Milk & Cookies

Hey guys, I know it’s been a while since I posted anything. Well, I’m back from the twilight zone and should have time to post my most recent escapades soon. And by twilight zone I mean quals-studying-and-trying-not-to-freak-out zone. That’s right, they are over, after a very noneventful 1.5 hours. (And I think that’s a good thing)

This is what Christmas looks like in Not-California. Jealous? Oh yeah, and on New Year's we made a snow-woman.

Since I now  have some experience cooking/baking, this Christmas I forced some of my recipes upon my family, with mostly good results. Here are some of my favorite recipes, cookie and non-cookie, which ended up in my parents’ kitchen this Christmas.

Parsley soup

I made this one up myself. One of my favorite soups to make because it is easy and is good for leftovers. Turn on the fan or your entire house will smell like onions for days! This doesn’t seem like a Christmas day meal, but keep in mind it was vastly overshadowed by the fondue (hey, we needed some vegetables). If you’re not making fondue, it also goes great with any sort of cheesy bread.

• olive oil
• 1/2 red onion, chopped
• 2 tsp (or to taste) garlic, minced
• 1 tsp (or to taste) dried basil
• 1 tsp (or to taste) dried oregano
• 1 tsp (or to taste) red pepper flakes
• 1 28 oz. can diced tomatoes (with juice)
• 3 14 oz. cans vegetable broth
• 1 14 oz. can canneloni beans (without juice – rinse the beans off first!)
• 1/2 lb dry rotini
• 1/2 – 1 parsley, chopped finely

Start water boiling for the pasta. Cook the pasta until very al dente.

Meanwhile, saute the red onion until almost translucent. (There are different types of red onions but the type that I get are huge and shiny, magenta-red and they taste awesome when cooked. The type that is small, not shiny, and brownish-purple is not as good.) When the onion is almost done, add garlic, basil, oregano, and red pepper flakes. Cook the spices for a few minutes, making sure not to burn them. When done (usually when I am starting to fear burning spices) add the tomatoes and vegetable broth. Rinse the beans and add them. Simmer with a lid.

While the soup is simmering, chop the parsley which will go on top as a garnish. Drain the pasta. Add the pasta when you’re almost ready to eat. It will absorb the liquid so you don’t want to put it in too early. Serve with parsley on top and don’t be shy with the parsley! It is awesome.

Buttermilk pancakes

My mom got an electric griddle for Christmas so of course we had to make pancakes! I taught her this recipe. This one is an example of the power of the internet. I found it because it had 145 reviews on Recipezaar with an average of about 4.9 stars. Behold it here. I have always been super picky about pancakes and even thought I didn’t like pancakes for a while, except when I went to good pancake restaurants. It’s because they use buttermilk. I first went looking for this recipe when we had leftover buttermilk from the Red Velvet Black and White Cookies. So even this recipe comes to me thanks to cookies!

• 2 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• 2 Tbsp. sugar
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 cups buttermilk
• 4 Tbsp. unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• vegetable oil to grease the pan
• maple syrup, for serving

Lightly grease your griddle. Set your electric griddle to 350 F (without the electric griddle I set my gas burner to medium low). Beat the eggs well. Add the buttermilk, melted butter, and vanilla and mix. Add the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt and mix until just blended (probably a good idea to mix all the dry ingredients before adding them to the wet ones). Ladle spoonfuls of batter onto the griddle. Flip after ~3 minutes or when the surface looks the correctly bubbly. If you’re not sure if they’re done, check to make sure the middle isn’t raw by sticking a knife into one of the pancakes and seeing if it oozes. Eat with maple syrup or even maple syrup and eggs!

Chocolate mint chip cookies

I have already posted two posts about these so I don’t need to expound more. But they’re really good, I made them for our extended-family Christmas celebration and they were well-received.

Chocolate chip muffins

My mom “accidentally” bought more chocolate chips than we needed for the cookies. Oops! So I made muffins.

Last night we went to a fabulous cookie party. Everyone brought 3 dozen cookies, there was tasting, voting, and trading, and we all left with a nice variety of cookies. Mmmm. It’s pretty much like a regular party but with rules and voting which makes it more fun plus adds an extra incentive to make the cookies really good.

We brought Chocolate Mint Chip cookies. Well, all of our training/blogging over the past 9 months paid off because our cookies won the “Best Looking” category and tied for “Best Tasting”!

