Fall Baking with Friends!

Welcome back! So sorry for the excessive delay in posting but don't worry, there has still been baking happening! As a matter of fact, this post will be a double dose of baking! As in there were two projects being baked SIMULTANEOUSLY. Wow. And lest you think that I have that much skill, let me assure you, I had help. Two of my good friends from college came to visit last weekend and on Saturday we had a slight baking and cooking frenzy. So to all those people who think I live a lonely existence with nothing but baked goods to keep me company...nah, I can't make that leap. But I had company this weekend! Yay!

Not knowing if my friends want to be referred to by name, I shall henceforth refer to them as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Those names are more giggle worthy anyway. In a celebration of Fall, we all went apple picking on Saturday morning. We were going to go to the Merrow Corn Maze as well but alas, they're closed this season. Stupid not wanting the soil to erode and ruining my fun. Anyway, in anticipation of the many apples we'd be able to pick we knew we'd obviously have to bake something with apples. Thing 1 had a lovely family recipe for Cranberry Crisp with Autumn Fruit so we decided that would be appropriate for our Fall excursion. After consulting the recipe, we decided to also pick up a couple pears at the apple picking place for the recipe.

After picking some apples we went into the store/stand/whatever place to pay for our apples (and pears) and we browsed around the shop for a bit. Behold! There we found packs of three cookie cutters each. One such pack had a leaf shaped cookie cutter and a pumpkin shaped cookie cutter. After great debate over whether that pack was superior to the pack with a turkey and a maple leaf, Thing 1 decided to get the pumpkin cookie cutter which (obviously) meant we would have to make some pumpkin shaped pumpkin cookies as well. Once we arrived at home, we googled a recipe (because apparently none of my cookbooks like pumpkin cookies) and found one for Pumpkin Spiced Cutout Cookies. Since we already had our hearts set on the Cranberry Crisp, we decided to just make both, in addition to the dinner we were already planning. I'm still surprised we had enough bowls and tools for everything we cooked.

Let the baking/cooking commence!

I'm going to try to post chronologically because everything was kinda getting cooked/baked simultaneously and it was a bit confusing. So to start out, Thing 1 and Thing 2 began with chopping some veggies for our dinner. We decided on grilled cheese with white cheddar cheese, browned (but not quite carmelized) onions, green peppers and tomato. I'm not familiar with cooking any of that stuff, being less diverse with my tastes so I started in on the baking. First order of business was to peel a bunch of apples and the pears that we got. And, wonder of wonders, I had a peeler! Who knew? So with a happy music playlist we were chopping, slicing, and peeling happily in my kitchen. Doesn't that make for a lovely picture? The apple and pear peeling went pretty well for me. I didn't even slice any of my nails with the peeler (a common Thanksgiving potato-peeling hazard) so the next step was to chop 1.5 cups of cranberries. For those of you not familiar with cranberries, they're kinda tiny. So I'm not entirely sure how I was supposed to chop them (Thing 1 suggested not chopping them at all but I will not deviate from the recipe!) but I just sliced them in half and deemed them chopped. This took a pretty significant amount of time. By now, the stuff for the grilled cheeses was just about done cooking so it was almost dinner time. I decided to just finish the first step of the recipe and add the sugar, flour, and cinnamon to the fruit. Now, Thing 1 has made this recipe before so when she asked if I had added the 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, that should have been a good tip off that she was right and I was wrong. Instead I said, "No, the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons!" In my defense, I had just read the recipe and the wording was confusing. The directions say to add 2 tablespoons of the flour and cinnamon. I don't know why I took that to mean 2 tablespoons of cinnamon without checking the ingredient list but there you have it. So, we had extra cinnamon-y cranberry crisp and Thing 1, I apologize for thinking you were wrong. Silly me.

Here we pause to eat a delicious dinner. Yum. Thank you Things 1 and 2 for cooking me dinner in my own home.

