The Cookie Monster

Candy Shop Biscotti

2012-01-19T06:28:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I need to do a "pantry clean out" of sorts to take stock of all of my random baking supplies. More often than not, this ends up spawning some kind of creative cookie idea, once I realize I'm hoarding a certain ingredient, or I need to use leftover supplies to make room etc... I've made a lot of "chip cookies" as of late, and upon cupboard inspection I discovered a plethora of nearly empty "chip bags" Chocolate chip, butterscotch chip, white chocolate chips and M&M's.

After some deliberation I figured I would use all of these tasty leftovers together for a super-candy-packed creation. I dumped them all together, busted out a basic biscotti recipe, and went to work.

Ingredients:
2 3/4 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
random candy mixture

First off, mix together all of your dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Form a "well" in the flour mixture, and add your eggs and egg yolks to the well. Also add in your vanilla extract.

Mix the eggs and vanilla into the flour, then add in your melted butter and mix until evenly distributed. The dough will be a bit crumbly at this point. That's OK. But if it looks too dry, try adding a couple tablespoons of milk.

Now its candy time!

Form your dough into 3 11 inch long logs. Flatten out the tops of the logs, as the dough will rise and spread out a bit during baking. As always, place them on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Bake at 325 for about 27-28 minutes, just until the logs are golden brown, and pass the toothpick test. Allow them to cool off for 15 minutes or so, before attempting to slice.

During the slicing process, there was a tiny bit of drama, whereby I nearly sliced my thumb off with our super sharp serrated bread knife. Joe had to step in and finish the slicing for me.

Thanks Hubby.

Pop these suckers back in the oven for 8 more minutes.

Flip them over, then back in for a final 8 minutes.

Yum. I was planning on also dipping these in some chocolate that I had lying around, but after the near thumb-amputation, I lost my motivation. They were still very tasty, but the chocolate dip would have put them over the edge...

Maybe next time. Until then, I will be avoiding sharp objects.

Have a great weekend everyone!

M&M and Butterscotch Cookies for the New Year

2012-01-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year Everyone! I hope you all had a fabulous holiday season. Baking has been minimal the last week or so as I wind down from the holiday craziness, but I did whip up some kid friendly cookies for a group trip up to New Hampshire on New Years Eve!

I made some colorful M&M cookies.

As well as (my favorite) Butterscotch Chip Cookies.

Both were well received, and on the two night weekend away, the two batches only lasted about half way through the first night. That, my dears, is affirmation of yumminess. Note the improved quality of the photos. Thanks for the new camera mama bear :) I'm a lucky girl.

Here's me in my new apron that my husband bought me for Christmas! Love!

And Munchkin. The cutest cat on earth.

Confirmed.

Coffee Snap Cookies

2011-12-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

Happy hump day blog readers! Time for me to share one of my all-time favorite cookies. I don't know why I love these so much, but I do. They are different and light and super yummy with a nice cup of coffee or tea. The recipe is slightly adapted from the frequently mentioned Ultimate Cookie Book.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter softened
1/4 cup shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
dash salt
2 tablespoons instant coffee powder
1 tablespoon hot water
1 egg
2 cups flour
sugar for dusting
whole coffee beans (about 36)

First off, cream together your butter, shortening and sugars until well blended. (Check out the action shot). Add in your baking powder and salt.

Next up dissolve your instant coffee in 1 tablespoon of hot water. Then add that into your butter mixture, along with the egg.

Form your dough into 3 7-inch long logs. The width of the log will be the size of your cookie, so don't go too thin. Then it's time to chill the dough. I stuck mine in the freezer for about an hour or so.

While the dough was chilling, I got my little work station set up, complete with a cup of coffee and baileys. Yum.

Start slicing your cookies about 1/4 inch in width. They will spread out a little bit on the cookie sheet, so definitely don't make them too thin....

Then it's time to adorn them with a little extra sugar sprinkle and a coffee bean. I went for one bean on each cookie, but the original recipe called for 3, along with a sprinkle of espresso powder. I opted to keep things simple.

Into the oven at 375 for 9 minutes.

These definitely weren't the prettiest cookie on the platter. But I love them. Like really love them. It's a good thing I gave them all away. Otherwise I would have eaten every. last. one.

All in all, it was a good holiday for baking. I also whipped up a pie:

And oogled over my cat:

I hope you're all having a good week settling in post-holiday. Enjoy your New Years and Happy Baking!

Oreo-Stuffed Chocolate Chip and Confetti Sugar Cookies

2011-12-26T10:41:00.000-08:00

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas yesterday! As a part of my big cookie platters this year, I took 2 ideas away from the huge Food Blogger Cookie Swap round ups: Confetti Cookies which I did a bit differently but used the some basic concept (so pretty!) and Oreo-Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies which are just as ridiculously wonderful as they sound!

For the confetti cookies, I decided to use my own basic Sugar cookie recipe (I like sticking to the tried and true) and add in the confetti sprinkles. I then decorated them as I normally would rolled sugar cookies, although I will definitely try them as sandwich cookies at some point. Yum.

I really love the concept of these cookies, they are so so pretty and festive.

I used the same pink/red (really it was pink) frosting and a few white decorating sprinkles to come up with these cute little guys. They were my Cousin Steve's favorite.

Next up I worked on the oreo-Stuffed chocolate chip cookies.

These bad boys were ENORMOUS.

Haha, I think I maybe put a little too much dough around the outside of the oreos....but hey, who doesn't love a giant cookie?

I didn't bite into any of them because I only got about 14 out of the batch. But you can sneak a peak at an oreo here:

Yum.

Stay tuned this week for a full recipe for MY favorite cookie from this years Christmas platter: The Coffee snap. Happy shopping to those who are braving the malls today.... I will be plopped in front of the fireplace for the duration.

Happy Baking!

Holiday Baking: Rice Krispie Wreaths

2011-12-23T14:41:00.000-08:00

Merry Almost Christmas! Today was my annual bakepalooza day where I made 5 different kinds of cookies for both a cookie platter headed to our Buell Family Christmas Eve party and also Cookie gift boxes that I've been giving out to friends and family the last couple of years. I will Share the recipes for each of the cookies above, but for now I'll star with the Rice Krispie Wreaths.

Following the same basic recipe I've used in the past, I basically just added TONS of green food coloring to the melted Marshmallow and Butter.

Then I folded the green stuff into the awaiting rice krispies....

Then I shaped the ooey goey mess into little wreaths, like so...

Then it was time to decorate them with little bows. I didn't have an gel food coloring (fail) so I used regular red food coloring, which really just gave me pink frosting. But hey, I like pink. I went with it...

I also made the anise biscotti that was such a big hit a few months back to add to the cookie boxes....

Recipes to come: Confetti Sugar cookies, Coffee Snaps, and (brace yourself) Oreo-stuffed chocolate chip cookies! I'll get the recipes up as soon as I can! Everyone have a fabulous holiday, enjoy, relax and be safe!

-S

Andes Creme de Menthe Biscotti

2011-12-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Happy almost Holidays everyone! Last week I received a request from the lovely ladies who organized the huge Food Blogger cookie swap for volunteers to bake a batch of cookies for some people who did not receive all of their packages (due to a litany of reasons, flaky bakers, mistyped addresses what have you). Seeing as this presented another exuce to bake, I happily volunteered!

I didn't have all of the necessary ingredients on hand to recreate the Dark Chocolate Peppermint Biscotti I initially made for the swap, so I whipped up something very similar, and I think I actually like them better!

Following the exact same process and basic recipe, I subbed in Andes Candy pieces for the chocolate chips, and gave them all a powdered sugar sprinkle instead of a chocolate dip.

Then I wrapped them up and sent them on their way to sunny California. I hope they make it in one piece!

In other news, I made a really yummy Drunken Venison Stew this weekend. It's Drunken because there is wine and beer involved. My kind of Stew.

I also participated in the second day of Gingerbread madness for the season. We meant to make 60 cookies. We made 110 instead. Woops. Extras to the shipping guys at work!

I have some really fun Holiday cookie boxes planned this year, and I'm hoping to get the posts up on Friday or Saturday so stay tuned! Happy last minute shopping!

-S

Holy Cookies!

2011-12-16T07:07:00.000-08:00

Hey Everyone! Just a quick update with you guys that the EPIC cookie swap I just participated in was a huge success! The two Blog writers who organized the event have posted "round ups" of all of the recipes (over 600!)

For some really awesome cookie ideas check out: Part One and Part Two

My Peppermint Chocolate Biscotti are in Round up Part one. Take a second to browse these two food blogs as well, They're both great!

Happy Baking!

GingerBread Madness!

2011-12-11T15:51:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas Season Blog Friends! Any of you who know me very well will know that Christmas time means primarily one thing for the Buell family: Gingerbread Men. For decades now we have gotten together in one form or another to bake several battalions of the spicy holiday favorite. I blogged about these in detail last year so I will just share with you a few of the special moments of this years baking marathon....

First up, a photo op:

All the ladies at work (actually, I was just pretending to work for the sake of the photo, really I was fiddling with m&m's):

Minor powdered sugar disaster. Major hilarity:

Jame hard at work:

Decorating, holy hand cramps:

And finally victory!

Afterwards we all had a well deserved beverage of the alcoholic persuasion:

All in all we made upwards of 150 cookies. Day two of gingerbread madness (yes, there's a day 2) is the week before Christmas, which only calls for around 50. Thank Goodness.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my post about the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap! Can't wait to share the experience!

-S

Food Blogger Cookie Swap: Dark Chocolate Peppermint Biscotti

2011-12-02T07:29:00.001-08:00

Hooray! It's finally time to share with you all my recipe for the great Food Blogger cookie swap! I sent out my cookies the last day of November, and hopefully they made their way in one piece to:

Georgia: http://foodvictorian.blogspot.com/
Ohio: http://www.sorelleecibo.com/
and New York: http://snacktimemunchies.com/.

I wrapped them up as tightly as possible, but the first Postal Service employee who touched them literally tossed them into a bin full of boxes. It was horrifying. My poor baby biscottis.

Anyhoo, here is the recipe I came up with. I pretty much winged it, although I used a basic chocolate biscotti recipe as jumping off point from The Ultimate Cookie Book.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp peppermint extract
1 3/4 cup flour
1 cup dark chocolate chips
6 ounces Bakers Dipping chocolate
1/2 cup starlight peppermint candies, crushed

To my horror, I turned on my camera to start documenting this project and saw this sad broken screen staring back at me. My 10 year highschool reunion was the weekend before. It was a rough night. As a result, I had to take all of these pictures with my iPhone, apologies for the lower-than-normal photo quality.

