Stained Glass Christmas Cookies - 11/30

I(Sara) is self confessed Martha Stewart lover.  I have her Cookies and Cupcakes Books.  Since I received the Cookie one, I fell in love with the Stained Glass Cookies.

What is best about this is that you can use any sugar cookie recipe, but if you want here is hers.  Just use your favorite cookie cutters and cut out a window for the crushed candies to melt in while being baked. 

We used a square cookie cutter that we had from our Valentine's Day Cookies and some smaller Christmas cookie cutters that fit inside.  We had a stocking, a tree and two slightly different stars.

We used Jolly Ranchers to break up.  They melt smoothly and easily. We knew this from our childhood days of melting the Jolly Rancher sticks and wrapping them around a blow pop. Good stuff! We had cherry for red, blue raspberry for blue, and apple for green.
Our Dad said the red would have been better if it were cinnamon candy. We agreed then he put one red speck of candy at the top of the green Christmas tree. Guess we should have had yellow too...

 

In our book it said to only put the candies in the middle of the space but it works much better if you fill up the whole section.  That way it spreads out evenly and you don't have to fight the candy to get it spread out.

They came out really cute and tasty too. The candy was just thin enough to be able to bite into without a struggle. Perfect!

Lessons learned:  Sugar cookies are always good and they go well with the fruity flavors of Jolly Ranchers.  Will definitely have to apply the window effect to our gingerbread challenge.

Ice Box Cookies - 10/20

**We're sorry that we haven't kept up with our posting. October gets to be a busy time of year for us. We've been hanging out with these guys:

More on that below.


When we were growing up, we used to have ice box cookies from our local bakery all the time.  The best part about them was how colorful they were.  Since we started this baking odyssey, I(Sara) have been looking for some recipe that was similar to those cookies.  I found one on Martha's site.  I know, I know, we are very pro Martha.  It is only because she seems to have a great team of people thoroughly testing her recipes and the end product is always pretty tasty.

When I read this recipe, especially since it says to involve your kids, I thought it can't be that hard can it?  We don't have a bench scrapper and for some reason the dough came out really sticky no matter how much flour we used.  So I attempted to stack my lopsided squares of dough to make the spirals of chocolate and orange.

I left the rolled dough in the fridge overnight and used the thread cutting method.  It worked really well.  I think this would have been an useful step for when I made the earl grey cookies for the third quarterly challenge, then my cookies would have been perfectly round.

 The cookies took the whole 15 minutes to bake.  I thought the dough tasted a lot better than the finished product but they sure looked pretty festive.  I brought them to the train park where Erin and I are volunteering and there weren't many left at the end of the night.  By the way...  If you are in the Los Angeles Area, come check out The Ghost Train.  The info is here.  They put on a great event every year and it is a fun, inexpensive way to celebrate Halloween.

Lessons learned: Martha may not always be right but I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.  String or dental floss is a great way to cut ice box/shortbread cookies.  Even if the recipe says have your kids help, it doesn't necessarily mean it's an easy recipe.

Third Quarterly Challenge - Cookies - 10/10

C is for Cookie and that is good enough for me. 

This challenge we decided to make cookies since it is national cookie month and it's Erin favorite thing to make.

Sara made a Earl Grey Shortbread Cookie.  She used the Martha Stewart recipe from her Cookie Book.  Here is a link.  Sara's favorite tea is Earl Grey and her favorite cookie is Shortbread, so this was a definite winner for her.

Erin's husband loves Chocolate Chip Cookies however this summer he discovered Oatmeal Apricot Cookies at a camping trip and proceeded to eat more than his share of the batch.  So, he wanted Erin to make some.  She found her recipe here which also happened to be Martha Stewart.

It was a tight race but the winner, as chosen by our friends and family of taste testers was Chocolate.  Sarah Bernhardt Cookies to be exact.  We assume they are named this because of the dramatic presentation but who knows, ask Martha cause this is again her recipe.  I guess we should have named this the Martha Stewart Cookie Challenge.

These cookies take a lot of steps to make them.  In fact we made them over the course of an afternoon and a morning, since there is lots of chilling involved.

First you make the Macaroon dough and then pipe them on the pan.  We used a zip lock bag since we didn't have the tip that Martha suggests. We felt that it worked great. After baking these, we had to taste them as pre protocol and Mom helped out with that. Here response was "Mmmm! That's what I'm talkin' about!" She loves almond macaroons and these cookies were destined for success.

Next make the filling and let it chill to truffle like consistency.  The trick here, which we didn't do, is to put the filling in the bag in small batches so that you won't warm it up too much with your hand.  Once the filling has been piped, the cookies go into the freezer for chilling.

After that chilling, chocolate and vegetable shorting are melted to create the shell for the cookies.

Like we said, lots of steps but this makes for a very chocolaty yummy cookie.  Thank you to all of our taste testers that came to sample and give their opinions.  We are looking forward to our next challenge...hummm what to bake??

