Month: December 2022

More Cookies

~ nancyruth ~ Leave a comment

Butter cookies to be exact. This is from BakeWise by Shirley Corriher (2008). I thought I would try new cookies this year and these were described as “melt-in-your-mouth”. That sounded tasty.

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
  • 2 large egg yolks
  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

This is a basic butter cookie. Cream butter, sugar, salt, and almond extract. Add egg yolks one at at time, then the flour. This gets rolled into a log, refrigerated, sliced, and then baked at 375 degrees F for 14 minutes.

In this book she has two of these butter cookie recipes. The difference is 1/2 cup sugar in the dough. The decorating/finishing is different as well. In the above recipe the logs get brushed with egg and rolled in course sugar. The second recipe has 1/2 cup less sugar in the dough and an indentation is made and filled with jelly.

I made the above batter and did both of the finishing touches.

For the recipes in this book the author talks about the science of the baking in a “What This Recipe Shows” section.

For my “What this recipe shows” is that 1) I did not get the dough mixed very thoroughly as butter spots kind of burned the edges on some, 2) I have difficulty evenly slicing cookie dough logs, and 3) I am not that big a fan of butter cookies. These were tasty enough but not my “go to” cookie of choice.

Oatmeal Bars

~ nancyruth ~ 4 Comments

This is a recipe from The New England Table by Laura Brody (2005). Bar cookies are appealing because they bake all at once. I need to bake more cookies as the first set was eaten with early December family visit. I want to make another cookie tray. I had these ingredients so thought I would give it a try for cookies for the Christmas Eve feast.

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 1/3 cups brown sugar
  • 3/4 cup light corn syrup
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla
  • 5 1/3 cups oats
  • 1 cup dry roasted peanuts, roughly chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter the sides and bottom of a 13 x 9 inch pan. Butter it well.

Cream the butter until creamy. Add brown sugar until light and fluffy. On medium speed add the corn syrup and vanilla. Then stir in the oats and peanuts. Press this into the pan and bake for 15-17 until surface is dry and edges have just begun to turn brown. Well, the surface was not dry. So I added 5 more minutes to the baking time. And then turned the heat off but left it in the oven for ten more minutes. The edges were brown but at least now the interior was set.

For the glaze:

  • 1 3/4 cups chocolate chips
  • 1 cup smooth peanut butter

Melt this and stir until smooth. I made about half of this amount with dark chocolate and chunky peanut butter. Spread this on the bars when they are somewhat cool. Cut when cool.

Thoughts: as I was making these I thought to myself that this is a super sweet baked oatmeal or an oatmeal-peanut butter fudge. They are very sweet and will stick to your teeth. Be sure to cut them into small squares. The recipe says 54. Hubby thinks they could be cut even smaller.

Sourdough Coffeecake

~ nancyruth ~ 6 Comments

I made a sourdough starter using the Cook’s Illustrated (Sept &Oct 2016) instructions. Then I made sourdough bread from a King Arthur Flour sales flyer. None of these have pictures. Since one has to feed the starter each week and there is always the “discard” I decided to make a coffee cake. I used a recipe I had printed from 2005 from Allrecipes.com. (All rights reserved…so I am just posting a picture of the recipe. Someone has since posted a version on that website which is slightly different than this one.)

This is a lovely and flavorful coffeecake. I substituted walnuts and Craisins for the pecans and raisins. I did not make the glaze. This cake keeps well covered on the counter for a week. Then it was all gone!

Miscellaneous thoughts from my kitchen: I started watching GBBO again and am having to catch up several seasons. Sometimes it inspires me to bake new dishes. I want to try Macarons. I think the show refers to all cakes as “sponges” whereas I think of a sponge cake as different than a butter cake. The show I watched recently had the technical challenge to make a lemon meringue pie. Well, I did not make a pie, nor meringue, but a nice lemon curd which I attempted to put into puff pastry (store bought) hand pies. Paul and Pru would not be pleased!

Seasons blessings to all!