Milk & Cookies

My mom never smiles in pictures, except when flødebollers are involved.

My mom looooooves flødebollers. Her family lived in Denmark for 2 years when she was a kid, and apparently the Danes are crazy about flødebollers. Did you know that the average Dane eats 50 per year (according to Wikipedia)? Anyways, a couple years back my uncle Steve made homemade flødebollers from this recipe, making my mom crazy with sugary delight and setting high expectations for baked good at family gatherings for the next few decades.

So of course I wanted to try making them myself! Although, once I saw the recipe I started thinking maybe it would just be easier to fly to Denmark and buy flødebollers than to actually make them… Here’s a picture of my mom and my aunt doing just that.

Eat me.

The flødebollers consist of a cookie base with a mountain of meringue/marshmallow on top, covered in chocolate. Here’s the recipe. It makes 25 flødebollers.

For the base:

• 1 1/4 cups flour
• 3 1/2 ounces butter
• 5 tablespoons sugar

Combine ingredients and roll out dough. Cut 2 1/2 ” circles from the dough and bake on parchment paper for 10 minutes at 400 degrees. I had a hard time getting them to roll out without sticking to everything… oh well.

My vintage avocado green mixer worked fabulously.

For the filling:

• 6 egg whites
• 1/2 – 3/4 cup sugar

Whip egg whites until stiff peaks form. I had never actually done this before but it turns out that these days anyone with an internet connection can be a good baker. I found very detailed instructions on how to most optimally whip egg whites here. I kept waiting for stiff peaks to form, but I never saw them. I was wondering what would cause stiff peaks to form randomly at the surface, seemingly defying the laws of physics… well it turns out you are supposed to take the beaters out of the egg whites and see if the egg whites “hanging” from the bottom of the beaters form stiff peaks even once they’re turned sideways. OOOOOOH, that makes so much more sense. Here are my beautiful egg whites in my vintage avocado green mixer (is there any other type of avocado green mixer?). They don’t actually look like stiff peaks exactly, but it seemed to work out well in the end.

Naked flødebollers

Chocolate coating:

• 12 oz. chocolate chips

Pipe the filling onto the bases, and bake for 5 minutes at 400 degrees. Meanwhile, start the chocolate melting on a double boiler. Once the chocolate is melted, remove it from the stove. Paint the baked flødebollers with a melted chocolate coating (dipping did not work very well for me). Here’s a helpful tip: even though it takes a little while to get the chocolate melted, once it’s melted it won’t solidify for a while, especially in a warm kitchen, so as soon as it’s melted you can take the chocolate off the heat. You’ll be getting melted chocolate all over your hands while you do this, so better to let it cool a little and not burn yourself.

Objects in oven may be smaller than they appear.

Last weekend Zoe’s parents came out to visit us and we spent some time hanging with the family. Some how we ended up inheriting a bag of fresh juicy lemons. How does that saying go? “When life gives you lemons…. you make lemon cookies!”

The recipe this week comes from AllRecipes. There are many variations on the internet for a recipe very similar to this one, so I wasn’t afraid to take some liberties to make it my own. Sadly, I couldn’t find any recipes that used fresh lemons very much in them, so even this recipe I substituted lemon extract for a combination of lemon juice and lemon zest in order to utilize our abundance of lemons.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 (18.25 ounce) package lemon cake mix
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 2 tspn. lemon zest
• 2 tspn. fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar (for decoration)

DIRECTIONS

The dough for these cookies takes almost no time at all, so go ahead and start off by preheating the oven to 350°F.
To make the dough, get out a medium mixing bowl, and your favorite rubber spatula. Combine the cake mix, eggs, oil, lemon zest, and lemon juice. Mix them together until the dough is smooth and consistent. You will have to mix by hand because this dough is pretty thick stuff.
On the side, prepare a small bowl with the powdered sugar, and lay out a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie tray. Take a teaspoon and scoop out dough balls one at a time. Roll each ball around in the powdered sugar bowl until it is nice and coated, and then place it on the cookie tray. These cookies expand a bit, but not too much, so you can place them about 1-2 inches apart. (I got ~25 per tray)
Once the tray is loaded up, pop the cookies into the oven for 7-9 minutes. They will start to brown just slightly around the edges when they are done.
Let them cool a bit and then start inhaling them. They are very small cookies so you probably want to eat like 3 or 4 cookies along with your glass of milk… maybe even more.