Following our incredibly filling meal, we set to work on finishing up the Cranberry Crisp and starting on the pumpkin cookies. While I finished stirring up the fruit and sugar mixture, Thing 2 got to work on the crumb mixture to sprinkle over the fruit mixture. This involved rolled oats, brown sugar, and flour and then cutting butter into that mixture with a pastry fork, I mean, regular fork because I don't have a pastry fork. Oh, and nuts too. I almost forgot about the nuts. I can't really say much on this process because I was in no way involved in it. Which was probably good for me but bad for you, dear readers, because I bet you would've loved reading about me cutting butter into that mixture. While this was going on, Thing 1 was mixing together the dry ingredients for the pumpkin cookies. All of a sudden there were beautiful smells of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, etc. It was happy.

I transferred the fruit to the baking dish (which Thing 1 had graciously greased for me) and while I was waiting for the crumbly topping to go on top, I got to work on the wet ingredients for the cookies. I'm tellin ya, we were a well-oiled machine in the kitchen. Everybody was doing something. So I used my trusty mixer to cream the butter, add some (dark!) brown sugar, some sugar, an egg, vanilla, and of course, pumpkin. Thing 1 had finished her task by then and measured out the pumpkin for me, which included actually opening the can. Given my experiences with can openers, I felt very fortunate to have had help with the challenging tasks. The last step to preparing the dough for these cookies was to combine the spice mixture from earlier. Now you get some interesting directions, folks! I was supposed to swap out the wire whisk for the flat beater. Hahaha. Silly. Oh wait, but it has directions for if you had been using a hand mixer: You might want to mix the ingredients by hand with a wooden spoon. Well sure. Apparently I don't want to overmix at this stage. So fine, I got out a wooden spoon and mixed in the ingredients a third at a time. It wasn't so bad until the last third when the dough got pretty heavy and hard to mix. I eventually got it though. Mission accomplished. Now I just had to split the dough in half and wrap each half in plastic to chill in the fridge for about half an hour. At this point, the Cranberry Crisp was in the oven and we were left with nothing to do for half an hour.

Scrabble time!

After a rousing and challenging game of Scrabble (I should note, I bought Scrabble for $1.00 at a yard sale. Allow me to bask in that triumph for a moment.) we took the crisp out of the oven to cool and got to work rolling out the cookie dough to make delightful Fall shaped cookies. The dough gets really sticky once it starts to get even a little warm, which I learned the first time I rolled out the dough because I a) didn't use quite enough flour and b) didn't roll quite quickly enough. Lesson learned though: Thing 1 rolled the dough out the rest of the time and she's a pro. Sadly, I didn't have any cute Fall colored sprinkles or anything to put on the cookies but we did find sugar "in the raw" in my cabinet which was cute to decorate some of the cookies with. We all pitched in with cutting out the cookies so we had adorable leaf shaped and pumpkin shaped cookies baking in several batches. During this time, I learned of the magic of parchment paper and how it allows you to not make a mess on your baking pan while baking. There was a moment of hesitation and debate with the parchment paper over whether or not it would catch on fire if it was hanging over the edge of the pan but we solved that by just trimming the ends of the parchment paper. Yay! Then we had to actually bake them and put the remaining dough back in the fridge. While they baked, we deviated from Scrabble and played a lovely game of Yahtzee. Halfway through Yahtzee (which, by the way, was invented on a yacht, hence the name), we paused to make another batch of cookies. After the game, we tasted our lovely Cranberry Crisp pictured below:

It was very yummy but very sweet and as I was still full from dinner, I didn't eat a whole lot of it. There won't be a critical reception section on the Cranberry Crisp because it's one of those things that's kinda messy and I really didn't want to bring it anywhere but the counter of my kitchen. Suffice it to say that the Things and I enjoyed it and I sent a good chunk of it back home with them to share with other people who hopefully also enjoyed it.

And now some cookies:

The cookies were also good. We described them as "a hearty cookie" because they are certainly hearty, if not a bit heavy. I'm not crazy about pumpkin cookies myself so I had a small taste and it was good but not something I want to eat an entire cookie of. These cookies will definitely end up being shared with the stat dept though. They're currently sitting in my office so my office now smells of pumpkin, nutmeg, and delicious. Thanks again to the guest stars of this blog post and for bringing me back up after my miserable brownie cups from the previous week.

