DONE!

I have been looking forward to (and, in a sense, putting off) this post for a long time.  Yes, it's been a while since I updated.  Two months is ridiculous.  However, I am proud to report that as of today I have finally completed this Martha Stewart cook book.

Many things have happened in the past several weeks.  Perhaps the most important event was my decision to change research groups.  Those of you who know me may be asking yourselves, "What, again?" Yes, again.  In case you didn't hear, I spent a year in a Quantum Information research group, and then switched to an Acoustics group in the Electrical Engineering department.  After nearly a year and a half in that group, I realized it wasn't working and decided to make the jump to Physics Education.  Already I am being much more productive and happy, so I think this was a really good decision.  And it probably won't actually set me behind any more than staying in the previous group would have.  Hurray for possibly someday graduating!

But I will do a proper recap post later.  I need to tell you about cookies first!

164. Biscochitos
These cookies are a Mexican recipe that involves anise seed, orange zest, and cinnamon.  The recipe as written calls for lard, but I wasn't interested in purchasing 5lbs and chose to use vegetable shortening instead.  With sufficient flour on the rolling surface, this dough was very easy to cut and transfer, and I had fun dumping cinnamon sugar on the cookies prior to putting them in the oven.
I really enjoyed these cookies - the anise flavor was strong but not overwhelming, and the texture was something between a regular sugar cookie and shortbread... it's hard to describe, but that's the result of using so much shortening.

165. Date Triangles
These cookies look pretty fancy, but I promise they weren't actually too much work.  In fact, almost all the mixing is done in a food processor, and can even be managed in a dinky 3C Cuisinart like I own.  The dough is made much like a pie crust, with butter and flour pulsed together with some orange zest and cold water; the filling is more like a larabar (if you haven't had them and you're into natural/vegan/gluten-free stuff, give them a try) with blended up dates, almonds, and orange zest.  Notice the theme here?  There was orange in everything.
So as I said, these were actually not a big deal to make, and the flavor was quite good!  The dough was hardly sweetened, so the natural sweetness of the dates came through nicely.

166. Bratseli
These cookies were also very easy to make, but they're a great example of the random expenditures I've had to make for this project.  To actually make these I had to purchase a pizzelle iron for about $30, otherwise they wouldn't be thin like that.  I had considered trying my belgian waffle maker, but I knew the effect would be all wrong.
The recipe calls for huge amounts of flour (up to 9C!), lots of butter, and an entire pint of heavy cream.  When eating these, it is easy to tell that they have a lot of fat in their composition, but this makes the texture really nice.  The experience of these cookies is something along the lines of eating slightly lemon-flavored waffle cones.  And now that I have the specialty iron, I will have to make cannolis or something to make it worth my money.

167. Classic Shortbread
Although I didn't manage to leave a chocolate chip cookie recipe for the end of this project, I still had a few simple things left over.  I've already made a few variations of shortbread, including cranberry, hazelnut orange, mocha, and maple, and this was the most basic variety: butter, flour, confectioners' sugar, and salt (not even any vanilla!).  I purchased a fluted tart pan for this recipe, and so it took nearly an hour for the 10" round of dough to cook all the way through.  The result was an addictive, buttery, crisp pan full of cookies that disappeared within minutes when I brought them to small group.  Oh, and the fluted edges looked super classy.

168. Italian Polenta Cookies
This was another lots of butter, why-am-I-making-crazy-shapes recipe.  These cookies are full of cornmeal, which gives them a crunchier texture.  Polenta is, for a basic explanation, an Italian cornmeal.  I wish I had known that the recipe actually wanted dried Polenta, because when I bought the real stuff at the store I got the pre-cooked stuff.  Oops.  When it came time to bake and I realized my mistake, I just used regular yellow cornmeal instead.
Overall, I found these cookies to be kind of bland.  They got some extra flavor from added lemon zest, but I just didn't find them to be very interesting.  This may also be due to the fact that the only shape I could get my cookie gun to make was this zig-zaggy thing you see in the picture, all the other shapes wouldn't detach properly, and with my busted pastry bag there was no way I was going to be able to pipe the fancy S shapes shown in my cookbook.  Oh well.  I'll stick to cornmeal thyme cookies if I want to do cornmeal stuff again.

169. Springerle
Springerle are a traditional European cookie that are made using some special mold to make them look pretty.  They are chock-full of confectioners' sugar, cake flour, and eggs.  So many eggs (half a dozen).  And so much flour.  I think I ended up putting more than 2lbs of flour into these.  And a little bit of anise extract for flavoring.  Since I lacked the special molds and didn't feel like ordering them off the internet, I used a neat idea I found on Pinterest and chose to make an imprint with a clean stamp I picked up on clearance from the craft store.  This technique worked really nicely, since I only had to cut the cookies into rectangles and then stamp them.
These cookies were, well, a little dry.  I guess they're supposed to be springy or something but they just seemed floury to me.  Actually, I felt like I was trying to eat those cookies that are baked to be Christmas ornaments.  According to a friend of mine, these cookies are used as decorations sometimes, so I feel like I wasn't too far off with that feeling.

170. Sesame Seed Cookies
I was skeptical of this recipe when I first looked at it.  My experience with ground up sesame seeds is tahini, and while I have a vegan cookie recipe that calls for tahini, I couldn't imagine it tasting any good with the other ingredients in this specific recipe.
There was no need for me to worry: as I worked through the recipe I realized this was basically a peanut butter cookie recipe with ground up sesame seeds instead!  Indeed, the final cookies were crunchy and tasted much like peanut butter cookies, except they tasted a little bit more like toasted sesame seeds.  My final verdict: this was a fun experimental recipe, and the main ingredient certainly got people's attention.

