cookies

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.

Jumbo Raisin Nut Cookies

~ nancyruth ~ 2 Comments

I had a hankering to bake cinnamon rolls. I mentioned this to Hubby and he said “can we make cookies?”. By “we” he meant me. So what type of cookies? He likes oatmeal but asked if we had chocolate chips. I told him I was not going to make his “loaded oatmeal cookies” but proceeded to do so anyway. I went to my mom’s recipe notebook and there I found a recipe to try. This comes from the back of a C&H sugar bag from way back. Mom has typed a note saying one can substitute 2 cups of oatmeal for 2 cups of the flour. Supposedly this will make 6 dozen cookies. I don’t need six dozen cookies; we’ll eat them all!

I figured I would make ordinary sized cookies using a cookie scoop which I believe is the medium sized.

First of all I saw no reason to boil the raisins. I also did not want to use 2 cups of raisins. I put 1/2 cup raisins and 1/2 cup Craisins in a measuring cup and filled it with water. The soaking water is needed in the recipe but in future I would leave this out. I added walnuts, mini chocolate chips, and ginger bits to equal another cup. Those are the additions. I used 2 cups oatmeal and 2 cups all-purpose flour. I made Hubby grind the nutmeg. I almost forgot the spices and added them to the finished dough before putting in the fridge to chill. In general I followed the directions above using butter instead of shortening.

I did not expect the dough to spread out so much. I baked three batches with different amounts of chilling times, with and without parchment paper. Same result. It was a very wet dough.

The name of the cookie is “Jumbo”. These are cakey but tasty and easy to eat. Too easy to eat!

Rolled oats mix

~ nancyruth ~ 2 Comments

And now from the 1960s comes a homemade mix to use for baking biscuits, muffins, and cookies. This is from the USDA booklet published in 1962. It’s title is Family Meals at Low Cost. I have substituted butter for the shortening. Some of the recipes call for canned meat and dried eggs. Mom would send off for booklets like these from the state’s university agriculture extension center. I do not know if she made this mix. She did make the biscuit mix as her notes on the changes she made to the ingredient amounts are in here.

I made half the recipe and was able to use my KitchenAid stand mixer.

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour (just because!)
  • 2 cups rolled oats
  • 1 cup nonfat dry milk powder
  • 2 Tablespoons baking powder
  • 1/2 Tablespoon salt
  • 3/4 cups butter, slightly softened but not too much

First I stirred the dry ingredients together and then the butter until it looked crumbly. Store in closed container in the refrigerator. Supposedly this will keep for one month. I immediately used half to make oatmeal cookies. I will most likely try the muffins next. For biscuits one adds water, for muffins add egg and water, and for cookies add egg, water and sugar. See below.

  • 2 1/2 cups rolled oats mix
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1 egg, beaten (or not!)
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1/3 cup mini chocolate chips and 1/3cup raisins

Combine all ingredients and stir just enough to moisten dry ingredients. This was a wet cookie dough. Drop dough in teaspoonfuls on a greased baking sheet for 12-15 minutes at 375 degrees F.

This made exactly 24 cookies. I used a medium cookie scoop to portion out the cookies. I baked 12 and put the other 12 cookie dough balls in a freezer bag to bake later. This makes a very tasty oatmeal cookie.

Failed Christmas Cookies

~ nancyruth ~ 4 Comments

Happy Saint Nicholas day to all!

I wanted to make cookies. I had found and kept available the Santa Hat cookie cutter. I had a plan to find red paste food dye and/or use beet juice for a deep red. I would make Santa hat cookies and carefully write all the family names on one for each. Well, this did not happen.

First of all I needed a recipe. I did not want to have to stand and cut out a million cookies  so wanted a recipe that made 2-3 dozen.  We were running low on eggs so did not want a recipe that required more than 1 egg (we had three in the fridge) so I thought a shortbread would work nicely. So my new Essential Pepin cookbook has an almond shortbread and I had all the ingredients. But then I thought that my daughter is allergic to almonds and she would not be able to eat any of these.

I did not take into consideration that this would most likely be a virtual-physically-distanced-for-social-solidarity-type Christmas anyway. So the search for the recipe continued. I thought Dark o’ Moon cookies but they require two eggs. That would mean no breakfast of eggs with the leftover roasted root veg this week. I paged through my mother’s recipe notebook’s cookie section. These are clippings that she collected and tried over the years. I found Cinnamon Crisps which were a cut out cookie and required no eggs. Bingo!

Flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, butter, and milk. Pet milk is a brand of evaporated milk, or my mother would have used Milnot. The recipe was put together similarly to a cake recipe. It made a soft dough. Too soft to roll out but I gave it the old college try anyway, adding flour to the rolling process. Finally I gave up and rolled it out on the parchment paper, put that on the cookie sheets, and baked.

