It's about time

...For me to do a cookie update!  While there are plenty of excuses I could make about why I haven't updated, it all boils down to one thing: this has been a busy summer.  This comes as a combination of teaching, research, meeting with friends once a week for dinner, leading a bible study, and going to the gym 5-6 days each week.  Oh, right, and spending time with Phil.  Let me tell you, finding shared free time for two graduate students can be pretty nearly impossible some days.

But now I have a "free" night, and it's about time I post my cookies before I forget what they were..

 152. Cream Cheese-Lemon Bows
A few months ago,  I broke my frosting bag, and I haven't yet bothered with replacing it.  Sometimes there are workarounds for this - I have a cookie gun too - but sometimes they don't work.  I tried to use my cookie gun, and the dough wouldn't come off properly, so these "bows" ended up being rounds instead.

These cookies are full of butter with a bit of cream cheese, along with lemon zest and juice.  After baking, they were pretty delicious, but a bit dry for my taste.  Maybe it had something to do with changing the shape, but I wasn't too impressed.

 153. Lemon-Apricot Sandwiches
Oh, these were good.  The cookies are crisp and lemony, given some extra nice texture with the addition of almond flour and corn starch, and apricot is a fantastic pairing.  The cookies themselves weren't very sweet, which meant that the jam completed the taste rather than making the cookies too rich.

 154. Bourbon Currant Cookies
Here's another winner.  These flaky cookies made with bourbon and currants (as indicated by the title) can be cut out into any shape, but I thought elephants were appropriately whimsical, and everyone I shared this with seemed to agree.  Before being baked, the cookies were brushed with heavy cream, and somehow that flavor came through spectacularly.  I will absolutely be making these again!

 155. Biscuit Sandwich Cookies
There's something about chocolate filling that makes everything better, and these cookies are no exception.  These cookies were pretty flaky, probably due to the combination of butter and heavy cream in them.  Although usually cookie fillings are some kind of ganache (that is, heavy cream mixed with melted chocolate), these are filled with melted milk chocolate.  A note on cooking with milk chocolate: you should always opt for the more expensive stuff.  Cheap milk chocolate is not the same at all.

 156. Homemade Graham Crackers (definitely a best cookie)
I'm always skeptical of the glowing comments that go along with the recipes in this book, but the ones for this recipe were entirely deserved.  Indeed, these cookies were not difficult to make, and they're full of whole wheat flour and wheat germ, which makes them pretty healthy!  Oh, right, and they taste really really good.  I'll be making these again and trying them with s'mores.

157. Meringue Porcupines
I have a confession to make.  I went home over the 4th of July weekend and completely ran out of time to make cookies.  Yes, that's right, I skipped a weekend.  This was not okay with me, so last weekend I doubled up and made two batches of cookies.  This was the first batch, prepared for a pizza-making and Munchkin-playing party at my friend's condo.  And so, in the midst of a busy Saturday, I had yet another meringue fail.  I don't know why, but I just can't seem to get meringues to work when I use the whisk attachment on my electric mixer.  It's very frustrating, and every time it happens it make me feel like a total kitchen failure.

So I beat and beat these egg whites, waiting for them to form stiff, glossy peaks, and I guess I added the vanilla too early, because they went from soft peaks to no peaks at all.  Nevertheless, I cooked what I had made, and the meringues turned out decently.  In the middle of the baking (drying?) process, I took them out of the oven and pushed their bottoms in a little bit.  When it was time to serve them, I put apricot jam in the divot of one and whipped cream with almond extra in the divot of the other, and sandwiched them together.  Everyone enjoyed these very much, but I think the meringues were a little too sweet.  If I ever try making these again, I will add less sugar to them.

double dream hands!

There's something about brightly colored sprinkles that makes me think of saccharine children's shows, and with the internet being as it is, this means I've had silly choreography stuck in my head all day.  Yes, indeed, watching a grown man explaining the choreography for some modern version of Kids Incorporated (or whatever the preschoolers are watching these days), is really awkward.  Which is why I'm putting it here for you to see.

 

 ..Aw man, Kids Incorporated was pretty much my favorite show in the world when I was four years old.  A quick internet search reveals that cast members included Fergie, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Mario Lopez.  Yeah, that's right, the children's shows I was watching were totally legit.

But enough about the late '80s.  I should talk about cookies!  You may have also noticed I've started making vegetable posts, but I'll keep the cookies and the veggies separate to avoid confusion.

150. Pistachio Tuiles
Now that I'm nearing the end of this project, I have to spend more time in the sections of my cookbook that I don't like as much.  I've sorely neglected the first section, which consists of light and crunchy cookies - in general, this means cookies that either take a lot of time or are just tricky to make work.
This recipe was actually not too bad compared to its neighbors.  The ingredients were simple and few, and once I had removed the shells from 1/2C pistachios, the batter came together quickly.  I refer to it as batter because it was so thin that 1tsp spread out to give a 3" diameter flat cookie.  These were baked six at a time, then removed from the oven and draped over the handle of a wooden spoon while still hot to shape them.

I was not hugely impressed by these cookies, although some of that is my own fault.  I've never really liked pistachios, and I made the mistake of not putting these away for a few hours after I finished baking them.  When they first came out of the oven and cooled, the cookies were melt-in-your-mouth crisp.  Unfortunately, the high humidity quickly turned them into melt-in-your-mouth sticky.

