reclaiming campus

The past couple weeks have been a whirlwind of graduation visits, students' final projects, exam proctoring, and giving people space so that they can get their last insane push of work done before not having that kind of work at all for a while.  Final exams here are over at the end of the week, and I am looking forward not only to seeing my friends more, but also (especially?) to the fact that most of the undergraduates will leave campus and not come back until August.

It's not that I think undergrads are awful - it's just that in the summer when many of them are gone, graduate students get the opportunity to take ownership of campus.  We can go to Green Street (the C-U equivalent of South U for my Ann Arbor friends) for lunch at noon without encountering long lines and equally long waiting times.  We can have picnics on the Quad, be it Engineering or the regular one.  It's possible to ride one's bicycle to the gym without encountering straggler pedestrians in every bike lane.  With such a drastic reduction in the university's 40,000-odd crowd, those who stay are granted the chance relax and breathe a little.  Oh, right, and the outdoor pool is open all summer, which has nothing to do with undergrads at all but makes me immeasurably happy.

At the Big House for Tony's graduation.

It seems my family doesn't understand the grad student summer very well: when I was home a couple weekends ago to see my little brother graduate, I had to field various questions along the lines of "So what do you think you'll do for summer break?"  For me, there is no summer break.  Yes, I might get a break from teaching, but I have already completed my required classes and spend my working time doing research.  The end of the semester changes nothing.  However, I'm hoping that the extra time I'll have from not teaching will allow me to complete this start-up project I've been working on for so long.  With that out of the way, I will be able to focus on the weighty task of finding a prelim topic (more on that in another post).

Throughout all this, I have continued with my baking endeavors.  I confess that I've started looking forward to the completion of this project, as the various ingredients have increased my grocery bills, sometimes significantly, and the time commitment has begun to feel just a bit onerous.  Do not fear that I will cut this off abruptly, I am committed to completing my cookie project on time.  I have learned so much about baking in the past 34 months and although I tire of this project, I still look forward to what I will learn in the next seven.

147. Coconut Cookies with Passion Fruit Curd
Living in Illinois, it can be kind of difficult to find something so tropical as passion fruit puree.  In general, I look for ingredients first at Meijer, second at Strawberry Fields, and then I start going to specialty stores.  I ended up finding passion fruit pulp at what should be my default third store to check, World Harvest.  This is a little Pakistani-owned shop (the owner is a great guy) close to campus that stocks ingredients from around the world.  And so, frozen fruit in hand, I rejoiced in the fact that I would finally be able to try this recipe.

The cookies themselves were amazingly easy to make.  I had most of the ingredients on hand, including unsweetened coconut flakes, which I found at the grocery store some time ago on the same shelf as carob chips.  The dough was kind of sticky, so I found it was important to pay attention to the chilling instructions in the recipe, and to use large quantities of flour to roll them out and cut them into circles.  Funny story: all my round cookie cutters were too big, so I ended up using a shot glass - well, a measuring shot glass, for tablespoon measurements and the like - to cut the cookies.  After baking, the result was a strongly coconut, already tasty cookie.  I guess these were supposed to turn out kind of crispy but maybe I undercooked them a little, as they turned out a little soft.  Honestly, though, I think I prefer the chewier texture.

As the cookie name indicates, passion fruit curd serves as the filling here.  The curd is made with passion fruit pulp (the recipe called for puree, but I'm not sure with this fruit that there's much of a difference), lemon juice, sugar, butter, and egg yolks, as well as a couple other non-flavoring ingredients.  The result was both sweet and sour, with a custard (curd?) texture to it.  If it weren't so rich, I probably would have just attacked the curd with a spoon and not bothered with the cookies.

I managed to behave myself and constructed these sandwich cookies as directed by the recipe.  Together, the passion fruit and coconut were AMAZING.  There are some tropical flavors I really don't like - papaya, for instance - but these flavors made a fantastic mix.  Given that I have half a bag of passion fruit pulp left in my freezer, these cookies will definitely be making a return appearance this summer.

