Eating the elephant one bite at a time...

I always thought that it would be very easy to keep a beautifully clean apartment once I started living by myself.  Perhaps if I were still on an undergraduate schedule (that is, one with longer vacations), I could set aside a whole day every month to thoroughly clean everything.  Such a day is impossible on my current schedule, so I think I may need to give myself a piece-by-piece cleaning schedule and just do some 30 minutes of work every day.  While I don't like the thought of this, I like the dirt and dust less, so we'll have to see if I can have my apartment nice and clean by the weekend.

A part of this problem that doesn't allow me large blocks of time to clean is that I've been spending a lot of time at the gym this summer, particularly in the outdoor pool.  My summer goal is to swim 3 miles every week.  I haven't kept to this perfectly, partly because it took me a couple weeks to get back to my usual pace and distance, and partly due to traveling a little, but I hope I can fit in another 17 miles before the fall semester begins.  Or, of course, I could try to push a little harder and swim more than one mile each time I go to the pool...

In the meantime, I keep chipping away at my cookie project:

105. Vanilla Malted Cookies
Here is another simple but impressive cookie.  Basically, malted milk powder and vanilla seeds are added to a very buttery dough, which is shot out of a cookie gun to result in a product that my advisor thought were store-bought.

Vanilla seeds are altogether too expensive, so I added 1.5t vanilla extract instead.  I suppose that, for a particularly discerning palate, there is a difference in taste, but I don't really expect that kind of refined taste in the non-bakers with whom I share these cookies.

Nevertheless, the vanilla flavor is strong, and the malted milk gives the cookies a rich caramel flavor, and they disappeared so quickly that I can only suppose that my coworkers liked them very much.  I'm also a big fan of using the cookie gun - oh, okay, so it's actually a cookie press - because it's so much easier than using cookie cutters.  It's kind of a shame that only a couple recipes in my book call for such a device.

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.