Critical Reception:
Oh yeah, speaking of those brownie cups... I still maintain that they weren't good. I brought them in to the tutoring center on the day of my midterm to share with people. Ok, fine, it's more like I just dumped them there and went to take my test. I had one person tell me that they were good but it's possible that she was just being nice. However, maybe I just think that because that's what I would say in that situation. Then again, maybe I'm being overly critical of the brownie cups. I mean, they weren't terrific but it was far from the worst thing I've ever tasted in my life. Maybe my bar is just too high. Indecision! So, the jury is still out on the brownie cups because I don't know what anyone else thought...when I got back after my exam, the bag of brownie cups had mysteriously disappeared! I guess I should take that as a good sign?

A Disney Moment: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
And now your Disney moment. The first film in the Disney animated classic canon is, of course, Snow White. A timeless film from 1933 that I have not seen in at least 10 years I'd say. I was first struck by the fact that the animation is just lovely. There's just such charm to it. And the wobbly quality of the old VHS really helps. Aside: this film watching project was delayed for several weeks because somehow my family's copy of Snow White has been lost to time. On the bright side, once I got back to CT I went to the Goodwill store and found an old VHS copy for $1.00. Cheaper than renting from Redbox, folks. I highly recommend getting a VCR for 5 bucks and then frequenting your neighborhood thrift store or Goodwill store or yard sales looking for movies because it's way cheap and there's a lot of selection. Aside over.

Early in watching this movie with my mom and my sister, my mom made the comment that Snow White is a simple girl. She meant that in the non-complimentary sense. However, if you view the movie through that lens, everything makes a lot more sense. Particularly when I was getting so annoyed that every single freakin dwarf warns Snow White against strangers and then she lets the witch in anyway (except Dopey. Because he's mute.) Other thoughts include: how rude Snow White is to just instantly ditch the dwarfs who kept vigil at her coffin for the prince who she's met once before, why is the prince's castle in a cloud?, Snow White's voice is still absurdly high pitched and fake sounding, and this movie is still pretty terrifying. Between the running through the woods scene and the witch brewing the apple and the transformation potion (and the creepy skeleton in her basement, who I half believe is the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White), and finally, the two vultures circling overhead being just enough to imply that the witch is surely dead, it's a pretty scary movie. Overall, still a classic and out of the first 5 Disney films, I rank it about a 2 or a 3.

Can I Call in a Substitute?

Well hello, loyal readers! There has been a delay in baking activity lately and I would love to say that it was because I was working hard academically but actually, it's because I went home for the weekend and watched a lot of movies instead. More on that in a bit. So, as I've been up since 5 am and didn't want to go to the store, I again picked a recipe that only used ingredients I have in my house. Or so I thought. Tonight's adventure is Mini Brownie Cups from the Bake Sale cookbook (the pictures really do heavily influence the decision) and it also includes a recipe for a Mocha Glaze. I've been wanting to do something besides cookies so I was leaning towards cupcakes. These aren't exactly cupcakes and are more like brownies in mini muffin cups but it'll do.

Lucky for me, the last time I went shopping for cooking tools, they had mini muffin pans on sale for like $2.99. Obviously I couldn't pass such a good deal up. So I have a mini muffin pan and I have mini muffin paper cups that my mommy got me and they have polka dots and stripes and they're cute. Looks like I'm all set! Oh wait. The first ingredient here is 1/4 cup "light corn oil spread". Hmm. I guess I didn't read the original recipe quite carefully enough when I decided that I had everything to make these. The reason I know I don't have light corn oil spread is because I don't know what that is. Google to the rescue! Sort of. And yes, I googled "What is light corn oil spread?" After actually going through several web pages, I found out that it's basically margarine. Which I don't have. I then spent like, 20 minutes searching online for a light corn oil spread substitute. I found one person on one web page that was like "whatever, just use butter". That didn't give me a lot of confidence so I pulled out the good ol' Joy of Cooking and looked in the "Know Your Ingredients" section. Didn't find anything so I flipped through about a hundred pages in the baking section of the cookbook. Nothing. So I gave up and substituted butter and if these taste like crap, that'll be why.