First things first, mix together your softenened butter and sugar, then add in your cocoa powder, baking soda and extract, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Then add in your eggs, one at a time. This smells SO SO very yummy.

Candy time.

When everything is mixed, form your dough into 2 logs, about 9 inches long and 3-4 inches wide. Beware, the dough is very sticky. Bake at 375 for about 20-25 minutes until the logs pass the toothpick test.

Let them cool completely on a wire rack. This is an opportune time to cook dinner for your husband, who can't understand why you spend so much time in the kitchen, covered with flour....

Once the biscotti is cooled, slice each log at an angle, cutting pieces about 1/2 inch in width. I'm really bad at guestimating distance of any kind, so mine were probably closer to an inch.

As a result, I only had about 32 biscotti when all was said and done, so I had to whip up batch number 3. This was complicated by the fact that my kitchen aid bowl and paddle were already washing away in the dishwasher. Fortunately, I had a back up plan:

Now, on to the reason why biscotti takes so long: The triple baking. Lower your oven temp down to 325, and lay your biscotti pieces out on a parchment lined baking sheet. Bake for about 9 minutes. Flip them over, then bake for 6 or 7 more. Get them nice and crunchy and dried out :)

Yum. While they cooled off on the wire rack, I got my Peppermint candies going in the food processor. This was actually the maiden voyage of our new appliance, we recieved it as a wedding gift from my lovely cousin Steve and his girlfriend Megan :) it's pretty Bad Ass.

Then it was time to dip dip dip. I set up a little work station on my dining room table, and went to work.

I dipped the biscotti in Baker's Dipping Chocolate first (I kind of felt like I was cheating by not actually melting down chocolate in a double boiler but... man was this a convenient shortcut). Then I rolled each one in the crushed up peppermint candies. Then it was onto a wax paper lined baking sheet and into the fridge to harden up.

I put some extras aside on a plate for me and the hubby. They were gone within a half hour.

I let the cookies chill overnight in the fridge, and packed them up in the morning before I went to work. I picked up 3 window gift boxes at A.C. Moore, and pulled out some of my new business cards and blog-stickers to dress up the boxes.

A little ribbon and packing paper, and they were ready to go!

I was really happy with how these turned out, and I hope they made it to their destinations in one piece! I was the happy recipient of some delicious Treats as well!

New Orleans Praline Disks from Phyl Divine in Ohio : Of Cabbages and King Cakes

Peppermint Sables from Sarah Reid in Vermont (www.dailynibbles.com)...

And finally Sprinkled Chocolate Thumbprints from Natalie Herr at www.ovenlove.blogspot.com!

I thought this was such a fun project, and a great way to connect with other bloggers, discover new blogs, and as always, discover new cookies.

Happy Holidays!

-S

Cookie Swap News!

2011-11-30T16:50:00.001-08:00

Happy Wednesday! And Happy Baking blog friends! It's been a busy two days of baking for me so I thought I'd throw up a quick blog post. Last night I whipped up my 3 dozen cookies for the Epic Food Blogger Cookie Swap (pictured above) and today I sent them off to some happy recipients in various parts of the country. Stay tuned for the full detail recipe blog post on Dec. 12th. I'm super proud of these!

Also, I received my First batch of cookies from Phyl Divine in Stow, Ohio. "New Orleans Praline Disks". These were quite tasty and packed with flavor.

In other cookie news, I made some White Chocolate Macadamia Nut cookies tonight for my husband and his merry band of Hunters as they head off to shoot even more deer. These are far and away one of my favorites, and worth mentioning everytime I make them!

Stay tuned for pics of my other two batches of incoming cookies from the blogosphere, as well as the recipe for my sweet treats! Have a great weekend everyone!

-S

CCHS 10 year reunion cookies

2011-11-27T11:57:00.001-08:00

Happy Sunday blog friends! I'm happy to report another success in the cookie-favor department. My former classmates at Concord Carlisle High School all celebrated our ten year reunion last night in Boston, and I was hired by the organizing party to make "Reunion" cookies for the occasion...

In about 5 batches and 5 hours I had 105 little decorated beauties to share with my friends:

I even bought myself an actual decorating bag for the occasion. I usually use disposable....

My work station...

Some of my favorites:

All in all I was really happy with how these turned out. My classmates seemed to enjoy them, another satisfied group of cookie-loving customers :)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!!!

Our First Thanksgiving (and mini thumbprint cookies!)

2011-11-25T06:56:00.001-08:00

Happy Black Friday peeps! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Joe and I definitely did! We hosted family from both sides for our first ever formal dinner party, and we got to use all kinds of fun fancy diningware that we've had stored away since our wedding. Believe it or not, most of the baking was contributed by our guests (shout outs to Birdie and Jame!) but I did manage to whip up little shortbread thumbprint cookies, with a trio of fillings.

Using my favorite sugar cookie recipe I rolled out tiny cookie balls....

dug some little "thumbprint" holes with the end of a wooden spoon....

And filled them u p with raspberry jam, dark chocolate or orange chai marmalade. yum.

Sprinkle of powdered sugar, and we're ready for Turkey day!

Well, almost ready. Then I had to make the stuffing....

Brine the Turkey....

Get the Venison Roast going in the crock pot (actually, this can be credited to Joe)....

Bake the Turkey and set the table....

But through all the craziness, we pulled off a pretty great dinner. Joe and I are so very Thankful for our family, friends, and our new life together :) What a great day.

Happy Thanksgiving, and good luck diving in to the holidays! Let the madness begin!

Peanut Butter Cocoa Cookies

2011-11-18T08:39:00.001-08:00

Happy Friday everyone! I am working from home today while I wait for Bernie and Phyll's to deliver our new dining room set (just in time for Thanksgiving). Joe is once again headed out for the weekend with a bunch of guys to hunt, so I thought I would whip up some cookies while I was sitting around, staring at my empty dining room.

I took stock of my cupboard supplies and came up with these. Pretty tasty if I say so myself :)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1tsp vanilla
1 egg
1 tsp baking soda
dash salt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/4 cup flour

Mix together your butter and sugar, then the peanut butter until nice and creamy.

Add in your egg and vanilla, mix, and then its time for the cocoa. At this point, it will start to smell like chocolate peanut butter fudge. yum.

Add in your flour a little at a time, and you'll get a tasty ball of goodness. Then its time to roll the cookies in sugar and get them on the baking sheet.

I don't know why people always do the little fork indentations in peanut butter cookies but, who am I to judge, I went along with the crowd.

Bake at 375 for 11-12 minutes. I did 12 and I actually think I went a little long.....

Delish :)

Stay tuned for thanksgiving posts next week! Have a great weekend everyone!

Home Alone

2011-11-11T16:25:00.001-08:00

What do I do when I'm home alone and the Hubby is hunting?

Cook healthy dinner....

Online Christmas shop....

And bake myself cookies. Naturally.

I had some extra dough leftover from my reunion cookie trial run, so after eating lots of veggies for dinner, I decided I'd ruin my diet and whip up some impromptu creations. They were very yummy. I made little sugar cookie braids and a couple of jam thumbprint cookies. De-lish.

In other news, I signed up today to participate in a nationwide Cookie Swap going on at the beginning of December. Basically I will be sending cookies to 3 other food-baking bloggers, and will receive cookies from 3 others. It's a very cool way to get new ideas, appreciate other people's blogging efforts, and of course its a great excuse to bake.

I'll definitely be sharing what I come up with! along with what I receive from other bakers! I can't wait!

Have a great weekend!

Sneak peak at a new project

2011-11-09T08:33:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update today to give you all a heads up on my next for-hire cookie project! I've been asked to make some Concord Carlisle High School cookies for my 10 year reunion party the weekend after thanksgiving. Have I really been out of High School for 10 years? Well Sh%@.

Last night I did a mini-trial run of 6 cookies so I could show my clients/former classmates what I was thinking. The finished products will likely have more variety and be a little more finished looking, but it was a fun baking project so I thought I'd share :)

And when I was done experimenting I slathered extra frosting on a few of the cookies and gobbled them up. Good stuff.

Stay tuned for that large project post and probably a few more in between. I'm pretty sure I just volunteered to host thanksgiving at my house, so baking will abound! I guess I have to roast a turkey too huh.... hmmmm

Pumpkin Gingerbread!

2011-11-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

Happy November Blog friends! Even though it has been kind of beautiful here in (sunny?) Massachusetts for the last week, I can't help but bake yummy fall-winter stuff now that it's November. This week I whipped up a Pumpkin Gingerbread, which was actually pretty tasty, and didn't last very long in our house. (About 2 days actually, and we didn't share).

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter, softened (half melted actually)
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1/3 cup water
1/2 can of pumpkin puree
2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves
1 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

As per the usual process, mix together your wet ingredients first, until they are nice and smoothly blended. Then add in your spices, baking powder, salt, and finally the flour, a little bit at a time.

Next up, pour your batter into a greased bread pan. I actually opted for a different approach, and lined the bottom of the pan with parchment paper, while greasing the sides. The bread slid right out after baking. Super easy. I heart parchment paper.

Top it off with a little brown sugar if you are so inclined. I always am.

Bake at 350 for about an hour....

Yum! Eat it for breakfast, eat it for dessert, but believe me....you will eat it!

Coming up: a few sample cookies for some upcoming hired cookie-projects. Sure it's mostly (erm...totally) my friends hiring me....but I'm still pretty pumped about it.

Happy baking!

Banana Crumb Muffins

2011-10-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

Happy weekend bloggers! This weekend was my first "hunting widow" weekend, with Joe off in the woods trying to track down Bambi with a bow and arrow. The good news is....Joe got a deer! Which means I will be cooking a ridiculous amount of Venison for the next 6 months. Venison cookies? maybe not, but I'll figure something out. Maybe I can bake some kind of meat pie. hmmm.

Anyway, I was home alone all weekend and I decided to make a sauce from scratch with Joe's Italian Grandmother's recipe. Delish. There's wine and whiskey in it. This is my kind of sauce.

Making this sauce is quite a process, and it required that I stand in and around the kitchen for about 5 hours. While I waited on my simmering concoction, I couldn't help but bake something. Why not right? Since apparently my husband has not been eating his daily banana in his lunchbox, I had a small pile of overripe fruit to work with. I looked up a quick muffin recipe:

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
3 mashed bananas
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup melted butter

topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon butter

Sift together your dry ingredients, then mix (I used a hand mixer) your sugar, butter, egg and mashed bananas.

