Milk & Cookies

Cookies made with love.... and chocolate

I am going to let you in on a little secret. I have a Wednesday night ritual that has completely changed the way I approach my week. Wednesday…. humpday…. the worst day of the week (many will say). I used to hate Wednesdays. Now I look forward to them.

Every Wednesday I come home from work and plug in my Ipod. I find an album that suits my mood (unless I am grumpy) and turn it up… way up. This week it was Radiohead – In Rainbows. I pour myself a glass of scotch… Then I bake.

I think that setting your mind to look forward to something can really change your overall attitude for the better. It turns out that I feel happier, not just on Wednesday, but every day.

The results of this week’s baking experience are below. These cookies were the most recent post on Joy the Baker. Instead of using fruity jam (PB&J cookies), I decided to fill the thumbprints with chocolate. Here is my recipe:

INGREDIENTS (makes ~3 dozen cookies)

• 1 3/4 cups finely ground honey roasted peanuts
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 1/2 tspn. vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar (optional)
• 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (or 1 cup jam if you want to make them fruity instead)

DIRECTIONS

First thing to do with these cookies is to crush up the peanuts. Just put them in a food processor and chop chop until they are finely ground. Then mix them up with the flour in a medium bowl. Set this mixture aside.

These cookies are really easy and quick, so you might want to get your oven pre-heating early this time around. Set it to 350°F.

In a large mixing bowl beat together the softened butter and the sugar on medium speed until it is fluffy and smooth. Then add in the vanilla extract and mix it a bit more until it is evenly blended. Then set the mixer speed to low and slowly add in the peanut and flour mixture. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides if needed. Try not to over mix, its ok for the batter to be a little uneven.

Prepare a couple of baking trays with parchment paper. Start making little ~1 Tblsn. sized balls of dough. Just roll the dough around a little bit in your hand and then plop it down on the parchment paper. Then using your pinky (not your thumb) press a narrow hole down the center of the dough. Don’t go all the way through the cookie though, you want a little well for the filling. I did my first batch with my thumb (I mean, they are thumbprint cookies), but this dough spreads more than I expected during baking, so my wells were really shallow. Using your pinkie and going pretty deep will make it work better.

Once your tray is covered in little dough bowls, go ahead and bake them on the top rack for 15 minutes. They won’t look completely cooked at the end, but its ok, they will stiffen up as they cool. Once removed from the oven, let the cookies sit for a couple of minutes and then move them to a cooling rack if you have one. After all of the batches of cookies are complete, dust them with the powdered sugar. (This was my favorite part since I finally got to use our sifter.)

Time to prepare the filling. If chocolate, melt the chocolate chips down in either the microwave using the 15 second – stir – repeat method, or on a double boil on the stove. If you are using Jam, bring it to a boil on the stove or in the microwave. Take your filling and either pipe it into the cookies, or just spoon it in to fill the wells up with delicious. Be careful of lurking spouses during this process… they will often strike when your back is turned and try to eat up all the filling!

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!

...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!

Can you smell the fresh baked cookies?

This is one of the simplest recipes I have tried yet. There are only 5 ingredients! Yet somehow they ended up being one of the most difficult cookies to make. Don’t let that throw you off though… these cookies are worth it. Once again, this recipe is comes from Joy the Baker (you will soon realize this is a running theme), and once again, the cookies are delicious.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients (makes about 24 cookies)

1 cup 100% Natural Peanut Butter
(I used creamy)
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tspn. baking soda
(I made a double batch)

Directions

Mix the peanut butter and the two types of sugars in a large mixing bowl. Sounds simple? Well its not. These ingredients simply do not like to be mixed. I mixed them as well as I could for about 2 minutes, but they turned into a crumbly sticky mess. Maybe the next step will help?

Add the egg and baking soda and mix for another 2 minutes. I was hoping that the egg would help make this mixture turn into more of a dough, but it didn’t.  The end result was thick and very crumbly. My mixer was struggling just to keep turning. Oh well, faith in Joy the Baker kept me going.

Preheat your oven to 250°F and get a baking tray ready with some parchment paper.

Form the “dough” into balls about 1″ in diameter. Do not be discouraged by the doughs lack of effort. If you just commit to getting your hands in there, the dough ends up being fairly mold-able. Also, I found that when it comes time to place them on the tray and mush them with a fork, they are very happy to break apart into many pieces. To minimize this, I started making little disks instead of balls. This way the fork doesn’t need to be pressed down quite as deep and the cookie holds its shape better. You should be able to get 12-15 cookies on a standard cookie tray.

Bake the cookies for 8-9 minutes. I tried going for 10 minutes and felt that the cookies were just a bit too well done. The next batch came out a bit early and they were soft and chewy and just perfect. The cookies will harden a bit after you take them out of the oven, so let them sit for a few minutes before you move them.

In the end, I think these cookies were worth the extra effort. As an optional upgrade you can try placing some chocolate on the top of each cookie before you bake it.