171. Langues-de-Chat
Okay, so these cookies were really bland.  This is another recipe with flour and sugar and butter and eggs, etc as usual.  In this recipe the proportions were such that the dough was pretty thick when mixed up, melted down in the oven, and became firm and crunchy when baked and cooled.  In a super-classy way, I used a plastic bag with the corner cut out to pipe the cookie shapes, and since I was in a hurry I chose to use regular sugar instead of superfine sugar, and didn't find any kind of detriment to the result.  Side note: if you want your sugar to dissolve into the dough, you want to use superfine sugar.  This can be made by running regular sugar through a food processor for 30 seconds, then letting it settle for maybe a minute or two.  Like I said above, I found these cookies to be really boring.  The solution to this was to dip them in Nutella.  They make great Nutella carriers.

172. Tuile Leaves
You can see from the picture that I could not figure out how to make these turn out well.  These light almond-flavored cookies are made from a very runny dough which is spread as thinly as possible over a leaf-shaped stencil, which the cookbook claims should be available in any craft store.  Well, I couldn't find any leaves, or anything of the appropriate size that was a solid shape, so I bought a blank stencil (read: piece of thin plastic) and cut my own leaf stencil.  I am not a very good artist, and it was difficult to get the batter not to run under the edges, so the picture on the left is about the best I could do.  These cookies dried to be thin and crisp, but I honestly was too embarrassed by their ugliness to share them with anybody.

173. Fortune Cookies
Yes, I made fortune cookies.  And they actually turned out pretty well!  These are made with almost exactly the same batter as the tuile leaves, including the almond flavoring.  These cookies were pretty easy to make - the batter had to be spread into circles on the cookie sheet, and then the cookies were folded up while still hot and pliable.  I had a few disasters with burnt cookies (the recipe called for a 400F oven, which killed them.  I recommend baking at 350F) and waiting too long to fold the cookies.  The biggest difficulty with these cookies is that they just take a lot of time to make: since they have to be folded quickly, I could only bake two at a time.  Now it's time for math.  Each batch of cookies spent 7 minutes in the oven, and let's (under)estimate a total of 10 minutes from putting the batter on the cookie sheets to folding the cookies and setting them aside.  With a yield of 40 cookies, this amounts to about 3.5 hours of active time.  I ended up making a dozen of these one weekend, saving the dough, and finally baking the rest today.
These cookies are tasty and fun, especially since I got the opportunity to write my own fortunes in them, but I would say don't make them unless (1) you have a big enough oven to have two cookies sheets in at a time or (2) you have a lot of time to waste.


Well, that's it.  I will probably post again soon-ish to do some kind of recap of life over the past three years or what I've learned about baking or something, but for now I am going to call it a night.  This has been a fun project, but I have no plans to start anything of this magnitude again for quite some time.

I'm expecting this fortune to be accurate.

Deep breath... and go!

This is yet another entry that's been a long time coming.  At first I had a reasonable excuse: the USB interface for my digital camera stopped working, and my hipster MacBook doesn't have anything so mainstream as a built-in SD card reader.  Then I ordered (and eventually received) an SD-to-USB adapter, and my only excuse now has been a back-to-back alternation of overwhelming busyness and lazyness.

This afternoon I find myself in the midst of one of the last lazy spells I can get away with before the fall semester really takes off.  Yes, classes began last Monday.  However, the stars have aligned for me such that my advisor is out of town, I don't teach until next Monday, and Bible studies haven't started yet.  Oh, right, and since I'm such a dinosaur graduate student (introducing myself as a fourth year makes me feel really old), taking classes is a thing of the past.

With everything set up to explode next week, now is the time to get caught up here.  So without further ado, here are several cookies summarized:

158. Almond Horns
These cookies were something like an almond shortbread, complete with the required large amounts of butter and confectioners' sugar sweetening.  Since they contain both toasted almonds and almond extract, the almond flavor is clear and bright, and fits in nicely with the crisp and crumbly shortbread texture.  The hefty 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt in this recipe counters the sweetness nicely.

Overall, these cookies were terrifically easy to prepare and very quickly eaten by my friends.  I've finally cleaned up my sugar sifting technique, too: I don't own a proper sifter, so to make these look pretty I put confectioners' sugar in a fine-mesh strainer and shook it above the cookies.

159. Pecan Logs
Without really meaning to, I ended up in a multiple-week series of recipes involving ground-up nuts.  Thank goodness for my food processor, which saves me so much time!  In this second week of nutty cookies, I switched to pecans, and made almost the exact same recipe as the first week.  Actually, looking back and comparing the recipes, one of the few differences is that this recipe called for twice the nuts, except that half of them went on the outside, so really it is not much of a change.

These cookies were, like their almond counterparts, crisp and sweet, with a good balance of salt and nut flavors.  I prefer pecans to almonds, perhaps because pecans always make me think of maple syrup, so I enjoyed this recipe more than the previous one.

160. Wholemeal-Almond Biscuits
After two weeks of nutty shortbread, I moved on to something a little more hearty, and possibly even healthy.  These flat cookies are made with ground toasted almonds and a mix of whole wheat and all-purpose flours.  The dough for these cookies was put together much like a pie crust - meaning there was cold butter and a food processor involved - although the result was not anything quite so flaky, probably because the brown sugar added some extra moisture.

When I started working on this recipe, I was really afraid these cookies would be bland and, well, taste like health food.  Fortunately, the recipe also calls for just enough cinnamon to make the whole wheat taste good.  Yes, I confess that even as an adult I do not like the taste of whole wheat by itself.  But I didn't have to deal with that in these cookies.  That said, they are still a little boring to eat by themselves.

161. Cherry Tuiles
In general, I have been reluctant to make the cookies that sit in the first section of my cookbook.  This first section is where most of the fancy-pants stuff sits: this mostly consists of meringues and things that have to be rolled up while they're hot.  The recipes usually have inconvenient yields - sometimes one dozen (not enough) or six dozen (too much!) - and take a long time to make.  This recipe had the special difficulty of calling for dried cherries, which tend to be a little pricey.  This was a problem until one day when I wandered into Aldi and found a bag of dried cherries for a reasonable price.  Yay!