Slowly pour your flour mixture into your banana mixture and mix on a medium speed until just combined.

Next up, mix together your topping ingredients in a small bowl. I actually used a pastry blender to cut in the butter. Then pour your batter into prepared muffin cups, and crumble to topping over the top.

Bake at 375 for 18 minutes.

YUM.

I ate, oh, about 5 of the 10 muffins this recipe yielded. There are a few left for Joe when he gets home, toting about 70 lbs of deer meat. OH BOY. Stay tuned for an odd but hopefully successful combination of baking skill and fresh venison.

Happy Baking!

Good Old-fashioned Chocolate Chip Cookies

2011-10-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Wow, is October flying! I can't believe it is almost November, and the opening of Hunting Season! As a result, I am what some may call "a hunting widow" every weekend until January, which on the bright side means that I will likely be doing quite a bit of baking-while-bored in my empty house.

Last night I whipped up some chocolate chip cookies for my husband and his best man/hunting buddy Brian. I used my go-to recipe that, at this point, I know by heart. Man, is it good.

I cranked these out while Joe was packing the car for the weekend. Munch looked outside longingly while he did so.

Joe made a couple of pit-stops during the process to sample the goods.

After 9 minutes in the oven, we had some ooey-gooey fresh cookies.

Happy Baking!

Anise Biscotti

2011-10-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

Happy Hump Day blog friends. Last night I whipped up some anise biscotti to send into work with my husband. Apparently I have been slacking on providing the family biz with baked goods, so I thought these would be right up their alley. I enjoyed one this morning with my coffee. I'm not gonna lie they were pretty delish.

I got the recipe off of one of my favorite sites for new cooking ideas, allrecipes.com. The only changes I made were 1) I didn't add almonds. 2) I baked them on parchment paper and not foil. and 30 I sprinkled them with some powdered sugar at the end, because who doesn't love powdered sugar.

First off, I mixed together the softened butter and sugar. Then it was time to add the eggs, one at a time, making sure the egg was totally mixed in before adding the next. Add in your extracts next. (I actually made a fourth change I am just now remembering) Change 4: I added 2 teaspoons of anise extract instead of 1. I like the smell.

Very sticky, but Very yummy dough.

Form your dough into 2 3x10 inch logs. They look smaller than you would think, but they will expand as they bake.

Bake at 300 degrees for 35 minutes.

Let the logs cool, then slice diagonally to form your biscotti.

Crank up your oven to 325 and bake the slices flat side down for 10 minutes.

Flip and repeat. I actually only let them go for 8 minutes the second time around because they were already browning nicely.

If you choose to sprinkle with powdered sugar, do so while they are still hot. This will make the sugar stick more easily to the cookie. You could also dip these in chocolate to make them more dessert-ish. That was actually my original plan but I didn't have enough chocolate in-house, and I was too lazy to go to the store.

These were a huge hit! It's only 10 AM and I've already gotten good feedback from the Fam ;) Definitely give these a shot, they're super easy, even though they're a bit more time consuming than your average cookie.

Have a great week everyone!

Ginger Snaps

2011-10-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

Hello bloggers! Now its time to blog about one of my favorite all-time cookies, the Ginger Snap. I actually used to make these all the time because they are fast and easy and involve many of my favorite ingredients such and molasses and cloves. They are a great "fall" cookie, to go along with your apple cider or pumpkin beer.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup shortening
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1egg
2 14 cups flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup sugar for rolling

First off, mix together your wet ingredients, then slowly add in your dry ingredients until everything is well blended.

When your dough comes together, roll into tablespoon sized balls, and roll each bar in the extra sugar to coat.

Bake at 350 degrees for 8 - 10 minutes, or until just set. Cool on a wire rack, and enjoy!

Happy Fall Everyone!

Chocolate Spritz Cookies

2011-10-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

As part of the cookie platter I made for yesterday's card party I made a quick chocolate spritz cookie That turned out pretty well. It isn't super sweet, so its more like a tea cookie which was perfect for a brunch time event. I only made half of the batch because the whole recipe makes about 40 cookies. Double the below ingredients to make a full batch.

Ingredients: 1/2 cup of butter, softened
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 an egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/8 cup cocoa powder
1 1/4 cup flour

First off as usual, mix together your butter and sugar, and add in your egg and vanilla, and mix until smooth.

Next up, mix in your dry ingredients until just blended.

Fill up your cookie press with the dough, and start cranking out cookies! I used a wreath plate to get make tiny chocolate circlets.

Some were prettier than others. I think my dough was a bit on the sticky side.

Bake for 10 minutes, and cool on a wire rack. You may want to let the cookies stand on the sheet for a moment, as they are very fragile while hot.

I finished them off with a sprinkle of powder sugar, then it's on to the platter!

Happy Baking! I've got one more cookie to blog about from the weekend, then I may try to make some kind of biscotti later in the week. Apparently I've been slacking on sending baked goods in to work with the hubby ;)

Banana Cake

2011-10-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I attended a birthday gathering for my (Step mom in law?) Husband's Step Mom's 50th birthday. I decided I would make some kind of a cake for the occasion, but I figured there would already be a birthday cake present. As I pondered baking ideas for the event, my eyes wandered to the counter where I spotted these:

Over-ripe inspiration! Banana cake it is!

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
4 mashed bananas
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

First odd, mix together the butter and sugar, then add in your eggs one at a time. This is actually a banana bread recipe that I made more "cake-like" by adding another egg and sifting the flour. And adding frosting, that seems to help too ;)

After that's mixed together well, add in your bananas and vanilla.

Sift your flour and add it into the mixing bowl, mixing at medium low-speed. Along with the rest of thew ingredients. Mix until it comes together evenly.

Bake for about 1 hour (I would check it at 50 minutes as ovens tend to vary) when the middle is set and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean, it is done!

This cake also gave me a chance to break in my new bread pan from Williams and Sonoma, courtesy of my friend Wilcox. Thanks dude ;)

Next, I whipped up a quick vanilla butter cream frosting, and got to work.....

I managed to only eat, you know, like 5 tablespoons of frosting out of the bowl....

I sprinkled the top of my cake with some shredded white chocolate a little cocoa powder, and then moved it to a clean, pretty plate.

This was pretty delicious! I'm sorry I never got a picture of it sliced, I mean to take one this morning of my leftover piece, but I remembered after I ate it for breakfast. Woops.

Happy Baking!

A Clipped Greetings Cookie Platter

2011-10-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

Happy Sunday! Today I had the pleasure of attending a "Card Party" held by my dear friend Kyle and her company Clipped Greetings. She suggested over a few beverages that I bake some cookies for the occasion, and bring along some business cards to promote my blog. Seeing as I did not have any business cards, I slapped some stickers on some cute card stock, and got to baking up some tasty treats....

I wanted to make some personalized cookies to showcase the "Favor" type baking I've been doing lately, so I used my trusty old white-chocolate sugar recipe and my lettering cookie cutter to come up with some brand-name cookies.

Then I whipped up some Royal Icing to do a bit of light decorating.

I came up with a few swirl patterns, a couple of flowers, and one pair of scissors that looks suspiciously like a lop-sided flower, but close right?

I also made some Gingersnaps and some chocolate spritz cookies to complete my platter, those recipes will be up in the next couple of days....

Ta-Da!

After I had them all wrapped up for the trip, I noticed I'd broken one of the sugar cookies without even walking out the door. Sigh. Cookie-transportation is by far the most stressful part of baking.

Stay tuned for a bunch of new posts this week (and probably one more today!) It's been a busy baking weekend!

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

2011-09-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

Hey blog people! So I guess when I said I would be baking more often now that the wedding is over, I think I underestimated how difficult it would be to get back in the swing of real life after almost 2 weeks in a tropical paradise. Sigh.

But! Worry not, I have some fun cookies up my sleeve which I will share in the coming days, for now, I give you my first experiment with frozen desserts, which go great with baked desserts. so it made it on my cookie blog. I've been drooling over the Salted Caramel Ice Cream that my foodie friend Wilcox blogged about some months ago, and decided I would give it a try. Check out her post on the subject here: http://morecheesemorechocolate.com/2010/05/28/salted-caramel-ice-cream/

Ingredients:
2 cups whole milk, divided
1½ cups sugar
4 tablespoonssalted butter
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 cups heavy cream
5 large egg yolks
3/4 teaspoon vanilla

First off, set up an ice bath with 1 cup of your whole milk and set it aside for later use. Then spread your sugar out in a large-ish sauce pan and heat on med-high until it starts to caramelize. Stir it around until its nice and smooth and caramelly :)

Once the sugar is all melted, remove it from the heat, and stir in your butter and cream until smooth. If the sugar starts to harden again, place the saucepan back over a low heat.

Pour a little bit of the mixture in with your egg yolks, and beat until its nice and smooth. The add the eggs and 1 cup of the milk (not the ice bath milk) and cook until the mixture thickens over medium-high heat.

Finally, strain the warm custard mixture into your ice-bath milk, and stir until you have a creamy delicious looking custard.

Yum.

Then you have to chill it for 8 hours. Except I got impatient and only chilled it for like, 4 hours. And it was just fine. I'm always skeptical of long "chill" times.

Finally, it's time to bust out the handy dandy ice cream maker I received from the fabulous Collins family at our Bridal shower. This thing is pretty awesome.

All you have to do is freeze the bowl overnight, and then press "on." Ice cream making for dummies.

Let it churn until it has thickened to your liking.....

Then into the freezer to firm up. We enjoyed this with an apple pie that my sister baked for us, which I neglected to photograph. Rats. Anyway, this stuff is deadly. It was actually described recently as F*$@ing Bomb.

Make some! You won't regret it!

Orange Buttercream Sandwich Cookies

2011-09-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks! Now that I am back from the honeymooon and happily a DiStefano, its definitely time to get back into baking-gear!

The boys headed up to the hunting cottage last weekend to do some work on the floors, so I thought I would whip up something new for them. I had some frozen white chocolate sugar cookie dough leftover from the wedding.....

But since they were all PRESENT at the wedding I wanted to do something a little different with the dough. Who doesn't like a sandwich cookie?