151. Chocolate cookie cutouts
The sprinkles on these cookies are the reason for the title of this post.  They are just so colorful that I got a little carried away. 
This recipe is something like a chocolate shortbread recipe: the cookie dough is made with copious quantities of butter, as well as some flour and confectioners' sugar, dutch cocoa, and cinnamon (there's a couple other ingredients, but they aren't key to the flavor).  The high butter content made this dough a huge hassle to work with, as I found I needed to use large amounts of flour when rolling and cutting the cookies, and ended up skipping a rolling/freezing step altogether when the dough I was trying to roll out started to stick to everything.  In order to work with this dough, it had to be kept chilled, so I could only use small quantities and returned all scraps to the freezer promptly.

The result of all this work was a decent cookie, with flavor equally divided between the chocolate and cinnamon, and with a fall-apart shortbread texture.  These weren't bad, but I think for all the annoyance they caused, they aren't worth it.  In fact, I only ended up using half of the dough.  The other half is still in the limbo of my freezer, waiting to become something baked.

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.

the lazy graduate student

Yes, I know, the title of this post sounds like a paradox.  Indeed, looking from the outside, graduate students are hardworking to the point that it is a fault.  Many of us fall into the trap of thinking that spending any waking hour not working is a waste of time.  I am not talking about this false laziness, but a real problem that comes out of burn-out, depression, lack of deadlines, or reaching a point where one can no longer coast.

Indeed, this state does exist, and I have fallen in and out of it for various reasons over the past couple years.  I can usually judge how bad this is by how messy my apartment is, and by how backlogged I get on my posting.  This gets into a weird feedback loops where cleaning my apartment makes my life better, and my life being better makes me want my apartment to be clean.  The activation energy is sometimes very high, but it's helpful for me to take care of the little things that have piled up.  And so, in my current recovery phase, I am posting what is not actually too bad of a cookie backlog:

137. Lemon Tassies
As you can probably guess from the picture, these are essentially tiny lemon cheesecakes.  The crust is a butter mixture kind of like regular pie crust, but it also has lemon zest in it.  This is baked before the filling, which is primarily made of cream cheese and flavored with lemon juice and more lemon zest, is spooned into it.  The whole thing is baked again to give the final result, which is a pretty and tasty treat!

I made a small mistake when I made these - when I read the recipe, I didn't realize that it called for so much lemon zest, and only bought one lemon when I definitely needed two.  I then tried to get as much zest as possible out of the single lemon and ended up including some of the bitter pith in the recipe.  This is always a bad idea.  Although this didn't completely ruin the recipe, these cookies (the definition is a little loose here I guess) ended up with a slightly bitter taste which shouldn't have been there.  When I shared these with my friends, they said it wasn't a problem, but I was not very happy knowing that they could have tasted better.

138. Cream Cheese Walnut Cookies
Continuing with the cream cheese trend, I went ahead and made these icebox cookies.  Now, the title here is a little misleading, because these cookies are made mostly of butter.  When I say mostly, I mean that there is an entire pound of butter in this recipe!  Yes, that's four sticks of butter, which is totally gross.  The cookies are a mix of all that butter, plus cream cheese, copious amount of vanilla, and finely chopped toasted walnuts (which I confess I burned a little).  The dough was rolled up and stuck in the freezer overnight, then I rolled it in more walnuts, sliced it, and baked it.

Fortunately, the yield of this recipe was something like 5 dozen cookies, so they ended up not being an instant heart attack for my peers.  The over-toasted walnuts weren't any kind of problem, and their flavor mixed with the sugar and vanilla left me thinking of maple syrup, which is never a bad thing.  I had a hard time peddling all of these off, so there are a dozen left in my freezer saved for another day.

139. Cocoa Shortbread Diamonds
Finally we have my rescued recipe, cocoa shortbread..um.. stars!  Faced with the prospect of cutting shapes in shortbread, I became reminiscent of the month I spent in Singapore in 2008 and the shortbread-decorating adventures I had there with my dear friend Bonita.  With that in mind, I couldn't bear just cutting these into diamonds, and went looking for a cute, small cookie cutter, which turned out to be a star.

Back to the topic at hand, however, these are shortbread cookies flavored with cocoa, so they have the typical shortbread ingredients - flour, confectioners' sugar, butter, and vanilla - plus cocoa powder.  This specific recipe calls for pulsing the ingredients in a food processor  until the dough starts to come together.  Unfortunately, with the quantities as dictated in the recipe, this never happened.  Even when I tried squeezing the dough together, it wouldn't stick.

Recognizing that this recipe was seriously flawed, I went online to the Martha Stewart website to see what the comments were on this recipe, and some people suggested adding an egg white to make the dough stick together.  I didn't like this idea: eggs have no place in shortbread, and I try to be very consistent about food definitions, so I added more butter instead.

I ended up adding nearly an extra stick of butter to the recipe, which made the dough stick together and made the cookies fantastically rich.  I think this ended up being a little too much butter, since the cookies basically fell apart when I tried them (and a few fell apart when I picked them up), but it was a good rescue.  So in the end, what I recommend is adding an extra 1/2 stick (1/4C) of butter to the recipe to make it work, and then it is a great success!

the roving researcher

I do a lot of theory and simulation work in my research, and so I find that I can sit down anywhere with a power cord and an internet connection to get work done.  Of course, the challenge of this is that there are many places where I sit down and get no work done whatsoever.  Working at home is perhaps the worst, because I tend to oversleep, and then do kitchen things or crochet or watch TV while I'm "working."  It's shameful, I know, and the only solution I've come up with so far is to just go to my office.  The only problem with my office, however, is that it's a solid 15 minute walk from any other places on campus I have to be, and so there are days when it's just not worth the time (this includes days like last week when the temperature was -5˚F).