148. Cakey Chocolate Chip Cookies
I mentioned above that I recently traveled to see my brother graduate.  Well, that weekend was an insane 67 hours of driving, visiting, celebrating, and not getting much sleep.  I left Champaign at 6:30am on Friday and returned at 1:30am on Monday, with no time in between for baking cookies.  I toyed with the idea of skipping the week's baking entirely, but I've been very strictly following the one recipe per week rule I set when I started, and decided that I could give an hour to make a recipe I was saving.  It was a little disappointing to have to use this now, as I kind of hoped to save it for the very end, but as I flipped through my cookbook before bible study, I realized that no other available recipe would allow me to have cookies ready to share with my small group.

These cookies have slightly less butter in them than standard chocolate chip cookies, and have more white sugar than brown sugar.  This makes them more dense and a little more dry, but not dry in a bad way.  I'm not sure if I would describe these specifically as being like cake, but it's probably the closest comparison.  I was very impressed by these cookies, and I think they might actually be my favorite iteration of chocolate chip cookies from this book (there are 3 total).  It's possible that I may have to compare them side by side, but I liked these, and so did my friends.  As a side note, since I've been making very fancy stuff lately, I brought these into my office and one of my labmates scoffed at their simplicity.  I told him if he had a problem with it, he didn't have to have any cookies.  So there.

149. Prune Rugelach
Some recipes take a long time from start to finish.  The best ones typically don't call for much active time.  This specific recipe falls somewhere in between.  It was necessary to prepare the dough the night before and chill it, and to soak the prunes in brandy overnight.  The next afternoon, I rolled the dough out into very large circles, spread the pureed prunes on them, followed by white bread crumbs and sugar, and then rolled the wedges up.  These had to chill for two hours in the fridge before being baked for 40 minutes.  From start to finish, this meant about 24 hours with approximately 2 hours active time.

I realize that you're probably thinking that prunes are old people food.  Indeed, they are high in fiber, but they also taste pretty good.  The brandy soak really perked up their flavor, although most of the alcohol evaporated away during the baking process.  It was important that this filling was very sweet, as the dough involved is a simple cream cheese and butter dough with no sugar in it.  Once baked, this dough was delightfully flaky and lent a fantastic richness to the whole recipe.  Overall, I found these cookies to be better than expected, and had a difficult time keeping myself from consuming several of them.

You may also notice that there is some mysterious jello in the picture above.  This was a recent experiment, where I made French Lemonade jello shots.  As a result of wasting time on Pinterest, I stumbled on a blog whose writers make cocktails into jello shots, and so I had to try making some.  You can check the blog out here: Jelly Shot Test Kitchen.

Alright guys, that's all I've got tonight.  I hope those of you in the Midwest are staying cool with this latest heat wave, and that you all stay safe with the subsequent possibly severe weather.

scatterbrained

The past several days have been a mess of distractions, mistakes, and things forgotten that should have been remembered.  This means dirty dishes have accumulated (they are clean now), gym shoes have been left at home, and - perhaps the worst thing to happen - it completely slipped my mind to take a picture of the cookies I made this week.

I am so embarrassed.

It's not like I didn't plan to take that picture.  I mean, I have three or four days between baking cookies and them being completely gone, but this week... well... I'll blame it on the wicked awesome thunderstorm we had last night.

For now, I guess I'll put in some placeholder picture, and hopefully (considering I have various specialty ingredients left over) I will make a batch again soon and actually take a picture.

146. Chocolate Chip Cookies for Passover
When I first looked through this cookbook, and even when I first started this project, I figured I would end up skipping this recipe.  After all, what would I do with matzo meal and matzo farfel (matzo farfel is broken up bits of matzo crackers)?  After spending so much time (and money) hunting down special ingredients and baking tools, I realized that it would actually be no big deal to make these, and since I should be done in November, this was my last Passover to give the recipe a shot.

