One Year: I've been scooped!?!

I realize, of course, that keeping a blog for anything at all is not particularly unique in this day and age, but I was glued to the tube the other night when I saw this (notice 1:15 to 1:20 especially). Oh great, a feel-good movie about a woman working her way through a cookbook and keeping a blog on it. Given, Julia Child is kind of cooler than Martha Stewart, and I don't have a soul-crushing job (or, at least I haven't discovered it to be so yet). And if, in the future, someone accuses me of copying this movie, I will at least be able to defend myself with the fact that I started this project an entire year before I heard anything about it.

Yes, that's right, I've been baking cookies on a weekly basis for a year now! The time has passed just as quickly as cliches call for, and here I am in perhaps the busiest summer of my life.

Why am I so busy? Well, let's see: I work full-time in a lab, I have three hours of rehearsal practically every evening, and whatever spare time I have otherwise goes into exercise or studying for the qual. I've still found time to sneak in cookie baking, but many of my projects have been uncomplicated to allow me to do other things. Although I'm often late and backlogged with posting, I promise that I'm keeping up this project, and will continue to stay on schedule with my baking.

Last weekend I made the 7-hour drive home to spend the Fourth of July with my family. This is one of the most important holidays on my Dad's side of the family, perhaps because there are something like 8 birthdays that happen in June and July put together. So everyone came home - my drive wasn't the longest, either - for a weekend of sun, soccer, and celebration. It was awesome. It also meant that I did not make cookies on Saturday.

Instead, I came home from rehearsal Monday night and started baking cookies that are perhaps the most interesting thing I've made yet: Cornmeal Thyme Cookies (53). Now, it's very difficult to imagine what it tastes like to put a savory herb into a cookie, and, to be honest with you, I thought that these were going to be disgusting. Or, considering that this is a published cookbook, I thought they wouldn't be better than mediocre.

After mixing everything together - that is, the cornmeal, currants, thyme, lots of butter, sugar, and other normal cookie things - and baking, I found that these are some of the best cookies I've ever had, especially the day after they were baked. Something between the first three ingredients listed made for a fantastic and unique taste, and perhaps it's the unique part that won me over. After all, I have some basis of comparison for most of the cookies I make, but this was totally new, and totally delicious. My friends were equally surprised that these were so good. If you're looking for a different cookie to share with people, this is definitely it.


Yesterday I decided to go with something a little more normal, and whipped up some Dark Chocolate Cherry Cookies (54). These are a basic cookie with Dutched Cocoa in the dough and bittersweet chocolate chunks and dried tart cherries mixed in. The product is a couple dozen large cookies that have a very strong chocolate taste. The cherries do not feature too heavily in the overall taste of the cookies, but when you get a bite of one, you definitely notice it. Although I think these cookies are tasty, I would have liked it if the cherries were a stronger taste in them - especially considering how difficult it was to find sour cherries around here. Ah well. I'll chalk these down as good, but they were kind of a waste of money.


Alright, it's time for some sleep - I've got to be up early tomorrow for the start of yet another busy week. Hi ho the glamorous life!

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.

Distractions

Well, the semester ended, I passed all my classes, and ran home for a week. After that I crashed in Ann Arbor for a couple days, during which I spent fun times with several of my close friends from undergraduate times, and wowed them with my cooking and baking skills. It helped that I made Truffle Brownies (47), which are now my favorite kind of brownies ever. Yes, these even top Grandma Carol's buttermilk brownies (although I may have to make those sometime again just to check).

These brownies have a lot involved: the base starts with sugar and eggs whipped together for several minutes, with melted unsweetened chocolate and butter added in, followed by the usual blend of flour, baking powder, and salt. Whipping stuff at the beginning makes the brownies pretty light, and the chocolate is nice and dark, which is how it ought to be. After the brownie part is baked and cooled, it is topped with a ganache made from heavy whipping cream and semisweet chocolate. All in all, the experience is one of chocolate decadence, which means tasty tasty bliss. And how is it that I can talk about something I made 3 recipes ago with such detail? It might have something to do with me making it again more recently for a friend's party.

Soon after that baking endeavor, I returned to my own home and started work in the new lab (well, it's new for me). That week basically consisted of me working on a simple optics problem, which actually meant learning how to use Matlab... until I realized that I needed to be using Mathematica. Basically, these are both computational programs, but the first is for numerical stuff (i.e. processing data) and the second is for symbolic stuff (that is, solving equations with variables). I'm actually still not done with that I need to do, but it's a lot of work to learn how to make Mathematica do what I want it to do. I'll get it eventually, though, and then I'm sure I'll be glad to have worked on it.

After concluding a week spent almost exclusively working on the computer, I decided it was time to make cookies that were a little more involved than usual. And so I made what my cookbook calls Alfajores de Dulce de Leche (48). Essentially, these are shortbread cookies (well, less sugar and more flour) sandwiching a layer of dulce de leche. If I had really wanted to work hard, I would have made my own dulce de leche by boiling sweetened condensed milk forever (that is, like 5 hours), but it's summer and I don't like to add more heat to my apartment than is necessary. These were tasty cookies, although a bit rich, and the center layer had to be put on just before eating them, so I kind of didn't like that I couldn't present them already prepared.