Maybe some of the issue here is that I haven't yet gotten used to the paradigm of not having a physical lab space.  I did experimental Physics research before, so I had to be in the lab to get work done.  There were no gray lines between work time and personal time.  Changes of venue, and their subsequent disruption of pace, were not an option.  Now they are, and I need to learn to stay put or else to lose less time in transition.  We'll see how that goes.

Or I could just work in my office and deal with the walking time.  It's especially useful to work there when other people are there and working (yay peer pressure!), plus it gives me a great opportunity to share my latest cookie adventure with people...

136. Cream-Filled Chocolate Sandwiches
If these look like Oreos to you, that's because that is basically what these cookies are.  As the title indicates, these are chocolate cookies sandwiched with vanilla cream.  The cookies get their chocolate flavor from a hefty dose of dutched cocoa, and are otherwise a little soft and kind of generic.  The filling is made with too much fat (1/2C butter and 1/2C vegetable shortening) and sugar (3+C confectioners' sugar!), which makes it taste even more sinful than your typical Oreo filling.

Basically, these cookies were pretty (as you can see), and very decadent.  Although the cookies themselves are pretty generic, they pair nicely with the filling to give a rich flavor and texture experience, and leave you with the lingering feeling that you're going to get both heart failure and type 2 diabetes.


I realize I promised two cookies this week, and I did make another vegan cookie - Peanut Apple Pretzel Drops - to share at a Superbowl party, but I neglected to take pictures.  You can find the recipe here, if you're interested.  These cookies have pretzels, peanuts, dried apples, and cinnamon (plus lots of brown sugar and such) in them, and made a tasty and even a little bit healthy snack.  I'm a fan (although I liked the green tea biscotti better).

New Year, New Teaching Assignment

Happy new year, everyone!  I realize I'm a bit late at saying it, but I've been busy (read: lazy) for the past couple weeks.  Although some would say this is okay because classes haven't started yet, I've found it kind of frustrating to have little motivation to get started on my research again.  I haven't been really into the whole "New Year's Resolution" thing this year, perhaps because I feel like there is no reason to wait until January to make promises to get my life in gear.  Thus I continue telling myself to go to bed earlier, stop biting my nails, and maybe even keep my kitchen clean for once.  Of course, the problem with the last one on the list is I keep messing up my kitchen with new adventures!

I'm looking forward to the start of this new semester for several reasons.  The first is that I'll be glad to resume my normal social activities, including working out (I go to the gym with a couple friends), Bible study, and wasting too much time playing Rock Band.  I've decided to join an additional Bible study group, this new one being with the church I attend, in the hope that it will help me get better involved in the church community.  We'll have to see if I can actually balance all my weeknight activities appropriately.  Not taking any classes should help.

The thing I'm currently the most excited about for this semester is the new class I'll be teaching.  Okay, to be fair, I'm actually just a TA, so I'm not writing my own lesson plans or anything, and this class isn't new to the University, just to me.  The course is Physics 123: Physics Made Easy.  I think the title is perhaps a little deceptive - although the course is, indeed, about making physics easy, the point of it is to equip future elementary school teachers to teach science.  It is an understatement to say that I am psyched about being able to do this.  I don't talk about it too much here, but science outreach is very important to me, and so I'm glad to be getting involved.  Since this course is a lot of kitchen physics, I may even post some of the demos here for anyone who is interested.

But that is me getting way off topic.  My primary reason for posting today is because I made more cookies, just like I was supposed to:

131. Chocolate Charms
On New Year's Day, in the midst of watching four different Big Ten bowl games, I suddenly realized it was Saturday and that I needed to make my weekly cookies.  Thankfully, I was able to find a simple recipe to share with my family that didn't involve running out to the store to buy random stuff.

These cookies have a basic dough, which has lots of butter and cocoa powder to give them a dense texture and a nice chocolate flavor.  They were easy to throw together, and smelled great while they were in the oven.  My family really enjoyed them.  As far as cookies go, these are good.  They're not the best simple cookies I've made, and you can tell there's lots of butter in them upon taking one bite, but they made a decent addition to our football snacks.

132. Coconut Cream Cheese Pinwheels with Jam Centers
In the midst of my sort-of post-break laziness, I decided that it would be a good idea to do one of the more time-intensive recipes left in my cookbook.  These cookies consist of a cream cheese dough; a coconut, cream cheese, and white chocolate filling; and some jam in the very center.

The dough was very quick and easy to make, but assembling these cookies took forever!  In order to get these uniform pinwheel shapes, I had to roll out the dough, cut it into squares with a pizza cutter (the recipe calls for a fluted cutting wheel but I didn't want to buy one), refrigerate those squares, add the filling, cut the corners of the dough, fold them over the filling, brush the whole thing with egg, sprinkle sugar on it, and finally put it in the oven.  Halfway through baking, I had to add the jam.  It took me 20 minutes to prep each batch, and since I had to add the jam midway, the assembly/baking process couldn't be overlapped - I couldn't start preparing the next batch until the first was out of the oven.  Thus, it took me about an hour of attention to make 30 cookies.

So these took a lot of time, but it was totally worth it, because they tasted AMAZING.  The dough is light and fluffy, and contrasts nicely with the very rich filling.  I filled these with homemade mixed berry jam, which ran a little bit, but it tasted good too.  The only thing I would probably change in this recipe is to use only an egg white for the wash rather than the whole egg, since I found the yellow on top of the cookies to not be very pretty.