Now, what's so special about Passover cookies? Well, during Passover the Jewish people remember the tenth plague of Egypt, the plague on the firstborn, where the plague passed over the Jewish families that had lamb's blood on their doorways, and subsequently led to their being freed by Pharaoh.  In part of the instructions about the Passover meal,

"Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it as on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come.  In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day.  For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses.  And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is an alien or native-born.  Eat nothing made with yeast.  Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread."

(Exodus 12:17-20)

 Basically, in order for these cookies to be acceptable for Passover, they need to have no leavening agent in them, nor any dairy.  All-purpose flour typically has some leavening in it, and so matzo meal and matzo farfel were used instead.  Furthermore, vegetable oil was used in place of butter, and the recipe asks for non-dairy chocolate chips.  Add in your usual vanilla, eggs, and brown sugar, and some walnuts, and you've pretty much got the whole recipe.

The results of this recipe were surprisingly delicious!  The cookies had a nice soft texture, and although you could tell that they were made with matzo instead of flour, all the people who tasted them had no complaints.

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.

All kinds of fun times

 Oops... I guess it's been way too long since last posting.  Um... Oops!  I guarantee that there's a perfectly good reason why I stopped posting mid-October, and here it is: in mid-October I met the guy that I am now dating (and if people have interest in knowing more, I can tell about it but not in a public post).  He's pretty cool so I tend to take my free time and save it to spend with him, and so although I've been baking a lot, I have completely neglected to post.

Until now.

I'm right in the middle of my very long Winter Break - they give us a month off from classes - although I'm not going to be taking the whole time as vacation proper.  Half of my "vacation" time will be spent back in the cornfield, working hard to finish up my current research project.  I spent the semester working on a starter project in the lab, and want to finish it up so I can move on to bigger, better, and more Physics-y things.

But for now I am still taking vacation, which means I had darn well better get caught up here!  As it's been some time since making several of these, I will be using my cookbook to remind me of what is worth saying.

68. 11/18 - Chunky Peanut, Chocolate, and Cinnamon Cookies 

These look like regular chocolate chip cookies, and, to be honest, I was so busy working on my Halloween costume (I got myself a sewing machine and pieced together a Belle costume.. but only the blue dress, none of the gold dress nonsense) that I didn't want to spend much time on baking them.  Fortunately, these were a quick cookie to put together.

The title explains pretty well what went into these cookies, aside from the usual flour, brown and white sugar, eggs, and so on.  In addition to peanuts, the recipe included a hefty helping of peanut butter.  I was skeptical at the idea of peanut butter and cinnamon together - at some point when I was younger I had them together and the memory still strikes me as A Bad Taste - but it turns out that the cinnamon was sufficiently subtle and paired with the chocolate chips to make these pretty good cookies, as far as the simple ones go.

69. 10/24 - Apple-Cherry Crumble Bars

This recipe represents yet another foray into the expensive world of dried cherries.  It's also one of my seasonal picks.  Here, dried apples and cherries are simmered in apple cider until they're properly rehydrated and soft.  The fruit is then used as a middle layer for a typical oat, butter, sugar, and salt crumbly mixture that you expect in any kind of fruit bar.

I enjoyed the flavor of these, but once again found the cherries to be too understated for the cost (although less than in those chocolate cookies I made in July).  I liked the oats in the crust, though, and used them again a couple weeks later when challenged to improvise a quick apple cobbler.  I consider this a small triumph, since the actual goal of this project is not to make tasty things, but to learn what it takes to make tasty things.

70. 11/01 - Anise Drops

One week I went on a fennel kick and, in the spirit of things black licorice-flavored, whipped up these cookies.  For those of you unfamiliar with fennel, it's a root used in Italian cooking, and the seeds are one of the definitive seasonings in Italian sausage.  Anise is a different herb, but it has a similar flavor.

As I mentioned above, the anise extract in these cookies made them taste like black licorice, but not in a particularly overpowering way.  Otherwise, these are very light cookies - there's no butter in them, so the texture is due largely to the baking powder and the fact that they had to be whipped for upwards of 6 minutes.  All in all, I think these are good, if a bit unusual, cookies.