Lessons learned: Chocolate and shortening make a great chocolate shell.  We could have used this knowledge a couple of weeks ago for our ding dongs.  Chocolate always seems to win though the other 2 cookies will become staples as they were very delicious and not as hard to make.

Chocolate Cookie Sandwiches 10/2

Sandwiches are beautiful.

Sandwiches are fine.

I like Sandwiches, I eat them all the time.

I eat them for my supper and I eat them for my lunch.

If i had a hundred sandwiches, I'd eat them all at once.

The lyrics for the classic children's song ring true for us this week, or me anyway. This is Erin. Sara has gone off on a quest for softball glory and is at a tournament in Tucson. So, I like peanut butter sandwiches. It's a great stand-by when you're hungry and it's even better when you do what I did and put peanut butter frosting in the middle of 2 chocolate cake type cookies, mmmm sweetness! I was in the mood for cookies since they are my favorite thing to bake and I was warming up for our Third Quarterly Challenge coming up: Cookies!!

I found this recipe in the Williams-Sonoma cookbook. I picked this recipe thinking it would be like the ginger snaps we made early in the year and the recipe would be online...no such luck. So, I can't link to it but I'll tell you all about it.

Like many good cookies, this one starts with lots of butter. Unlike many good bakers, I started out with bad butter. I had it out to get to room temperature and then I began to cream it with the sugar and felt that something wasn't right, or smelled it rather. I don't know if I can say that butter has a smell, maybe a bit sweet smelling but it definitely doesn't smell like cheese which was what I was getting. This wasn't good. I usually think "oh it'll be alright" and just continue but this definitely wasn't salvagable. I scrapped the butter and started again. The problem I had was that I didn't have time for it to warm up so I did a sped it up a little. I cut the butter into small pieces and placed them onto a plate. This is a pretty fast warm up but I nuked it for 5 seconds just to be sure. Success!

All the ingredients came together and made a pretty cakey cookie dough but I didn't come up with the recipe. What do I know? I could understand why the next step was to refrigerate the dough so I did it.

The next part didn't make a whole lot of sense. It called for taking the dough and rolling it into 1" balls using moistened hands. Wetting my hands did not help. The dough was very sticky and hard to work with.

 Then the recipe called for flattening the dough balls on the baking sheet with a cup with cocoa powder on it or a spatula. This was also difficult as the dough just wanted to stick to anything it touched and flattening didn't really occur.

Then as you can see, the cookies came out way too big. I was imagining that they would be smalled sandwiches and wasn't happy with this crowding so I cam up with my own solution. I was also surpised to see that the flattening step was completely unneccesary. The dough kind of melts into a pool and then bakes up into a cookie. I would have expected this cooks.com but you, Williams-Sonoma? I'm disappointed.

I used a teaspoon to measure out the dough. Got about a half a spoon measurement and just pushed it onto the pan with my finger. Minimal touching was the key.

See, much smaller cookies. No worries about crowding here.

Cookie puddles!

Peanut butter frosting for the middle!

And there's the finished product. This is a pic of the bigger ones. They were a hit. If I make them again though, I will be modifying the recipe for maybe a less cakey cookie/less sticky dough. I'll post the recipe here if I do it.

Lessons learned: Start with fresh butter. Also, don't be afraid to stray from a recipe even if it is published in a well respected book.

Pecan Sandies 8/5

When I(Sara) think of summer, I think of sand and the beach.  I thought we should make something resembling that and Pecan Sandies, because they have sand in their name I guess, popped into my head.  I remember eating the Keebler Pecan Sandies growing up.

So we googled away and found various recipes for "Pecan Sandies."  Most of these recipes are short bread based(including the Keebler one), which requires anywhere from an half an hour to three hours of dough chilling time.  Since this time we were baking on a school night, we didn't have that kind of chilling time.  We found a recipe on Martha's website for a quick batch of Pecan Sandies.

With only 6 ingredients, this recipe came together really quickly.  I kept thinking "are we getting better at baking or is this just a really easy recipe?"  I think it is a bit of both.  I did realize that "coarsely chopped" means a once through with the knife rather than what is pictured above.

One of the best parts about this batter is, there is no egg in it and that means you can eat away!  I don't think there is much that tastes much better than flour, sugar, butter and vanilla. 

Once the dough is rolled into balls, you squish them.  I think that ours were a bit on the large size so we didn't end up with 18 cookies as the recipe says.  However, they were tasty.  Our dad reviewed them as "Not Bad" and had a hard time coming up with an improvement other than "they could use a bit more salt."

Although these didn't quite taste like the Keebler ones that we remember, this was a really simple and quick recipe that is worth making.  I think we might have to take the time to make the shortbread ones one of these days. 

Lessons learned: Homemade baking from scratch is always worth it. This is a good cookie base.  Maybe next time we try with some other ingredients, butterscotch perhaps?  Chop the pecans bigger.