Alright, that is all for now.  This weekend I might try making fried cookies.  They won't be healthy, but I'll have several places to share them, so I can spread the heart failure around.

Large Batches of Christmas

This year, Phil and I decided to be super serious and spend Christmas together.  This means that we've been in Pennsylvania since last Thursday, and we'll be leaving for Michigan in a day or two to visit my family.  It's been busy and fun, and it's given me good reason to make lots of cookies.  Which is good, because the things I've made have had VERY large yield.

129. Gingerbread Snowflakes
These cookies were supposed to be 7" in diameter, which totally wasn't going to happen.  I used my 3" cookie cutters, and what was supposed to give ~16 cookies turned into some 8 dozen!

If you follow the link on the cookie title, you can look at something very similar to this recipe.  I'm actually a little surprised that things were changed, as the book version turned out quite well.  The differences are the following: (1) my book calls for 5 1/2 C flour, not 6C; (2) no baking powder; (3) no pepper; (4) 1 1/2 C molasses instead of 1C.  Since I used a smaller cookie cutter, I reduced the baking time to 6 minutes, and the result was nice soft cookies.  The icing was a bit sloppy to do, but it was simple to make: it's just powdered sugar, (soy) milk, and meringue powder.  I shared these with my labmates, and a couple friends who were still in town, and still had a couple dozen to bring on our drive to PA.  They were very popular with everybody.

130. Peppermint Meringue Sandwiches with Chocolate Filling
Guys, I've finally done it.  I've made meringues that didn't totally fall, fail, or otherwise disappoint me.  It may have helped that I was using Phil's mom's fancy Kitchenaid stand mixer, but I am just so relieved that I was able to get meringues right for once.

Making these was a little different, as the recipe calls for dissolving the sugar into the egg whites prior to beating them, and then adding peppermint extract after they form stiff peaks.  To make the stripes, I took red gel food coloring and drew lines on the inside of a pastry bag.  The egg white mixture was squeezed through these to give a lovely, minty result.

The thing to remember when making meringues is that they are not so much baked as dried.  These took about 2h in a 175˚F oven to get the appropriate melt-in-your-mouth texture.  After they were completely cooled (I left them in the cooled oven overnight, actually), they were sandwiched with a semi-sweet chocolate ganache.  When I made the ganache, I think I messed up a little, since I bought whipping cream instead of heavy whipping cream, and so I ended up having to add lots of extra chocolate to make it firm up properly.  Nevertheless, these are pretty, impressive cookies, and I am just so glad to have finally gotten this right ^.^

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!!

Too distracted to sleep

I have this problem where I keep meaning to go to bed at a reasonable hour, and then the internet distracts me.  It is bad news.  So that I don't get too distracted and won't be too loopy when teaching my students tomorrow morning, I'll keep this post short.

121. Dulce de Leche Bat Cookies
Okay, so I realize the shapes in the picture aren't bats.  It would have been fun to follow the recipe, but I just didn't have the time or inclination to go searching the few baking stores around town for aspic cutters (which are basically very tiny cookie cutters).  Instead, I used my linzer cookie cutter, which has a little insert for the middle shape.  Yes, hearts are very different than bats.  They weren't my only choice, but hearts are happier than stars, triangles, diamonds, or circles.  So there you have it.  Happy brown hearts.

These cookies are super crunchy and full of chocolate.  The dough has both Dutch-process cocoa and melted semi-sweet chocolate mixed into it, and not very much sugar.  It's also quite salty, with 3/4 teaspoons of salt in it (a usual amount is 1/8-1/4t).  The filling is simply store-bought dulce de leche.  Again, I didn't have the time or inclination to make my own, as it involves cooking sweetened condensed milk for five hours.  The canned stuff is pretty good, I think I'll try to use the rest of it on apples.

Overall, these cookies are quite delicious.  I had concerns that the dulce de leche would make them taste too rich, but the dark chocolate flavor and saltiness of the cookies counteracts the sweetness of the filling very nicely.  I think that these cookies are perhaps a little too salty, though, so maybe if I try these again I'll have to reduce the salt to 1/2t.

Mexican Hot Chocolate in cookie form!

This has been a pretty busy weekend, and since I need to get to bed soon, I will skip the usual small-talk and get to the cookies.

119. Chocolate-Black Pepper Cookies

I realize pepper usually ends up in cookies as a cruel practical joke, but these cookies are actually very good!  These icebox cookies are flavored with dutched cocoa, instant espresso powder, cinnamon, and black pepper.  The cocoa and espresso dominate the flavor palate, giving a nice dark chocolate taste.  The cinnamon is, well, apparent, and the black pepper adds just a bit of spiciness, which comes as a bit of a surprise, but I really like it.  The flavor of these cookies very closely matches that of Mexican hot chocolate (the creepy background grandma is my hot chocolate box), which gets its unique flavor from the addition of cinnamon and chili powder.  The cookies are somewhat soft, and altogether tasty.

I expect I will make these again when I want to surprise someone with a spicy flavor and secret caffeine.

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.

Small town woes

Today my boyfriend and I went to Taste of Champaign-Urbana, a local food festival intended to showcase local restaurants, to see what there was to see (and eat).   The food was priced far too high for its mediocre quality, but I suppose the festival did give an accurate depiction of local fare.  After all, the quality of restaurants here is always qualified by the fact that, despite the presence of a large university, this is a middle-of-nowhere set of cities.  We describe restaurants as having "good (insert type here) food... for Champaign."  So I suppose, in that spirit, the food festival was a good festival... for Champaign.