71. 11/07 - Rocky Ledge Bars (marked as a best cookie)
These bar cookies were so good: imagine for a moment that you have chocolate chip cookie dough, and then you add to it miniature marshmallows, chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and pieces of caramel.  If your mouth isn't watering then your imagination might be broken.  These were decadent and delicious, what I like to call "full of bad for you", and the flavors fit together so nicely that even I, with my disdain for all things caramel, thought they were wonderful.  I suspect these might make a reappearance sometime next summer....

72. 11/14 - Chocolate-Ginger Brownies

When it gets to be November, I like to start sneaking things like ginger and and nutmeg into my recipes.  And so in this case fresh ginger, ground ginger, nutmeg, and cloves are mixed with bittersweet chocolate and Dutch cocoa to make surprisingly good brownies.  For all that I was afraid my friends wouldn't like these, they were also surprised to find they really enjoyed the mingling of flavors, especially a day or two after these had been baked, so that the flavors could actually mingle properly.  When that had happened, the ginger taste was very strongly present, but didn't overpower the chocolate.

73. 11/21 - Chocolate Cherry Crumb Bars

My cookbook describes these bars as being similar to Black Forest cake, which is not something I really know anything about.  Nor did I know where to pick up any of the optional kirsch (cherry brandy), so that had to be left out of the recipe.

This is a 3-layer concoction, with toasted coconut, cocoa, sugar, butter, and flour mixed together to make the top and bottom (very crumbly) layers, and a center layer of dried cherries, sugar, and lots of egg.  As you can see in the photo, the center was pretty gooey.  This is the first dried cherry recipe that I have been satisfied with - for once the cherries had a solid place in the flavor palette, and I'm a big fan of gooey chocolate-y stuff.

74. 11/29 - Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies

These guys are on the cover of my book, and the introduction says something about how they're just about the most amazing thing ever.  I am inclined to disagree with Martha Stewart in yet another thing (there have been some interesting and some misleading typos in the book).  These cookies are basically a molasess cookie with cocoa in the dough and chocolate chips added.  It sounds kind of like the brownies I made a couple weeks before these, except that where the brownies had the ginger as a background to the chocolate, these cookies set the chocolate as a background to the ginger and molasses, which left my tastebuds confused.  These tasted much better after a couple days (again, flavors needed to mingle), but I think if I want to make a dominantly ginger cookie, I'll be sticking with the recipe I first used last February.

75. 12/06 - Dried-Cranberry Shortbread Hearts

I have been copying the recipe titles from my cookbook, but I do not copy all the directions exactly when I think they're wasteful.  One such wasteful instruction is using cookie cutters to make shapes out of things that have already been baked.  So my choice of shapes was triangles.  I made these late on a Sunday night, desperate to get something made quickly so that I could study for quickly upcoming final exam without missing a weekend.

I know I've discussed shortbread before, but I'll do so again as briefly as possible.  Shortbread is made from butter, confectioner's sugar, flour, salt, and vanilla, plus whatever you put in it to give additional flavor.  Basically, that means that whatever you add has to go well with vanilla and butter.  Cranberries definitely fit the bill, although other dried fruits or chocolate chips would work too.  But I liked the cranberries in this shortbread, and might not bother with putting in other flavors.

76. 12/13 - Buttered Rum Meltaways

Oh, these were good.  These cookies are made with dark rum, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves as their flavoring.  When baked, the alcohol evaporates, and the lack of baking soda or powder keeps them from rising, thus resulting in a warmly-spiced dense but kind of crumbly cookie.  After they had cooled, I had to toss them in confectioner's sugar, which added just the right amount of sweetness.  The nice thing about these cookies, aside from the flavor, is that the dough keeps for a long time - once prepared, it's formed into rolls and can be kept in the freezer for a month or so.

