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!

There's No Business Like Show Business

...especially when it comes to throwing my schedule into complete turmoil.

Over the past several weeks I've been kept super busy with work and rehearsals (and the actual show, of course) and my attempt to keep up some semblance of a social life in the midst of all that chaos. It was rough. But after 4 shows, the run of Annie Get Your Gun is over and I can move on to finish my summer as a normal person.

Aw, who am I kidding? I have three weeks left to study as hard as I can for my Qualifying Exam, which is basically the most important exam of my whole life. That means nonstop studying between then and now. In fact, I should be studying right now. In order to get back to my textbooks as quickly as possible, I will have to keep this post brief.

Yes, I realize I'm backlogged on 4 posts now. I'll give you pictures, brief descriptions, and will do my best not to wax too scientific on you.

After all my trip to Michigan funtime, I decided that I really like hazelnut flavoring in my coffee. This made me think that perhaps I would also enjoy hazelnuts in cookies too, so I chose to make hazelnut orange shortbread (55).

This was an interesting recipe, because the dough is about half flour and half toasted hazelnuts (which, I admit, I think I burned a little bit), and the orange zest has a nice strong taste. There's cane sugar on top, which adds just enough sweetness to help keep this shortbread from tasting like a granola bar... or, at least I was a bit reminded of some Nature Valley business or some such. My coworkers disagreed.

(marked as a best cookie) The week after that I decided that, being the middle of summer, it was the perfect time to make what I consider to be a perfect dessert for the summer: lemon bars (56). I'm not sure if it was the recipe, or if it's just an inherent quality of lemon bars, but these were SO GOOD. When I brought them in to work I encouraged everyone around me to eat them up so I wouldn't.

The recipe for the crust had an unusual instruction in it: it called for grating frozen butter so that it could be mixed with the flour and sugar. I think my grater was too fine, though, because by the time I got halfway through a stick the end had started to melt.

After that, I made peanut butter and jelly bars (57). These were a late-night endeavor, thrown together after loading everything into the theater and running through musical and technical rehearsals, so I chose something simple that required minimal shopping. What these bars did call for, however, was a LOT of peanut butter. A medium-sized jar of peanut butter went into this recipe, along with a couple sticks of butter and some other random stuff. Essentially what these are is a peanut butter dough covered with a layer of strawberry jam (homemade by my grandma), and then covered with another layer of peanut butter dough and roughly chopped peanuts.

When I tried these, I found, to my dismay, that they taste just like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that has been in a lunchbox all morning. My friends said they really liked these, but something put me off. It may be that I don't like how strawberry jam goes with peanut butter. It may be that the consistency made me think of elementary school cafeterias. I don't know. But I wasn't particularly fond of these bars. I did like the peanut butter dough, though, so I might see about revising this recipe to make peanut butter cookies (especially considering the melty peanut butter cookies I made last year).

Finally, this past weekend, I found myself a tiny bit of free time to whip together some key lime bars (58). Now, I love key lime pie, and I like lime in general, and so Saturday turned into a lime fiasco by mistake: my family came over to see the musical, and while they were here I served them Pad Thai (with lime), limeade, and these bars. But that's slightly off-topic.

I like these bars (although not as much as the lemon bars) - the key lime juice makes them exceptionally tart, so that adding whipped cream on top tones them down just enough to be amazing. I'm also particularly fond of graham cracker crusts, which is exactly what is on the bottom layer. The top layer is made with key lime juice, egg yolks, and sweetened condensed milk.


Aside from baking, I've picked up a couple things to keep me occupied in my nonexistent free time: I've been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I've spent a bit of time getting stars in Super Mario Galaxy, and I've started watching an old BBC comedy called 'Are you Being Served?'. I expect that I will be dropping all three of these in order to study more this month.

I'll try to keep the cookie posts up, although I warn in advance that everything I choose will be chosen for its quick prep time.

Ok that is all for now ^.^

Slightly underwhelmed

Last weekend was a continuation of my crazy cooking/baking/doing everything at once from last week. I slept in on Saturday (after all, it was my only chance to get a good sleep before diving back in to the homework cycle), then went to Sam's Club and Meijer. At Sam's, I picked up something like two pounds of smoked salmon, which makes me very happy (and when I start eating it, I will be even happier). I will not be eating it straight like Cassi has, though: she has a pack that she's been keeping in the office fridge, and at lunch time she gets it out and just eats strips of it. I'm ok with that, but I think the flavor can be better enjoyed with, perhaps, a bagel.

