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.

Possibly Health Food

Life is very busy right now, and so this one is going to be a short post without (most of) the usual small talk.

103. Fruit and Nut Cookies
Over the summer I am trying to balance out my recipes between the availability of ingredients and time, but this specific recipe didn't really follow either specification.  Instead, I selected these cookies to send along as a hearty snack for a couple conference-going friends.  In this cookie, hefty quantities of pistachios, macadamia nuts, shredded coconut, chopped dates, and chopped dried apricots are just barely held together by the standard chocolate chip cookie dough base (that is, minus the chocolate chips).  The result was a good, chewy cookie that had a nice mix of subtle sweetness from the fruit and intermittent saltiness from the pistachios.

With all the healthy stuff in these cookies, I think the standard dough base was not the most appropriate choice.  I would have preferred (and in the future may change it to have) some whole wheat flour or wheat germ in the recipe to give the dough a richer flavor, and to perhaps make these cookies a little healthier.  A typical way to do this without messing up the recipe is to substitute wheat flour for half of the all-purpose flour.  A friend of mine suggested adding oats to these cookies, but I'm not sure if that would be a good idea, as that would give the dough one more thing to hold together...

That's it for this cookie.  Considering my desire to mix wheat with fruit, I'm excited for whenever I make the whole-wheat date bars in my book.

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.

Happy (carda)Mom's Day!

This week I finally gave in and bought a new spice, one I've never used before, and which was more expensive than I expected (I probably would have done better if I went to an Asian market), so that I could continue with my cookie project and also work on this pear and ginger muffin business.  That spice is cardamom, which supposedly comes from the ginger family.  As for how it tastes/smells...

According to Wikipedia:

Cardamom has a strong, unique taste, with an intensely aromatic fragrance. Black cardamom has a distinctly more astringent aroma, though not bitter, with a coolness similar to mint, though with a different aroma.

..Yeah that's not helpful at all.  I find the experience to be akin to a combination of allspice and black pepper, both toned down a little so that you don't feel totally overwhelmed upon tasting or smelling it.  The container suggests putting it in apple pie or using it as seasoning for pork.  I used it as the showcase ingredient for this week's cookie.

96. Sweet Cardamom Crackers
These cookies are of the light and crunchy variety, although their crunchiness is a result of large amounts of butter added to the dough (that means they're a little oily).  For this recipe, ground cardamom was added to a standard dough, which was rolled out thinly, scored with a pizza cutter, and sprinkled with a mixture of shredded coconut, chopped pistachios, and sugar, and then baked for a little while.

The cardamom in the recipe really takes the flavor spotlight in this otherwise very sweet cookie, as the ingredients sprinkled on top are milder and provide more aesthetic appeal.  Honestly, I think the chopped pistachios make these cookies look so much more appetizing, as well as providing a little bit of texture contrast when eating them.

I think this recipe may be worth revisiting soon... it was very easy to prepare, difficult to mess up (I typically burn my first batch of cookies because my oven is always too hot), and it's uncommon enough to seem like it took a lot of work.  Plus, I spent all that money on ground cardamom, I've got to find some way to use it.

traveling made these cookies possible!

Last weekend I took a very quick trip home to buy a car and see my best friend graduate from the University of Michigan.  While in Ann Arbor, I stopped by Trader Joe's, and saw that they sell dried pears, an ingredient required for one of my cookie recipes that I have been unable to find locally.  Needless to say, I purchased some and proceeded to make the following blondies.

95. Pear, Pistachio, and Ginger Blondies
Here is an example of a baked good that improves with (some) age, as well as a flavor pairing that is old news on internet recipes (I'd like to try this one), but is brand new to me.

These start with a usual dough base - butter, brown sugar, flour, eggs, baking powder, and so on - which is given flavor by the addition of dried pears, candied ginger, and chopped pistachios.  The result immediately after baking was a little dry, but the next day the pear and ginger flavors mingled, and the pistachio taste mellowed out a little to create something delicious, and probably a little less guilt-inducing than some other blondies (full of butter, toffee, chocolate, and so on) I've baked.

I wish I had the appropriate vocabulary to describe the taste of the ginger-pear pairing, but despite my deficiency, I'll try: on their own, pear has a very light taste, and ginger tends to be overwhelming.  Somehow, when both are put together, they enhance the other's taste, so that the sweet pears get a kind of spicy taste, but the ginger is also calmed down a bit.  I think perhaps the best adjective I've got for this is 'crisp.'  Yes, I'll go with calling it a crisp flavor.  The pistachios in the blondies add some salt... and pistachio taste, of which I've never been particularly fond.

Overall, these don't taste as heavy or rich as many other things I've baked, and so they make a good standalone snack.  If I get another chance to grab dried pears (or if I take a friend up on his offer to dry some for me), these may show up again soon.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In other news, as of yesterday I am finished with required classes forever.  Now I just need to buckle down and do some good research, so that in 4 ± ?? years I can get my PhD.

exam panic time!

As predicted, now I am super stressed out about exams, seeing as take-home tests are kind of like death. Especially in the way that they're both things I don't really want to try right now.

