Milk & Cookies

Last year we posted about “don’t eat and drive” rum balls, a family recipe from my dear friend Sarah. This year we tried a different type of rum ball, also instigated by a friend. This time it was our friends Shannon and Malcolm, who invited us to their apartment for a cookie night! (Apparently my family is deficient because we don’t have our own rum ball recipe. I must make do with friends’ recipes. Making cookies with friends… it’s a hard life!)

Eat me!

Shannon and Malcolm have an amazing apartment in San Francisco. Their roofdeck is about 200 feet from Coit Tower which means you see Coit Tower in one direction and amazing views in the other three. I kicked myself for not bringing my camera! We also almost died trying to drive up the hill to their place, but that’s another story. Next time we’ll park at the bottom of the street and walk up. On the plus side, it’s 3 days later and Jason’s car has finally stopped smelling of burnt clutch, so that’s good. Eek!

Here’s Shannon’s recipe:

Dough

• 16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened but still cool
• 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons light rum
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour , sifted

Coating

• 16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), melted
• 1 1/2 cups walnuts , finely ground
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

Using stand mixer, mix brown sugar and butter for dough. Add rum and mix. Add flour and mix. Add a little extra flour if necessary until it truly looks “doughy”. Roll the dough into thirty-six 1 inch balls (ours ended up more like 1 1/2″ or 2″ – they came out fine). Put in refrigerator overnight, or freezer for an hour. (We did refrigerator for about half an hour. They came out fine!) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Then bake dough balls for 15-20 minutes, or until light brown. They should still be soft in the middle but fully cooked on the outside.

Cool cookies for 30 minutes (we didn’t do this either…). In the meantime, set up the coating. Put walnuts in food processor until finally ground. Add sugar and cinnamon. Melt butter in a saucepan. Then, take dough balls and one at a time, dip them in butter and then the coating mixture. Let cool… okay, just eat them!

This recipe called for a lot of downtime, which is not what you want on a Thursday night. We rushed through some of the various cooling steps and they came out fine! Actually they came out great. Yum! I think that since they are baked, the alcohol evaporates from the outer portion of the dough, but the inside remains a little alcholic. So… don’t worry, you can drive after eating these. Even on San Francisco hills! (Well, I can’t. But that has nothing to do with the rum.)

Okay, I totally failed to get a picture from Shannon and Malcolm’s awesome roof deck. Instead, here’s a picture from our front window in Fremont. It’s no Coit tower, and it has gross construction out front, but still… the trees are nice! This is what the weather has been like recently. Gray gray gray. I think we will have a gray Christmas…

December in California

My mom always made these dates as an appetizer/snack/dessert food for family holiday parties. She says Thanksgiving only, but I swear I remember them from both Thanksgiving and Christmas! As a kid I would totally stuff myself on these and ruin my appetite for dinner. (Get it? Stuff myself? Ha.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

They are incredibly simple. Ingredients:

• Pitted dates
• Peanut butter
• Powdered sugar

Directions: Slice pitted dates along one edge. Put peanut butter inside with a butter knife. Roll in powdered sugar. Eat. You see? Simple.

Of course the devil’s in the details, so here are all the details. Mind you, these will still taste great even if you don’t worry about the details. But here goes.

Date type: My mom recommended using Medjool dates since they supposedly taste the best. But I used Deglet Noor dates since the Medjool dates at our store cost 3x as much, were 2-3x as big (not bite sized) and weren’t pitted! The Deglet Noors came out just fine.

Peanut butter type: I also used “natural” peanut butter since I thought that would make them seem fancy. However, in the future I think I will use regular peanut butter. (A) Why bother using peanut butter with no added sugar, when you’re about to put the peanut butter in a sweet fruit and roll it in sugar? (B) The natural peanut butter separates and the oil gets on the outside of the dates, making them sticky, which means you need even more sugar to make them not sticky! I stirred the peanut butter really well but it was very oily. I suppose maybe I should have poured off some of the oil from the top, then stirred. But next time I’ll just go with my cheap-o, homogenized peanut butter.

Stuffing method: The dates are pitted like an olive, so there is a cylindrical hole down the middle. Like I said in the directions, I sliced the dates along one side and stuffed them with peanut butter, kind of like a sub sandwich. But I suppose if you were really fancy you could use a frosting bag (or just a plastic bag with the corner cut off) and squeeze the peanut butter in one end. I may try that next time for better looking dates.