Since I'm making mini brownie cups, I finally got to use the small bowl of my mixer. I was pretty excited about that because I'm sick of cleaning the big bowl. If someone wants to offer to come over and clean all of my bowls after I bake, I'd happily accept. The first thing to do was "in a saucepan over low heat, melt corn oil spread". Hahaha. Well, I'm already substituting butter, so I'll just substitute a stove and a saucepan with a bowl and a microwave, k? Beautiful. So I melted half a stick of butter. I've been melting butter since I was old enough to make popcorn by myself so I'm an old pro at it. Next, I had to beat two egg whites and one egg. I actually really enjoy separating egg whites from the yolks. Some people need tools to accomplish this (yes, they do sell an egg separating tool that looks kinda like a spiral funnel) but I separate the old-fashioned way, passing the yolk from one half of the egg shell to the other until all the whites have separated out, just like my daddy taught me. I smoothly separated the eggs and beat until "foamy" as the recipe directed. Then I beat in some sugar and mixed in the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt.

Mixing in the flour and other dry stuff was kinda funny. When I started the mixer, a small cloud of powdery ingredients flew up out of the mixer. Yay! It wasn't too terrible though and then the problem was fully solved once the ingredients got a little blended. Then I mixed in the corn oil spread butter and voila! All done! Pretty easy recipe really. All that was left was to fill the muffin cups 2/3 full with the batter. The batter was a little thick and kinda sticky so it didn't like being transferred to the muffin cups. As a result, my hands were once again covered in chocolate (well, cocoa batter but still). Also, I'm a bad judge of volume so for me to decide where 2/3 full is in a mini muffin cup is completely absurd. I did the best I could though.

The supposed yield for this recipe was 24 mini brownie cups. I made 34. Whatever. During the baking time for the first batch, I mixed together the dry ingredients for the Mocha Glaze. Allow me to explain. As if mini brownies in polka dotted paper cups weren't cute enough, I am supposed to drizzle Mocha Glaze over these brownies in an adorable fashion. My intuition says that this will be more difficult than it looks. Regardless, I decided to wait to make the glaze until after all the brownies were baked to give them adequate time to cool. Fun fact: after the first batch of brownie cups were done, I had to transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling (and to free up the pan for the 2nd batch) and I was almost really stupid. My hand was about 8/9 of the distance to the pan before I realized that I shouldn't stick my hand on a hot pan to remove hot brownie cups. I may be more tired than I thought. Possibly instead of just substitute ingredients I could've used a substitute baker. Regardless, after staring at the hot pan like an idiot for approximately a full minute and rejecting several absurd methods of removing the brownie cups, I decided on just using a fork to fish them out. It worked and I didn't burn myself. I have a pretty low bar for success tonight.

And now the glaze. Umm, WTF Mr. Mocha Glaze? Mocha glaze was a huge disappointment. All it is is cocoa, powdered sugar, hot water, instant coffee and vanilla. How hard could that be? And I swear I didn't screw this up. I triple checked the recipe. Anyway, the glaze turned out a lot thinner than I expected. Then I was supposed to "drizzle" the glaze decoratively on the mini brownie cups. In the picture it looks more like piped icing than the gloppy mess I ended up with. I wasn't really sure of the best drizzle method but I just used a spoon because it was so thin to begin with. I kid you not, the glaze ROLLED OFF the brownies. Rolled off. I don't even know what else to say about it. It was like raindrops rolling down a window pane and I was powerless to stop it. So, instead of the cute drizzle stripes I was planning, they're more like ugly drizzle splotches that just rolled to the edge and then soaked into the brownies. Hmm. I swear I didn't make a mistake in the recipe. What a mess. Blah. Here's what they look like in the end:

As far as taste goes, they're terrible. The brownies are extremely dense, the mocha glaze is bitter, and it's a lot of awful in one place. I'm really tempted to throw them all out. Maybe I'll bring them to school Thursday with a note that says "Eat At Your Own Risk" and then run and hide. Nightmare. Sorry folks, I guess this was the first dramatic baking fail.