So I baked up around five dozen little cookie circles, and whipped up a quick batch of buttercream frosting. I had some OJ and orange extrat on hand, so I went with a quick Orange buttercream recipe:

Ingredients:

1/3 cup butter, softened

3 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp orange extract

2-4 tablespoons orange juice

To make this frosting, simply blend together the butter and sugar, slowly at first to prevent a powdered sugar explosion. Then add in your liquids and blend until you have your desired texture.

Then it's time to spread the frosting on the cookies, and taste a little of course.

These were yummy, but VERY rich.

Happy Baking!

Wedding! and Wedding Placecard Cookies!

2011-08-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

Hey Blog Friends! So I am back from our beautiful honeymoon in Mexico, and ready to share with you my Wedding cookie extravaganza blog post! I promise now that the wedding is over I will be baking and blogging at a more regular pace. For now, here are the details on the largest (by far) cookie project I've undertaken to date: 200 place card/cookies that would direct guests to their tables at Joe and I's August 20th wedding....

I started this project, as always, with a reflection on the real magic of baking: taking raw ingredients (pictured above) and turning them into something creative, beautiful, and of course delicious.

I used the white chocolate sugar cookie dough recipe that I outlined in my previous "wedding preview" blog post. I made 10 batches of the dough, which turned out to be way more than enough (I have some left in my freezer).

The dough took over the refrigerator, early in the week.

And I took it upon myself to roll and cut out all off the cookies. This was actually much less time consuming than one would think. It helped a lot to take my mind off all of the wedding stress actually, and turned out to be a huge blessing during a hectic week.

Then I baked them all, a batch at a time, for about 6 and half minutes each. It took around 3-4 hours. Haha. Burn victims were quickly gobbled up by my then-fiance-now-husband and/or myself.

I made a couple special cookies for him along the way too :)

Once I had about 230 finished cookies, I packed them up tight for safe keeping. The decorating and packing phases would take place in the following days, and for these time-consuming tasks, I called in all the troops....

My Sister/Maid-of Honor Jamie and Friend/Bridesmaid Kim volunteered to help with the decorating process..... They did a great job, although they had difficulty not eating all the cookies themselves.....

We frosted the cookies simply with a classic royal icing recipe I've used many times before. Although it's not the tastiest of frostings, it dries rock-hard and has a shiny-finished look.

We found ourselves getting constantly confused while counting/writing numbers on the cookies. It turns out it's very difficult to count to 10 when you're writing the number 5 over and over with frosting.

Next up was the wrapping phase. I did a small amount of the cookies myself, and realized I would need help for this part too....

So I wrapped up my dining room table as if it was a huge platter with saran wrap, and waited for reinforcements to arrive the next day.

Thank God for the Bridesmaid patrol: Jamie, Tasha, and Jenn.

With their help, we packaged all of the cookies, and packed them in reverse alphabetical order for delivery to the reception hall. (This involved an embarrassing amount of singing the alphabet outloud to make sure the order was correct). The day before the wedding we arranged them on the escort card table, for guests to see immediately as they walked into the wedding.

My mom even painted me this nifty sign, complete with a golden whisk.

I was very very proud and happy with how these cookies came out. They also worked relatively well as place cards, although I think we made too many table 15's, and Joe's Grandma crunched hers up before reading what table she was supposed to sit at. Woops.

All in all, it was a very successful project, and easily the happiest day of my life thus far. Hooray for Marriage, family, friends and of course.....cookies.

Happy Baking!

Wedding Cookie Project sneak peak :)

2011-08-06T14:36:00.001-07:00

Hello Blog Friends! I feel the need to once again apologize for my lack of blogging lately. Our wedding is exactly two weeks from today (AH) so I have been very preoccupied. However! as promised, here is a sneak peak at my wedding cookie project. Because it wouldn't be my wedding without cookies.

I'm going with a sugar cookie base, plus a little kick (which I LOVE)

Ingredients:

1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup shortening

3/4 cups sugar

1 egg

1tsp vanilla

1 tsp baking powder

dash salt

2 cups flour
1/3 cup shaved white chocolate

The grating of the white chocolate will be very time consuming. considering I'm making around 200 cookies. HOWEVER it gives the dough a rich, sweet depth that is lacking in your standard sugar cookies. Love this. Seriously I can't stop eating them (woops, wedding diet fail).

Chill your dough for 30 minutes or so after it all comes together.

Cut into desired shape, and bake for 7 minutes (6 if you have a really hot oven)

For the sake of this trial run I bought frosting (gasp) but worry not, I will be making the real thing (royal icing) for the big day. This gel store bought stuff kinda sucked. So the decor work will be prettier day of as well.

And here is your one and only look!

Why am I putting seemingly random numbers on cookies you ask? Well you'll just have to wait until after August 20th to find out :)

In other news, I have been cooking a lot lately (way more than I've been baking unfortunately) and this week I made this yummy little number:

Baked ziti with fresh summer vegetables. Good stuff.

And I did bang out some snickerdoodles for a cookout a few weeks ago....

aaaaaand here's a cute picture of my cat.

Happy Baking!

Chocolate Meringues. Success!

2011-07-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

Man, I am the worst blogger ever lately! Sorry folks, I have been VERY busy with wedding shenanigans and unfortunately my baking frequency has suffered the consequences. HOWEVER, I did finally make a successful batch of meringues which Joe and I handily devoured shortly thereafter. Third time is a charm.

Since I wasn't thrilled with the flavor of the cardamom meringues, I decided I would try good old fashioned chocolate for a flavor. Here's the recipe I used:

Ingredients:

3 egg whites, room temp and carefully divided
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder

First I beat together the egg whites, vanilla and cream of tartar. I think the cream of tartar was the key, because of the leavening action. It allowed me to slowly add my sugar and then, at last, the elusive..... Stiff Peaks! Yes!

Then it was time to gently fold in the cocoa powder, which I totally should have sifted before hand but I was too lazy. It was Saturday afternoon and I was a few beers in already.....

Instead of using a pastry bag, I simply filled a big freezer bag with the batter, and snipped off one of the corners. Then I piped the meringue into pretty little kisses on my baking sheet.

Ta-da They look a lot better that the flat-as-a-pancake attempts of old.

Then into the oven at 300 degrees for 25 minutes.

And we have light, fluffy, sweet little treats.

I'm a big fan of these and I'll definitely be making them again. next up on the baking agenda is a trial-run of my wedding cookie project (you didn't think I'd get married without baking for my own wedding did you?) I'll have to figure out how to share the trial run with ya without giving away the final project. It's gonna be the bomb.

Happy July!

Healthy Banana-Oat muffins

2011-06-30T15:42:00.001-07:00

Happy almost-Friday everyone! I was home early today and was greeted by some very-ripe bananas when I walked in the door. My first thought was banana bread, but Joe and I have been trying to eat better so I thought I'd try out a healthy muffin recipe.

Ingredients:
3 ripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
1 tsp almond extract
3/4 cups sugar
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/8 cup coconut
1/8 cup brown sugar
1/8 cup oats

Time to bust out the new hand blender! This thing was from my cousin Jenn at our shower, it's great for quick recipes that don't quite need the kitchen aid.

Beat the eggs until fluffy, the mix them with the mashed banana. Add in your almond extract. In a separate bowl, mix together all of your dry ingredients....

And mix it all around.....

Spoon the batter into lined muffin cups....

I topped these with a mixture of coconut, brown sugar, and quick cooking oats. Largely because that's what I had in the pantry....

Yum.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes. These smelled awesome. They taste ok, ya know, "healthy" food. Not up to my usual delicious standards but good for a guilt-free breakfast.

Mini Strawberry Crisps

2011-06-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

This week at the grocery store I bought this enormous box of strawberries. After putting them in my cereal every morning for five days, this was all the progress I'd made. Hmmmm. Obviously I had to come up with some tasty dessert to use them up. Since Joe always complains that I never bake anything for just him, I thought I'd whip up a couple of strawberry crisps for our Friday night dinner.

First I chopped up the strawberries and added about 1/4 cup of sugar and a tsp of vanilla extract.

Then for the topping, I mixed 3 tablespoons of melted butter, 1/4 cup of whole wheat flour (wedding diet), 1/4 cup of oats, and 2 tablespoons of brown sugar.

I used a couple of our new Crate and Barrel ramekins from our Wedding Shower. These things are so cute, and perfect for single serving desserts.

I topped off the strawberries with the crunchy topping.... And then baked them at 350 for about 20 minutes. With berries the bake times are pretty low. If these were apples, I'd probably have extended it another 10 minutes.

Yum! For dinner, I made a veggie and bacon quiche. I'll share some picture, because it was pretty. Although it looked better than it tasted. All in all it was just okay (wedding diet, strikes again). It was super low-calorie though :)

Have a great weekend everyone!!!!

Meringue's Round 2. Slight Improvement.

2011-06-18T08:36:00.001-07:00

Alright! SO round two of Meringue making went slightly better then round one, however I would still classify it as a bit of a baking failure. However, in the spirit of full disclosure I thought I would share my findings with my faithful blog readers anyway....

After my first meringue failure, which was REALLY a failure, no cookies at all were produced, I did a little research on what went wrong. After a few simple corrections (room temp eggs, not cold eggs, and a very careful separating process for the egg whites) the consistency of the Meringues was much improved.

I used a VERY simple recipe I got off of allrecipes.com. 3 egg whites at room temperature. 1 cup of sugar. 3/4 tsp of cardamom. That's it. 3 ingredients. That's my kind of cookie.

I also took the opportunity to break in one of my new bridal-shower appliances (Thanks Collins family!) The Cuisinart smart stick blender. This little contraption comes with a whisk attachment. Power tool meets Whisk. So cool.

First up, beat the egg whites until foamy.

Then slowly add in your sugar and continue beating until stiff peaks form. Then fold in the cardamom. I think this is where I went wrong. Impatient little me decided my peaks were stiff enough when really, this was not the case. As a result my meringue didn't really hold its form well on the baking sheet. They weren't pancake flat either though, so we're getting closer....

Bake at 275 for about 45 minutes. The recipe said 60-90 minutes, but they started to get burny-brown after 50. I think this over-cooking was also partially responsible for the final product that wasn't quite up to snuff.

Tada! Instead of the pretty piped swirlies I was going for, I got meringue blobs. Boo. The consistency was decent, but the cardamom was WAY too much. I think for round three (which WILL be a success I promise!) I'll stick so something simple to flavor the meringue, like vanilla extract.

I only made a few, as I also managed to dump half of the batter onto my kitchen counter while attempting to transfer it to a piping bag. Sigh. All in all, it was a bit of a rough experiment. I think I will try something with a high probability of success my next go 'round to recover a bit of my baking momentum. Then I'll try to tackle these bad boys again.