These cookies are a bit crazy.  They are made with lots of melted butter, brown sugar, and corn syrup, as well as a little bit of cake flour, which has no leavening agents in it.  This means that the dough really spread out when I baked it!  I measured single teaspoons onto the cookie sheet and ended up only being able to bake six cookies at a time (as a funny side note: in my first batch I tried to bake eight at once, they all melted together to form a super mega cookie that I rolled up and fed to my boyfriend).  When these cookies baked, all the sugar bubbled and boiled and became nice and caramelized, and I shaped them by rolling them around the handle of a whisk while they were still hot.

I really enjoyed the taste and texture of these cherry cookies.  For once I remembered to put them in an airtight container right away, so they remained perfectly crisp - it was like eating incredibly thin ribbon candy.  I may have underbaked some of the dough, which made it difficult to remove from the cookie sheets to shape, but most of the cookies turned out fine.  My only comment to anyone who want to try this themselves: don't be impatient about chopping the cherries.  If you make them too large (like I did), your cookies will have some weird lumps.

162. Spiced Almond Wafers
...And you thought I was done with nut cookies for now.

Actually, I feel like Almond Wafers is a bit of a misnomer.  The only almonds involved are the slices sprinkled on top of the cookies.  These are really another spice cookie, much like a combination of ginger snaps and molasses cookies.  Indeed, looking at the recipe, you'll see the typical combination of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and dark brown sugar, which is basically white sugar and molasses.  These cookies made with lots of butter, which makes them nice and crisp.

In order to make thin, uniform cookies, the recipe requires preparing the dough and pressing it into mini loaf pans.  The dough is then frozen and sliced as thinly as possible before being baked.  I liked this method, although my mini loaf pans weren't exactly rectangular, so I ended up with trapezoidal cookies instead.  Nevertheless, these were good, simple cookies, and I really liked how they stayed crunchy all week.

163. Umbrella Sugar Cookies
One of the complaints I have about this cookbook is that some of the recipes are too specialized.  The cookie-cutter recipes are especially so, with recipes calling specifically for umbrellas, or acorns, or shapes of card suits, or a Fleur-de-lis, and so on.  Since I don't own an umbrella cookie cutter (or any of those other ones), I use what I have, but I don't like when the name hinges on the shape.  So instead I present for you: Lemon Sugar Cookies!

These are a good basic cookie, quick to make and easy to make pretty.  I chose to make hearts (and some stars) because hearts are cute.  This recipe is pretty much a standard sugar cookie recipe with lemon zest added to give some extra flavor.  I really like the lemon flavor in these, it is a good summery taste.  The icing is a simple mix of confectioners' sugar, meringue powder, and water.  It dries really solidly and is easy to work with.  In fact, I spooned it into a sandwich bag and cut off the end to make the decorations.

Here's a couple quick notes on cookie cutters for anyone who is thinking about changing shapes:

• It's a good idea to use something that is similar to the recommended size in a recipe.  If you don't have anything similar (or want to use something else), you'll need to reduce your baking time for smaller cookie cutters and increase your baking time for larger ones.
• For best results, choose a cookie cutter design that doesn't involve small side details.  If you have any small pieces of dough sticking out of the side of a cookie, they are more likely to burn.  Once again, if your heart is set on one of these cookie cutters, you'll want to be careful about the time the cookies spend in the oven, or you may want to lower the temperature.

I had to watch the trunks and mouths pretty carefully so they didn't become crispy!

• Finally (and this is something that holds for any cookie baking), keep a close eye on your first batch.  Recipes give a range of times to bake because every oven is different.  For example, my oven is small and always heats up too much on the bottom when I put a cookie sheet in it, and so I have to turn the temperature down by as much as 25˚F and often also end up shortening the baking time.  It may be that your oven does something else, so use your first batch of cookies to figure out the timing and any temperature adjustments, and after that you can just set a timer and go do something else until it dings.

unflappable as a giraffe

It's nice to not be taking any classes this semester. While my younger friends, little brother, and students are stressed out with exams and final projects (and some older friends with quals and prelims!), I just float along at my regular level of sustainable chaos, fretting over research that won't quite turn out and unfortunate substitute kickboxing instructors.

With longer-lasting worries, I find that I am more likely to find joy in small things, almost as if they are a break from my concerns. Thus, riding my bike to and from campus yesterday was the most amazing twenty minutes ever. And my dinner - well, you make yourself some black beans, broccoli, and quinoa with a raspberry chipotle sauce and see if you are not the happiest camper on the block.

The cookies I've made have also made me happy, some for how they look, and some for how they taste.  Unfortunately, you only get to experience the former.

143. Mexican Wedding Cookies
I guess crunchy almond-butter cookies are not only made for Mexican weddings, but I am not responsible for their name.  As the previous sentence indicates, these cookies are made with lots of butter, and have ground toasted blanched almonds in the dough.  These cookies resemble a dry almond shortbread, and the confectioners' sugar coating makes them more pretty and just sweet enough.  Needless to say, these did not last long around my friends.

144. Chocolate Ginger Leaves and Acorns
Leaves and acorns are boring, so I decided these needed to be chocolate ginger stegosauruses instead.  These cookies have ginger (both dried and grated), molasses, and a hefty dose of cocoa in them.  They were supposed to be crunchy cookies, but I chose to underbake them a little, and they turned out to be really soft and awesome.
I know I've complained about the balance between chocolate and ginger in other cookies, but I found that the two flavors complimented each other nicely, with neither being overwhelmed by the other.  Between the flavor and the cuteness of the dinosaurs, these cookies were a big hit.