Critical Reception:
The pinwheel icebox cookies were a hit. I thought they were only ok but people liked them. The colloquium speaker even deemed them "outstanding" which I think is an exaggeration (especially since he's Italian and is probably used to way better cookies) but it was a nice compliment either way. All 40 cookies were gone within an hour which was good for me because I didn't really want them. Yayness!

A Disney Moment:
This is the latest feature of my blog which is completely irrelevant to baking or statistics. In anticipation of my upcoming trip to Disney World ::cough (in May) cough:: I decided to watch all of the Disney animated features in order. Why, you ask? Because I felt like it. And there's no better reason than that. Now, I'm no movie critic but I'll share my insights into these films which will sometimes not extend beyond "I don't like this one and I don't feel I need to provide a reason". This past weekend I watched the first five Disney animated feature films with my sister (Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi) and I am stalled on the next six because I don't have them yet. This post has gotten somewhat long though (plus I'm depressed about the fail brownies) so I'll wait to talk about Snow White until next time. I'll leave you with this thought though: it is a beautifully nostalgic feeling to see the old Walt Disney Classics logo and the bright red FBI warning on the old VHS copies of classic Disney films.

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...

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.

How to Make Cheesecake Without a Springform Pan

[Edit: This has been my most popular blog post due to what I presume is people googling "How to make cheesecake without a springform pan". If that is how you got here, welcome. While I don't know of any way to make a round cheesecake without a springform pan, I do know how to make Chocolate Cheesecake Triangles which are pretty delicious and I imagine could be made without the chocolate. I talk about them below with a few tips for baking them but the recipe can be found here. If this link was helpful to you, I only ask that you pick another of my posts and read it and decide if this blog is worth your time. Thanks and happy baking!]

Hello all! For this week's project, I decided to deviate a bit from the cookies. I've been craving some cheesecake lately but alas, I have no springform pan. Plus it's harder to bring a cheesecake into the office to share with people. Then I'd have to worry about plates and utensils and that's currently beyond the scope of things I care about. Fortunately for me, the Bake Sale cookbook came through for me. In the bar cookie section (yes, that is a specific section) I found "Swirl of Chocolate Cheesecake Triangles" which was exactly perfect.

So, naturally, after choosing this recipe I had to head over to my friendly neighborhood Big Y to pick up some things, namely, graham crackers, cream cheese, and evaporated milk (the recipe called for the brand name Carnation but I bought the cheap Big Y brand). By the way, does anyone else find evaporated milk kind of odd? It kinda creeps me out that all you have to do is add water and then it's supposedly the equivalent of fresh milk. Weird. Anyway, while I was picking up the creepy milk, a box next to it caught my eye. This magical box read: "Graham Cracker Crumbs".  Yes, they actually sell graham cracker crumbs for budding bakers like myself. So, I was immediately faced with a decision to make. Should I do things the old fashioned way and crush up 2 cups of graham cracker crumbs? Or should I pay a slightly higher unit price and save myself the time? While trying to decide, I was reminded of the last time I made cheesecake. In that instance, the person designated to crush the graham crackers took approximately 45 minutes to do so. While I certainly would have gotten it done faster than that, I decided that the time and effort saved would be better spent working on my probability homework. So I took the easy way out and went off to the kitchen.

The first step was to make the graham cracker crust. I know from experience that this is super easy so I felt good about that. I melted some butter and mixed it up with the graham cracker crumbs and sugar and it was a piece of (cheese)cake. The next direction was to press the crust into the bottom of a 13x9 inch baking pan. Who's betting at this moment that I don't have one of those? Well, you'd be WRONG! I have one rectangle baking pan and it is exactly 13x9! How exciting! This recipe seems to be going flawlessly for me.