Here are the results:

I had to cut the one blob of cookie apart for the final few minutes of baking and if you look closely you can see the Santa hat shape I was going for. They are actually tasty. I should have made the decision to make them drop cookies when I saw that the dough was too soft to roll.  And then squashed them slightly with the bottom of a glass dipped in cinnamon sugar.  Ooh, that sounds good. But too late for that now.

I will wait until the grocery shopping Hubby fills up my baking pantry with eggs and brown sugar and more butter. That way I can choose from more recipes than I did when I chose Cinnamon Crisps. Meanwhile, these are tasty, although unsightly, nibbles.

Ooey-gooey Chocolate

~ nancyruth ~ 2 Comments

It’s been awhile since I’ve written. Writing is an interesting phenomenon for me. I used to write my memoirs of my mundane ordinary life. I did this on computer and then in some handwritten journals. I then wrote the blog. At present I am exchanging emails with my best friend from high school in the middle of this pandemic. She’s in the Midwest; I’m in the Northeast. The point is that these writing episodes do not seem to overlap. I’m writing either one or the other. And lately I decided to handwrite letters to my son who is in the Northwest. But here I am back on the blog.

It’s not that I have not been baking or cooking. Well, actually, I have been doing less as Hubby has picked up cooking and dinner making. He continues to make me breakfast as I go off to work, either at the Agency or to the Dining Room. Either commute is not a hardship as the Agency is just up the street and across the road. Most of my baking is for something sweet. I have made a few batches of brownies. The problem with that is we tend to eat the whole pan in one sitting, or in two days, whichever comes first!

So I wanted to make something chocolate but not brownies…again! For some reason I had a couple of cake mixes in the baking pantry. Why do I have these? Because I thought I would have to bake my own birthday cake which is traditionally German Chocolate. I have made German Chocolate cake from scratch but have no problem making it from a mix. I’m telling Hubby that I found coconut so have all the ingredients and plan to bake the cake.  He has to tell me then that he has bought me the cake as a surprise and now I went and ruined his surprise!

In my search for something to bake I remembered a cookie bar made from cake mix and sweetened condensed milk. It takes me some time to find the recipe notebook with this scrap of cake mix box. These are called Macaroon Cookie Bars. They are sort of a brownie as well.

  • 1 package chocolate cake mix: I used a German Chocolate mix. The original recipe was from a Devil’s Food Cake Mix
  • ½ cup butter, softened
  • 1 egg
  • 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 egg
  • 1 ¼ cups flaked coconut; divide this to use the ¼ cup separately
  • 1 cup chopped nuts; I used pecans

Mix the first 3 ingredients and press into a greased 13-inch x 9-inch baking dish. Mix the  remaining ingredients except for ¼ cup of the coconut. Spread that mixture on top of the cake mix batter. Sprinkle the ¼ cup reserved coconut on top. Bake for 350 degree F for 30-35 minutes until golden brown. The edges will be the darkest. Cool completely and cut into squares.

Super simple and yummy!

Shortbread

~ nancyruth ~ 2 Comments

I made two different shortbread recipes. And although they were tasty it is not something I plan to make regularly. For some reason I got it in my head that I wanted to make shortbread. Possibly from watching the GBBO. The only other time I made shortbread was from Cook’s Illustrated: https://mykitchenmythoughts.com/2017/01/29/millionaires-shortbread-and-citrus-salad/. (I can no longer figure out how to make a name for the link other than copying it. WordPress changed a little a while ago.)

That shortbread was fancy. Since then I found a similar recipe in one of my UK published cookbooks. So when I was thinking of shortbread that is where I went first. Basically it is butter, sugar, and flour.

  • 4 1/2 ounces butter, softened (what an odd amount!)
  • scant 1/4 cup sugar
  • generous 1/8 cup powdered sugar
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • pinch of salt
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • superfine sugar, for sprinkling (make this by processing regular sugar in your food processor)

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 C). Grease an 8-inch round pan with butter. Beat butter and sugars until fluffy. Sift flour and salt into the mixture and then the vanilla. Mix to form a soft dough.

Roll dough into an 8-inch circle. Place in prepared pan. Cut into 8 wedges. Prick all over and decorate the edge with the fork tines. I found that this took a little finesse since it was already in the pan. Bake for 30-35 minutes. It might even take 40 minutes. It should be crisp and pale golden in color. Sprinkle with the superfine sugar. Cut through the wedges again to be sure they are separated. Cool in pan before removing.

These were very thick and buttery. Tasted like shortbread. Very rich.

The next shortbread dough I made was from Mark Bitman’s How to Cook Everything. I followed his recipe exactly. It includes an egg. I made a batch cutting them out in circles. I forgot to take a picture. They were a very nice butter cookie but did not taste like I thought shortbread should taste. The second batch I made of this recipe I tried to be festive and stuffed pieces of dough into a Christmas cookie mold pan. Big mistake!

