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.

Mini Maple Pancake Muffins 9/25

We were busy last week...with birthdays, dinners, and just stuff going on, then suddenly it was the end of the week and we hadn't taken the time to bake anything.  So we woke up early before our trip to New Orleans for the weekend and made these for breakfast. Plus we wanted to use this.

How cool is this little squeeze bottle cupcake/muffin filler?  We think it is pretty cool. Thanks Mom!

How can you beat buttermilk, maple syrup, and chocolate chips.  YUM!

We added the chocolate chips on the top instead of in the dough because we wanted to the squeeze bottle and the chips would fit through the nozzle.

We ended up baking them a bit longer than recommended on Bakerella's site.  We wanted to make sure they were completely cooked all the way through.  They were pretty tasty.  We had eggs too for some protein.

Lessons learned: Quick recipes make for tasty breakfast.  We'd use smaller chips next time to fit through the cupcake filler. We wanted to use what we had this time.

Birthday Baking: Us! 9/18

It's birthday time in our family. Erin's(and her twin sister Ellen's) birthday is the 20th and Sara's is the 15th. Since our birthdays are so close together and we all get along so well, we usually celebrate together. This year we celebrated on the Saturday that fell between our birthdays by hosting a movie in the back yard. We rented a screen and projector, borrowed some patio furniture, had all sorts of movie treats like candies, hot dogs, pretzels and watched "Singing in the Rain." A little over 20 friends and neighbors were there. It wouldn't be a birthday party without a cake so we made one, and 24 cupcakes, and 24 mini cupcakes. Maybe we got a little carried away.  But it is our birthday and really who doesn't want to take home a tasty treat from a party.

The best part...  You take your favorite vanilla cake recipe, our is this one, and add a row of Oreo cookies that you have run through the food processor to the desired consistency and viola Cookies and Cream Cake!

For the frosting, we used our favorite cream cheese frosting recipe.  Super easy and super yum.  One 8oz room temp cream cheese, one stick of room temp unsalted butter, 3 - 4 cups of confectioners sugar.  Again we added a row of food processed oreos for the cookies & cream taste.  This amount of frosting covered all 24 standard cupcakes and 24 minis.  We made a second batch to frost the cake.

Can't really beat Cookie and Cream Cupcakes and Cake.  Happy Birthday to us!

Lessons learned: Cookies and cream equals vanilla cake recipe and oreos.   Also, we're getting better at frosting cakes and cupcakes. Sorry there are no pics of the cupcakes but they were pretty too.

Verdure al Forno 9/10

It hasn't been the warmest of summers here in So. Cal, so home gardens haven't been doing too well but someone we know still managed to grow this huge zucchini.

Look, it is bigger than Genoa Puppy!

Zucchini is a vegetable that is pretty near and dear to our hearts.  Our Grandpa was a very successful gardener, some might say too successful, because every summer when we would visit there would be lots and lots of zucchini.  So our Grandma made zucchini bread, zucchini soup, zucchini pancakes and a cheesy like lasagna(but she used zucchini instead of noodles).  When I(Sara) saw this huge zucchini I thought of that dish she would make for us.  So I looked around on the Food Network site and found this recipe from Giada De Laurentiis.  She calls it Verdure al Forno which translates into "Baked Vegetables".

This recipe calls for three different kind of white cheeses.  All yummy on their own and super good together.

Because this was a form of cooking and we weren't super strict on the measuring.  We made sure there was lots of cheese and lots of bread crumbs.

It came out really yummy and much like the recipe our Grandma made, although I think she might have used Italian Bread Crumbs, which would probably be worth a try cause that will kick up the flavors a bit.

We even had enough zucchini left over to make zucchini bread from the Cooks Illustrated recipe.  We made it with dried cranberries and nutmeg.  We highly recommend trying it.

Lessons learned: Italian bread crumbs could make it taste even better.  Big produce can be used in multiple dishes, I guess that is why we always had so many growing up.

Fruit & Nut Bars - 9/2

Sorry for the delay in posting....  We have a new family member.

Her name is Genoa.  Like the sail not the salami.  :)  Erin and her husband are sailors.

We decided to bake something on the healthy side of baking.  If there really is such a thing.  You could say that a homemade ding dong is healthier than a store bought ding dong because there are less preservatives and other stuff in them but you couldn't really say the a homemade ding dong is healthy period.
We figured less butter, eggs and sugar would constitute healthy so, we chose to make fruit and nut bars from the Joy of Baking website.  We had almost all the ingredients except for the dried apricots and the choice of figs, dates or prunes, of which we chose Dates. Erin particularly wanted to use dates because of her fond memories of the China Ranch Date Farm, which she visited over 10 years ago.  If you make it with any of the other combinations let us know how it tastes.  We also used Pecans instead of Walnuts because we had some left over from our Pecan Sandies post.

There was a good amount of chopping. The pecans had to be chopped. The apricots had to be chopped and the dates too. We aren't that great at it but anyone with limited chopping proficiency would have it done in a jiff.

Everything without the egg wash yet

The ingredients came together quite quickly.  In fact we would recommend making this if you have a bit of extra time instead of buying bars at the grocery store.  They don't use too much flour so you are mainly getting to enjoy the taste of dried fruits and nuts.

Mmmmm Fiber!

We were really happy with the way they came out. They smelled and tasted great. They were sweet without a lot of sugar, but not too sweet.  It's a perfect snack to make and keep around. According to the original recipe they can be stored for up to 10 days. Ours didn't last that long. They were eaten up by co-workers and family members long before that.

Lessons learned: We should bake more with dried fruit. It's really good and good for you.

Bonus Post: Giving Tree Cupcakes 8/28

Sara helped throw a baby shower for her best friend this past weekend. The theme was bed time stories and Sara's favorite is "The Giving Tree." We decided to make applesauce spice cupcakes that look like apples a la Martha Stewart. 

To add our own little flare, we took 5 of those cupcakes and decorated them to be the different stages depicted in the book. 

We had a lot of fun turning tootsie rolls, frosting and sprinkles into an edible version of a beloved classic.

Lessons learned: We'd use a thicker, fluffier frosting next time to make the leaves look thicker. Also, tootsie rolls don't want to stand up on their own too well. Toothpicks are necessary.