Spoke too soon. The filling was easy, just combining cream cheese, sugar, flour, evaporated milk, eggs, and vanilla. On a related note, I hit a milestone in my baking. I finally finished my first bottle of vanilla extract! I feel like that means I actually have accumulated some experience by now. Speaking of experience, you know how I have to melt chocolate for pretty much every recipe I bake? Well, I should have used my experience in that area and deviated from the recipe. The recipe told me to microwave the Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels (Hey, a brand name I did use!) and it gave me specific microwaving directions. I followed them and ended up with a lumpy, congealed mass of chocolate in my bowl. After trying unsuccessfully to melt the chocolate further, I threw my hands up and used the tried and true bowl of hot water technique. In a couple of minutes, I successfully melted my chocolate and vowed not to microwave chocolate anymore. Oh, and lest you think something went smoothly, in the process of stirring my chocolate, I managed to splash extremely hot water all over my shirt. Yay.

So, the swirl of chocolate aspect comes into this recipe in this way: I was supposed to combine one cup of the cream cheese mixture with the chocolate, pour the remaining cream cheese mixture into the pan, pour the chocolate/cream cheese mixture on top, and then use a spoon to pull the plain cream cheese mixture over the chocolate mixture. Whew. It seemed needlessly complicated but I guess I did get a nice marble-y swirl. And now, into the oven for 45 minutes. I used the baking and cooling time to watch a couple of episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. Yep, I unashamedly watch bad tv.

One note on the baking: by the time I pulled the pan out of the oven it had risen to slightly above the rim of the pan. But by the time I went back to it after the cooling time, imagine my surprise when I found it had all sunk down back to the original level! Regardless, it still smells delicious. Unfortunately, I have to wait a bit for the cheesecake to chill in the fridge before I can eat it.

::twiddles thumbs::

Yay, they're chilled! Cutting these was a bit of a challenge. Not because they were hard to cut but because the triangles were really big and for some reason the graham cracker crust was really really crumbly. I'm not sure why that is but the crust definitely leaves something to be desired. As far as look goes, you be the judge:

I think they look cute. As far as taste goes, the graham cracker crust is a bit too dry and crumbly for my taste so maybe the graham cracker to butter ratio was off (though I swear I followed the recipe!) and it's actually a bit too chocolatey for me. I guess I'm more of a cheesecake purist and like it the plain way. Also, due to the crumbly crust, this is best eaten with a fork. That should get interesting when I bring these to colloquium.

Critical Reception:


Well, the peanut butter cup cookies were here one second and gone the next. I put them out at colloquium and many of them were gone before I even showed up to get my cup of tea. Overall positive reviews though. One ambiguous review: one person (that I know of) did not realize that they were eating peanut butter cookies. After reading the blog entry, this person wanted to try one, not realizing that he/she had eaten a couple of the cookies two days earlier. Maybe I should start labeling what I put out?

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.

Honey Badger Don't Care

Ooooooh! Two blog posts in one week! Exciting, right? The double dose of baking this week is brought to you by the Statistics Department Fall Picnic (and viewers like you). When carefully pondering what delicious goodies I would bring to the picnic I flipped through my cookbooks and considered several factors including nut allergies, non-meltyness, and oh! Blondie brownies! Sounds good to me! (And yes, I did stop flipping the moment I found something reasonable.)  This recipe is from the same cookbook that brought us Cookie Dough Truffles.

The recipe is officially titled "Blondies with Chips" for anyone wanting me to be precise.  The first thing I noticed was that the recipe called for an 8x8 baking dish.  Obviously, if history tells us anything, I don't have one of those.  Then I caught myself and I was like, "8x8? How many brownies is this recipe supposed to make?" Answer: 1 dozen.  That didn't really seem like the appropriate amount to bring to a picnic that was sure to have at least 20 people. So the easy solution to the lack of an 8x8 pan was to double the recipe.  Then I started doing the math to see what size dish I would need (I have what I deem small, medium, and large rectangle dishes and I am too lazy to look up the exact sizes for you readers).  So an 8x8 would make 64 square inches of brownies so then double that...you know what? Medium sized looks about right! For all of you about to say "but you're a stat person! You were a math major!" you should know that I don't do mental math and I avoid doing math at all after 6 pm.  It was already 9 pm when I started the baking.  Nuff said.