The problem with this is that I am often disappointed when I go out places here, which means I find myself less inclined to want to go out places, and end up watching Quantum Leap on Hulu instead.  Oh, right, and looking around for new recipes so that I can cook fun stuff for myself, since I clearly can't rely on the restaurants around here for new and interesting foods (and because it's so much less expensive to cook even fancy foods at home).

Thus I continue on with my kitchen projects, and present for you this weekend's cookie endeavor, with its usual set of quirks.

101. Chocolate Malt Sandwiches
These rich chocolate cookies are so good, and aside from one special ingredient, were pretty easy and quick to make:

The main cookie part in this recipe has mostly typical ingredients, including Dutch cocoa to give it a strong chocolate flavor.  It also has a good helping of malted milk powder and a specialty ingredient called crème fraîche.  The malted milk is responsible for the nice chewy texture of these cookies, and I suppose the crème fraîche helps to make the cookie flavor just a little bit richer.

Before I go on, I suppose I should talk about this funny ingredient with all the accents.  Crème fraîche, or "krem fresh" for those who, like me, don't do French, is a nutty sour cream traditional in, you guessed it, France.  In the United States, it can be purchased for something like $5 for 8 oz, or you can make the equivalent amount for about $1 (and a couple days of waiting) by following the instructions in the above link.  I chose the cheap option, and whipped the rest with sugar to put on my nectarine slices.  Another inexpensive option, as suggested by a friend, is to use regular sour cream as a substitute.

The cookies on their own were delicious, and I didn't think they lacked anything, but my cookbook demanded filling.  In the spirit of completing the cookbook, I proceeded to make a decadent mix of nearly a whole bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips, butter, a cup of malted milk, cream cheese, half and half, and vanilla.  This was chilled, whipped, and put on the previously baked cookies.  It turns out they taste even better with the filling: both parts are very chocolate-y, but nothing is too rich all together, and the chewy texture of the cookies keep the filling from smooshing out of the center, which is always a plus.

I have one other comment before I stop talking about this recipe: there are some strange quantities various recipes in this book call for (such as 2C plus 2T of flour), and some quantity errors (particularly between tablespoons and teaspoons) that lead me to believe that much of this cookbook was made from rescaled recipes and lots of cut-and-paste.  My best proof for the latter is the final sentence in this recipe, which gives the storage instructions.  In my opinion, it is the best sentence in the entire book.

Cookies can be refrigerated between layers of parchment in airtight containers at room temperature up to 3 days.

This is why I don't worry about following instructions exactly.  I will be storing these in the refrigerator, which is definitely not at room temperature.

Another project concluded.

With the normal passage of time (and my normal obliviousness to its passage), June has come, and today makes it 80 days since I started my limoncello steeping.

You may recall I discussed this project about 40 days ago, but if you don't, here's a recap: I peeled 16 lemons, and threw the peels, a sprig of rosemary, and a fifth of 100-proof vodka in a jar, sealed it, and left it in my closet.  Eventually I added sugar syrup and more vodka, and put it back in my closet to sit again.  Today I took that jar out, and have strained this sweet and potent beverage into clear swing-top bottles.  The vodka picked up a nice yellow color that makes it look nice and summery.  In that spirit, I'm looking forward to enjoying this home-made limoncello with my friends.

As it has continued to be warm, I've been doing what I can to go outside, eat fresh produce, and all the other somewhat healthy things associated with nice weather.  Last Saturday I combined these activities in a trip to Urbana's Market at the Square, the local farmer's market.  There I saw plenty of strawberries, zucchini, and green beans, as well as baked goods and stalls for local butchers.  I wasn't feeling too adventurous (and I have pride about doing my own baking), so I just picked up some strawberries, which I proceeded to use in this weekend's cookie recipe.

99. Chocolate-Strawberry Thumbprints
I'm getting to the point in this cookie project where I am deliberately trying to prepare recipes I've been putting off for some reason or another.  This recipe had been delayed for two reasons.
1) Berries are expensive when they're not in season.
2) These cookies cannot be pre-assembled.
The nice thing about living in the Midwest, though, is that berries are now in season, and there is always at least one picnic or cookout to attend on Memorial Day.  So with berries in hand and a get-together in mind, I made these cookies.

There are three layers involved in this recipe.  The first is the chocolate cookie on the bottom, which is made with both dutch cocoa and semi-sweet chocolate.  For these cookies to be useful, I had to use my thumb to press a hole in the center before baking, and then use the end of a wooden spoon to deepen the hole halfway through the baking process.  Thus, the cookies themselves have a strong chocolate taste, with a nice open space in the center to hold the other two layers.  I was able to make these cookies a couple days ahead of time, as it's just the assembly that's time-sensitive.

The toppings for the cookie are simply cream cheese mixed with confectioners sugar, and diced fresh strawberries tossed with a little bit of granulated sugar.  The sugar made the strawberries more juicy, so if the toppings were left on the cookie for too long, the whole ensemble would get a little soggy.  This wasn't a big problem, though, because my friends ate them up in good time.

Overall, I would say this is a good recipe, although I found that the cream cheese doesn't really stand out when juxtaposed with the strawberries and all that chocolate.  It provides a nice texture and visual contrast, but I'm never totally happy with a recipe unless I can taste all the key ingredients.

