls for a decorative container.  The picture in the book shows one of those cylindrical metal tins with adorable ribbons wrapped around it.  Awww.  Apparently you are supposed to measure the cookies to precisely fit inside the canister.  I don't even have to tell you by now that I did not do this.  I did not have one of these tins and I tend to feed the statistics masses who would only find the tin to be a hindrance.

So that was the first unusual thing about this recipe.  The second unusual thing to me is that despite this being the BRAND NAME cookbook, the recipe never once mentions Reese's peanut butter cups.  The name of the recipe refers to Reese's as peanut butter candies and the ingredient list calls for "quartered miniature peanut butter cups". Now I'm not really a huge candy eater but seriously, does anybody else even make peanut butter cups? Anybody? The recipe is unquestionably calling for Reese's peanut butter cups (even the picture looks exactly like Reese's miniatures) but in the very first recipe of the Brand Name cookbook, they do not refer to the brand. Am I the only person who finds this absurd? Did Reese's refuse to allow their brand name to be used? And if so, why? Hershey's is mentioned several times in the book and Hershey's owns Reese's, right? I'm not entirely sure why this bugs me quite this much but it seems very silly to me. On to the cooking!

I started work on these cookies yesterday, not quite sure when I was going to bake them. What I did know was that I had to buy Reese's, I mean, "miniature peanut butter cups" and quarter them. So I decided to get a jump start on that.  I know from baking chocolate chip cookies from scratch that one 12 oz bag of chocolate chips is 2 cups so I assumed about the same for quartered miniature Reese's. Which meant a lot of unwrapping. Think about it: each miniature Reese's has the tinfoil wrapping and the paper wrapping and there's a lot of mini Reese's in a 12 oz bag. But that's ok, I parked myself in front of the tv and watched Biggest Loser while unwrapping and cutting my candies. =)

Once I was done, I decided I was bored and decided to just go ahead and bake them. Step 1: beat peanut butter and butter in a large bowl. Otay. I had to measure out 3/4 cup of chunky peanut butter. I'm a smooth peanut butter girl myself so I didn't have chunky but I'm fairly sure it's one of those things that wouldn't have mattered. By the way, in case you were wondering, the recipe did not specify a brand of peanut butter. Knowing that peanut butter is sticky, I tried to devise a plan to minimize my suffering. I decided to line the measuring cup with wax paper so it would be easier to transfer after measuring.  This actually worked pretty well. It was a challenge to see the measurements though because I have a stupid Pyrex measuring cup that put the measurement information on the inside. I'm still confused as to why someone would do that. But anyway, success. From there it was your standard brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, etc etc. After I stirred in the peanut butter cups, I let the dough chill for 1 hour.

The baking side of things, on the other hand, had some fascinating instructions.  Remember how I said that the cookies should fit nicely inside the decorative container? Well, the recipe gives specific instructions about how if you make a 1/4 inch thick disc of dough, 2 inches less in diameter than the size of the container then the cookie will grow to...blah blah blah. It actually wanted me to bake a test cookie to figure out the proper size of the cookies. This was all easy to disregard but my eye caught on one thing. It recommended using 1/3 cup of dough PER COOKIE. Think about that for a second. If volume doesn't give you a sense of the size of these cookies, how about that the recipe yields 9 5-inch cookies? Those would be big freakin cookies. Those are like those cookies you see at diners wrapped in plastic that you can't picture anyone eating. If you still can't picture the size, how about that with the amount of dough I had, I made 2 and a half DOZEN cookies. Ok, that's all I'll say about the idiotic size of the cookies.

After baking, the last thing to do was decoratively pipe chocolate onto the cookies.  However, it was late at night by then so I decided to save that step for today.  So, today I followed the very specific instructions about melting chocolate in a plastic bag in the microwave. For once I didn't have to use chocolate chips in the recipe! Instead I melted a Hershey's bar. The directions for melting were pretty good actually. After melting, I was to cut a tiny corner of the plastic bag to turn it into a piping bag. Unfortunately, I cut the hole a little too large so the first couple cookies have overly thick piped chocolate on them.  Then I decided to cut the other corner of the bag to make thinner lines of chocolate.  Yay! That worked well. Of course, I ended up with hands covered in melted chocolate again as usual. I was then instructed to let the cookies stand until the chocolate had set.  20 minutes later the chocolate had not set but colloquium was drawing near so I tossed the cookies in the fridge to speed the process. That worked ridiculously well and was what I should have done in the first place.  Oh, and I tasted one too. Yummy. They tasted less peanut butter-y than I expected, considering all the peanut butter, but they were quite good. So here they are, my cute peanut butter candy cookies:

Oh, and by the way, this recipe ultimately never referred to any brand of anything.

Critical Reception:
The blondie brownies made their way to the statistics picnic on Saturday.  Once people discovered that it was ok to take the plastic wrap off and once people discovered that blondie brownies are not dark chocolate brown in color, nor are they chocolate chip cookies...the brownies went pretty quickly. I received a few compliments and a few "I want to try whatever you made!" so overall I put it down as a win. Considering my brownies were competing with copious amounts of food, I was just happy they got eaten at all between soccer games.