So, the reason I was baking this late at night was because I had class till 5 pm and then I hit mad traffic leaving campus because of the UConn football game and stupid teenage drivers who can't drive.  I also had to stop at my friendly neighborhood Big Y to buy some ingredients.  The first thing on my list was whole wheat flour. Oooooh.  According to the recipe, the consumers of these brownies will "never suspect that one of the ingredients is whole wheat flour"! I strongly considered not buying it at all if people weren't going to notice but the small package was only 2 bucks so I deemed it worthwhile.  Next on the list was canola oil which I was surprised to realize I didn't already have.  Then, honey.  I have always wanted a good excuse to buy that little bear shaped container of honey.  I didn't previously have an excuse because I do not use honey in any way, shape, or form normally.  And before people start claiming that honey is God's gift to tea-drinkers, let me just say that I love tea but adding honey makes it way too sweet.  Tangent over. So I bought the little bear shaped container of honey and it made me smile.  I also had to pick up some chocolate chips because apparently I use them every time I bake.  I really need to start buying them in bulk.

And now we come to the baking itself.  Combining the dry ingredients was easy as I am now an old pro at that.  Then I had to whisk the eggs, oil, honey and vanilla.  Let me tell you, honey is kinda a pain in the ass.  That little bear is really hard to squeeze and the honey comes out sooooo slowly.  Then it pours out of the tablespoon sooooooo slowly.  And I had to use 4 tablespoons.  I seem to recall a trick that's either for honey or cream cheese and involves either plastic wrap or wax paper but I couldn't really remember so I took the slow approach.  Then I had to actually whisk the ingredients together which was kinda annoying at first because honey is awfully thick and didn't seem to want to combine with the oil but then I took to whisking just like my daddy taught me and voila! Nice evenly combined wet ingredients.

After that, I had to stir in the dry ingredients "just until combined" and then the chocolate chips.  The recipe warned me that the batter will be thick. They weren't kidding. That honey really thickened things up because I could barely stir it as all the batter congealed into one sticky ball in the center of the bowl.

We interrupt this blog post for a brief movie review.  Halfway through writing this, I took a break to go see Lion King 3D.  Now, let me say, I hate 3D.  I generally think it's pointless and expensive and when it's done poorly it gives me a headache.  However, I was told that the 3D would be worth it and I went in with an open mind.  Wow. The Lion King rocked my socks when I saw it in theaters in 1994 and it was even better now.  I got chills hearing the first note of "Circle of Life" and I was completely engrossed in the film the entire time.  Which is pretty impressive for a film I can pretty much recite verbatim.  And the 3D...wow. To say that this was a work of art would be an understatement and would insult the film in its original form which was already a work of art.  But the 3D actually took the film to another level and was beautifully done. So to me, this was $12 well spent on a movie that gave me newfound respect for Disney 3D.  Amazing. Go see Lion King 3D. End of aside.

Now where was I? Ah, complaining about how annoying honey is.  Ok so the last step before baking was to, of course, put the batter into the baking dish.  This was a slow process that I will again attribute to the honey. Plus, it just looked like too little batter for the dish.  I managed to spread it out to at least cover the pan but it looked like I was going to be having some pretty thin brownies.  After baking and letting the brownies cool, I carved them up and decoratively piled them on a paper plate to bring to the picnic:

I also tasted one.  So delicious.  Sweet, but not overpoweringly sweet and the only thing I would change might be to use slightly fewer chocolate chips.  They were pretty amazing though. I had another two at the picnic. Overall, success. Honey won't defeat me.

Critical Reception:
Those absolutely deep dark chocolate fudge cookies went over like gangbusters.  People love them and think they're delicious and keep comin' back for more of them.  There are a few left and they're the current emergency "Oh my God, I don't think I can grade any more of these damn Minitabs" snack in my office.  They were pretty easy to make too so maybe I'll make some more at a later date to send to people who are farther away from me. =)