145. Orange-Cardamom Madeleines
Having already purchased a madeleine pan and needing something to make quickly, I jumped at the opportunity to make these cookies.  If you've read any previous entries, you'll know that I'm a big fan of cookies that look good without taking much effort, and madeleines fit the bill.
These madeleines are made with lots of cardamom in them, and not much else flavor-wise.  After being baked, they were covered with an orange glaze made with zest and juice.  I think I didn't make the glaze thick enough because it soaked into the cookies a little bit, but they were still really good.  These cookies were not as cake-y delightful as the lemon madeleines I made before, but I enjoyed the cardamom flavor.

snowverrated...

Okay, I admit it's cheap of me to go for a snow pun, since they are overabundant this week.  And, to be fair, the roads were pretty awful here today.  Thankfully, Champaign has a magical weather protection bubble which, although my meteorology friend complains makes things boring, means that the really bad weather skirts around us.

As far as the Midwest "Snowpocalyse" goes, this means we had a lot of sleet yesterday, but not the foot of snow that was originally predicted.  Classes were cancelled today, and even though this didn't really disrupt anything for me (I'm not taking any classes and I don't teach on Wednesdays), I am still happy to call this my first snow day since the fourth grade.  Of course, this just meant that I worked from home, until it was time to dig my car out and make Phil take a break from running experiments in the wind tunnel to have dinner with me.  He's been super busy, which has meant I've been wasting (too much) time with my newfound craft, crocheting.  I am making a blanket, perhaps I will post a picture when I am finished.

The green color depends on your matcha.
Clearly, mine isn't very green.

I've also found myself tempted to pick up another project, and this one is totally my mom's fault: she gave me a vegan cookie recipe book for my birthday, and nearly everything looks amazing.  I'm not sure if I'm ready to commit to tacking another 100 weeks onto this cookie project, but I've already flipped through and noted a few of the recipes I'd like to try, including Grapefruit Icebox Cookies and Tahini Lime Cookies.  There was one recipe, however, that caught my attention so strongly I had to try it right away, and thus I ended up making Green Tea Walnut Biscotti last weekend (recipe can be found here).  Yes, these are vegan, and even though they have no animal product in them, they taste AMAZING.  That said, I am a huge fan of matcha, or green tea powder, so if you don't like green tea you might not be so excited about these.  But if you do, I strongly recommend trying this.  Biscotti are very easy to make, although they take upwards of an hour to bake.  Also, if you're not interested in buying ground flax seeds (i.e. you don't want a vegan recipe), you can omit the flax and a couple tablespoons of water and add an egg instead.

135. Amaretti Crisps
Saturday was kind of a weird and lazy day for me, starting with a malfunction in CRCE's sound system that badly disrupted my kickboxing class, and ending with a surprise birthday cake.  And so when I picked out cookies, I picked out something that matched my level of laziness, and which only called for four ingredients.  That's right, there's almonds, almond extract, confectioners' sugar, and egg whites in these cookies, and nothing more.

These cookies are made by whipping egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then folding them into a mixture of sugar and ground almonds, then adding the extract to give more flavor.  They were supposed to be put into a pastry bag and squeezed into cute little wreath shapes, but my pastry bag is broken, so I decided to go with the tablespoon option instead.  This may have made the cookies look a little less pretty, but I don't think it was really a problem.

The result of this recipe was a light, crisp (hence the name), and strongly almond-flavored cookie.  They are super easy to make, assuming you have an electric mixer, and everyone in my research group really liked them.  I recommend this recipe as a simple, low-risk way to try sharing a new kind of cookie with people.


Alright, that's it for now.  I've got to get back to simulating pressure pulses in tubes of random shapes.  Yay Matlab!  More cookies next week, with another vegan recipe as well.

Now you can try too!

The end of this semester was a little overwhelming, and so I got behind on my posting.  I'm currently in the process of taking care of normal life-type stuff.  Taking care of my backlog is very much included, so here are posts!  You may notice that I'm putting links on the cookie names - well, these are links to the recipes!  I realized a lot of these are available online, so I'll be linking them when available.

126. Milk-Chocolate Cookies

I've never been a big fan of milk chocolate - I find it to be too sweet, and prefer the more bitter taste of dark chocolate instead.  The more expensive varieties are a little better, and so I have no qualms about buying Ghirardelli when a recipe calls for milk chocolate.

These cookies were very delicious!  There's chocolate melted into the cookie dough, as well as chocolate chunks in the cookies.  A hefty half teaspoon of salt helps to balance out the sweetness of the chocolate, and the soft texture of the cookies is nice.  If you're looking for an easy chocolate cookie, I highly recommend this cookie.

127. Iced Hermits

Since I have less than a year remaining on this project, I realized that I need to get through the Christmas-type recipes now.  As I've said before, ginger is very much a holiday ingredient, and so this recipe was a good kick-off to the season.

These cookie bars have raisins, candied and ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, molasses, pepper, and cloves in them, which means the flavor is potentially very complicated.  However, the recipe recommends waiting a day or two for these flavors to mingle properly (which sounds a lot like instructions for soup or quiche).  I waited overnight to put brown sugar icing and more candied ginger on top of these, and this was enough time for the flavors to mix.  Once again, these were very easy and well-received by my friends, and I recommend this recipe if you have candied ginger on hand.

128. Lebkuchen

These German Christmas cookies have so many ingredients in them!  I had to buy candied orange and lemon peel, almond paste, almonds, hazelnuts, apricot jam, and mace (the spice, not the spray) for these cookies, as well as using dates and various other spices I had at home.  I couldn't find whole blanched almonds at the grocery store, so I bought whole almonds and removed the skins by letting them sit in hot water for a minute and then rubbing the skins off.  These blanched almonds are in the cookie dough, and on top of the cookies, with a confectioners' sugar and milk glaze on top of them.

With 10 or so distinct flavors mixed together, it was pretty much impossible to notice each one when eating these cookies.  I usually don't like it when I can't tell flavors apart, but this mix was superb.  The cookies themselves are soft, and the glaze on top adds just a bit of crispness and sweetness, which was well appreciated at bible study this week.