Almost done.

That's an awfully large cookie for such a small cow!

Apparently Some Crust Bakery in Claremont, CA has some famous mocha cookies. How I never discovered this during my 4 years there is a mystery. I guess my college bubble didn’t extend past about 6th street. Anyways, at the Alumi Weekend about 1 1/2 weeks ago, my friend Trish took me there and we ate their delicious mocha cookies. Yum!

Anyways, they’ve made the recipe available to the public so here it goes (here’s a link):

• 4 1/2 oz unsweeted chocolate (100%)
• 9 oz bittersweet chocolate (70%)
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 4 eggs
• 3 Tbsp. instant espresso
• 1 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup pastry flour
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 8 oz bittersweet (70%) chocolate chunks

The main ingredients

Basically, you melt the chocolate and butter in a saucepan. Meanwhile, mix the eggs, espresso, and sugar in an electric mixer. Add the melted chocolate and mix more. Add the flour (plus baking powder and salt),  mix a little more. Finally, fold in the chocolate chunks. Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

It was a tough job but someone had to do it.

We couldn’t find pastry flour so we used regular flour. And we couldn’t find instant espresso so we used regular espresso. If you find a little piece of crunchy stuff, that’s probably espresso. Kind of like eating those chocolate covered coffee beans. Finally, I think our oven runs a little hot so the first batch came out a bit overdone. For the second batch I turned it down to 300 and only left them in for 14 minutes. Hopefully the second batch came out better, I just couldn’t bring myself to try one after I had already eaten one from the first batch plus I licked all the batter from the beaters. They’re VERY rich.

...but where are all of the muffin bottoms?

Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you plan them. This week’s cookie is a great example for two reasons. First, I was very excited to try out the recipe voted most popular by those of you who voted. I was at the grocery store with a pile of fresh jalapenos, and cream cheese. Sadly, there were no fresh cranberries to be had. After weighing my options (dried cranberries, canned cranberries), I decided to go with the second place cookie instead. Pumpkin Butterscotch! Don’t worry jalapeno lovers…that cookie is still going to happen.

Also, these aren’t really cookies. Even though Joy the Baker calls them cookies in two different recipes… do not be fooled. These truly are muffin tops. Light, fluffy, sweet, and very cake-like. All that is missing is the muffin bottoms, but who needs those anyways.

Ok, here is the recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour
• 1-1/2 tspn baking powder
• 1 tspn baking soda
• 1/2 tspn salt
• 1 tspn ground cinnamon
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup canola oil
• 1-1/4 cup canned pumpkin
• 1 tspn vanilla extract
• 1 cup butterscotch chips

Directions

Looking at all of those ingredients, these cookies might appear to be complicated. Don’t worry about it. These cookies are actually pretty easy to make.
First combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon) but not the sugar, in a medium bowl and mix them together. In a second (larger) bowl combine the eggs and sugar. Beat the eggs and sugar together using a blender until they are well mixed (about 1-2 minutes). Now mix in the dry ingredients a bit at a time and blend on slow until they make a nice batter. Now mix in the pumpkin, vanilla, oil, and butterscotch chips. This batter will end up being much more like cake batter than cookie dough.

Now that the batter is complete, set it in the fridge for an hour or so. In the mean time you can prepare a couple of baking trays by lining them with parchment paper.

When you are ready to bake preheat the oven to 325° F. Using a large spoon or even an ice cream scoop, make ~1/4 cup batter piles for each cookie. These cookies expand by quite a bit during baking so be sure to leave 1-1/2 to 2 inches between each cookie. I was only able to get 9 or 12 on each baking sheet depending on how tight I tried to squeeze them. When each tray is complete pop them into the oven and bake one tray at a time. Baking time should be approximately 16 minutes, but you should test a cookie with a toothpick before removing them. If the toothpick can be inserted into a cookie and come out clean, then it is done.

Each tray will need to cool for a few minutes before you remove the cookies, and eat them.

If you are a fancy-pants and have a sugar sifter, give the cookies a nice dusting of powdered sugar and they will look amazing. I sadly, do not yet have one, but it is next on my list of kitchen gadgets (along with a cooling rack).

Oh yeah, don’t forget your milk!