DONE!

I have been looking forward to (and, in a sense, putting off) this post for a long time.  Yes, it's been a while since I updated.  Two months is ridiculous.  However, I am proud to report that as of today I have finally completed this Martha Stewart cook book.

Many things have happened in the past several weeks.  Perhaps the most important event was my decision to change research groups.  Those of you who know me may be asking yourselves, "What, again?" Yes, again.  In case you didn't hear, I spent a year in a Quantum Information research group, and then switched to an Acoustics group in the Electrical Engineering department.  After nearly a year and a half in that group, I realized it wasn't working and decided to make the jump to Physics Education.  Already I am being much more productive and happy, so I think this was a really good decision.  And it probably won't actually set me behind any more than staying in the previous group would have.  Hurray for possibly someday graduating!

But I will do a proper recap post later.  I need to tell you about cookies first!

164. Biscochitos
These cookies are a Mexican recipe that involves anise seed, orange zest, and cinnamon.  The recipe as written calls for lard, but I wasn't interested in purchasing 5lbs and chose to use vegetable shortening instead.  With sufficient flour on the rolling surface, this dough was very easy to cut and transfer, and I had fun dumping cinnamon sugar on the cookies prior to putting them in the oven.
I really enjoyed these cookies - the anise flavor was strong but not overwhelming, and the texture was something between a regular sugar cookie and shortbread... it's hard to describe, but that's the result of using so much shortening.

165. Date Triangles
These cookies look pretty fancy, but I promise they weren't actually too much work.  In fact, almost all the mixing is done in a food processor, and can even be managed in a dinky 3C Cuisinart like I own.  The dough is made much like a pie crust, with butter and flour pulsed together with some orange zest and cold water; the filling is more like a larabar (if you haven't had them and you're into natural/vegan/gluten-free stuff, give them a try) with blended up dates, almonds, and orange zest.  Notice the theme here?  There was orange in everything.
So as I said, these were actually not a big deal to make, and the flavor was quite good!  The dough was hardly sweetened, so the natural sweetness of the dates came through nicely.

166. Bratseli
These cookies were also very easy to make, but they're a great example of the random expenditures I've had to make for this project.  To actually make these I had to purchase a pizzelle iron for about $30, otherwise they wouldn't be thin like that.  I had considered trying my belgian waffle maker, but I knew the effect would be all wrong.
The recipe calls for huge amounts of flour (up to 9C!), lots of butter, and an entire pint of heavy cream.  When eating these, it is easy to tell that they have a lot of fat in their composition, but this makes the texture really nice.  The experience of these cookies is something along the lines of eating slightly lemon-flavored waffle cones.  And now that I have the specialty iron, I will have to make cannolis or something to make it worth my money.

167. Classic Shortbread
Although I didn't manage to leave a chocolate chip cookie recipe for the end of this project, I still had a few simple things left over.  I've already made a few variations of shortbread, including cranberry, hazelnut orange, mocha, and maple, and this was the most basic variety: butter, flour, confectioners' sugar, and salt (not even any vanilla!).  I purchased a fluted tart pan for this recipe, and so it took nearly an hour for the 10" round of dough to cook all the way through.  The result was an addictive, buttery, crisp pan full of cookies that disappeared within minutes when I brought them to small group.  Oh, and the fluted edges looked super classy.

168. Italian Polenta Cookies
This was another lots of butter, why-am-I-making-crazy-shapes recipe.  These cookies are full of cornmeal, which gives them a crunchier texture.  Polenta is, for a basic explanation, an Italian cornmeal.  I wish I had known that the recipe actually wanted dried Polenta, because when I bought the real stuff at the store I got the pre-cooked stuff.  Oops.  When it came time to bake and I realized my mistake, I just used regular yellow cornmeal instead.
Overall, I found these cookies to be kind of bland.  They got some extra flavor from added lemon zest, but I just didn't find them to be very interesting.  This may also be due to the fact that the only shape I could get my cookie gun to make was this zig-zaggy thing you see in the picture, all the other shapes wouldn't detach properly, and with my busted pastry bag there was no way I was going to be able to pipe the fancy S shapes shown in my cookbook.  Oh well.  I'll stick to cornmeal thyme cookies if I want to do cornmeal stuff again.

169. Springerle
Springerle are a traditional European cookie that are made using some special mold to make them look pretty.  They are chock-full of confectioners' sugar, cake flour, and eggs.  So many eggs (half a dozen).  And so much flour.  I think I ended up putting more than 2lbs of flour into these.  And a little bit of anise extract for flavoring.  Since I lacked the special molds and didn't feel like ordering them off the internet, I used a neat idea I found on Pinterest and chose to make an imprint with a clean stamp I picked up on clearance from the craft store.  This technique worked really nicely, since I only had to cut the cookies into rectangles and then stamp them.
These cookies were, well, a little dry.  I guess they're supposed to be springy or something but they just seemed floury to me.  Actually, I felt like I was trying to eat those cookies that are baked to be Christmas ornaments.  According to a friend of mine, these cookies are used as decorations sometimes, so I feel like I wasn't too far off with that feeling.