Prep Work

When I was in elementary school, I never had to study for anything.  In middle school, I had my first experience where I actually had to think ahead and prepare for a test the night before.  It took me until my third year of college to learn to start my homework more than one day in advance, and until graduate school to start it once it was assigned.

Now, it wouldn't have made sense for me to memorize all the countries in Europe a week in advance in sixth grade, but as my assignments (and chores, and sewing projects, and kitchen experiments...) have become more complicated, I have realized that prep work is crucial in order to ride the wave of chaos.

Today's prep work has been for a self-caused problem - I am going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, and they're not at all equipped to deal with my mostly-vegan habits.  Thus I have been getting things together for snacks/lunch on the road tomorrow, and have started collecting simple recipes that hopefully won't scare my family off of the interesting foods I eat.

I confess that I am making something strange for my own consumption, but that is in the hopes that it will be able to fill in if I feel like a meal needs some meat texture.  I think I'll talk about that more in another post, though.

For now, I am working on catching up on my slight posting backlog.  Thus, here are the past two week's cookies:

123. Chocolate Waffles (marked as a best cookie)

Oh. My. Goodness.  It has been quite some time since a recipe from my cookbook has left me so impressed.  But this one has, and I had a hard time not eating them all up myself (which would have been a bad idea).

These cookies/waffles are super full of chocolate - they have unsweetened chocolate melted into copious amounts of butter, as well as a hefty serving of Dutch-process cocoa.  Aside from the regular other ingredients, these have half a tablespoon of cinnamon, giving them a nice Mexican Chocolate flavor.

The batter for these is cooked in a waffle maker, which means each batch (of 4) only took about 2 minutes to be done, and looked very pretty too.  Finally, the cooled cookies are dipped in a chocolate icing so that only the ridges are covered, and sprinkled with confectioners' sugar.  The result was a delicious cakey cookie, with a rich chocolate flavor.  I'm not sure if the icing added any extra flavor, but it made them look so very pretty.

These were very easy to make, but still very impressive.  They'll definitely be making a reappearance.

124. Chocolate-Almond-Marsala Cookies

I'm not exactly sure why I chose these cookies this weekend, except perhaps that they needed to be done.  These cookies are made with Marsala wine as their main liquid, and are further flavored with chocolate chips, toasted almonds, candied orange peel, and cinnamon. The mix of flavors is interesting, and was pretty good a day after I baked the cookies.  However, when I was making these I was very concerned that there wasn't enough liquid in them... adding honey as instructed provided enough liquid to make the dough stick together.  Still, I think these cookies are too dry for my preferences.  In the meanwhile, I will be making more Tofu Marsala, and trying to figure out why blogger wouldn't upload the brighter version of my cookie picture.

Aright, that's all for me, I'll maybe have adventure stories later.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

Meringue fail, again

Before I start talking about school or cookies or anything, I have to say the following:

To those of you who ride bikes:  Please wear your helmets!  One of my closest friends was hit by a car yesterday while riding his bike, and if it weren't for his helmet, his skull probably would have been just as smashed up as his shoulder and hands (which are broken).  I know protective headgear looks stupid and can be a hassle, but your brains are totally worth it!

That said, much of my energy this week has gone into caring for those close to me, and, honestly, it has been exhausting.  Phil and I spent last weekend constructing his new bed frame, friends have been traveling, other friends have been injured, yet other friends are in Qual panic... and as a result I am way behind on my own work, and on posting (which should come second, but I'm trying really hard to avoid backlogs this year).  I really hope next week will be more sane.

111. Baci di Dama

I have something to confess - I am terrible at making meringues.  This is my second attempt, and they fell just as flat as the ones I tried making last year.  Previously I hypothesized that they were underwhipped, but I'm pretty sure in both cases the meringues where overwhipped, as this batch suddenly lost all its thickness as I attacked it with my hand mixer.  Well, I guess now I know what it looks like, and have two more recipes to try and get it right.

Although they didn't look quite right, these little chocolate cookies weren't a complete failure.  The main part of these is meringue with dutched cocoa and ground up blanched almonds, and the filling is semisweet chocolate with a tiny bit of vegetable shortening.  The result was a very chocolatey, light cookie, with a bit of extra texture provided by the almonds.  I thought they were really good, and was also thrilled with each batch only needing 15 minutes in the oven, rather than the 2h required for regular meringues.

fruit -> fruit flies

This month I've put myself on a mostly vegan diet, which has meant giving up some things I really like to eat, like, um, meat and dairy.  Although it's a bit drastic, it's the best way I know to cut high-fat and in general junk food out of my diet.  What this has meant, however, is that I've been eating a hefty quantity of fruits and vegetables.

I love this time of year because I can go to the farmers' market and to the grocery store and find peaches, berries, cherries, asparagus, zucchini, and so on for low prices.  What I don't love about this time of year is the hitchhikers that come along with the produce I purchase.  Yes, this is the time of year when fruit flies buzz all around my kitchen.  Well, not just my kitchen, but the kitchens of all produce-buying people in the area.  When I first moved here, I was shocked by the number of flies that hovered around even a very clean kitchen, so I did some research and came up with the following solution, which I will share in case anyone is interested.

1. Put your produce in the refrigerator.  I know this is not ideal, but as long as it's sitting out, flies will be attracted to it, and will lay eggs in it too.
2. Make a trap.  I use a shallow plastic cup with some cider vinegar in it (shown to the right).  The cup is covered with plastic wrap with a few holes in it.  The flies, attracted to the vinegar, climb into the cup and are too dumb to find their way out.

Keep in mind, for this to work, your kitchen has to be clean.  That means no fruit peels in an open garbage can, or other things the flies will be more attracted to.

Among other things, this also meant that I had to quickly put away the cookies I made this week, although the recipe recommends freezing them to keep them fresh, so I don't have a problem with it.

