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

Okay, I have been really craving sweets so I bought some baking chocolate and was going to make brownies this weekend. But we ran out of eggs! D’oh! Instead, I remembered that we had some leftover gingerbread dough in the freezer from Christmas AND still had that fresh ginger from the past two cookie recipes. Ginger lasts for a really long time in the fridge. So I decided to make the gingerbread cookies, adding some fresh ginger and some extra spices for more flavor.

I was also excited that I baked these during the day so there was some natural light for the photography. I discovered a secret of some of the food blogs out there – they use special, expensive flashes instead of the one that comes on their camera. I always wondered about that… most people cook at night but the cooking blogs have these beautiful pictures that look like they are naturally lit. Anyways, this blog let me in on the secret. For now I am stuck with natural light (and not much of it) or the regular flash.

Chopped ginger

First, I defrosted the dough and let it come to almost room temperature so it was roll-able. Meanwhile I chopped the ginger, watched some winter olympics (biathlon!), took a shower, and took some pictures of my cats. Some of these steps are optional – use your judgement.

Maya, the photogenic one

Once the dough was  ready, I rolled it out a little and carefully measured a pinch of nutmeg, a pinch of cloves, and 2 pinches of cinnamon onto the dough. Then I added the fresh ginger and kneaded it all together a few times.

That looks about right

Then I rolled out the dough and cut out some shapes. I made some hearts, a dog, 2 cats, a flower, a moon, the state of California… then by the end I got tired of the shapes and made Colorado, Wyoming, and some coastal states that might have existed had we drawn the lines differently. One of them looks like Kentucky but that was an accident. Then instead of frosting I pressed each one into a pile of sugar and baked them for 7 minutes at 350 F.

There's Wyoming in the middle, and part of Kentucky in the bottom left

Then I ate them and ruined my dinner.

Mmm. I ate four of these today, and four yesterday. At least. It’s hard to keep track after four (and embarrassing).

These cookies sparkle in the sunlight. The main difference between these cookies and a vampire is YOU get to eat THEM. (Also, note to producers, next time try rolling him in sugar for a more believable effect.)

Okay, so here’s the recipe:

• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup molasses
• 1 Tbsp water
• 2 1/2 cups flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp fresh ginger, chopped
• 3/4 cup raisins
• Additional 2 Tbsp white sugar for rolling cookies in before baking

Brilliant idea from the vegan.

I found this recipe on Recipezaar (here). I noticed that the description mentioned that it had been modified to be vegan, but I figured I would just unmodify it by changing the margarine back to butter and all would be good. Well, I got halfway through the recipe when I realized the other vegan change: there were no eggs! I love eggs! I know some cookies don’t have them but I would never take eggs out of a cookie just so it could be vegan. (Plus, this way my cookies have “protein” and “nutritional value”.) So I went back and I think I found the unvegan recipe this had been modified from. From Allrecipes (here). Apparently the vegan had made a few changes: changed butter to margarine, used 1/3 cups of water instead of 1 Tbsp, 2 1/2 cups of flour isntead of 2 1/4, and 1 1/2 tsp baking soda instead of 1 tsp. The vegan had also added fresh chopped ginger (brilliant)! By the time I looked at the recipe it was too late to change the amount of baking soda or flour, but I decreased the water, added the one egg, and kept the fresh chopped ginger. Everything came out great, but you could play with the amount of flour, baking soda, and water if you wanted and maybe it would turn out even better. I actually think you could decrease the amount of sugar as well and it would still be good.

Do what I say, not what I do (I combined steps 6 and 7). Or you'll get flour stuck in your raisins!

Okay, after that long literature review, here’s the instructions.

1. Preheat oven to 350 F
2. Chop ginger until you get 1 Tbsp
3. Mix dry ingredients (flour, soda, ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, salt)
4. Cream sugar into butter
5. Add egg, molasses, and water to sugar/butter and mix.
6. Add dry ingredients and mix.
7. Add raisins and chopped ginger and mix.
8. Form walnut-sized balls and roll them in the additional 2 Tbsp of sugar.
9. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
10. EAT EAT EAT. OW! Let cool first.