77. 12/20 - Candy-Stripe Cookie Sticks

These look pretty fancy, and they should because rolled-up cookies are really difficult to make.  The dough for these is very basic, with only sugar and vanilla as flavoring, and it's pretty runny, too, so that it can be spread thin.  I separated some of this dough and added food coloring until it turned red.  In order to make the appropriate rectangular shape, a cardboard stencil was made, so that the white batter was spread to fill the stencil.  Then I used a pastry bag with a circular tip to pipe the red stripes on top.  However, the sugar I was using was old and clumpy, so the batter kept getting stuck in the tip, leading to a few kitchen adventures, my favorite being the one where the tip flew off and red batter ended up all over my stove.

The other tricky part about these is that they had to be rolled immediately after they were taken out of the oven.  While this type of cookie is hot it is still pliable, but once it cools it hardens.  And so, with much cursing and slightly burned fingertips (and much appreciated help from the boy, as well) these cute cookies were achieved.  Take a good look, I don't think these will be coming back again.

78. 12/23 - Cranberry-Pistachio Cornmeal Biscotti

I made these a little early because I knew I would be busy Christmas weekend, and because I wanted to have another nice thing to offer for my family to eat.  As the title suggests, these are biscotti made with dried cranberries, pistachios, and cornmeal.  There's also a lot of lemon zest in them, which provides a lot of the flavor.  I really like the use of cornmeal in these, as it makes them a little more crumbly than usual biscotti, and thus a bit easier to eat.  All in all, I find these to be delicious and appropriately festive.  Oh, right, and nice to have with tea.

Well, that's a lot of cookie summaries.  I should just close out this post, but there's a couple books I wanted to post about too, since they're interesting.

The first, Living the Christian Year by Bobby Gross, is one that was given to me (and the other people on the exec team) by the Graduate Christian Fellowship staff worker at UIUC.  It is basically a devotional guide to following the Liturgical calendar - that is, the church seasons like Advent, Epiphany, Lent, and so on.  I grew up in various church backgrounds, having moved around a lot, and so while I'm aware of these seasons, they haven't really had much meaning to me.  However, it looks like this book might make a good guide for going through the Christian year while trying to keep the focus of my everyday life very firmly set on Christ.

The other book is one my mom gave me for Christmas, Then Sings My Soul by Robert J. Morgan.  It's a book of 150 hymns and a one-page summary of their history, particularly concerning the history of the music and lyrics.  Since I am secretly a Musicologist, I think this book is super cool - few things make me happier than taking music and connecting it with people's thoughts and ideas about life.  In fact, I am seriously considering doing a research project on music in the Church, particularly focusing on reasons for and reactions to new types of music, and going back to the first inclusion of singing as a method of memorizing Biblical text as early as the 5th century.  This may be too much of an undertaking, but at least what I can get done will be fun and maybe even edifying.

Alright, now that I've written far more than any sane person is willing to read, it's time for me to stop and do something else.  I hope you all are having great (or at least bearable) holiday times!

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.

Backlog, take 2

I apologize for my tardiness in posting yet again, despite it being summer, I've been insanely busy. A typical day for me lately goes like this: wake up and go to work, from work go to rehearsal, from rehearsal go out with people. Rinse and repeat for at least half of the week. Weekends get changed up a little, but I like to go swimming, and then (again) end up spending time with my friends. Whom I love. So it's cool.

The first set of cookies shown here are a basic chocolate chip cookie (50), with ingredients set up so that they're thin and crunchy. You can see Domo is crunching on this one. As far as making chocolate chip cookies to have different textures, one has to vary the ingredients. I'm noticing that things that are crunchy typically have more butter and less flour (cakey things go the other way). At first when I realized this it came as a surprise: for some reason I thought that butter would make things moist or something. This is not true. But yes, these were pretty good, plus they were convenient to make while I was over at my friend's house watching the first Transformers movie.


On the following weekend I was in my cousin's wedding (congratulations Whitney and Adam!!), so I drove home for a whirlwind weekend of fun. I was completely unable to make cookies then, but I managed to sneak some baking in on Wednesday when I decided it was too hot to leave my apartment. Baking didn't really help, but these cookies were quick to make and worked well for the pool party I went to with the people from my lab.