Happy Baking!

My Bridal Shower!!!!

2011-06-12T13:54:00.000-07:00

Hello blog friends! I have been MIA for a couple of weeks, largely due to a very busy schedule. I have only engaged in one baking adventure which was pretty much an epic failure, BUT I wanted to share with you some fun cooking related news: Yesterday was my Bridal shower! Above is a picture of me with my flower girls and bridesmaids after the gift-bonanza. I cannot believe what wonderful generous families Joe and I have on both sides of the Aisle. We are very blessed.
These were the cookie favors made by my sister, cousin and aunt. Look familiar? http://shan-thecookiemonster.blogspot.com/2010/12/buell-family-gingerbread-marathon.html

How cute are they???

And here is our new toaster! It has an LED display that counts down the "toasting cycle." I mean seriously? This thing is like a space ship....

Our kitchen is now appliance central....

Spices.....I'm sure these will be used in subsequent blog posts....

Cookie cutters! But of course! From my darling friend Kristin :)

A whole cabinet's worth of bakeware. OH MAN. I almost don't want to use it, it's all so beautiful.

Very Very shiny pots. It won't take me long to bang these up.....

And finally, me and Joe. In cookie form.

I will be attempting to rectify my recent baking failure shortly. I tried to make some chocolate meringues, which I'm admittedly inexperienced with. Basically I had some soft peaks, added sugar, and instead of stiff peaks, I ended up with zero peaks. Maybe even negative peaks. Big Sigh. I'll figure it out soon ;)

Butterscotch Chip Cookies

2011-05-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

We're almost done with this loooooong week! And tonight I was getting ready for an awesome camping weekend out in western Mass by....making some cookies of course! I decided to whip up some butterscotch chip cookies, and MAN did I eat a lot of cookies dough. I'm gonna have to run that off tomorrow Morning!!!!

Ingredients:

3/4 cups sugar
3/4 cups brown sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
pinch salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/4 cups flour
1 bag butterscotch chips

First off, blend together your butter and the two sugars.

Next add in your egg and vanilla.

Followed by....your flour, salt and baking soda. Generally I mix in the baking soda and salt first, then slowly add the flour, just to make sure those first two dry ingredients get mixed evenly into the batter. Now its time for your butterscotch pieces. Make sure to save a few of these babies for yourself!

Mix until JUST blended. your dough should stick to your mixing paddle, like so:

Using a large spoon to keep your measurements equal, roll the cookies into 1 to 2 inch balls (I usually err on the side of BIG).

Bake at 375 for 8 minutes. You'll get a soft, sweet, rich chewy result.

I also whipped up some rice krispie treats for the kiddos who are coming along for the weekend/ (Who am I kidding, they're really for me).

Have a great Holiday weekend folks!

Thank You Cookies

2011-05-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

Update!

Tonight I finished my Thank you cookie-bags for my confirmation class teachers. I decided to add to the biscotti with some coconut macaroons dipped in white chocolate.....

These were pretty delish, gooey and messy....but delish.

Aaaaaand one of my all-time classics, snickerdoodles.

Then I wrapped them all up with some love and fancy ribbon :) Ta-da!

I hope everyone's week is off to a good start!

Banana Biscotti

2011-05-22T16:18:00.001-07:00

As the weekend winds down and another busy week begins, I started in on my latest baking project: Thank You cookie bags for the presenters at my confirmation class. I was confirmed last weekend as a full-blown Catholic in preparation for my Wedding, and this week I'm having dinner with my class and the presenters who volunteered their time for the last 9 months. Cookie gifts were obviously in order.

I wanted to have some variety in my gift bags so tonight I thought I'd make a biscotti. Conveniently I had some very ripe bananas, so I googled some recipes. I started out following a random recipe from a blog, but ended up pretty much winging it due to several factors (my lack of brown sugar, love of butter etc...) Here's what I came up with.

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 mashed bananas
½ cup butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
2.5 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons cinnamon, whoops
1 cup choc chips

First I mixed together my sugar and butter, eggs, vanilla and bananas. I couldn't resist putting in a second banana, when my recipe only called for one, so at that point I just went totally rogue and started making things up.

Then I added in my flour, baking soda and cinnamon. I thought I had a slotted cap on my jar of cinnamon, however this was not the case. As a result, I dumped a TON of cinnamon directly into my batter. I tried to skim some out, but I decided it was best to just roll with it. Apparently there's fiber in cinnamon, call it a health food.

After it was all mixed together it was time to form the dough into logs. This was more challenging than usual as the dough was SUPER sticky. SO sticky in fact that I thought my experiment might be going awry. NO way to tell for sure though until you bake the damn thing. so....Into the oven!

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. In my oven, more like 27 minutes. I think my oven is gradually getting hotter, I need to start systematically knocking minutes off my bake time.

Diagonally slice your log into your happy little biscotti pieces.

Then it's time to bake again! Turn down the heat to 300, bake for 12 minutes, flip, then bake one more time for 10 minutes.

Yum.

Stay tuned this week for the rest of my cookie gift bags, and some memorial day yummies to come!

Orange-Coconut Macaroons

2011-05-14T16:29:00.001-07:00

Happy Weekend! After a lazy afternoon that involved team-napping with my elderly cat, I decided to whip up some Coconut Macaroons (one of my FAVORITES). I usually make these with dried cranberries and orange zest, but seeing as I had neither of those ingredients on hand, I thought I'd just use orange extract, with some chocolate drizzle action.

Ingredients:

2/3 cups sugar
2 teaspoons Orange Extract
2 egg whites
dash salt
3 cups shredded sweetened coconut
3 ounces bakers chocolate
1 tsp shortening

Whisk together your egg whites, sugar extract and salt in a large bowl until evenly blended.

Next, fold in your coconut until it's evenly moistened.

Roll your Coconut into balls, and place on a baking sheet. Bake at 350 for 12-14 minutes. (I baked for 15 and it was too long, I had some burn victims). Meanwhile, melt together your chocolate and shortening over low heat.

I decided to use a pastry bag to make my drizzle a little neater, you can also just use a spoon...

Yum. A little on the dark side, but they still taste good. :)

drizzle your chocolate over the macaroons once they've cooled off a bit, and you're done!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Weekend Baking

2011-05-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

Happy weekend! Yesterday I whipped up a couple of fun things so I thought I'd share some pictures. My cousin was kind enough to host me and a few other lovely ladies at her house last night to do some wedding-crafty projects and my first hair trial (ahhhhh I'm getting married SO soon! Crazy!)

I was kind of running around all day beforehand, so I just whipped up some quick bites to bring to the party. First up (not a dessert) were some Jamaican style meat pies. Love these....

Basically you cook a filling of beef, onions, scotch bonnet peppers, and yummy seasoning, then plop it in some puff pastry circles.

And Bake! Yum.

On the dessert front, I broke out the cookie press once again....

I tweaked the basic Butter Spritz Recipe by using orange extract instead of vanilla...

Then sprinkled it with some cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

Hope everyone's out enjoying this sunny day!

Peanut Pie

2011-04-25T15:28:00.000-07:00

Yo Peeps! Yesterday I brought some tasty treats over to my mom's house for our Easter dinner. I wanted to try something different than my usual apple or pecan pie, so I decided to give this peanut pie a shot.

So I whipped up a quick pie crust....

And got to work....

Ingredients:

2 eggs, beaten

1/3 cup creamy peanut butter

1/3 cup white sugar

1/3 cup light corn syrup

1/3 cup dark corn syrup

1/3 cup butter, melted

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup salted peanuts

Beat your eggs, then add in your vanilla, corn syrup, peanut butter, sugar and melted butter.

Mix until creamy.

Add in your peanuts....

Pour it all into your pie crust. It smelled delish.

Bake at 375 for about 30 minutes....

Yummmm....

I was pretty happy with this pie! Although, it was very similar to a pecan pie. I thought the peanut butter in the filling would make it more creamy and less gooey. All in all, pretty tasty though! A scoop of vanilla ice cream sealed the deal.

I also made some brownies for sundaes :)

Hope you all had a great Easter!

Royal Icing Lady Bug Cookies

2011-04-16T06:22:00.001-07:00

Happy Weekend Blog Friends! Last night I finished my first ever hired-cookie-job. A friend of mine is hosting a baby shower tomorrow and asked me to make her lady bug cookies for the favors. I was pumped to have a paid cookie job, and excited for a challenging project. My client (hehe, I have a client) asked for sugar cookies, and we decided to jazz them up with chocolate shavings inside the dough. I used my standard recipe and added about 1/3 cup of grated semi sweet chocolate when I mixed in the flour. Then I rolled out the dough and cute out the cookies with a lady bug shaped cookie cutter.

Yum. For elaborately decorated cookies like these, its best to use a royal icing recipe. royal icing used to be (and sometimes still is) made with egg whites, which gives the icing a shiny, smooth look after it dries. It also dries completely hard which is great for these kinds of cookies, they won't smudge, chip etc...

Nowadays Royal Icing can be made with Meringue Powder, instead of egg whites, for those who have salmonella concerns. I went with the powder.

In a large mixing bowl, mix 3 tablespoons Meringue powder, 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar, and 3 cups of powdered sugar until evenly blended. Add in 1 tsp vanilla, and 1/2 cup of warm water. Mix slowly at first until e well blended, then beat on high for 5 minutes or so until it's firm.

With royal icing, it's best to use gel food coloring, the regular food coloring will give you pastel like shades, and it's tough to get the true color. It's messy though, beware.

I got my red and my black going....

Then I watered down half of the icing for a "flooding" consistency. Basically the idea is you draw the borders of your designs with the thick frosting, then flood the middle with the liquidy frosting so you get a clean, smooth finish when it dries....

Ready to rock.

I decided to do all of the black first, then do all of the red.

The cookie on the left was my ugly first attempt. Good thing I got better as I went.

After making the outlines, I "flooded" my little bug-heads with the liquid black frosting.

Then I added little white non pareils for eyeballs. Next up was the red outlines and filler. Below is a "red progression" from outline, to flooding, to the final effect. I used a tooth pick to push the flood frosting up against the outside line and to smooth it out.

Starting to come together.

Lastly I went to work on the dots, which was actually the easiest part of the whole decorating process....

Hehehe, so cute!

I put some antennae on this guy....

Then it was time for packaging....

A little branding never hurt anybody! ;)

And we're done!