They stuck in the pan!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

~ nancyruth ~ Leave a comment

(Warning: this post does not contain a specific recipe. There will be links to two recipes though, one that I have written about before and one someone else’s.)

Chocolate chip cookies are the comfort food of cookiedom. Oh sure, you come across one of those oddities of people who don’t like chocolate but I think they must be aliens from outer space. No offense intended.

First I made the best chocolate chip cookie recipe EVER! to take to my weekend in Maine with “the girls”. We are all grown women ages 40s to 60s but we call this the girls’ weekend and have done for the past 5 years. The recipe is from Cook’s Illustrated and I wrote about it a while ago https://mykitchenmythoughts.com/2017/11/30/cooks-cookies-chocolate-chip/. The secret is the browning of some of the butter. It is a bit fussy to put together but absolutely worth it. Hubby and I ate a dozen of them before the weekend and then the camp neighbor took the remaining 4 in the bag. We thought he would only take one! We did have Sue’s chocolate cookies with nuts which were quite delicious too.

Lake Cobboseecontee

Meanwhile here I am trying to adjust to new progressive eyeglasses. I can see further better but this mid range and reading are a chore. And I have worn progressives for a number of years. I think my eye doctor did not test my reading range adequately but I did not want to write my own prescription by making an adjustment. It also takes 2-3 weeks to adjust just because it is a new prescription. Must have patience.

The next chocolate chip cookie is a tribute to the fall season when all the recipes are coming out as pumpkin spice. I like pumpkin but am not that fond of pumpkin spice coffee unless it is one of those fancy lattes with whipped cream and such. The description of this cookie sounded like a cookie I would eat, not cakey. I have made the pumpkin cookie recipe from my Betty Crocker cookbook and although tasty it was cakey. This promised to be “super soft, chewy, and filled with chocolate chips.” https://www.livewellbakeoften.com/pumpkin-chocolate-chip-cookies/. My first bite was heavenly. I do not like the phrase “to die for” but it would apply to these cookies.

I am continuing to enjoy having a house husband. I was never a proper housewife so had no idea what to expect. I think our advanced ages make this more workable than say a couple in their twenties. Hubby claims not to be fond of cats. Our cat Squeaky is the only pet remaining in our home. So, who feeds her “mushy food”, who brushes her fur? He is working hard at home refinishing the floors and scraping the layers of paint off the mantle, which is flying about and leaving paint spots on the floors. He is not worried about this so I won’t worry about it either. He is my handyman!

This is at the top of Mount Greylock. Early morning, squinting into the sun!

The third batch of chocolate chip cookies were eaten but not enjoyed. These were made by the recipe on the back of the package of almond flour I bought just for fun. I will not bother with this again. These were mushy in texture even though light brown on the edges and the bottoms. Hubby had the great idea of re-baking them to see if they would crisp up. I re-baked them the next day for another 10 minutes. They did crisp but were still not enjoyable.

Until next time, happy fall and fall baking! I’ve already made a pumpkin pie!

I made Biscotti

~ nancyruth ~ Leave a comment

Life goes on at our home. I go to work, walking most days. Hubby continues his unproductive job search. We avoid getting run over by a car. We hope we did not board up the sparrow babies in their nest when we fixed the eave under the gutter. Really, we listened very closely and did not hear peeping for a several days. We watched and did not see momma and daddy sparrow going in to feed the young. We are trying not to feel guilty but did our best to honor the bird lives. Eminent domain? 😦

Hubby asked if I could do this. One of my nieces told me a few holiday seasons ago that they are easy to make. I looked through a few cookbooks and settled on Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I will ‘fess up to two mistakes: I should have flattened the logs before baking the first time and I forgot to leave them in the oven until dry the second time. Oh, and I just smeared the chocolate on the after dipping did not work out so well.

  • 1/2 stick butter (4 Tablespoons, softened)
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon almond extract
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1-2 Tablespoons milk
  • 1/2 cup dried cranberries
  • 4 ounces dark chocolate orange with almonds chocolate bar, melted

Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and then add the extract. Mix dry ingredients and add to the dough a little at ta time and add the milk as needed to bring the dough together. Add the cranberries at this time as well.

Butter and flour two baking sheets. Divide dough in half and roll into logs about 2 inches wide. Bake these 30 minutes. Remove from oven. Lower oven temperature to 250 degrees F. When loaves are cool enough to touch use a serrated knife to cut them into 1/2 inch slices on the diagonal. Put these on the baking sheets and return to oven, turning them once, for 15-20 minutes. Cool on wire racks.

I then tried to dip them in melted chocolate. And then I glopped the chocolate on them as frosting. Very tasty. Very rich tasting. Hubby ate most of them.

Will I make these again? Not especially. Well, perhaps if Hubby asks nicely!