Cookie cutting without cookie cutters

Along with rum balls, we made gingerbread cookies with icing! We used Paula Deen’s gingerbread recipe. The flavor was okay but not great, I thought it was too molasses-ey and not enough ginger-ey. Thusly, I won’t describe the cookie recipe in detail.

The fabulous part about these cookies was our total lack of cookie cutters, forcing us to use our own ingenuity to make cookie shapes. I think we did quite well. Here are some of our ideas:

• We used a snowman head-shaped measuring cup to make snowman head-shaped cookies!
• A champagne glass to make round (ball, ornament) shaped cookies
• For the rest, a knife – some good shapes were stars, christmas trees and probably the winner of the creativity contest, Johnny 5.

Assorted

Johnny 5, or as I sometimes call him due to my 80's-specific cultural ignorance, Jackson 5

Moonie, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs ... ok, just Moonie

Good things are a-brewin’. First of all, Switzerland was awesome! A giant thanks to Jan and Kim. I am still living on a little bit of a high from that trip, so I am taking all of life’s little annoyances in stride. I am also getting very close to making a large shift in my career path. Just knowing what is on the horizon is giving me daily energy and a better outlook on life. Last, and certainly not least… look at those cookies! I think these are the most amazing cookies I have made to date. I absolutely do not want to wait to eat one! The marshmallow filling is perfect. These cookies are a pretty large time commitment since they are completely from scratch, but man, is it worth it. Seriously…. these cookies will make you a star.

Big thanks to Nan Slaughter @ Pots and Pins for this recipe.

INGREDIENTS (makes 12-15 cookies)

Cookies:

• 1 cup sugar
• 5 tbls butter, softened
• 1 tspn vanilla
• 2 large eggs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 5 tbls unsweetened cocoa
• 1 tspn salt
• 1 tspn baking soda
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 1 cup buttermilk

Filling:

• 1 envelope unflavored gelatin
• 1/2 cup cold water
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/4 cup light-colored corn syrup
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/4 cup cold water

DIRECTIONS

Preheat your oven to 375ºF.

First thing to make will be the cookies. In a large bowl, combine the butter and sugar. Beat it together until blended. Add in the eggs and vanilla and beat it together until it is fluffy. In a separate bowl combine the flour, cocoa, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. Whisk it together until its all nice and mixed.

Now go back to your first bowl with the wet ingredients and start adding the dry ingredients and buttermilk a little bit at a time. Do this while mixing the batter, and alternating buttermilk and dry ingredients as you go. Scrape down the bowl a few times and make sure that the batter is well mixed.

On a parchment lined cookie tray, start spooning heaping tablespoon sized cookie batter. Leave a couple of inches between the cookies so that they don’t touch while cooking. Bake each tray for 9-10 minutes until fully cooked (use a toothpick to test). Let the cookies cool for a few minutes and then move them to a cooling rack. Keep baking until all the batter is used up. (should be about 30 cookies)

The filling is the fun part of these cookie sandwiches. First put the 1/2 cup of water in medium to large mixing bowl. Sprinkle the gelatin powder into the bowl and set it aside.

In a small saucepan put the other 1/4 cup of water, sugar, corn syrup, salt, and vanilla. Heat it on the stove until it reaches 244ºF. Apparently some people have a thermometer in their kitchen, so use that if you got it. I just waited for it to just start to simmer and then called it a success (my filling turned out great). Pour the hot liquid into the gelatin bowl and start mixing. Start by mixing on low for a little bit and then turn up the speed to max. The mixture will start to froth a bit and eventually will work itself into a thick foam. It supposedly takes anywhere from 6-10 minutes for the filling to get thick enough to use, but for me it took a little bit longer.


I think it has to do with the temperature… it needs to cool adequately before it will start to set. Anyways, you’ll get there. Now start spooning giant blobs of fluff onto the bottom of your cookies, using a second cookie on top to make a heavenly sandwich. Let the cookies set for an hour (or less if you are impatient).

Now pour a glass of milk and eat up!