107. Blueberry Bonanza Bars
I'm not so sure about the bonanza part, but I like these bar cookies.  In this recipe, a pre-cooked crust filled with ground up toasted almonds is topped with blueberry jam and almond-coconut granola.  My cookbook instructed me to mix the crust exclusively in my food processor.  For me, this was impossible, as I only have a 3-cup KitchenAid, so I did all the necessary food processing in smaller batches.  I also had to make my own granola, which was a successful first for me.  The recipe I followed (on the same page as the cookie recipe) yielded about 2C too much granola, so I've been enjoying it for breakfast.

These cookies are better than I expected.  The toasted almonds have a pretty strong flavor, and they keep the blueberry jam from being too overwhelming - this was a big concern of mine, because I'm not a big fan of blueberry jam, and think that I might use apricot preserves instead if I repeat this recipe.  The granola on top provides a nice texture, because no fruit bar is complete without a crumbly topping.

Ok, that's it for tonight.  I've got to clean my kitchen so that more fruit flies can die.

Wishing for beach time

It has been so ridiculously hot this summer, and I guess I can't complain too much because most of the US (and several places in the Northern Hemisphere, or so I've heard) has been just as hot.  It's very expensive to run the air conditioner, but too humid to leave it off, so I just sit here and think about my weekend on Lake Huron, and the wonderful way the lake cools down the surrounding area....  When I was home I could sail all day, when on shore it was 95˚F, and never be too warm (the water was a nice 65˚F).

All those thoughts about the beach and Lake Huron in general got me thinking about the Port Huron to Mackinac Race, which is the biggest thing to happen in Port Huron, and probably the biggest thing to happen every year on my mom's side of the family.  The race started last Saturday, and my uncle's sailboat made it to the island this morning, winning first place in its class.  Hooray and congratulations!

106. Sand Tarts
In honor of the race, and because it's about time I got around to this recipe, I made what my cookbook calls Sand Tarts.  These are dense sugar cookies flavored with lemon zest, then topped with cinnamon sugar and sliced almonds.

When I first tried one of these, I was unimpressed by its lack of texture, but after they had the chance to cool down, the cookies became a little more crisp, which I think suits the sandy appearance nicely.  The lemon zest is also great - it isn't overwhelming, and is definitely the kind of flavor that refreshes on a hot day (in contrast to nuts or chocolate which seem to be more fall/winter flavors).  The almonds are just there for show, so that the cookies can resemble sand dollars.

All things said, this was an easy recipe, with the added bonus of a nice presentation.  The one thing I did note in my cookbook, however, is that it calls for altogether too much cinnamon sugar (I found I had 1/3C left over after dumping as much as I could on the cookies).  I guess I'll be eating cinnamon oatmeal once all the heat breaks.

Baking by the Lake

I went home last weekend, and so spent at least half of my Fourth of July weekend on Lake Huron.  That meant swimming and sailing and trying very hard not to get a sunburn (I succeeded! But I got a dozen mosquito bites instead).

Since Phil is allergic to cats, and my dad's house is full of cats, we stayed at my grandparents' house.  I love their house, it's beautiful, and my Grandma Carol is probably the best cook I know.  She's very good about feeding many people for every meal, and now that my grandfather has to avoid gluten she has expanded her repertoire to include more interesting foods (which tend to be the same kinds of foods I eat but no one else in my family has ever heard of).  I would be willing to blame my propensity for kitchen adventures almost entirely on her influence.  She was very happy to facilitate my out-of-town baking, and thus the following blondies were made (in her convection oven.  I am so jealous).

104. Raspberry Almond Blondies
I have been looking forward to these for a long time.  Raspberries are, by far, my favorite fruit, and they've finally become a little bit less expensive.  This recipe was particularly ideal for this past weekend as the only extra ingredients (i.e. things you wouldn't find in most pantries) were the berries, which were strewn on top of the batter, and the sliced almonds, which were both mixed into and scattered on top of the batter.
Although the raspberries made me very happy, I'm not sure that I was entirely impressed with this recipe.  It seemed like the almonds weren't a very good fit with the raspberries, and there wasn't significant flavor aside from those same berries.  I think I probably would have liked these with a little bit of white chocolate mixed in to make the blondie batter a little more rich.  I suspect that might give a nicer contrast, rather than just an excuse to eat raspberries (which I will do with no excuse at all).

quick and classy

This week has been rather stressful for me, as I've been working hard to sort out a schedule that puts the things I need to do (i.e. research) at a higher priority than the things I like to do (i.e. dance).  I don't expect that I will turn into a work robot, though: although the idea seems outdated, I've started taking a Sabbath again, and so tomorrow I will not do homework, I will not do housework beyond normal maintenance things like washing dishes, and I will not be stressed out.  Well.. it may not be so easy to forgo the stress, but I need a day, and I need to trust God with my time.  Thus, I am looking forward to tomorrow, although I am not quite finished with today, no matter what the clock tells me.

My weekly cookie project just came out of the oven about half an hour ago, and maybe if I post right after I can get back into the habit of only having to talk about one cookie per post, on time.

Here goes...

87. Almond Macaroons
If you have never tried almond macaroons before, I think there is no way I can describe their flavor properly.  These are just about the simplest cookie in the book (yes, even simpler than shortbread!), and yet I had never tried any cookie with the same flavor palette before I got into this book.  The first time I made almond macaroons was as a part of another cookie, discussed in this entry, and was so impressed by the flavor that I was looking forward to making the plain macaroons.  So yes.  In these cookies are almond paste (which can be found in the grocery store next to the pie filling), confectioners' sugar, salt, egg whites, and vanilla.  That's it.  The ingredients are mixed together until the dough becomes thick, and then baked for some 20 minutes.  I made a mistake on the first batch, as I didn't mix enough for the egg whites to thicken, and I used the tablespoon of dough the recipe directed, and ended up with wide, flat, ugly cookies.  I attacked the remaining dough more before the second batch and reduced the cookie size to 1 tsp each, and found the result to be much prettier.  With all the stress of this week and even today, these quick cookies were a nice project to throw together, and I look forward to sharing them tomorrow.


