Milk & Cookies

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

I made cookies for my qual committee. I knew it wouldn’t affect their decision, but I thought maybe it would put them in a better mood so they would be nice to me! (They were). I offered them the cookies and one of my committee members said, “Ooh, cookies. Are we allowed to eat them or is there some rule against that?” (I think there might be).

My advisor said, “Oh, it’s fine, Zoe makes cookies for us all the time.” (It’s true). Sweet, my advisor’s got my back.

These cookies are called “World Peace Cookies”, aka, if everyone ate them we could finally have world peace. Perfect for a blustery Wednesday afternoon qual exam.

Here’s where I found the recipe: http://smittenkitchen.com/2007/01/in-which-world-peace-eludes-me/

Mix the flour, cocoa, and baking soda together with a fork (or sift it… okay, you’re supposed to sift it but I didn’t.)

Using your stand mixer, beat the butter until it’s nicely creamy. Add the sugars, salt, and vanilla extract and beat for 2 more minutes.

Pour in the dry ingredients and mix just until the flour disappears into the dough.

Add the chocolate chunks and mix a little more.

Work the dough into two logs, each 1 1/2″ in diameter. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3 hours, or overnight.

It was tough to get a good photo of the logs before slicing.

…Wait 3 hours. I used this time to make another batch of cookies – regular chocolate chip cookies – in case these didn’t work out. Wouldn’t want my committee members eating gross cookies! Baking also distracted me from my exam…

Slice the logs into 1/2″ thick slices. The recipe is very detailed and notes that your cookies might crumble a bit during this step. Mine did, but it was okay.

A lucky uncrumbled cookie.

Bake on a cookie sheet for 12 minutes at 325 degrees F. Again, the recipe was detailed here and absolutely correct. It says your cookies will not look or feel done at this point, and mine didn’t. Take them out anyway! Basically, they are very limp at this stage but as they cool down they will harden. There are no eggs in this recipe so underbaking isn’t really an issue.

Once they cool, you can test them! I have to say, mine did not look like the pictures on the internet say they’re supposed to look. But they tasted great. It seemed like mine expanded/melted more and also developed some holes in them, like they had bubbled during baking. Maybe my oven was too hot? We don’t have an oven thermometer but I have always estimated that my oven runs 25 degrees hot and adjust accordingly. I use this correction because it seems to lead to the right bake time for most recipes. These cookies seem extra sensitive to temperature so maybe my oven is off by more than that. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t sift… I should probably sift.

Funny looking cookies.

Well, this was almost 3 months ago but just writing out this post is making me hungry! Maybe I should bake some more cookies today… In fact, I’m inspired to make a second attempt at these to get them to look right.

I love heath bars. These cookies have been on my to-bake list for about 6 weeks and I just haven’t gotten around to them what with the holidays. My plan was to just try putting heath bar chunks into toll house cookies instead of chocolate chips and see what happened. When I saw my family over the holidays it turns out my aunt Sally already makes cookies just like that! (She also makes about 30 dozen cookies every Christmas so she’s an expert.)

Heath bars shed their skin once a year

So I went out and bought a 12 oz. bag of mini heath bars. This turned out to actually be much cheaper than buying several full-sized heath bars but I feel a little bad about all the excess packaging! Then I chopped each mini heath bar individually into 12 chunks. Now that I think about it, I probably could have used the food processor, but the chopping didn’t seem so bad with terrible reality TV going on in the background (The Bachelor: On the wings of love). This resulted in about 2 1/2 cups of heath bar chunks.

Then I followed the Toll House cookie recipe (the one on the yellow bag!):

• 2 1/4 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 2 1/2 cups Heath bar chunks

This dough was really smooth. Since it's really not any different from regular cookie dough, I'm guessing it's because of the extra hour the butter had to soften while I chopped each Heath bar individually.

Preheat oven to 375 F. Combine dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt). Cream butter and sugar in a separate bowl, then add vanilla and eggs and mix. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix. Finally, add the Heath bar chunks and mix.

Put spoonfuls of dough onto a baking sheet and bake 10 minutes.