I'm pretty proud of how these turned out! I can't wait to hear the feedback from the baby shower.

Happy Baking!

A Tale of Two Cookie Presses. Part 2

2011-04-08T15:29:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday Blog-people! Tonight I took on part two of my cookie press comparison experiment with the press my mom got me for Christmas. It came in this fancy-schmancy carrying case.... Apparently it's a Kuhn Rikon, from Switzerland. Sounds fancy. It kind of looks like a weapon, don't you think?

Anyhoo, I decided to try a slightly different recipe. So I went with a "Chocolate Chip Spritz" cookie.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened

2/3 cup sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 egg

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 cup coarsely grated chocolate

2 1/4 flour

Mix up your dough by the usual process. I had to grate some semi sweet chocolate. At first the grate was too fine, so I nuked the chocolate in the microwave and it helped get more of a "course" texture.

Woops chocolate dust on the floor.

Mixed into the dough, the chocolate specks looked like little tiny chocolate chips. yum!

This dough was DELISH. I actually liked the dough better than the cookies. Haha. It tastes just like the dough in cookie dough ice cream. I was tempted to roll up some little balls of it and mix it in some vanilla....future project perhaps.

Enter the Swiss cookie press....

This thing actually had a "trigger" type apparatus, which measures out the amount of dough for you. For a novice cookie-presser, I think this was simpler (instead of trying to figure out the best amount of dough for each press.

However, I did have some trouble with it. Because of the smaller amount of dough it allowed through the press at once, I kept getting incomplete cookies. Slightly annoying...

After a while though, I got the hang of it, and made some pretty flowers...

Bake at 400 degrees for 5 minutes. these cookies were less doughy and smaller than those from the pampered chef press, so the bake time was quick. I actually had a few burn victims.

Powdered sugar sprinkle, and we're done!

Both of these presses have their pros and cons. I think the pampered chef version, although a little less "high-tech" allows for a little more control and variation, which I think will be better once I'm more practiced at this whole "cookie-pressing" skill. The Swiss version is cookie pressing for dummies, which actually would have been better for round 1 I think.

Pampered chef: bigger cookies. Swiss: more delicate cookies.....

I guess it just depends on the mood. I'm sure I will use both in the future. They're both good products and made two yummy batches of treats!

Happy baking and happy weekend!

-S

A Tale of Two Cookie Presses. Part I

2011-04-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Greetings Blog readers! I am SO sorry I was MIA for the entire month of March! Between a vacation to Jamaica, a business trip to D.C. and trying to keep up with all the wedding nonsense I honestly did not bake a single thing for an entire month. Inconceivable! But, I'm back with part one of a two part series on a little invention that was until now foreign and unfamiliar to me: The cookies press. Now, one would think with the copious amounts of baking I do (except in March) that I would have used one of these thingy-ma-doos before. However, that was not the case. Fortunately for me I recieved not one, but TWO cookie presses from my lovely family (and family-to-be) for Christmas. It's taken me this long to put one to use, but hopefully in the next week or so I will Christen the other one as well, and then compare...

Since I'm new at this whole cookie press thing I decided to start with a really simple buttery spritz recipe.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

1 tsp almond exctract

1/s tsp salt

2 1/4 cups flour

powdered sugar for dusting

First cream together your butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer. Add in your egg and almond extract, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Then mix in your remaining ingredients until just combined.

At this point I picked out two shapes to use with my press. I decided to try out the pampered chef press first, as it looked a little less intimidating.

Stuff your cookie press full of dough.....

And start pressing! Admittedly, this took me a little while to figure out. At first I was cranking way too much dough out, you really only need a little bit. Also, the cookies need to actually stick to the cookie sheet so parchment paper is a no go. I made a huge mess in the beginning, but after a little tweaking, I was pressing cute little flowers....

And cute little diamonds!

Bake at 400 degrees for 6 or 7 minutes. I have a very hot oven so 6 minutes was plenty...

Doesn't the above photo look like a Pampered Chef Commercial? They should start reading my blog! :)

Now clearly, my shapes could use a little work. I'm sure with practice the weird little tentacle-like appendages will happen less and less.

Ta-da!

I finished them off with a powdered-sugar sprinkle....

Yummy! These are simple, buttery little cookies and were actually very quick and easy once I figured out the new contraption. There are tons of different plates that came with the press for different shapes so, I'm sure there will be much more fun to come.

Coming up (hopefully this week) I'll give the other press a try, and do a comparison! That one also doubles as a frosting-dispenser. I need more cabinet space for all of this nifty stuff.

Happy Baking!

Lemonade Cookies

2011-02-26T15:56:00.000-08:00

Today Joe and I went to a birthday party for my soon to be nieces and nephew, Talia, Gianna and Vincenzo. For the party I decided to re-attempt to make the "fruit dream" cookies that I royally screwed up last summer : http://shan-thecookiemonster.blogspot.com/2010/08/cookie-mishaphey-nobodys-perfect.html

This time around however, I decided to use lemonade mix instead of weird strawberry crystal light. It was a good call.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup drink mix
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour
colored sugar

Blend together your butter, shortening, sugar and drink mix. Add in your dry ingredients and mix until well blended, scraping down the sides of the bowl.

Refrigerate the dough for 15 minutes or so until it's easy to handle, then roll it into 1-inch balls. Roll in your colored sugar.

Bake at 375 for 10 minutes, then let cool on a baking sheet.

These came out tangy, sweet and pretty damn yummy! I think they'd be great for a summer picnic. Too bad it’s still February. Wishful thinking I guess!

Happy Baking!

Cinnamon Brownies

2011-02-19T09:01:00.000-08:00

Happy Weekend! I’m heading up to the mountains today for a little skiing with some of my favorite family members, I wasn’t really planning on baking anything, but you know me with the bringing-baked-goods-everywhere-I-go nonsense.

So I whipped up some from scratch brownies.

Recipe here: http://shan-thecookiemonster.blogspot.com/2010/04/never-make-brownies-from-box-again.html

Seriously, if you’re still making brownies from a box, give these a shot. It’s really really just as easy, with no cheating involved :)

I added about a teaspoon of cinnamon and topped these with some mini chocolate chips to jazz them up a bit. They go great with a scoop of Vanilla ice cream.

Have a great weekend everybody!

Cookie Hearts for my Valentine :)

2011-02-14T16:10:00.001-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day Blog-Folk! My hubby-to-be and I decided to have a frugal Valentine's this year, due to the wedding planning, but I wanted to do something little and special, like whip up some of his favorite cookies. And make them heart shaped. :) Enter White Chocolate Macadamia Nut heaven.

I rolled out the standard dough, then used cookie cutters to shape the cookies into hearts. They're not the prettiest hearts that ever were....but you get the idea ;)

For the Recipe: http://shan-thecookiemonster.blogspot.com/2010/07/white-chocolate-macadamia-nut-cookies.html

I packed up my little hearts in a pretty box, and wrapped them up for my Valentine :)

Note the roses in the background that he sent me at work. Awwiees....

I also made some plain old regular-shaped cookies to share with my co-workers tommorrow :)

In other baking news......Last week I failed miserably at making a lemon cake for my friend Crystal's Birthday. Looks kind of burnt right? But it was liquid in the middle and fell apart. So sad.....

Good thing it's the thought that counts! I think I'll stick to cookies!

Happy Baking!

Cocoa Oatmeal Cookies

2011-02-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

On this lazy Saturday afternoon I felt like baking some cookies :) Instead of going out and buying more ingredients, I thought I'd try to make a dent in my current stores, and kinda make something up to use up some random stuff that's been laying around for a while. Mainly oats and walnuts. This is what I came up with:

Indecipherable right? It's a good thing I blog because most of my handwritten recipes are gibberish.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

3/4 cup flour

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

dash salt

1.5 cups oats

1/2 cup walnuts

1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

Blend together your better and sugars. then add in your eggs and vanilla. Scape down the sides of the bowls occasionally to keep things even.

Next add in all of your dry ingredients (excluding the oats, nuts, and chocolate chips).

Next add in your oats, mix until well blended. Then finally add in your nuts and chocolate chips.

Roll into tablespoon sized balls and place on a lined cookie sheet. bake for 10 minutes at 350.

These are very yummy! The oats and nuts are really the star of the show, it tastes like a more delicious version of a granola bar.

I'm usually not a huge fan of nuts in my baked goods, but I think after my last couple of baking efforts, I may need to revise that opinion.

Enjoy! Happy Baking!

P.S. I added these cookies to a "linky party" on another great baking blog. Check it out for some cool ideas! http://sweet-as-sugar-cookies.blogspot.com/

50th Blog Post! Cardomom Cookies

2011-02-02T16:33:00.000-08:00

Greetings blog readers! It's my 50th blog post. yay! I'm so glad that after a year I've been able to share some of my baking adventures with you. Thanks for reading :)

Today I went to the mailbox in the middle of the hundredth winter storm of the year (it feels like it anyway) and I found a package from my fellow food-blogger and college buddy Wilcox! Inside was a nifty little tool that I have often wished for, a sifter! She is so thoughtful and wonderful! She also sent me heart shaped marshmallows that I can't stop eating. Check out her blog at www.morecheesemorechocolate.com.

Clearly I had to use my new tool right away! SO I decided to try out a recipe I've been eyeing for a while. Cardamom cookies.

Ingredients:
1 cup butter, softened
¾ cups confectioner’s sugar, plus more for dusting
1 tsp almond extract
1 ¾ cup flour
½ cup chopped walnuts
1 tsp ground cardamom
pinch salt

Start off my mixing together the butter and sugar. In a separate bowl, mix together your dry ingredients.

Slowly add your dry ingredients to the butter mixture.

Form the dough into 1 inch balls.

Bake at 350 for about 13 minutes….

Let the cookies cool for a bit on a wire rack. The dust them with some powdered sugar.

Look at the lovely, even, snow-like powdered sugar dust. Sweet relief. This is so much prettier than my usual clumps. Thanks Wilcox!!!

Tiny Shortbread-and-Jam Cookies

2011-01-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

January is almost over and this is my first actual cookie post of the month! Terrible! It's been very busy folks, between wedding stuff, my Grandma's passing, and just the daily grind, but never fear, here is a new fun yummy recipe I got from allrecipes.com :)

Ingredients:
3/4 cups butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 cups flour
2 tablespoons strawberry preserves
Confectionery sugar

First off, cream together your butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer, and separate your egg. Add in the egg yolk, and then mix until well combined...