On the topic of things shared, I had a baking project this week that is non-project, but was so delicious I had to take a picture, and I think it is worth sharing.  We like to celebrate people's birthdays in my bible study group, and I like to find new kinds of cake to bake for people when the opportunity arises.  And so I was stumbling around on allrecipes when I found the following:

Are you ready for this?  These are cupcakes with cookie dough in the middle.  The lighting in the picture is kind of poor, but the cupcake pictured here is dark chocolate cake (box mix) with a big hunk of undercooked cookie dough, and topped with a chocolate ganache icing.  The concept is actually quite simple: if you make chocolate chip cookie dough and freeze it in ~1tbsp balls, you can put it right on your cupcake batter and bake it.  The cake part will bake all the way and the cookie dough will not.  I liked the chocolate cake because you can actually see that the dough is in there.  It also paired well with the icing: chocolate ganache is just semisweet chocolate melted in heavy cream, and so the chocolate taste is strong without being as sweet as regular icing.  Everyone in my small group really liked these, except for the birthday boy, who, as it turns out, doesn't like chocolate.  I am fail.  But these cupcakes are amazing, and if you want to impress someone with not much work, this is a sure bet.

That's about all for now, except for a quick follow-up on my Cuban recipes post: I made the chicken recipe, and although it took a little while to prep, it was SO DELICIOUS, as there was a good mix of sweet and savory, and maybe even just a little bit of spicy taste in there too.  I'll probably make it again in the summer, when the avocados and mangoes are something more like in season.

and I keep rollin' on

Well, I've done it again.  I keep saying I'll post more regularly, and then I take longer and longer breaks from actual cookie posts (although I've put up a couple other random things to prove I didn't die).  This time, some of it is due to an attempt to go to bed by midnight on school nights.  Tonight, clearly, is a fail on that.  Some of my non-posting is due to just being insanely busy - this semester I'm taking a Quantum Information class and a Jazz dance class, teaching intro Physics, still active in a bible study group with GCF, baking and cooking on a regular basis, doing research in the lab (a never-ending and hugely time-consuming thing) and flitting around doing silly things with my boyfriend.  As my dad has said before, I do well when I build up a certain level of chaos and then maintain it through the semester.

In what I imagine to be a slight break in the chaos (read: I got my homework done early and am waiting for something in the kitchen to finish), I present yet another cookie update!

79.  01.02.10 Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies
I made these the day before leaving my dad's house to return back to the middle of nowhere, and so I chose something that wouldn't involve outlandish ingredients, and would hopefully be eaten quickly.  These are made with a basic brownie batter, with a filling that is mostly peanut butter and confectioners' sugar swirled around in the batter.  The idea is nice - after all, chocolate and peanut butter are delicious together, when done properly - but the execution was a bit mediocre.  When I ate these, all I could taste was the peanut butter, and not the (expensive) chocolate melted in the brownies.  Although it tasted good, I think that if I want to the taste of eating peanut butter straight, I'll forgo the baking for a spoon and the PB jar.

80.  01.10.10 Cappuccino-Chocolate Bites
The weekend after I returned to my apartment, I flew down to Louisiana to visit my sister and brother-in-law, who are both actual rocket scientists.  This was actually interesting times, because my original flight was canceled due to lots of snow in Central Illinois, and I had to fly the next day.  I was totally okay with that, since I learned to drive in South Florida and am still terrified of snow driving.  But yes, the cookies.  I decided to make these because my brother-in-law is into making his own espresso, which meant that I could easily acquire the 1T of ground espresso beans the recipe called for, without ending up with a bag of coffee I couldn't use.  The ground espresso was mixed into the cookies, which otherwise had a basic shortbread texture (you know, butter, confectioners' sugar, that kind of thing).  These cookies were then sandwiched with a milk-chocolate ganache and sprinkled with cocoa powder and confectioners' sugar to make them look very pretty.  In general, I find milk chocolate to be inferior to, well, everything ever, but in this case the richness of the ganache (yes, I consider milk chocolate to be rich) helped to mellow out the espresso so that every bite was a good experience.  Of course, it is wise not to eat these late at night, but I believe the ones I left at my sister's house were eaten for breakfast the next day (cookies for breakfast are always a lovely idea).

81.  01.16.10 Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Feeling that it was time to make some good, traditional cookies after all the rich and fancy stuff I'd made recently, I went to the the store and finally picked up the special ingredient for these cookies.  These are ordinary oatmeal raisin cookies, except that they also have toasted wheat germ in them.  In theory, this helps to make the cookies more hearty (and maybe more healthy, although health and cookies aren't too often put together).  Wheat germ is hidden by things like oatmeal in the grocery store, and is unfortunately sold in fairly large quantities.  However, these were pretty good cookies, so I don't mind making them again to use up the left over ingredients.  This time around I messed up a little: I was baking these while folding laundry, or some other such chore, and so didn't get a chance to check one of the earlier batches for baking time.  Thus, it turned out that these were a little crunchier than I think oatmeal cookies ought to be, but I think in the future if I reduce the baking time by 2 or 3 minutes they should come out close to perfect.

82.  01.23.10 Cherry Almond Biscotti
Since the last week had gotten me all excited about specialty ingredients (and I wanted to use up some old dried cherries sitting in my kitchen) I went to the grocery store and bought some amaretto (almond-flavored liqueur) to make these biscotti.  I'll point out as a side note, amaretto is tasty stuff.  But back to the topic at hand: here the dried cherries are boiled in amaretto until properly hydrated, and then added to the biscotti dough along with blanched almonds and a little bit of the leftover cooking amaretto.  The dough is baked first in a log, and then sliced and baked again, as is done for biscotti in general.  I found that these were very delicious - although the texture of the cherries was a little unexpected in the otherwise crumbly biscotti texture, they added a nice taste, as did the amaretto, which was pretty subtle.  I'm not sure about the feasibility of making these again, though, as you may recall, I've complained before about how expensive dried cherries are.  Maybe someday when I get a fancy job I'll be able to afford lots of crazy ingredients, but for now I'll try to live within my means.