Another week passed, with more work (finally some lab work too, hooray) and an audition snuck in on Friday night. As if I don't have enough to do what with preparing for the Qual, learning what I need to do in the lab, and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life, I am now singing in the ensemble for CUTC's Annie Get Your Gun. If you're not familiar with the show, here's my synopsis: this is a musical about a woman who's a champion sharpshooter, and she's in love with a guy who can't handle the idea of a woman being better than him. Throw in some other standard Musical Theater types - a young couple's forbidden love and a bunch of chorus numbers - and you've got this show. Although I'm sure I make it sound bad, I actually think it's pretty cute and I'm really excited to be involved ^.^

That weekend I got some of my favorite ingredients (toffee and butterscotch, mostly) to make butterscotch cashew blondies (49), which turned out to be exceptional. I ended up bringing these to a potluck lunch party for a friend, and everyone enjoyed them. Since these are blondies, they're pretty dense, and the three flavors mentioned above blend fantastically.


Okay, I'm off to lunch with friends, I didn't skip last Saturday's cookies, I just don't have them ready to post yet. Expect another rambling entry soon.

Vacation, had to get away

This is it, I've survived my first "year" (that is, two semesters) of graduate school! The last week was awfully rough, with two take-home exams pretty much kicking my butt.

Friday night, after finishing my last final, I braved severe weather to go out for a drink with friends, and thus began this nice but tiring week of vacation. On Saturday, after shopping (I got a new swimsuit for the outdoor pool), I made some cookies, and spent the rest of the evening peddling them off to whatever friends were left in town.

(46) These are very crunchy coconut cookies with nutmeg added, which I think pair nicely. The recipe claims that the flavor palette is Jamaican. I wouldn't know this because I'm not familiar with Jamaican flavors, but I think that coconut and nutmeg pair together nicely. As I've said, these are very crunchy - in fact, the recipe doesn't have eggs, butter, or oil in it. There's just sugar, coconut, some baking soda, nutmeg, and probably a couple dry ingredients I've forgotten, plus enough water to make it into an actual dough. I think I added too much dough when I made these because when I rolled them out and tried to cut them into circles, they were way too sticky to work with. Instead, I ended up grabbing dough and forming them into disks by hand.

But that was Saturday. On Sunday I took a very long drive (6.5 hours!) and ended up at my dad's house to spend the week. It's a relief to be close to water again, and a little taxing to deal with my entire family at once, but it's still great to be here. Today I went bike riding through town with my brother and we spent some time scrubbing my grandpa's sailboat and catching sun. Tomorrow I think I might go to the beach and jump in Lake Huron. If I do, however, it'll only be for a quick dip, because the water is still something like 42˚F. We'll see. I kind of want to do it, just for bragging rights.

The schedule for next weekend should be interesting - I plan to be in Ann Arbor for all of Saturday, so I may make my cookies early, or I may make them late. I will definitely be making them at some point for the weekend, but I'm just not sure when.

All that said, I think I'm going to go back to enjoying my time off, before research kicks in for the weekend.

summer is icumen in

Okay, so actually Summer is still 1+ months off, but the 85˚F weekend has gotten me a little enthusiastic about moderately warm weather. Among other things, this has meant throwing open my one big window to let all the fresh air in, and changing my comforter out for a light quilt.

Yesterday, a group of us decided to take advantage of the lovely weather, and we went to a small park in Urbana, located perhaps a mile away from campus. Despite its proximity to some 30000 students, we only had to share the park with a few children and some folks playing tennis. So the 15 or so of us took over a baseball field and played kickball (although we had to explain all the rules to the several international students playing with us). Miraculously, I didn't get a sunburn while we did this.

When we finished with the park, I went home to make cookies. This was not so nice as it usually has been, because during the winter I enjoyed the fact that the oven warmed up my apartment. The oven still warms my apartment up, but since "room temperature" is much warmer to begin with, there's the potential for things to get a little uncomfortable. Add to that the fact that I made about eight dozen cookies, and it suddenly becomes a good thing that I didn't start baking until the sun was well on its way down.

This week I made thumbprint cookies (43). The name has a pretty simple (and obvious) origin: halfway through baking the cookies I had to take them out of the oven and use my thumb to poke a hole in them. Then they were returned to the oven to finish baking, and later filled with a chocolate, butter, and corn syrup mixture.

The cookie dough is pretty basic. I would say that it's more or less like a shortbread recipe - butter, confectioner's sugar, vanilla, and flour - except that there's more flour in here than shortbread calls for. The flavor and texture is pretty simple, which means that the somewhat soft chocolate filling takes center stage in the cookie-eating experience. I'm not sure how I feel about that, it seems a bit like the cookies are just there to hold the chocolate.

There is an up side to the simplicity of these cookies, though: I made such a big batch so that I can give them to my students as an incentive for them to actually show up to class this week and get their old quizzes (I really don't want to have to hold on to them). Since there's no big surprises here, I don't think there will be any complaints, except perhaps the occasional "I don't like chocolate."

Speaking of quizzes, it's about time that I get my grading done. Then I have some homework death and so on. Oh, the joys of wrapping up the semester...