Imaginary Free Time

The Spring semester has ended, which means I'm a day or two short of being completely done in the old research group, and ready to start work in this new acoustics group.  With the end of teaching duties and typical GCF scheduling, I like to think that I'll now have more time available to do other things... which include but are not limited to swimming, sailing, dinner groups, sewing, reading, traveling, and continued kitchen adventures.

Hey, look at that, I've managed to give myself plenty to do this summer.  I guess there's no such thing as "free time" in my life.  At least this summer I won't be committing to any musicals or similar huge endeavors.

Since this weekend marks a good in-between point before I construct a new hectic schedule for myself, I've taken some time to make a more complicated cookie from my recipe book.

97. Chocolate Pistachio Cookies
I said above that these are complicated cookies.  The reason for this is not that the recipe calls for many ingredients, but rather that several steps are involved.  First, a chocolate filling is made with egg yolks (yes, they're raw), melted semisweet chocolate, and a simple syrup, and then must cool in the refrigerator for at least 45 minutes.  The cookies themselves are pistachio paste with some sugar and an egg white to hold the mix together.  These cookies were baked, allowed to cool, sandwiched with the filling, and then frozen for an hour before being covered in bittersweet chocolate.

The result of this 2+ hour project is a moderately crunchy cookie that tastes just like pistachios, a kind of mushy filling, and a strong taste of chocolate.  Considering the few ingredients involved, these two tastes are really the only ones I expected, although (as I've mentioned previously) I am not particularly fond of pistachios.  My boyfriend assures me the cookies are very delicious, though, so that's good.

As far as personal preference goes, I think I prefer the Sarah Bernhardt cookies I made last year, since they had a very similar texture, and I most definitely like almond better than pistachios.

Painful cookies, take two

This weekend has been pretty busy times, especially as I decided I would sort through my clothes and get rid of those that are (1) worn out, (2) too big, or (3) not things I want to wear anymore.  The second and third categories were much easier to deal with, as I just had to pull them out of bins in my closet, but that first category, well....  The logic goes like this: I wear the shirts I like best pretty regularly, which means they get worn out quickly, but they're still my favorite shirts so I don't want to get rid of them.

For now, I will fail a little bit at my closet cleaning and set those worn but loved shirts aside in the hope that someday I'll find the time to use the images on the front for something else, like a witty quilt.  We'll see.  I just hate to see the Runnin' Rhino go into the garbage like he's not helping me comment on society.

94. Cigarettes Russes
Blame the name on Martha Stewart - I don't want any food I eat to be called cigarettes - but these are really delicious!  You may recall that back in December I made cookie sticks much like these, with a thin batter and red food-coloring stripes.  Although there are subtle differences in the dough, the main difference with this new recipe is that the finished product is dipped in bittersweet chocolate.  This chocolate coating adds elegance and flavor to the experience.

I'm sure it's obvious that I like these cookies.  However, I did not enjoy preparing them.  As I mentioned when I made the other cookie sticks, these must be rolled up immediately after they are taken out of the oven.  This means that, no matter what interesting and new method I come up with to roll them, I always end up with badly burned fingertips and a sense of disappointment that I can't roll them to look as beautiful as the Pirouettes you can buy at the grocery store.  The necessity of rolling them while still hot also made it so I could only bake three at a time, making it a 2-3 hour endeavor to bake all of them.  Clearly, this kind of recipe is intended for people who have lots of free time.  Someday when I find that kind of free time (and when all the nerves in my fingertips go dead) I'll have to give these another go.

Finally up to date... at least for now

Tonight I found myself with a little bit of free time, and not a whole lot that I could actually do. You may have noticed by now that I've been catching up on my backlog. In order to close that off completely, I'll update for last weekend as well (because, let's face it, I don't really feel like reading my sewing machine manual right now).

Last Sunday (because Saturday was too busy) I made chocolate pretzels (67). These get their chocolate flavor from Dutched cocoa and a little bit of espresso powder. To make these, a bunch of basic ingredients, although, hardly any sugar, are mixed together, chilled, and then cut into pieces, which had to be rolled out and then shaped. The sparklies on the top are not salt, as some of my friends guessed, but sanding sugar.

I thought these cookies were alright, not as crunchy as I hoped they would be, and after the complex flavors from the past couple weeks, I wasn't ready for something this simple.

That's okay, though, I have plenty of other complex things to work out, both in research and in home things.

A Weekend in the Country

For all that I claim that I live practically in the middle of nowhere (that is, I live in Cornfield, USA, hence the blog title), I am still very much and probably will always be a city girl. Or at the very least, a mildly sophisticated suburbian girl.

Last Friday I went to a nature reserve about 40 miles east of town to go on a camping trip and retreat with the Graduate Christian Fellowship. Most of the retreat consisted of us sitting around the campfire talking with each other, but cooking was also a major part of the fun. As I am always stubborn in my desire to be creative, I surfed around the internet looking for good campfire recipes and stumbled on a boy scout site that included directions for cooking a peach in the fire. So I pitted a peach, wrapped it in foil, and cooked it. The result was pretty tasty.

Friday night was spent sleeping in a tent, trying to keep warm as the temperature crept down to the mid-40s. I knew it would be cold, and remembered how I couldn't sleep last year, so I came prepared this time, with basically two sets of pajamas to wear, plus my sleeping bag with its secret hood. The moon was nearly full, so the overcast sky was fairly bright, and I could peek out of my sleeping bag to watch the rain and wind on the tent. Although I was prepared, I was still very glad that this was just an overnight trip, because I definitely prefer the amenities of home.