From the top they look less appetizing because the Heath bar chunks don't "pop" like regular chocolate chips. From the bottom I think they look pretty cool.

Well, I really liked these cookies but I think I like regular chocolate chip cookies better. No offense to Heath, but I think the chocolate used on Heath bars is not as high quality as the usual Nestle semi-sweet morsels I use in choco chip cookies. On the other hand… TOFFEEEEEEEEE. Maybe next time I’ll go half choco chips, half Heath bar chunks!

I was inspired to make these cookies because there’s this place I sometimes go to on campus to get hot chocolate, and they have these very chocolatey cookies with green mint M&M’s. Somehow I always eye these cookies but never buy them. Sorry cookies, for always being my second choice!

Today I honor these second-place cookies by trying to reproduce them. Sadly, things didn’t work out as planned. I couldn’t find mint M&M’s! I had to substitute mint chips. Well… the switcheroo served me well because I think they turned out great!

I basically followed a “Chewy White Chocolate Chocolate cookie” recipe (found here), but replaced the white chocolate chips with a 2:1 mix of mint chips and regular chocolate chips. You guys all know how I feel about white chocolate… grrr. But this recipe was fixed right up with mint chips!

Here’s the recipe:

• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 1 1/4 cups cocoa powder
• 1 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar
• 2 tsps. baking soda
• 1 cup butter
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 1/3 cups mint chips
• 2/3 cup chocolate chips

The directions go like pretty much any other cookie you make… cream butter and sugar, then add eggs, then mix dry ingredients together and combine them with the butter-egg-sugar mixture. Finally, add the chips and mix. Ho hum. Except, oh wait, you replace about a cup of flour with 1 1/4 cups of cocoa powder! Holy cow! Okay, so here’s the thing. When I started adding the dry ingredients to the creamy ingredients things didn’t really seem right. It seemed too dry and tough. I was pretty concerned that I had done something wrong, but everything turned out fine in the end (minus some sore mixing muscles). So don’t sweat it.

Set oven to 350 degrees and bake about 10 minutes (I did about 13 minutes but my cookies were quite large). Let cool on tray for longer than usual, maybe another 10 minutes, before moving to a wire rack. These guys are pretty smushable.

Professional Cookie Image courtesy of Donald Chan

Well, we have been in Switzerland since Friday. Interlaken had been having beautiful weather with temperatures in the 70s! (That’s about 20 C for you Europeans). That is, until we got here… now it is in the 40s, or about 4 C. Well, it has made our high altitude hikes very scenic and also cold, requiring lots of hot chocolate when we get back. Here is how we make up for all those calories we burnt while hiking… making a whole batch of cookies without our coworkers to share them!

Well, we have been in Switzerland since Friday. Interlaken had been having beautiful weather with temperatures in the 70s! (That’s about 20 C for you Europeans). That is, until we got here… now it is in the 40s, or about 4 C. And even colder at the higher altitudes. Well, it has made our hikes very scenic and also cold, requiring lots of hot chocolate and cookies when we get back. Here is how we make up for all those calories we burnt while hiking… making a whole batch of cookies without our coworkers to share them!

• 1 cup butter: 226 g butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar : 300 g zucker
• 2 eggs : 2 eier
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract : 1 1/2 tsp vanille-extrakt
• 2 1/4 cups flour : 295 g weissmehl
• 1 tsp baking soda : 1 tsp haus natron
• 1/2 tsp salt : 1/2 tsp salz
• 1 1/2 cups Toblerone chunks : 200 grams Toblerone brocken

Baking in a foreign country is always fun. Most of the ingredients are easy to figure out, for example eggs (not much else looks like eggs) or butter (german: butter). But some are more of a guessing game. For example, baking soda is haus natron… or so we think. The cookies turned out fine so I guess we were right.

So far we haven’t bought any super fancy chocolate, but we got some store brand chocolate which was delicious! In the US I refuse to buy store brand chocolate just on principle. And Toblerone for the cookies of course. Almost everything here is much more expensive than the US, except cheese. You can get a wedge of Brie for about half what it would cost in the states! So we have been chowing down on that. Yum!