So in the spirit of procrastination, I not only made cookies, but finished my wall decorating project I mentioned last week. I've been kind of bothered by some of my empty walls and how expensive it is to find things that aren't frameless posters to fill the space.

Then one day as I was surfing around the internet I stumbled on the suggestion to glue scrapbook paper to styrofoam sheets and put that on the wall. I decided that this was a good idea, and raided Michael's. The result is shown on the right. I like the way this looks because the paper is about 1" away from the wall (meaning, there's some dimension to it). Also, I was able to put these up using sticky tack and a level program I downloaded for my ipod. Accelerometers FTW.


As for my baking adventures, yesterday I made lemon-pistachio cookies (45). These are nice fluffy cookies, made fluffier by the egg white I had to beat until it formed peaks (thanks to my friends for the blender <3). Aside from the egg white, there's chopped pistachios, a little bit of lemon juice, a LOT of brown sugar, and about a tablespoon of flour involved. Since there's so little flour (and no butter), these are kind of crunchy and really airy, as you can probably tell from the picture.

I made these cookies because I wanted to use up my pistachios (they're not exactly my favorite nut, I think they're too salty), and I wasn't sure if they would turn out well, but I think these are really tasty. The brown sugar balances out the salty taste of the nuts, and the lemon juice adds in a slight bit of sourness just where it's needed. What's more, once you get past chopping 1C of pistachios, the recipe is very easy.

Alright, that has to be it for now. I have an Electricity and Magnetism final to plod through, followed by Quantum Mechanics. This is going to be a very long week.

I left New Orleans for sub-zero temperatures. Bad form.

Last weekend I took a train to Louisiana to visit my sister and brother-in-law. This was my first time on a real train (the metrorail, subway, and so on totally don't count), and the ride was 17 hours both ways, which was agonizingly boring.

I have a couple comments about the train ride, although they're not specifically related to riding the train:

A few weeks ago I downloaded an application called Stanza for my iPod Touch. Now, this application is basically a document viewer, but it's set up to go online and download free domain books from Project Gutenberg and a few other sites. On the train (and in some other situations), I've had the chance to read classics that I've been wanting to read, and all for free. Which totally beats the overpriced versions they sell at Borders. So I suggest that if you can deal with reading on the computer, look into such websites. Although, I definitely don't suggest reading The Time Machine before bed. It leads to somewhat disturbing dreams.

The other thing the train reminded me of is my complete inability to sleep while sitting up. And even when lying down in awkward positions, one of my legs falls asleep and then I wake up (at least my leg got some rest). I haven't really figured out how to deal with this, but I'm open to suggestions. Drowsy-making medicine doesn't work for me, though.


So I took the train to New Orleans, and my big sister picked me up and took me to Slidell, which is just across Lake Ponchartrain. She and her husband have a lovely apartment overlooking the lake, and I got to spend the weekend with them there. While I was in the area, I felt like my clothes and speaking style and so on screamed out "Yankee", but oh well. It was nice and warm, so my coat was a little lonely in my bag, and I was thrilled.

On Saturday, I delayed my cookie baking so that I could go visit Stennis Space Center, where my sister and brother-in-law work. For those of you that don't know, NASA has a space center in southern Mississippi, where they test rockets. And testing rockets, of course, is fantastic, if only because it means that Becca and Justin can rightfully call themselves rocket scientists.

Being in the area meant that I had to request local food, and Justin was so kind as to get some boiled crawfish for us to eat on Saturday night. I think that a year ago I would have totally been grossed out by the idea of pulling these guys apart and eating the meat from their tail ends, but I think after spending time in Asia I'm not quite so squeamish. In Louisiana, of course, the spices are different, and I couldn't figure out exactly what they were, but in my defense, I was paying more attention to not eating the guts part of the crawfish. Wikipedia says "salt, cayenne pepper, lemon, garlic, bay leaves, etc." Fair enough, although the etc seems a little sketch.


And now I am back in Illinois, where the current temperature is a balmy -6˚F (or 252K, which makes me feel a little better about life). That made Tuesday a perfect time to make these chocolate pistachio biscotti (28) to dip in my coffee (and to share with my friends who've already made it back to town). These are... not my favorite thing I've made, partially because biscotti are awfully hard, and I've never been particularly fond of pistachios. And I had to shell 1C of pistachios. It was a drag. Then I rinsed them in the hope it would make them less salty, but it didn't get rid of enough salt, in my opinion.

Alright, I realize that I'm making these sound like they're bad. Which they are not. These aren't weird like the Pecan Tassies I made back in the summer. In fact, they're quite edible, which is fantastic, because Saturday is coming up again, and I'll be making more cookies then (I won't tell you which until I actually make them, so you'll have to wait to find out).

But now, the goal is to keep my apartment warm against this horribly cold weather. Usually I turn my heat off at night, but I found that was a bad idea with last night's chill, and hope that I'm smart enough not to repeat my mistakes in such close succession. So the heat stays on (but so do the sweaters).