These are called Honey Florentines (51). They're made with butter and honey, some sugar, and the tiniest amount of flour. This is the kind of cookie that melts all over the place in the oven, and the lacelike texture is a result of things boiling and then cooling. Although they were very buttery, these cookies gave the illusion of being a light snack, and they seemed to go over well at the pool party.


(marked as a best cookie) Finally we have Sunday's (yes, I was late again) concoction, Peach Drop Cookies (52), which have won their way onto my top five list. There's a couple reasons why I like these so much: first, they basically taste like Snickerdoodles with peaches in them. Second, their texture is soft and cakelike (more flour, less butter!). Third, they were super easy to make. Aside from the normal ingredients, these cookies have chopped peach bits and homemade peach jam in them. I did not make the jam - it was a Christmas gift from my grandma, which means I should call her and tell her about how I used it. These taste so good... they were especially delicious when I had just taken them out of the oven, and I have to admit I downed about half a dozen while they were still warm. I blame it on that they're too good. As long as peaches are in season, I may end up making these again.

Alright, it's time to get back to work. Rehearsal is picking up since the show is about a month away, and Quals are coming up in two months, so I've really got to get my act together. Oh, right, and posting this stuff on time would be nice too.

put 'em all together and a-whaddya get?

The first week of classes was moderately uneventful but still full of random blessings.

One such fortuitous event occurred on Tuesday, the very first day of classes, when I missed my bus. Now, taking the bus means that my time getting to school is quantized, meaning that instead of being able to be as many minutes late as I leave the house, I can be ten minutes early, five minutes late, or twenty minutes late, all depending on the bus. Having missed the bus that would get me to campus on time, I resigned myself to taking the next bus and being embarrassed by being late to my first class. As I stood outside waiting for the next bus to come, my friend Cory drove by, saw me, and gave me a ride. It was fantastic, I didn't have to set such a bad precedent for the semester (because my plan is to go to ALL my classes instead of skipping practically every morning class, as I did last semester).

There are a few extra things I'm trying to do regularly or to cut out this semester. A recent one, and a behavior I really hope to keep up beyond the "one-month wonder" range is spending time at the gym. My friends and I set up a schedule where we go to the pool twice a week, the gym twice a week, and have a day where we decide which one we want to do. So far, it's been doable, and actually quite nice - the gym facilities here at UI are well kept, and free for students to use.

Another thing I'm up to that I think is very important is making myself take a day off from physics (that day being Saturday). As such, it's my Sabbath: I realized that school has been an idol in my life for years, and taking a day off allows me to reassert that there is something much more important ruling my life, namely God. Taking a sabbath doesn't mean sitting around on the couch all day. I went to the gym in the morning, I did some reading, I went out with my friends, and I made cookies.

On Friday, when I did my grocery shopping, I was perusing through my book trying to decide what cookies to bake, when I realized that I've been making very chocolate-y things in the past couple weeks, and decided it would be good to take a break from that. So when I saw the recipe for Peanut Butter-Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies (30), I decided they were just the variety I wanted.

Looking over the recipe, I realized that I'm starting to pick up on the basic ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, as compared to other cookies. I find that chocolate chip cookies have equal parts white and brown sugar, and lots of butter. But the brown sugar, I think, is the thing that gives them a lot of their characteristic taste, and it's in these cookies, too. The recipe I used yesterday was actually very interesting because it called for 3 cups of oats and only 1/3 cups of flour (and whole wheat flour, at that). I thought perhaps this was an error, but with the low viscosity of the natural peanut butter and the absorbency of the oats, the cookies weren't goopy at all. You'll notice I mentioned natural peanut butter: this basically means it doesn't have salt, sugar, and other random stuff added, which gives it a different taste and makes it a lot less solid. There's also salted peanuts in the cookies, which puts the salt right back in.

