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12.01.2008

First snow, more cookies!

You will notice that I am backlogged again. Life as a grad student is a little hectic, especially when all my exams happen at the same time. But the cookies continue to happen.

With one week left before Thanksgiving break, I decided I didn't want to go grocery shopping anymore, and chose my recipe based on what was in the cupboard. Fortunately, I had just made an interesting Greek dish with lemons, so I had lemons to zest, and sugar cookies to make (19)!

These cookies were actually very good - I didn't quite have enough lemon zest (which, as I think I've mentioned before, is just the yellow part of the peel) but the flavor came through nicely. One of the issues I usually have with sugar cookies is that they are too sweet. These cookies were sweet, but the lemon balanced them out and brightened up the day. They currently hold the #1 spot on Noah's top cookie list.


Several of my friends have remarked upon the fact that I'm pretty committed to this every week thing. The way I figure is that if I let myself have a week off, I'll take another and another until I just quit this project entirely. So in that spirit, I made sure to bake something before leaving Chambana for Fall break. Usually I try to bake something in a large enough batch to share with something like 40 people, but this time my goal was to be rid of my wares by the time I left on Sunday afternoon. Thus, I decided to make brownies (20). It turns out that, with the exception of my grandmother's buttermilk brownie recipe, this is the first time I've ever made brownies from scratch, and I was very pleased with the result. This whole melting chocolate and then mixing it into the dough is a new thing for me, but I think it's something I'll try to incorporate into other experiments in the future.

So this past weekend, after driving for hours and hours to get back to the cornfield, I thought it would be nice to do something with more chocolate in it. And so I made what the book calls crackle cookies (21). Basically, these cookies have dutch cocoa and bittersweet chocolate in them, and after mixing the dough together I separated it into balls, which I rolled in granulated sugar and then in powdered sugar. The double layer of sugar was supposed to keep the powdered sugar white and pretty. I realized as I took a batch out of the oven that my cookies matched the outdoors, as we had our first real snow yesterday. I also realized that the sugar on the bottom of the cookies melted and solidified, so the bottoms are a little crunchy, but not burnt. This recipe, I've decided, is one of my personal favorites - eating these cookies is like eating a brownie without the mess (and, of course, with the added danger of asphyxiating on powdered sugar).


In other news, while I was at home over Thanksgiving, I pulled out a recipe I'd been meaning to try and made potato cheese bread. If you like to make bread, this is something I really recommend: although it was a bit of a chore to knead the cheese into the dough, the result was totally worth it. It was also very much worth it for me because I sort of made a friend do the hard part (well, she needed to learn how to knead dough so she can make her own bread in the future).

Alright, I think that's all for now, but expect interesting things over the next month as I get out molasses and cookie cutters and suchlike ^.^

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