Chocolate Chip Cookies 5/22

This weekend is Erin's Husband's Birthday. He LOVES chocolate chip cookies. When preparing for the wedding there was a brief discussion about wedding cake then it was decided that there would be no cake, Tim only wanted chocolate chip cookies. 
This week, we decided to figure out the best chocolate chip cookie. Most of the research has already been done in that since Tim loves these cookies so much we've made quite a few. A basic, tried and true stand-by is the Good Ol' Nestle Toll House recipe. Its hard to find something wrong with this recipe, to make an improvement, but people try, well respected people like Martha Stewart, Cooks Illustrated, um...us. Ok, so it's back to Sesame Street and "one of these things is not like the others" but I digress.

We've made the "Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipe from Cook's Illustrated before. The dough is quite flavorful but when Tim is looking for a cookie, he wants it all chewy, not crunchy (the Cook's recipe is a combo). He also is not big fan of the fancier chocolates that Cook's recommends. He says he still votes for the Toll House recipe.  He prefers the sweetness we guess so we modified (simplified) the Cook's recipe to find Tim's favorite cookie. We made 2 different recipes; the favored toll house and ours.
We started with the Toll House recipe. We made it as instructed. It's supposed to yield 5 dozen cookies! I don't think we've ever ended up with 60 cookies but we followed it as directed at least for the first batch. It calls for 1 rounded tablespoon of dough. 

Now, that's not very much and we wanted bigger chewier cookies. We about doubled the size of the dough balls and were happy with that. Anyone who's made cookies before knows the risk in this practice; siamese cookies. Luckily, we happen to be excellent cookie surgeons or tearer-aparters... 

Our recipe follows the Cook's recipe except for when it comes to complicating the cookie. We browned 10 tablespoons of butter and mixed in the rest to add some flavor to the dough.

 Cook's adds a step here to make the cookie crunchier and add a toffee flavor. We wanted a chewy cookie so we skipped it. There's also a 60% Dark Brown sugar to 40% White granulated sugar ratio instead of equal parts like the Toll House recipe. Again, this adds flavor. Instead of Ghirardelli, which we've used in the past, we went with the same Toll House morsels. Tim just likes the taste better. We can't help what he likes. He does eat a wide range of delicious and fancy to generic foods, from Filet Mignon to Hot Dogs. This just happens to be more on the Hot Dog end of the scale.

These cookies are bigger. 3 tablespoons instead of 1.

We think that they look prettier too.

In a side by side comparison, we like our modified Cook's Cookie better. The dough was nuttier and more flavorful. The bite was more appealing than the thin Toll House cookie. We also liked that the chocolate chip to dough ratio was higher.

In the end though it was up to Tim. Which cookie did he like best? The Nestle Toll House one.  Grr!

Lessons learned: Make them more often. Tim will be happy with any homemade chocolate chip cookie. Literally, he is happy when he has one.  Happy Birthday Tim!

UPDATE:

The Toll House recipe is easy to find but here it is:

2 1/4 Cups All purpose flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1 tspn vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups (12 oz pkg) Nestle Toll House Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels

We skipped the cup of chopped nuts.

Preheat oven to 375

Combine flour, baking soda, and salt

Beat butter, sugars, and vanilla till creamy then add eggs

Slowly add flour mixture till just combined, then add the morsels

Drop rounded tablespoon (or in our case, closer to 2 tablespoons) on baking sheets

Bake for 9-11 minutes.

We're sorry to report that the other recipe is property of Cook's Illustrated though we adapted it a little. We assume that posting it here would be in violation of their Use poilcy. We can say that their online service is incredibly thorough and helpful in learning to cook or bake and is great for coming up with ideas. They offer a 14 day Free trial and their service is $34.95/year. Their recipe is called "The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie" and has loads of info about why they chose each ingredient, quantity, and process. There's no limit to what one can learn from them. We should point out that they are the same people who make the America's Test Kitchen TV show and cookbook that we LOVE.

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day seemed like the perfect reason to bake something and Sara thought of the perfect thing: Sugar Cookies. We haven't made them much before but the decorating possibilities are endless. For the sometimes baker, there's a great website called Fancy Flours where you can buy some great wafer paper decorations. This avoids having to buy one of those printers that uses edible ink. We ordered our supplies and away we went.
We planned on having our cookies ready for distribution at work before Valentine's day. We started on Wednesday night making the cookies.

Turns out, even with our baking party of four people, it took a lot of time and we had to call it quits around 10pm. It became a 2 night event. We began some of the decorations on night 1 but had to finish up on night 2.

The cookies tasted great and looked great. Some people didn't want to eat them for the art of it all but we firmly believe that flavor should not suffer for looks. These cookies were no exception and we are very glad to have co-workers to share them with instead of having a gluttonous marathon of eating over 50 cookies ourselves.

Lesson learned: Allow more time to make the cookies. Elaborate decorations need more than one school night to complete.