Milk & Cookies

cocococococonut

Last minute coconut cookies is a much better post title this week. Zoe decided Wednesday afternoon that she wanted me to do the cookies for her this week. Such is the life of an overworked grad-student. This week’s cookie is in honor of my sister, who just got hired on as the executive director of the new mexico wine growers association. Congrats Olive!

Ingredients

• 1-1/2 cup flaked coconut
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1-1/4 cups flour
• 1/2 tspn baking soda
• 1/2 tspn vanilla
• 1/4 tspn salt

Directions

Before you get started mixing ingredients do the following:
Soften the butter in the microwave for 30 seconds.

Ok, to make the dough start by combining the butter, sugar, and eggs in the mixer. Blend them up until they are nice and fluffy. Now add in the flour, baking soda, salt, and vanilla. Finally, add in coconut flakes and mix them in well. Set the dough in the fridge for a while and take a break. You earned it!

Get the oven preheated to 375°F, and prepare some baking sheets with parchment paper. Start plopping down teaspoon sized balls of dough about 2″ apart on your sheet. I was managing 24 cookies per batch. Let them bake for 8-10 minutes. This week I actually followed my own advice from last week and I melted a little bit of chocolate chips down in the microwave to drizzle on top of the cookies. Unfortunately, I did it with 100% cocoa chips thinking that it would be rich and dark and delicious. Instead I managed to turn one tray of cookies bitter. Oh well, I learned my lesson well. Use 70% cocoa or less unless it is being mixed in with something sweet. I still plan on eating those chocolate covered cookies though.

Stay tuned for a future post about making home-made samoa’s. You know, those delicious coconut, caramel, chocolate girlscout cookies.

First batch, ready to go!

This week, once again there were issues with the cookie poll. I even got rid of the old version and installed a newer *better* plug-in, but now it appears that most people can not vote at all, and are just stuck indefinitely with a loading graphic. I’m sorry. At this point I am not sure what to do, because I have tried many different approaches to fixing this issue, and I am just about out of ideas. Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.

This week’s cookies come from a couple different sources. It is really a mash-up recipe combining a handful of different recipes from all over the internet. The directions below will be for a single batch (about 30 cookies), even though I made a double batch (which was a large mistake on my part).

Ingredients

• 8 oz (1 pkg) cream cheese
• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 egg
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tspn baking soda

Directions

I think these cookies are probably very easy to make. I managed to make it very hard on myself by doing a double recipe when my mixing bowl and electric mixer were just not big enough to handle the task. In the end I did a lot of mixing by hand, but I think that can be avoided by not being an idiot. Here are some more tips to make these cookies much easier:

1. Soften the butter in the microwave for 30 seconds before mixing it in.
2. Soften the cream cheese by letting it sit out for an hour or so before making the cookies.

Ok, to make the dough start by combining the butter, sugar, and eggs in the mixer. Blend them up until they are nice and fluffy. You can optionally add the cream cheese into the mixer now, but I chose not to for reasons I will point out later. Now, melt down 1/2 of the chocolate chips in either a double boiler, or by microwaving them in a plastic bowl for 30 seconds at a time and stirring until they are fully melted. Mix this melted chocolate into the dough. Now add in the flour, baking soda, and remaining chocolate chips. At this point the dough should be pretty thick and gooey. Now add in the cream cheese and mix it sparingly. The goal here is to try to obtain a marbled look, where the cream cheese leaves streaks in the cookie. Now stick the dough in the fridge for a bit to let it thicken up (this will make the cookies softer in the end).

Get the oven preheated to 375°F, and prepare some baking sheets with parchment paper. Start plopping down tablespoon sized balls of dough about 2″ apart on your sheet. I was managing 12 cookies per batch. Let them bake for 8-10 minutes. As usual, let them cool off for a bit before moving them to a tupperware, serving tray, or your mouth (recommended). If you want some really fancy cookies, save a little bit of the melted chocolate until the end and drizzle it on top of the cookies.

Moo!

Lemon zest

Well this baking session went about as well as everything else has been going for me this week, the main difference being that all the problems here were entirely my fault and preventable, like starting out without any butter in the kitchen, not being prepared for the 2 hour wait while the dough sits in the fridge, leaving out 33% of the sugar, and fatally burning 15% of the cookies. Whoops!

Before I manage to explode this blog post somehow, I’ll get to the recipe, from Joy the Baker. You can get the directions from her too, I won’t write them out because they’re so long.

• 2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter (preferably high-fat, like Plugra), softened at room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted before measuring
• 1/2 teaspoon salt, preferably sea salt
• 2 large egg yolks, preferably at room temperature
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• zest of 1 lemon and zest of 1 lime

For the decoration (optional):

• 1 egg yolk
• Crystal or dazzle sugar

Not part of the unlucky 15%

Now here’s what I actually did:

• 2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter (preferably high-fat, like Plugra), softened at room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted before measuring
• 1/2 teaspoon salt, preferably sea salt
• 2 large egg yolks, preferably at room temperature
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• zest of 1 lemon and zest of 1 lime 1 lemon…. that is 2 lemons (Meyer lemons from my aunt Beth’s lemon tree in Berkeley)

For the decoration (optional):

• 1 egg yolk
• Crystal or dazzle sugar regular sugar
• that confectioner’s sugar from above, dusted over the cookies

The cow is back from haitus

As you can see, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. And they get this ringing endorsement from Jason: “They taste a little like cardboard.” I actually think they taste fine. Maybe they’re not as good as the past few on here but hey, they can’t all get 5 stars.

Wednesdays are made for baking!

This week’s cookie vote was a bit of a fiasco. There were 4 choices and they all got exactly 1 vote. So I decided to just go with the cookies that I wanted to make. I am considering getting rid of the voting since no one seems to be using it.

The big news for us this week is some new additions to our cookie making arsenal. We finally got a hold of some cooling racks (which really help when making multiple dozens of cookies and no where to put them), we picked up a flour sifter, and most importantly, a new camera! Hopefully there will be an upgrade to the picture quality from this post on. Also, the combination of the new camera and the classic chocolate chip cookies means that I can finally update the Cookie Blog header to have a picture of one of our own cookies instead of the stock image. Hurray!

The recipe this week comes straight from Hershey’s:

Ingredients

• 2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tspn baking soda
• 1/2 tspn salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1 tspn vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups chocolate chips or semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

This is quite the quick and easy recipe. Lets start with the cookie dough.
Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt in one bowl and mix them together. In a second larger bowl combine the butter, both sugars, and vanilla. Beat them together until creamy. Do not forget to pre-soften the butter. I usually forget to leave it out to warm up, so I end up popping it in the microwave for a few seconds and that does the trick. Ok, next add the eggs and beat it again. Start adding the flour mixture from the first bowl a little at a time while continuing to mix. Lastly, add the chocolate chips and stir it all until well mixed. Stick the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour if you want chewier cookies in the end.

When you are ready to start cooking, get your oven up to 375°F.  As usual, I will bake these cookies on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Start placing scoops of ~1 rounded tspn. on the tray, 0r you can be like me and go for supersized cookies and do heaping tablespoons instead.  Each tray should be baked one and a time for approximately 8 minutes.

Prepare for your house to smell amazing!