Camping on Friday meant exhaustion on Saturday - so after a sad football game (green is a very silly color) and a double feature of Toy Story and Toy Story 2, I quit for the day.

(66) That means that today (well, yesterday by now) was my cookie day for the weekend, and once again I aimed for something kind of fancy. These cookies are basically chocolate shortbread with a white chocolate ganache in the center and plain white chocolate drizzled on the top for decoration. The cookies themselves are a little crunchy and very chocolate-y, and I think their dryness pairs well with the ganache.

Whenever I make something with white chocolate, I am always concerned that its richness will overpower everything else, but in this case I think that the fairly small size of the cookies (a little more than 1 square inch) helps to prevent that problem.

Today I ended up spending a large amount of time in the kitchen, preparing food for the next several days. Among my smaller projects are included a modified Turkey and Black Bean Chili (modified because I'm playing around with ways to reduce my meat consumption, so I added fake meat instead), and mixing up a batch of hummus. I'm excited about the hummus, as it's expensive to buy at the store but much less expensive to make at home.

As far as cooking goes, I really love autumn. Now that it's cooling down, I can start making more soups, stews, and chilis, switch back to drinking tea on a regular basis, cook interesting squashes, and pull out the spices that have been in the back of the drawer all summer.

It should be good times. Now all I have to do is make a decision on a Halloween costume...

An epic tale

It's been a very stressful month since my last post, but somehow (and probably not wisely) I have kept up my baking, and even remembered to take pictures of the results.

And thus begins my epic tale of the Qual.

For those of you not well-acquainted with the world of academia, I'll explain the situation a little:
The path of pilgrimage to the Ivory Tower is fraught with obstacles, trials, and rites of passage to weed out those who lack the ability or determination to achieve the final goal, which is Knowledge. The Qualifying Exam occurs a little ways down the path, after one has toughed it out through the Undergraduate Education and Graduate School Admissions, as well as the First Year of graduate school.

In the Qualifying Exam, pilgrims are asked questions that should allow them to demonstrate their proficiency in their chosen subject. In the specific case of Physics in the Cornfield, eight questions in what are considered the four Main Topics of Physics must be answered in two three-hour sessions. To pass this test, the pilgrim must have sufficient knowledge of concepts and equations from his or her senior level undergraduate courses and be able to write very quickly. Upon passing, he may continue along towards his PhD. However, if he fails, he must try again in a year, and if he fails again, he is no longer allowed to pursue his degree.

Knowing this fully, I entered into my studying much later than my brighter peers, and had significant trouble forcing myself to focus and start working through the many old problems available online. I spent time reading textbooks, making formula sheets, cleaning my apartment, sleeping a lot, and getting very frustrated with old problems from 1995.

That weekend, I made brownies (59), because brownies are simple, and because marbled things are pretty. I failed to realize in advance that the coconut and condensed milk in the light part would not have a very strong taste, and so I was sorely disappointed to taste a brownie, and to only have the coconut texture to let me know it was actually in there. Without the taste, the texture just made the brownies seem weird.

Riding on the tails of this disappointment came terrible unhappiness at my lack of work ethic, and the realization that the only way I could possibly get through would be by God's grace. So after some serious praying, I dove into the next week.

Early in that week, it dawned upon me that it was foolishness to continue on my quest alone, and so I joined two of my stronger (i.e. smarter) friends in their studying. Their motivation was catching, and my difficulty with the subjects was alarming, and so the next several weeks passed in a panicked flurry of practice problems and pasta. For, indeed, I switched over into a mode where I spared little time for non-Physics endeavors, including food.

When I did spare a little time for cookie baking, I attempted to make chocolate meringues (60). Clearly, I did not leave enough time for whipping them, as the one shown in the picture on the left had the most shape. Aesthetically, these were a complete failure. However, they still tasted good, and although they required two hours in the oven, I was able to spend those two hours busy with... you guessed it... more practice problems.

In the final week before the Qual, my peers and I started doing practice runs of the exam - we would take old exam sets and sit down from 7-10pm in a poorly-lit and steeply-inclined auditorium, in order to get used to the misery of the real test. After each practice test, we'd get together and compare answers. Or, rather, I would look at what my friends had done, since I wasn't really able to do a lot of things. My level of panic growing, I stayed for later nights as my more prepared peers took evenings off, making lists of the things I knew I needed to understand, finding problems related to those concepts, and working on them until I thought I maybe had some idea.

At this point I was desperate. My list of concepts ran four pages long, and each of those concepts took at least half an hour to master. By the weekend, I knew that I had to forgo the practice exam schedule and just focus on my weak points. So I worked out problems, skipped the Annie Get Your Gun cast party, and tried my hardest not to do anything too unwise before the test.

During a short break I whipped up some ANZAC Biscuits (61), which seemed appropriate as they're the cookies Australian families would send to soldiers in World War 1. This wasn't war, but I certainly had no time to go the grocery store or to roll out dough, so these were a great way for me to keep up with my baking. The taste of these was rather sweet - perhaps because I could only find sweetened coconut, and the only real flavor came from the golden syrup the recipe called for. Unfortunately, this was another case of coconut providing texture but not much flavor.

Monday came, and I was a mess. I was so scared about the exam that night that I couldn't eat and had to force myself not to listen to the voice in the back of my head, repeating over and over, "I can't do this. I'm going to fail." Fortunately, several friends and family members emailed and called, wishing me luck and reminding me that they believed in me (which totally sounds like the climax of an 80s movie or a 90s anime where the heroine is just about to give up).