Add in your flour and mix by hand. This is to ensure that you don't over work the dough. The cookie texture will be flaky and pastry-ish as a result.

The recipe said to knead the dough on a lightly floured surface for 2-3 minutes. I maybe kneaded for 30 seconds. Just enough so that the crumbly dough comes together a little bit more.

Form your dough into little 1 inch balls. And place them on a parchment lined cookie sheet. (Shout out to my future sister-in-law Vickie who gave me these awesome new cookie sheets for Christmas. THANK YOU!)

Using the end of a wooden spoon, poke a little hole in the middle of each ball. You may need to reshape them a bit after doing this, as the dough will still be a bit crumbly. (No worries, crumbly = Yummy).

I whisked together some strawberry preserves and a little bit of Grand Marnier for my filling.

Then I carefully filled my little cookies. I mixed way too much Jam. You really only need 2 Tablespoons....

Bake these little babies at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes.

Then Sprinkle with Confection Sugar. I really need one of those sugar sifter things so my sugar doesn't clump all over my cookies. Sigh. Wedding registry!

Happy Baking!

Homemade Bread

2011-01-12T16:39:00.000-08:00

Hi Blog readers! Sorry I've been so MIA as of late. It's been a busy couple of weeks, but I am back with my first post of 2011. It it not a cookie, not a pie, not even a sweet dessert experiment.....I decided while getting snowed in, I would make some homemade bread from scratch....

I've intended to try this for quite a long time, so many times in fact, that I frequently purchase yeast packets in anticipation. Here is the yeast in my cupboard that had expired....

And here's the yeast that was still good. whew. At least I had one.

I busted out my trusty bread hook.

And activated the yeast (my one lone packet) in some warm water.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup milk

1.5 tablespoons sugar

1 tsp salt

2 tablespoons butter

1 package yeast

3/4 cups warm water

2.5-3 cups flour

cheddar cheese

First off, activate your yeast in the warm water, and melt together the butter, milk, sugar and salt over low heat...

Then, in the bowl of your mixer, mix 2.5 cups of flour, the yeast mixture, and the milk mixture with the bread hook for one minute or so.

Once the dough starts to come together, add the remaining flour a 1/4 cup at a time, until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl.

Continue kneading for about 2 minutes on a low speed. I timed this on my iphone....

Lookin' good.

place the dough in a greased bowl and let rise for about an hour. I went and watched some tv....

once the dough has doubled in bulk, punch it down, then pull it out to shape your loaf...

Roll it out in a rectangle-ish shape...

Add some yummy fillings if you like (I went for some sharp cheddar cheese).

The roll it up into a little loaf of yumminess.

Place it in a greased loaf pan, cover, and let it rise again for another hour....

until it doubles in bulk...

I sprinkled on a little cheese....

Then baked it at 400 degrees for 30 minutes while I shoveled.....

Hooray for multi tasking :)

It came out pretty fantastic :) It's a nice hearty bread that goes great with.....

Some homemade chili.... Happy Baking!!!!!

Mini Muffins!

2010-12-30T17:14:00.000-08:00

Ripe Bananas + New fun bakeware = a stellar excuse to make some muffins. Joe's lovely family seriously outfitted me with new Pampered Chef bakeware for Christmas, so I decided to put it to good use tonight...

First up on the new stuff inventory....Joe's mom Birdie got me this awesome non-stick mini muffin pan...

So I googled this recipe for mini banana muffins:

INGREDIENTS:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 large bananas, mashed
3/4 cup white sugar
1 egg
1/3 cup butter, melted
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla

Mix the sugar, butter, egg, vanilla and cinnamon all together in the bowl of an electric mixer.... Then add the Bananas....yummm

Then, if you're as lucky as me, bust out your new adjustable teaspoon measure from your future sister in law Vickie....

And add in your dry ingredients....seriously this thing is so clever! Love it!

Mix it all together until well blended.... the batter is pretty tasty....

Then, spoon the butter into a greased mini muffin pan. You could probably make large muffins with this recipe too, you'd just need to up the bake time by 10-15 minutes...

I topped these little guys with a mixture of white and brown sugar...

Bake at 375 for 13 minutes. These came out perfect and slid out of the muffin cups quite easily. They're like little two bite bits of heaven. Joe and I ate about half of them while they were still warm....

Thanks Birdie and Vick! :)

Ginger Snowflakes

2010-12-26T10:46:00.001-08:00

Included in my cookie gift boxes this year were some delicious, spicy gingerbread snowflakes. I gave this new recipe a shot, which I actually thought was very good. These cookies are light and a bit crunchy, very different from the Buell gingerbread men, but still quite tasty. The star of the show is definitely the freshly grated ginger, which adds a lot to the flavor of the cookies.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon grated ginger
3/4 tablespoon baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cloves
1/2 cup Molasses
1 egg
2 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp shredded lemon peel

Creamy White Frosting:
1 cup shortening
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
4 1/2 cups powdered sugar
4-5 tablespoons milk

Grating madness....

Mix together the butter, sugar, ginger, cinnamon and cloves....

add in your molasses and egg....

Add in your flour, baking soda, and lemon peel. Once the dough is evenly blended, form it into 2 balls and chill for 2-3 hours....

This dough was super easy to roll out, which was nice.... no crumbling or breaking. love it.

I used a snowflake cookie cutter :)

Pretty. Bake at 350 for about 7 minute. Let them stand on the cookie sheet for a minute or two before moving them to a wire rack....

While the cookies are cooling, you can whip up the frosting.

Mix about half of the sugar with the shortening and extract, then add in the milk a couple tablespoons at a time.

Add in the rest of your sugar and milk, and mix until the frosting is a nice piping consistency...

Then start decorating!

I like this one....

These came out really well. Festive and yummy additions to the cookies gifts :)

I wrapped them up in pretty gold boxes...

Along with the Chocolate biscotti and snicklerdoodles....

Also on the menu for the day was a cherry pie....It looks really pretty in the picture below...but don't be fooled, I burned the crap out of it while I was taking a shower....so sad....

And I made a mini apple crisp for my grandma.....

I hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas!!!! Happy Baking!!!!

Triple Chocolate Biscotti

2010-12-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

Christmas = Baking madness in my household Today I made the following: three types of cookies, two other desserts, a TON of Green beans and baked butternut squash....
The Kitchen is a war Zone.

Here's the recipe for my triple chocolate Biscotti:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, softened

2/3 cup sugar

1/4 cup cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 eggs

1 3/4 cups flour

3/4 cup white chocolate chips

1/2 cup chocolate chips

Blend together the butter, sugar, cocoa and baking powder as shown above :)

Add in your eggs....

Then blend in all of your flour, followed by the chocolate yumminess....

Form the dough into 2 9 inch logs. Bake at 375 for 20 minutes.

Let the logs completely cool before starting to slice... I took this opportunity to start my gingerbread snowflake cookies (a post I will write at a later date...)

oh, and I did 2 batches of these guys.,...

Once cool, slice the logs diagonally, forming your biscotti :)

Line em back up on the cookie sheet, reduce the oven temp to 325, and bake for 7 minutes on each side....

Delish. These were really good warm with all the melty goey chocolate...

Then I wrapped them up for their final destination....my annual cookie gift boxes! (finished product to be blogged at a later date)

Now I'm off to run around like a crazy person!! Merry Christmas everyone!!!!!!!!!

Cookie Kits!

2010-12-19T09:07:00.000-08:00

Usually for Christmas I bake a whole lot of cookies. That won't change this year (post coming later this week) but I also decided to try something a little bit different for a select few people. I love giving the gift of cookies, but I also wanted to give the gift of BAKING somehow.

I came up with these "cookie kits". I took two of my favorite recipes (white chocolate macadamia nuts cookies, and snickerdoodles) and put together all of the ingredients in an easy, 3 step system that's all pre-measured etc....

Then I wrapped them all up in pretty boxes.

And wrote out instructions on pretty paper with silver pens.....

Then I finished them off with pretty bows!

Ta da! I hope the people I give these to are as excited about them as I am ;) We'll see how it goes! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Buell Family Gingerbread Marathon

2010-12-12T15:54:00.000-08:00

For pretty much as long as I can remember, gingerbread men have been an integral part of the Buell Family Christmas experience. We’ve always had these large, soft, spicy men at our family Christmas Eve bash, each marked with the name of a family member or friend. Once upon a time my Aunts used to take turns making them. There are lots of stories involving rock-hard brown sugar (we broke it up with a hammer), missing ingredients, and Kama Sutra gingerbread man positions. But the last five years or so we have made the cookies a family event, where aunts and cousins all pitch in to make them for family and friends.

Because the quantity has increased so much over the years (from around 30 large cookies to 180-200) we break up the madness into two days. This Sunday was Cookie day #1 of the year, and we cranked out about 160 of these bad boys.

The recipe is kind of a family secret (or I should say an auntie Barbara secret) since none of us really know it in its entirety. I’m pretty sure my aunt strategically splits up the tasks so no one else can be the recipes keeper. SO, I will share with you the general process, but alas, I have no measurements for you….

I arrived a little late to the party. When I walked in, everyone was already very focused on their individual tasks.....

Auntie Sue was melted together the butter, molasses and brown sugar on the stove. (The Buells have a genetic inability top keep our eyes open in pictures).

Jenn mixed up the dry ingredients, then added the egg and molasses mixture.

Jamie rolled out the dough, then cut the cookies and placed them on the baking sheet.

Everyone took turns decorating the raw cookies with M&M's and chocolate chips...

We made 16 batches of gingerbread. Holy Cow. The Christmas Music and egg nog inspired us.

I was assigned to mix in the food coloring for the frosting. we generally use white decorating frosting, red, green, and yellow. We make the "royal icing" from scratch, another recipe I'm not officially privy too.

I stuffed the pastry bags and we were ready to start decorating the baked cookies.

So I went to town....

We split up the decorating so that each of us was in charge of a certain feature. Jenn was on the mouths, I was on the hands and feet, Lauren was on the hair etc....

We had a little fun with the faces. This little guy is buck-toothed.

And this one knows his ultimate fate is death-by-eating.

We took a sandwich break at some point....

And finally, about 7 hours later, we completed cookie day #1 with around 150 finished men.

Cookie day #2 is only about half the gingerbread people. Hopefully we'll have recovered from our cookie-and-frosting hangover by then....

Happy Baking!