170. Sesame Seed Cookies
I was skeptical of this recipe when I first looked at it.  My experience with ground up sesame seeds is tahini, and while I have a vegan cookie recipe that calls for tahini, I couldn't imagine it tasting any good with the other ingredients in this specific recipe.
There was no need for me to worry: as I worked through the recipe I realized this was basically a peanut butter cookie recipe with ground up sesame seeds instead!  Indeed, the final cookies were crunchy and tasted much like peanut butter cookies, except they tasted a little bit more like toasted sesame seeds.  My final verdict: this was a fun experimental recipe, and the main ingredient certainly got people's attention.

171. Langues-de-Chat
Okay, so these cookies were really bland.  This is another recipe with flour and sugar and butter and eggs, etc as usual.  In this recipe the proportions were such that the dough was pretty thick when mixed up, melted down in the oven, and became firm and crunchy when baked and cooled.  In a super-classy way, I used a plastic bag with the corner cut out to pipe the cookie shapes, and since I was in a hurry I chose to use regular sugar instead of superfine sugar, and didn't find any kind of detriment to the result.  Side note: if you want your sugar to dissolve into the dough, you want to use superfine sugar.  This can be made by running regular sugar through a food processor for 30 seconds, then letting it settle for maybe a minute or two.  Like I said above, I found these cookies to be really boring.  The solution to this was to dip them in Nutella.  They make great Nutella carriers.

172. Tuile Leaves
You can see from the picture that I could not figure out how to make these turn out well.  These light almond-flavored cookies are made from a very runny dough which is spread as thinly as possible over a leaf-shaped stencil, which the cookbook claims should be available in any craft store.  Well, I couldn't find any leaves, or anything of the appropriate size that was a solid shape, so I bought a blank stencil (read: piece of thin plastic) and cut my own leaf stencil.  I am not a very good artist, and it was difficult to get the batter not to run under the edges, so the picture on the left is about the best I could do.  These cookies dried to be thin and crisp, but I honestly was too embarrassed by their ugliness to share them with anybody.

173. Fortune Cookies
Yes, I made fortune cookies.  And they actually turned out pretty well!  These are made with almost exactly the same batter as the tuile leaves, including the almond flavoring.  These cookies were pretty easy to make - the batter had to be spread into circles on the cookie sheet, and then the cookies were folded up while still hot and pliable.  I had a few disasters with burnt cookies (the recipe called for a 400F oven, which killed them.  I recommend baking at 350F) and waiting too long to fold the cookies.  The biggest difficulty with these cookies is that they just take a lot of time to make: since they have to be folded quickly, I could only bake two at a time.  Now it's time for math.  Each batch of cookies spent 7 minutes in the oven, and let's (under)estimate a total of 10 minutes from putting the batter on the cookie sheets to folding the cookies and setting them aside.  With a yield of 40 cookies, this amounts to about 3.5 hours of active time.  I ended up making a dozen of these one weekend, saving the dough, and finally baking the rest today.
These cookies are tasty and fun, especially since I got the opportunity to write my own fortunes in them, but I would say don't make them unless (1) you have a big enough oven to have two cookies sheets in at a time or (2) you have a lot of time to waste.


Well, that's it.  I will probably post again soon-ish to do some kind of recap of life over the past three years or what I've learned about baking or something, but for now I am going to call it a night.  This has been a fun project, but I have no plans to start anything of this magnitude again for quite some time.

I'm expecting this fortune to be accurate.

Cicadas and humidity

Few things evoke old summer memories like the crescendo of the cicadas' drone in the dizzying heat of the late afternoon.  When I was young, I attributed the noise to electricity: I thought that was the noise transformers made when it was very hot outside.  After all, what else could explain that unceasing, unvarying buzz? (Keep in mind, this is before vuvuzelas became internationally known).  It still baffles me that an insect only an inch or so long can make such a loud noise.

I missed that sound when I lived in Florida, where we had the heat and humidity of a Midwestern summer for a good 3/4 of the year.  With my assortment of experiences, I suddenly find myself associating summer with a tropical location, and it becomes entirely appropriate for me to bake and eat cookies that are largely made with coconut.

108. Coconut Cream-Filled Macaroons
This strikes me as a somewhat redundant recipe, as I made coconut macaroons nearly two years ago, and was impressed by their simplicity and tastiness.  This recipe went and kicked up the coconut several notches, first through the addition of coconut extract to the macaroons, and second through calling for a cream filling.

The cream filling is both appalling and kind of good at the same time.  It's made with butter, vegetable shortening, confectioners' sugar, cream of coconut (usually used for making piña coladas), and more coconut extract.  This fatty and sweet concoction goes between two macaroons to give a nice texture contrast (after all, the macaroons are basically coconut held together by egg whites), but the flavor is exactly the same in all parts of the cookie.  I found this a little bit disappointing, as I could have enjoyed the taste of coconut without setting myself up for diabetes and a heart attack.  Plus, I'm always of the opinion that each separate part of a cookie needs to add both flavor and texture contrast to be successful.

That said, I think I'll be sticking with the macaroon recipe sans filling (although I may try them with mini chocolate chips sometime...)

Oh, and a quick side note:  this recipe called for unsweetened shredded coconut, which is not available in most grocery stores.  To get around this, I used sweetened coconut and omitted all the sugar.

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.