So on Monday night I took the first half of my test. Some of it was alright, some of it was awful, and I came out of it totally numb. After an evening of beer and Rock Band, I returned home to sleep. I awoke on Tuesday more scared than I had been the day before - although I knew that the four specific topics from the night before wouldn't be repeated, they still could ask anything else, and there were still so many topics I hadn't mastered. In addition, I figured I had only gotten half of the points on the first part of the test, which meant the pressure was on to perform better on the second part. Knowing this, I entered into another studying frenzy, until the exam was near enough that I had to go to the Physics building.

I entered into the second part of this ordeal completely aware of the inadequacy of my preparation, and completely terrified. When the exam had concluded, I had no idea if I had done well enough to pass. By the time the letters were distributed on Friday I had completely convinced myself that I had not passed and would have to go through it all over again next year. So as I opened my letter, I steeled myself for the "I regret to inform you..." that meant failure, but instead I found:

I am delighted to be able to tell you that on the basis of your written qualifying examination and your record as a graduate student in this department, the Qualifying Examination Committee recommends you as a candidate for the Ph.D. degree in Physics.

Unlike the Committee Chairman, I was not delighted - or, rather, not just delighted - I was ecstatic, incredulous, completely in shock. I had to read the letter again to make sure it was real.

It was definitely real. The letter is now stuck my refrigerator as a monument of the fact that miracles do happen, and as a reminder that someone, at some point, thought that I am good enough to be in this program, and to be chasing after this PhD.

So, bridge crossed and giant defeated, I celebrated that weekend with fancier baking: vanilla cookies made into a sandwich with white chocolate raspberry filling (62). The filling was made with the juice from fresh pureed raspberries, heavy cream, and white chocolate, which means that I was in heaven. Somehow it ended up that too much liquid got into the filling, so it was very runny, but I added more white chocolate and that (mostly) solved the problem. It was good, in this case, that the actual cookies were very simple and not too sweet, as they were necessary to balance out the richness of the filling.


It would be nice to end the story here, to say that all has been well and calm ever since, but that is far from true - the long journey towards my degree continues, with small trials (like dysfunctional circuits), and other milestones (like the Preliminary Exam) to be passed on the way. For now I fill my time with research, exercise when I can get it, and my ever-continuing baking projects.

One Year: I've been scooped!?!

I realize, of course, that keeping a blog for anything at all is not particularly unique in this day and age, but I was glued to the tube the other night when I saw this (notice 1:15 to 1:20 especially). Oh great, a feel-good movie about a woman working her way through a cookbook and keeping a blog on it. Given, Julia Child is kind of cooler than Martha Stewart, and I don't have a soul-crushing job (or, at least I haven't discovered it to be so yet). And if, in the future, someone accuses me of copying this movie, I will at least be able to defend myself with the fact that I started this project an entire year before I heard anything about it.

Yes, that's right, I've been baking cookies on a weekly basis for a year now! The time has passed just as quickly as cliches call for, and here I am in perhaps the busiest summer of my life.

Why am I so busy? Well, let's see: I work full-time in a lab, I have three hours of rehearsal practically every evening, and whatever spare time I have otherwise goes into exercise or studying for the qual. I've still found time to sneak in cookie baking, but many of my projects have been uncomplicated to allow me to do other things. Although I'm often late and backlogged with posting, I promise that I'm keeping up this project, and will continue to stay on schedule with my baking.

Last weekend I made the 7-hour drive home to spend the Fourth of July with my family. This is one of the most important holidays on my Dad's side of the family, perhaps because there are something like 8 birthdays that happen in June and July put together. So everyone came home - my drive wasn't the longest, either - for a weekend of sun, soccer, and celebration. It was awesome. It also meant that I did not make cookies on Saturday.

Instead, I came home from rehearsal Monday night and started baking cookies that are perhaps the most interesting thing I've made yet: Cornmeal Thyme Cookies (53). Now, it's very difficult to imagine what it tastes like to put a savory herb into a cookie, and, to be honest with you, I thought that these were going to be disgusting. Or, considering that this is a published cookbook, I thought they wouldn't be better than mediocre.

After mixing everything together - that is, the cornmeal, currants, thyme, lots of butter, sugar, and other normal cookie things - and baking, I found that these are some of the best cookies I've ever had, especially the day after they were baked. Something between the first three ingredients listed made for a fantastic and unique taste, and perhaps it's the unique part that won me over. After all, I have some basis of comparison for most of the cookies I make, but this was totally new, and totally delicious. My friends were equally surprised that these were so good. If you're looking for a different cookie to share with people, this is definitely it.


Yesterday I decided to go with something a little more normal, and whipped up some Dark Chocolate Cherry Cookies (54). These are a basic cookie with Dutched Cocoa in the dough and bittersweet chocolate chunks and dried tart cherries mixed in. The product is a couple dozen large cookies that have a very strong chocolate taste. The cherries do not feature too heavily in the overall taste of the cookies, but when you get a bite of one, you definitely notice it. Although I think these cookies are tasty, I would have liked it if the cherries were a stronger taste in them - especially considering how difficult it was to find sour cherries around here. Ah well. I'll chalk these down as good, but they were kind of a waste of money.


Alright, it's time for some sleep - I've got to be up early tomorrow for the start of yet another busy week. Hi ho the glamorous life!