Sugar timing: I made these dates the night before, rolling them in sugar until they weren’t sticky. By the next morning, the sugar had sort of coalesced with PB oil and they were sticky again! So I rolled them in sugar again. They still tasted good and weren’t tooooo sweet (at least for me), but one sugar roll would surely have been enough.

I got the recipe for these waffle cookies from the Southwest magazine (May 2010). They looked fun! The author (Lauren Chattman) said that she was looking to make cookies faster than usual so she decided to use the waffle iron which takes only a few minutes to bake. There are a few things wrong with this logic, one being that you can only bake about 4 cookies at a time (4 cookies at 3.5 minutes each compared to 12 cookies at 12 minutes each for regular oven sheet cookies… you can see it’s really a wash). The other problem is that it is somewhat messy. You have to clean your waffle iron afterwards instead of just throwing out a piece of parchment paper like you would for a sheet of cookies. Surely that takes some time? My dishwasher (read Jason) is pretty good, but not that good. Not “I’ll clean up the mess you made trying some crazy cookie experiment that I didn’t even like” good. One more logistical problem: the cookies take up too much space! You need extra large tupperware because each cookie has so much air.

Anyway, putting logistics aside for now, these cookies were indeed fun and delicious. They are pretty similar to regular toll house chocolate chip cookies, but with lots of crunchy edges. It is not possible to make these cookies non-crunchy. If they’re not crunchy, they won’t come out of your waffle iron. This is why Jason didn’t like them – he loves the ooey gooey center of cookies and these didn’t have that. I love ooey gooey centers too, but that doesn’t stop me loving crunchy cookies. I’m open-minded.

Anyway, here’s the ingredients:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp instant espresso powder (I left this out)
1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks (I used chips)

Combine them just as you would any other cookie recipe to make batter. I believe it has a higher ratio of butter to everything else, making the batter extra oily and the cookies extra crunchy. Put a blob right in the middle of each square of your waffle iron. Don’t try to get fancy by only focusing on one at a time. Jason tried to get fancy and it confused the waffle iron’s temperature sensor. Cook for about 3.5 minutes. You can check earlier, but it may tear your cookie in half. Better wait at least 3 minutes before checking.

Then remove the cookie as you would a waffle – stick a fork in the side and simple machine (lever, not screw!) that baby out. Some cookie may remain on the waffle iron, particularly some chocolate chips. I worried about it at first, but it doesn’t really seem to cause a problem to leave them in the waffle iron for a few more cookie runs. I’d watch out if I was doing several batches, but for this it was fine. Maybe some of the leftover chocolate chips even got incorporated in the next run?

As happens fairly often on here, I will close with a picture of my cat. This is Petra, our 8 1/2 year old, never tears up the couch, never throws up, never goes outside the litter box, never gets fat no matter how much we feed her, too snobby for wet food, best cat in the world!

We went to a cupcake party! Melissa and Patrick did a really good job. They made everything and all we had to do was put it together. There were yellow, chocolate, and lemon cupcakes. Dulce de leche, whipped cream, buttercream, chocolate ganache and cream cheese frosting. And a TON of different topping options. Mmmmm…

Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera to the party, but I took some pictures of our “leftovers” the next day. Here are some pics of some of our favorites.

The fabulous five cupcakes that we brought home as leftovers. Chocolate cake with dulce de leche and chocolate/peanut butter chips, yellow cake with dulce de leche and butterfly sprinkles, chocolate cake with whipped cream and crushed oreos, chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and decorative sugar, chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and Andes mints bits.

Chocolate cupcake, dulce de leche, chocolate and peanut butter chips on top.

Chocolate cupcake, cream cheese frosting, decorative sugar

Remember when I made those brownies from scratch? Well, they came out okay but I was a little disappointed and chalked it up to the quality of the chocolate. So this time I made them again, from the same recipe, with Ghirardelli 100% chocolate. It really makes a difference! I still think there’s room for improvement if I mess around with the egg/sugar/flour ratio, but this was a pretty good first step.

I'm running out of outdoor photo settings for my baked goods!