This was truly a team effort; I pioneered the Chocolate Mint Chip recipe a few weeks ago but yesterday Jason improved them with a new strategy. Instead of putting lumps of dough on the cookie sheet, roll the dough into balls (we call this the “Smooth Ball Strategy”). When they come out of the oven they look beautifully smooth with cracks instead of kind of lumpy like the original cookies did. We couldn’t have won “Best Looking” without this strategy! We’d also like to thank our oven, Reynold’s for selling parchment paper, and our coworkers for being our guinea pigs.

Compare the two strategies below:

without the "Smooth Ball Strategy"

with the "Smooth Ball Strategy"

with a professional photographer

Yes, the results are clear. Besides looking at these cookies through the lens of a professional photographer, the best thing you can do to make these cookies look great is to use the “Smooth Ball Strategy”.

Here’s some more pictures from the cookie party:

The spread, complete with pencils and paper for voting!

Lacey oatmeal cookies, which were a contender in all three categories! ("Most Creative", "Best Tasting", and "Best Looking")

Stained Glass cookies - the colored parts are melted Jolly Ranchers and you can see right through them! These got my vote for "Best Looking"

Cranberry White Chocolate Macadamia Oatmeal cookies - came close in "Best Tasting"

Sandies, winner in the "Best Tasting" category

Peanut butter kisses (aka "Nipples") and Snickerdoodles. The Nipples were a favorite and were almost gone by the time we went to divvy them up and take them home.

Careful consideration before voting

Anthony wins "Most Creative" with his Peanut Butter and Jelly cookies

I humbly accept the award for "Best Looking", followed by a 10 minute acceptance speech.

Veronica wins "Best Tasting" with her Sandies

In the end everyone won because we all took home a pile of cookies like this.

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!

Super ultra secret guest COOKiE blog!

I had promised to bring these into work when Zoe first started gracing us with her and Jason’s cookies…oops.  Yes, I am a procrastinator. lazy. You can make the dough way in advance and then slice them as you want them (which’ll probably be ASAP if you read a cookie blog, in which case it’s after ~8hrs. in the fridge). And they look pretty, which is why I wanted to make them in the first place.

Chocolate-Peanut Butter Pinwheels (Courtesty of Recipezaar)
Ingredients:
2 cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup creamy peanut butter or chunky peanut butter
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
For Filling:
1 (6 ounce) package semisweet chocolate morsels
1 teaspoon butter

Directions:
1. Sift flour with soda and salt.
2. Set aside.
3. Beat butter until fluffy.
4. Beat in sugar.
5. Beat in peanut butter, egg, and vanilla.
6. At low speed, add half flour mixture.
7. Mix in the rest by hand to form a stiff dough.
8. Refrigerate 30 minutes.
9. Meanwhile, make the filling by melting the chocolate and butter.
10. Cool.
11. Divide dough in half.
12. Roll each half into a 8×10 inch rectangle on a lightly floured surface. between two pieces of plastic wrap.  In the future, I would use two pans to flatten so that it’s more even. (Mine was fatter in the middle because I suck at rolling.)
13. Spread each with half the filling.
14. From the long side, roll each rectangle tightly like a jelly roll.
15. Gently press edge to seal.
16. Wrap separately, seam side down, in saran wrap or foil.
17. Refrigerate until firm, about 8 hours or overnight before slicing and baking.
18. (They will keep in the fridge for a little over a week.) Preheat oven to 375, and place 1/2 inch slices 1 1/2 inches apart on a greased cookie sheet.  Warning: slicing these cookies may be tricky because the chocolate filling will likely be solid.
19. Bake 6-8 minutes or until lightly browned.
20. Let cool for a few minutes on sheet, then cool on wire rack.
21. Makes 40 cookies all together.

So, I had forgotten that these had to chill overnight…luckily, they bake super fast in the oven (6-7 minutes was plenty, and I still burned a bunch of ‘em). Slicing through the chocolate filling after a night’s hardening was tough, so I might add a bit more butter in the future. The PB cookie part of the swirls was the softest, chewiest PB cookie I’ve ever made. And it’s probably one of few cookies that was actually better fully cooled than straight out of the oven.  Work loved them, and I enjoyed them enough that I’ll probably make them again…although maybe somehow both add more chocolate and yet make it easier to cut through.