Nutmeg Fleur-de-lis

2010-12-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

My latest new cookie recipe experiment was for these soft, spicy nutmeg sugar cookies. I brought them along with me to a girls night last night, and they were well received. The nutmeg seems very seasonal, but bring something a little different than your typical gingerbread or pumpkin cookies for the holidays.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sour cream
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
4 cups all purpose flour

Cream together the butter and shortening.

Add in the sugar, nutmeg, salt and baking soda. Blend until well mixed.

Next, add in your egg, vanilla and sour cream. When that's mixed thoroughly, add in your flour, one cup at a time, scrape down the sides of the bowl to make sure everything is even.

Roll your dough into 3 large balls, and chill for around 2 hours. I went and watched Harry Potter.

Then I came back to the kitchen and started rolling out the dough. I used my new Fleur de lis cookie cutter I bought at my friend Sarah's cooking store out in Seattle (www.mrscooks.com). Love this place.

These were pretty large cookies, but the recipe makes a lot of dough, so you can still get around 3 dozen out of it.

I wanted to make these a little prettier, but wasn't really up for making a batch of frosting. Instead I went for a little texturing/drawing with a toothpick.

Bake your cookies at 350 for 10 minutes. That was the perfect amount of time.

and enjoy! I dusted mine with a little powdered sugar to add some more sweetness. They came out pretty well, looked gorgeous, but were not very sweet. These are definitely more of a "tea-time" cookie then a dessert cookie.

Happy Baking!

Pie Crust Basics

2010-11-24T13:55:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of one of my very favorite holidays (and possibly the best excuse to bake ALL year) I wanted to do a post about making pie crust from scratch. Over the last couple of days I've talked to several people who are baking for the holiday. All of them have confessed to using store bought pie crust. This. Is. A. Travesty! First and foremost because crust is really not all that hard. All you need are the ingredients pictured above, and about 15 minutes. Cheaters never prosper, friends. ;)

Above is my super secret Pie Crust recipe that I swear by. I've tried lots of different ones, but this is by far the yummiest and most successful. It's adapted from a Paula Dean Recipe. I just added sugar and used salted butter. It only exists on this little torn piece of scrap paper in my Recipe Binder....and now in cyberland, too.

Mix together 2.5 cups flour, 3 tablespoons sugar, and 1/4 tsp salt in a large bowl until evenly distributed. Cut up your shortening and butter into tablespoon sized pieces, and then add them to the mix. It's very important that the butter is COLD. This will give your crust the right consistency...

Cut the butter and shortening into the flour. This is exactly what it sounds like. You can use two sharp knives and criss cross them over and over, targeting the larger chunks of butter. I bought a pasty blender a couple of years back to do this exact task, and it was the best 6$ I ever spent ;)

Work the butter/shortening into the flour until it resembles a crumb topping. The little balls of butter should be about the size of peas. The less you actually work/cut in the flour, the better. As you work with these kinds of doughs, the more you mix/mess with it, the more the gluten in the four develops. With pie crust, you want a light flaky texture, not a doughy one. Try to keep the contact to the absolute minimum.

Now, add cold water, a tablespoon at a time to the dough. Mix it with your hands, until all the dough is JUST moistened. You don't want to over-water your dough here. You really want to make it just wet enough that it will stick together...

This time around it took about 3 tablespoons of cold water. When you're all set, form the crust into two balls.

Pop them in the fridge, and you've got HOMEMADE pie crust for your apple, cherry, rhubarb, pecan whatever pie!!!!!

Give it a shot. It's a little tricky at first, but once you've got it figured out, you'll never buy crust from the grocery store again. I promise!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Vanilla Rounds with Chocolate Buttercream

2010-11-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

This weekend Joe's dad threw us a little engagement party at his house, as an opportunity for our parents to meet each other and our siblings etc... I figured I would try out a new recipe for the event, since per-usual I didn't want to show up empty handed. I love sandwich cookies, and I love butter cream frosting, so I thought I'd give these little delightful cookies a shot....

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
3 ounces cream cheese
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 3/4 cups flour

Cream together the butter and cream cheese, then add the cup of sugar.

Add in the vanilla, eggs, salt and baking soda.

Add in the flour and mix until just blended. Separate the dough into two balls, and refrigerate for 2 hours. I myself just stuck them in the freezer fr like 10 minutes. It seemed to work just fine.

Once the dough is easy to handle, roll it out to about 1/8 of an inch thick. Then cut out your cookies using a 1 1/2 inch round cookie cutter.....

Place about 1/2 inch apart on a cookie sheet lined with parchment.

Then bake at 375 for about 7 minutes, or until the edges start turning a light brown.

Yum.

While the cookies are cooling, whip up your chocolate butter cream....

Mayhem in the kitchen....

For the Buttercream:

1/2 cup butter softened

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 cup cocoa

2 1/4 cups confectioner's sugar

2 tablespoons milk.

This stuff was mighty tasty.

Put a scant amount of frosting on the bottom side of one cookie, then sandwich.

They're like a reverse Oreo. Pretty good!

And here's us with our engagement cake, clearly it is way too pretty to have been decorated by yours truly....This was a pro-job.

Happy baking!

Almond Coconut Sugar cookies

2010-11-13T13:49:00.000-08:00

Two very exciting things happened this week. 1) I made up a cookie recipe on the fly that I absolutely LOVE. 2) I got engaged.

So awesome. I went to a DiStefano family party today to say hello to my soon to be family, and knew I should bring something along. SO I decided I'd make some snickerdoodles.

I creamed together my shortening, butter and sugar, and then realized that I didn't have several of the ingredients I needed for snickerdoodles. Crap. I'd already mixed the ingredients, so I decided to just make something up on the fly. I scoured my cupboard and found some Almond extract and Coconut.

Here's what I came up with:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup salted butter

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 egg

1 tsp almond extract

1 tsp baking soda

1 3/4 cups flour

1/2 cup flake coconut

Since I'd already creamed the butter, I went ahead and added my egg and almond extract, then slowly added the dry ingredients. I rolled out tablespoon sized balls of dough, and then rolled them in a bowl full of coconut.

I baked the cookies at 375 for 9 minutes.

Seriously Delicious. This is a keeper recipe and possibly a new favorite. I couldn't even bring myself to save some cookies for my new fiance. I tried, but I ate them.

Make some. You won't be sorry.

Macarons in Seattle

2010-11-06T16:44:00.001-07:00

This week, I headed out to Seattle to do a set up for a tradeshow. While I was there, I was able to hang out with my good friend Sarah from DePauw, and we decided to cook up some Tasty treats.

Sarah had attempted to make real almond flour macarons a few times without success. We decided to tackle this finicky cookie. We tried two different recipes, one of which was pretty damn good, the other was....not so good. For the purpose of being productive, I'll focus on the good ;)

We used a recipe Sarah found online for Fool Proof Macarons. Check it out here: http://www.myfoodgeek.com/2007/06/08/almost-foolproof-macarons/

The recipe called for everything in grams, so we busted out the kitchen scale, and pre-measured everything.

While Sarah was measuring, I started beating the egg whites with a hand mixer, until they formed soft peaks.

Then, Sarah got the Sugar-water syrup heating up on the stove.

We added the syrup a little at a time to the eggs whites, along with a little vanilla extract, and blue food coloring. we continued to beat the mixture until it got very stiff, and held its shape like-so.

Then, we added in the almond meal and sugar, along with the rest of the egg, and folded it all in.

Once totally mixed, we took turns piping the batter onto lined cookie sheets,

Then we baked them for 15 minutes.

While we were baking up all these blue Vanilla Macaroons, we decided to try to make some chocolate ones. They were sticky, and not light, and kept falling apart when we tried to remove them from the cookie sheet. Here's a peak. We didn't bother sandwiching them.

Not so good. Ok, let's move on back to the successful cookies :) time to sandwich.

And Sample. Yum. These cookies, according to Sarah, are not quite the delicious Parisian macaroons that she buys for large sums of money in the city. But they were the closest yet. The cookies were light, and slightly gooey, very tasty, and got even better when we filled them with dark chocolate Ganache.
Pretty!

And they matched Sarah's Gurgle pot. Perfect.

Good job team.

Shoofly Bars

2010-10-28T17:33:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, we used to go up to Maine to visit my uncle and cousins on Thanksgiving. Their dessert policy, which I highly support was “a pie per person.” My personal favorite, every year, was the shoofly pie. At the time, I had no idea what was in it. I just knew it was goey and sweet and yummy. Now, in all my adult wisdom, I know it involves one of my favorite, and infamously overstocked, ingredients: Molasses.

So when I came across this “Shoofly bar” recipe I had to try it. I don’t have the metabolism anymore to eat a whole pie, but I’m pretty sure I can get away with a bar. Or Four.

Ingredients:

Crust:
1/3 cup shortening
1 ¼ cups flour
1 tablespoon Sugar
¼ tablespoon salt
Filling:
1/3 cup snipped dates
¼ cup Molasses
¼ tsp baking soda
3 Tablespoons hot water
1 egg
Topping:
½ cup flour
3 tbsp brown sugar
¼ tsp cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
pinch ginger
¼ cup cold butter

First off, you want to make your crust, which is basically a simple pastry. Mix together the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl. Then cut in the Shortening using a pastry blender. You can also do this by criss-crossing two knives. I did that for a long time, until I spent the best 6$ of my life on this little baby.

Once your shortening is looking like small little floured pea-sized grains, moisten the pastry with cold water, one tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork. Mine took 5 Tablespoons to be Moist enough to handle.

Roll your pastry into a ball.

Then roll it out, into a square. Mine looked more like an oval, but I made it work.

Lay your pastry in an 8x8 or 9x7 ungreased baking pan. Spread the pastry up the sides of the pan, I rearranged excess pieces since my shape wasn’t exact.

Next, Snip your dates.

Or you could by snipped dates, I bought whole, pitted dates, because I love doing extra work.

Sprinkle them on top of your pastry.

Next, we’ll make the topping. Mix together the dry ingredients, and cut in the butter using the same nifty tool shown above. You’ll want the end product to look like a grainy yummy topping.

Next for the filling. Mix your hot water and baking soda. Then add in your molasses and egg. This smells so yummy.

Pour this over the pastry and dates, as evenly as possible.

Then sprinkle on your topping.

Bake at 375 for 25 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown. Let cool, and slice!

Tada!

The flavor of these was great, but I think I'd make a few changes. First off, I would use butter in the crust instead of shortening. The "crust" was kind of bland. Secondly, I would add some melted butter to the filling, I thought the texture was a little off. Definitely a fun experiment!