I thought I might not like these too much: I usually don't like cookies with peanuts in them, I'm wary about peanut butter, and I always worry about too many flavors and textures going into a recipe, but I think these cookies are delicious. They're a different take on the whole chocolate chip thing, but they're just as easy to make (with about equal yield), and the oatmeal and peanuts go together to make these cookies delightfully crunchy. This recipe is definitely getting a comment written in for quality.


That's about it for now. I've got a problem set to knock out and a lesson plan to prepare, so that hopefully I can do what I want on my birthday instead of losing the day to the demands of grad school.

If you've got it, flaunt it...?

After all the things that came together to make up last week, I have come to the conclusion that I absolutely have to start practicing voice again. Why? Let's see... Many of the first-year grad students have some kind of serious sports history - playing Ultimate Frisbee, or swimming, or training for marathons... and this makes me feel kind of silly, because the one thing I do very well (aside from Physics, I guess I have to say now that I'm actually a grad student) is singing. That, and apparently I blew people away sufficiently at the visiting weekend when I sang karaoke that they still remember, and if I let that slip, that'll just be silly.

Most of all, though, I just love to sing. The phrase is nothing original, the sentiment is genuine. When I finally had the opportunity to take voice lessons, I found that diligent practice actually made it more fun... partially because practicing meant I sang more every day, but also because I was able to actually find my own sound, as opposed to the adolescent choir sound I had developed. Then, somewhere along the way, I buried myself in musical theater pieces, and have since found all kinds of fun in expressing character and moods through tone and physical expression. Now all I need to do is find an amateur MT group so I can stroot my stoof.

But that is a different project. This week, as usual, I baked more cookies (8)! These ones have banana, semi sweet chocolate chips, toasted walnuts, and wheat flour in them (aside from the normal things). The recipe called for chocolate chunks, but when I was at the store, I found it was less expensive to purchase 12oz of chips than two 4oz bars.

These cookies ooze healthiness. I have to admit, I was one of those kids who LOVED white bread, and couldn't eat wheat bread unless it had all kinds of stuff on it. I eat whole wheat bread now because it's good for me, but I'm always very aware of the taste and it's not my favorite. That whole wheat taste is present in this latest batch of cookies, but I think it goes pretty well with the walnuts and bananas. The chocolate chips kind of save the recipe, though, by putting in something that's not so healthy. I think I may have put too much banana in the batter, since the cookies are a little spongy...but in a good way.

Of course, I will take these to the physics building on Monday, when people get together to do their homework (how lame are we, that we're taking our day off to go to work), and they will probably be gone by the end of the day. And hopefully, so will our homework.

**re-made on 7/19/10

apple & cookies

I'm a little behind this weekend for several reasons... on Friday I went to my old apartment to move all my stuff out and clean it up, and only got back in the early evening yesterday.

Last night was dedicated to baking (as usual) and playing with my new laptop. Like so many people I know, I finally got fed up with Microsoft and purchased a Mac. It's a fun time, but I'm not used to the OS yet and have to go through the hassle of installing software and moving files and learning the commands, since I've always been a shortcut girl. Despite the frustrations that inevitably come from getting a new computer, I am excited that the hardware is faster (my other laptop is four years old) and the speakers are louder. Awesome.


But I did not come here today to alternate between complaining about and cheering for the features on my computer. I'm here to post a picture of my lovely chocolate chip cookies (4)! I realize that these are a staple sort of food, but I happened to have the correct amount of chocolate chips lying around (from a s'mores mix experiment) for the recipe. These cookies are just what you hope for - soft and chewy, and full of more butter than you really want to know. They are awfully tasty, and in a nice continuation of tradition, I had some fresh out of the oven with a glass of milk (I shared them with my stepsister too, she was pretty happy about that).

Over the next several weeks I'll need to make sure I pick some quick and easy cookie recipes - between my roommate ruining some of my bakeware, moving, and starting training and classes soon, I fear I won't have the required time or resources to do the more interesting baking experiments. I'm sure I'll still find the time to take photos and post them here - no amount of busyness can keep me from wasting time on the Internets.