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!
In addition to the Saltine bark I made yesterday, Jason made some chocolate golden raisin walnut cookies. (Somebody didn’t believe that dessert with Saltines in it would taste good!) We had a little contest today to see which our friends liked better. Saltine bark won, but it was close! Here’s a nice outdoor picture of the golden raisin walnut cookies.
Delicious flaky exterior
Camouflage
Congratulations to my dear sister Lucy, who graduated from college this May! I had this Saltine bark at her graduation party and decided I had to try making it myself. So she gave me the recipe and it’s delicious!
Ingredients list:
- About 1 (maybe a little more) sleeve of Saltine crackers
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup butter
- 1 11 oz. package of semi sweet chocolate chips
- 1/2 to 1 cup of walnuts (I substituted hazelnuts)
A Saltine platoon
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 350
- Cover a cookie sheet with foil. Line up the saltine crackers on the sheet to completely cover it. It should take 1 sleeve of crackers or a little more.
- Mix the brown sugar and butter and boil/heat it for about 3 minutes (microwave or stovetop).
- Pour mix over saltines.
- Bake 7 minutes.
- Remove tray from oven and cover with chocolate chips. Wait for them to melt and then spread the chocolate evenly over the crackers. Sprinkle the nuts on top.
- Put in freezer to cool.
Yummy
Basically, this is a layer of saltines, a layer of caramelized sugar/butter, a layer of chocolate and a layer of nuts. Hard to go wrong with that! The only problem I had is my caramel layer is a bit too chewy. I’m not sure how I could have fixed that – maybe bake it less time? Anyways, I think it’s worth it. Picking caramel out of your teeth is a small price to pay for something this delicious.
I have gotten a special request (threat?) from my friend Blythe – she needs fudge! Mmmm… hard to say no to fudgey chocolatey goodness. Sadly, I don’t know how much fudge she’ll get as I seem to be eating most of it myself! Anyways, I’ve decided to continue the trend from last time of remaking a previous recipe (Wilma’s Fudge) and then practicing my new hobby – outdoor baked good photography.
Fudge & Flowers
I was going to take pictures of fudge at the pool, but when I got there the pool was closed off! It’s probably for the best as I don’t have one of those floating pool snack trays. Maybe next time… If the pool repair work is anything like our porch repair work, it should only take about a year for us to have access again.
In other news, our cat Ewok is sick. 
She’s the one in the picture in the last post. She had a fever and had lost 1 pound (10% of her body weight). We don’t know what was wrong with her but antibiotics seem to be helping. Now we are trying to convince her to eat more, poor baby! So today the house has been smelling alternately like fudge and various odiferous meaty cat-food. (By the way, the word “odiferous” is from our vet, who specifically recommended odiferous foods!)
Until next time.
I just tried these cookies again to see if I could make them look better. Well, they look perfect! I set my oven to 275 (50 degrees below the recommended 325. Naughty oven.) and was very, very careful not to let the dough warm up at all before putting them in the oven. There was the 2 minutes required to chop the cookie logs and then they either went straight into the oven or back into the fridge to wait for their turn. Beautiful!
cookies in their natural habitat
I’ve decided from now on I’ll try to bake on weekends. We used to bake on Wednesdays because Thursday was Cookie Day at Jason’s work, but that is no longer. I have more free time on weekends to bake, plus then I can photograph in natural light! Much, much better.
And since I seem to be favoring one cat in the photos, here’s another:
Ewok looking out the window