Part of my busyness is due to my decision to make coffee cake to share with my first-year friends for the Brinner (that is, breakfast for dinner) we had on Saturday night. So I called my grandma up to get her recipe, and made my first coffee cake ever. The recipe is fairly straightforward - the dough has yeast, flour, sugar, &c. and has to rise several times before it's time to roll it out and add the pastry filling. Fortunately, I didn't have to make my own filling, and this time around I used apricot, only because the raspberry filling was out of stock when I ran to the store. Next time I will use raspberry. But, fruit choices aside, it turned out very nicely, once I moved the pan high enough in the oven that the bottoms didn't burn. You can see in the picture that it's very pretty too, which is good because visual appeal is an important part of the food experience.


My cookies from Saturday, on the other hand, did not turn out to be quite as good. These are what my cookbook calls "Peanut Butter Whoopie Pies" (36), but I don't think they call for so much enthusiasm as that. The cookie part is very floury, with some unsweetened cocoa and buttermilk involved (oh, and lots of butter too), but I find that, perhaps just because I'm comparing it to other foods, the cookie flavor is somewhat bland. The layer in the center is peanut butter mixed with butter and powdered sugar, which, to be honest, seems like a bit of a waste. The recipe calls for taking two cookies and sandwiching them together with the frosting in between. When I did this, it was like eating a small hamburger, and I didn't like it. Instead, I chose to keep the frosting separate and to bring it in with the cookies so that my friends could put the peanut butter mixture on the cookies in whatever quantities they decided were appropriate.

I find myself underwhelmed by this recipe, so I expect not to revisit it after my project ends. I suppose this is alright, though - in three years when this project ends, it'll probably be good to have some recipes eliminated so that I don't just go through the cycle again.

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.

Cookie backlog

So basically I'm a pretty busy person these days. This doesn't mean I haven't been making my cookies, though! I don't have a whole lot to say about the cookies, but I'll put something in, I suppose.

I'll just do this in chronological order, I suppose.

Week 1: Peanut Butter cookies (12)
I think there was something wrong in this recipe - the dough was far too sticky and the cooking time was so long that I burnt the first batch. The sticky dough was particularly unfortunate, because it meant that I was completely unable to include the cross-hatch pattern that everyone expects out of peanut butter cookies. Clearly, in the future I will be using my own recipe.

Week 2: Brandy Snaps (13)
The cookie title is deceptive - there is no brandy in these. However, I did have to go to the international food store to pick up a jar of Lyle's Golden Syrup, which is a British corn syrup concoction. These were actually a lot easier to make than they look... there's no baking soda or eggs or anything silly like that, so they just baked out flat, then I had to roll them around the handle of a whisk as they cooled.

Week 3: Coconut Macaroons (14)
I always thought macaroons were difficult to make. I was wrong. The recipe called for something like five ingredients, and then you make lumps, put them in the oven, and, voila! macaroons.
The picture on the right was taken in my office... you can see my Statistical Mechanics book chilling out in the corner, and the hat I was knitting just chilling out. The guys like to make fun of the three girls who knit, but I think that's because there's not much else to make fun of us for (well, except for being women studying physics, but that's a line that doesn't get crossed).

Week 4: Snickerdoodles (15)
These were a much bigger hit than I anticipated. I made these cookies on the suggestion of a friend, and then it turned out that everyone ever (except me) ate these as a kid when their grandmother/mom/babysitter/dog made them. I never had snickerdoodles until I was in college, and I never was particularly excited about them, although they taste pretty good. My friends who ate them enjoyed them thoroughly, which leads me to wonder about the power of nostalgia as a spice.


Week 5 (today!): Oatmeal Apple cookies (16)
After a very long week, I decided that it would make me happy to spend some extra time cooking. That decision made, these cookies seemed like a good decision. I made applesauce Thursday night while my cousin was visiting, and put half a cup of it in my cookies today. The cookies themselves have oatmeal, applesauce, and golden raisins in them. I find that the applesauce doesn't have a very strong flavor, but the raisins are nice. The frosting is your typical stuff: confectioner's sugar and water, with a few tablespoons of maple syrup added in to complement the taste of the cookies.

Hopefully next week I'll actually be motivated to post on time, and maybe even talk about something interesting. For now, however, physics has taken my soul hostage, and I don't expect to get it back until Friday.