83.  01.31.10 Butter Cookie Sandwiches with Chestnut Cream
Well, these guys look fancy enough, although they weren't particularly complicated to make.  The cookies are basic shortbread cut into 1-1/2" rounds, so they're quite small.  The centerpiece of this recipe is supposed to be the chestnut cream filling, which is made of butter, confectioners' sugar, and chestnut cream (crème de marron, to be fancy about it).  These sandwiched cookies are then dipped in melted semi-sweet chocolate to get their nice appearance.  Although they look very nice, I was a little disappointed with these cookies - the chestnut cream was difficult to find and expensive to buy, so when I tasted these and the filling tasted just of butter, I lamented the waste of money this turned into.  The chestnut cream itself tastes of chestnuts, as it ought, considering it's made of chestnuts and sugar, but the flavor just didn't come through all the other things going on in the recipe.

84.  02.06.10 Gingersnap-Raspberry Sandwiches
I have always been a big fan of molasses/ginger cookies, and although this one doesn't have any molasses in it, it sure had potential to be delicious: aside from regular cookie ingredients, this recipe features a large dose of ground ginger and maple syrup.  Unfortunately, I messed up when baking these cookies and did not bake them quite long enough, leaving them with a funny taste that didn't let the ginger shine through properly.  Although the recipe calls for putting raspberry jam between these cookies, I found that doing so was a hassle, as the jam oozed out all over the place and didn't taste very good with these kind of funny-tasting cookies.  Ah well, perhaps I'll have success with these another time.

85.  02.14.10 Raspberry Honey Financiers
For all that I complain about the silliness surrounding Valentine's Day, I have to say that I had a lovely day spending time doing non-consumerist things with my boyfriend, and sharing these cookies (well, more like mini muffins) with him.  The dough for these is made with butter, lots of honey, toasted and ground blanched almonds, sugar, cake flour, and egg whites.  The honey and almonds are the strong point here, to give a nice sweet taste and a little bit of crunch.  The red hearts shown in the picture are raspberry juice strained out from a puree.  The raspberry taste wasn't particularly strong, but the hearts were cute, and that was exactly the effect I was going for (well, and that the recipe told me to do).

86.  02.20.10 Ne Plus Ultra Cookies
Since winter insists on hanging on, and the Midwest has turned into a mess of snow and rain and potholes the size of a small vehicle, I decided it was time to make some comfort cookies.  That means simple tastes and chewy cookies, preferably the kind that can be eaten warm out of the oven with a glass of milk while watching the Winter Olympics.  This recipe gave me exactly what I was after: these are basically over-sized chocolate chip cookies with pecans and raisins added to them.  Usually I would object to nuts and raisins getting between me and chocolate chips, but because these cookies were so large, these ingredients prevented the cookie from being too rich to eat in one go.  To any novice bakers out there, I would suggest these cookies as a good project.  They are extremely simple to make, and they taste just a little bit better than standard chocolate chip cookies (and about a million times better than that nasty pre-made dough they sell at the grocery store. ick).  As usual, if anyone is interested I am happy to share the recipe.


...And that brings me up to date with my cookies.  This means, unless I've had a counting fail, that I am at 84 recipes already, which is nearly halfway through the book.  I may have to start organizing my efforts so that I'm not left with all the difficult recipes in my last year of this project.  For now, though, it's time to get some sleep, so I can get back to aligning optics in the morning.

epic backlog - recovery!

After I finished with my Qual, it was time for work. And homework. And catching up with all the people I'd been neglecting. I took the next several weeks to make tasty cookies, but I didn't really get around to posting. Nothing was too exciting about life, so I'll just talk briefly about the cookies.

(Marked as a best cookie) (63) To be brief about these first cookies will be difficult, because they were very delicious! I had carrots left over from making a carrot cake, so I used them to make carrot cake cookies. The cookies are a basic recipe, with carrot, raisins, and oats, as well as cinnamon and nutmeg. The filling is a standard cream cheese frosting. The cookies turned out nice and soft, and paired with the frosting kind of tasted like the Little Debbie oatmeal pies that I used to eat as a kid... except that these are a lot healthier, and the filling has no weird unidentified hydrogenated death oils. Honestly, I think this is the tastiest recipe yet. Hooray!


These next cookies were chosen so that I wouldn't get totally stuck in a pattern of cookies with filling, and so that I could get them done a bit quickly - I spent all day Saturday being involved in a wedding (congratulations Josh and Janine!!). Although, actually, these are blondies. Here, a basic blondie batter (you know, brown sugar, flour, eggs, butter) is mixed with (and covered with) chocolate chips, coconut, walnuts, and dried cranberries, then put in cupcake tins. Unfortunately, some of the stuff on top was a little loose, and fell off when people were eating them. The blondies were pretty good, but if I make them again I'll definitely be putting more cranberries in them. (64)

The week after I went on a baking spree (this is the same week I made those cake balls) and made what my cookbook calls Sarah Bernhardt cookies (65). According to Wikipedia, which is the source of all credible knowledge, Sarah Bernhardt was an exceptionally famous French stage actress in the late 19th century. My cookbook claims that this name is due to the many layers of these cookies resembling the layers of characters Bernhardt played. Or something like that. I don't know about these things, but I do know that I really like these cookies: these are almond macaroons (which kind of taste like marzipan) with a dollop of chocolate mousse on top of them. The whole ensemble is coated in semi-sweet chocolate mixed with just a little bit of vegetable shortening. Since they were covered in chocolate, I had to work hard to get people to eat them, but once they tried them, they were impressed. I like to describe their taste as very high class, and considering the cost of the almond paste in the macaroons and the amount of time taken in preparation, I think the description is fairly accurate. Maybe I'll make these again sometime for something fancy.