Milk & Cookies

I got the recipe for these waffle cookies from the Southwest magazine (May 2010). They looked fun! The author (Lauren Chattman) said that she was looking to make cookies faster than usual so she decided to use the waffle iron which takes only a few minutes to bake. There are a few things wrong with this logic, one being that you can only bake about 4 cookies at a time (4 cookies at 3.5 minutes each compared to 12 cookies at 12 minutes each for regular oven sheet cookies… you can see it’s really a wash). The other problem is that it is somewhat messy. You have to clean your waffle iron afterwards instead of just throwing out a piece of parchment paper like you would for a sheet of cookies. Surely that takes some time? My dishwasher (read Jason) is pretty good, but not that good. Not “I’ll clean up the mess you made trying some crazy cookie experiment that I didn’t even like” good. One more logistical problem: the cookies take up too much space! You need extra large tupperware because each cookie has so much air.

Anyway, putting logistics aside for now, these cookies were indeed fun and delicious. They are pretty similar to regular toll house chocolate chip cookies, but with lots of crunchy edges. It is not possible to make these cookies non-crunchy. If they’re not crunchy, they won’t come out of your waffle iron. This is why Jason didn’t like them – he loves the ooey gooey center of cookies and these didn’t have that. I love ooey gooey centers too, but that doesn’t stop me loving crunchy cookies. I’m open-minded.

Anyway, here’s the ingredients:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 Tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp instant espresso powder (I left this out)
1 cup bittersweet chocolate chips or chunks (I used chips)

Combine them just as you would any other cookie recipe to make batter. I believe it has a higher ratio of butter to everything else, making the batter extra oily and the cookies extra crunchy. Put a blob right in the middle of each square of your waffle iron. Don’t try to get fancy by only focusing on one at a time. Jason tried to get fancy and it confused the waffle iron’s temperature sensor. Cook for about 3.5 minutes. You can check earlier, but it may tear your cookie in half. Better wait at least 3 minutes before checking.

Then remove the cookie as you would a waffle – stick a fork in the side and simple machine (lever, not screw!) that baby out. Some cookie may remain on the waffle iron, particularly some chocolate chips. I worried about it at first, but it doesn’t really seem to cause a problem to leave them in the waffle iron for a few more cookie runs. I’d watch out if I was doing several batches, but for this it was fine. Maybe some of the leftover chocolate chips even got incorporated in the next run?

As happens fairly often on here, I will close with a picture of my cat. This is Petra, our 8 1/2 year old, never tears up the couch, never throws up, never goes outside the litter box, never gets fat no matter how much we feed her, too snobby for wet food, best cat in the world!

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

It’s been a while! Well, here’s the thing. Making cookies every week was getting to be a bit much. First of all, Jason’s coworkers were very enthusiastic cookie fans, but he’s working from home now so there’s less of an audience. And second of all, Zoe started eating all the cookies that Jason’s coworkers used to eat, and has gained 5 pounds. Jason hasn’t had this problem for some reason.

I still have one recipe from March that has gone unposted. And I have a few more ideas of cookies that I want to try. So there should be more posts soon, but not weekly.

In the meantime, feast your eyes on this!

Maya licking her lips in anticipation

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.

I’m not referring to MY hubby, because he says pretzels don’t belong in sweet things. But any other hubby who eats these will surely become chubby. These are your basic chocolate chip cookie except with less chocolate chips and additional peanut butter chips and pretzel pieces. They’re not very photogenic and I don’t have a ton of pictures, so I will start with a picture of my adorable kitten, Maya, sniffing the flowers that our friend Liz gave us.

Chubby Maya

For the recipe, I started with one from Recipezaar and made a couple changes:

cookie dough

-1 cup butter

-1/2 cup sugar

-1/2 cup brown sugar

-1 egg

-1 Tbsp. vanilla

-2 cups flour

-1/2 tsp. baking soda

-1 pinch salt

-1 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

-1 cup peanut butter chips

-1 cup pretzel pieces (about the same size as the chocolate chips)

Stalking half-baked cookies

Do exactly what you would do if you were making chocolate chip cookies: Mash butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla, mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl and then stir them into the butter and sugar, add the chips & pretzels, stir, bake at 350 F for 11 minutes until edges barely start to brown and middle is still soft and pale colored.

Well, I really like these cookies, but they make me crave the real Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby. I may have to invest in some vanilla ice cream to eat with these!