Milk & Cookies

Narrator: You’re NEVER going to BELIEVE the TWIST! Coming up on Milk & Cookies!

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Narrator:  And NOW, back to Milk & Cookies.  Tonight, we’ve got a twist you’re NEVER going to BELIEVE!

[Diary room]

Derek, investment banker: What?? Holy [beep]!

Sherriann, professional hang glider:  Oh my God, when they told us the twist, I was just like… Oh my God.

Narrator: Stay tuned for more Milk & Cookies!

[Flashy image & swooping sound]

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Anyways… there’s a big twist on this week’s cookie blog. You’d never believe it if I hadn’t been hyping it all week long. Okay… are you ready? [cut to commercial] Okay… are you ready? This week’s cookie blog is about muffins. That’s right, all along you thought this was a blog about cookies and now I’ve pulled the rug out from under your feet!

I’ve made muffins before and they usually come out okay, or fine, or pretty good. But these ones are awesome. I’ve always wanted to make muffins that taste like they came from a café, and these ones finally do! Of course, they have no health benefits whatsoever and barely qualify as a breakfast food. Whatever. Apparently café operators don’t worry about these things so neither do I.

Ingredients

I mostly followed a recipe I found on Recipezaar and then changed it slightly to make it better. Basically I just added a little more sugar and baking powder. My friend Harley was telling me that you’re supposed to use nice fresh baking powder to make muffin recipes turn out right, rather than the stuff that’s been in the back of your cupboard for months. My baking powder has been in my cupboard a while… but I figured instead of buying new stuff I would just add more baking powder to the recipe. Ta da. Nice and fluffy.

Here’s the stats (makes 15 muffins):

• 2 cups flour
• 1/3 cup light-brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2/3 cup milk
• 1/2 cup butter, melted and cooled
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 package semi-sweet chocolate chips (~12 oz or 2 cups)

Ready to go in the oven

Preheat oven to 400 F. Place muffin papers in muffin tin. In a large bowl, stir together dry ingredients (flour, sugars, baking powder, salt) In a plastic bowl, microwave butter until melted. Add milk, eggs, and vanilla to melted butter and stir. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Add chocolate chips and stir a little more. Spoon batter into muffin cup, filling each cup between 3/4 and all the way full. Sprinkle sugar across the tops. Bake ~15 minutes.

If you’ve ever made muffins before, you know they tell you that the less you stir the better. But isn’t there some minimum amount of stirring that just has to be done or else the things don’t mix together? Some of it depends on the spoon (use a big one!). My own personal rule is to absolutely positively never stir more than 25 stirs after mixing wet and dry ingredients. It’s generally pretty easy to stay under 25. But someday maybe a real muffin expert will tell me how you get everything stirred together in 5 stirs or less. Crazy.

Actually this picture is from this weekend's batch not tonight's so I was able to photograph them in natural light. Beautiful, huh?

Anyways, ponder these things while you wait the 15 minutes. Then take out the muffins & let them cool on a cooling rack. Or eat them. They are best straight out of the oven. Enjoy! Or rather, since I’m the one with a bunch of warm muffins in my kitchen, Yum!

P.S. While the second batch is baking, you can ponder why reality TV shows repeat the exact same thing before and after a commercial break. After a week of filming 24 hours a day on multiple cameras, do they not have enough material? Do they think we won’t notice?

Rocky Road? ... nope thats the cookie dough!

I keep running into recipes for “Dark Chocolate”, “Double Chocolate”, “Super Chocolatey”, even “Triple Chocolate” cookies. Well eat this one all you wannabee’s! These are QUADRUPLE chocolate cookies! “Ridiculous!” you say…
yes, ridiculously good!

This recipe is based on a couple of different recipes from the Food Network, America’s Test Kitchen, and AllRecipes.com. It is far enough from them that I will not link to them since this recipe is truly my own.

If you don’t like these cookies… you must be dead already. Go see a doctor immediately.

INGREDIENTS (makes ~3 dozen cookies)

• 16 ounces semisweet chocolate (chopped, chips, or morsels)
• 10 Tbls. (1-1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 2 tspn. baking powder
• 1/2 tspn. salt
• 4 large eggs
• 2 tspn. vanilla extract
• 6 oz. white chocolate chunks (or chips) (recommended improvement – 8 to10 oz. instead)
• 6 oz. bittersweet chocolate chips (60-70% cocoa)

DIRECTIONS

Start by (slowly) melting your semi-sweet chocolate in either the microwave or on a double boil on the stove.

In a large mixing bowl beat together the softened butter with the two types of sugar for about 1 minute.

Add the eggs and vanilla and beat for another 45 seconds or so.

Now pour in the melted chocolate and beat again until combined.

Now stir in the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt. Do not over mix these ingredients, its ok if it isnt completely smooth.

Finally stir in the two types of chocolate chips / chunks. This recipe reflects the actual quantities that I used, and I would recommend adding more white chocolate since it seems to get lost in these cookies. Maybe use 8-10 oz. instead.

Now your dough is complete, you can either start making the cookies now, or refrigerate the dough for a while to let it stiffen up.

Preheat the oven to 350°F and line a couple trays with parchment paper. Start placing tablespoon sized scoops onto the trays with a least an inch of clearance around the dough. Cook each tray for 13-15 min. Let each tray cool for a few minutes before moving the cookies to a cooling rack or tupperware container or (best of all) your mouth.

Cookie Action Shot!

Today is a special day. It marks one of the most frightening and fulfilling days in my life. A day that I will cherish forever, as a moment when I felt completely full of love and completely loved in return. I am talking of course of my wedding day three years ago. Thank you, Zoe, for making me as happy today, as I was when you first entered my life some 8 years ago.

As a special treat for Zoe, this weeks cookies feature an ingredient that I usually shun from being in my cookies. I am talking about nuts. But as all things should be, I compromised, by making sure that the cookies selected this week are also full of rich dark chocolate so that I will also be unable to resist them! I guess this weeks cookies are a match made in heaven.

INGREDIENTS (makes 35-40 cookies)

• 8 oz. bittersweet chocolate, 60%-72% cocoa (chopped)
• 4 Tblsn. butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tspn. espresso powder
• 1 tspn. vanilla extract
• 1 cup flour
• 1/4 tspn. baking powder
• 1/4 tspn. salt
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup chopped walnuts
• 3/4 cup golden raisins

DIRECTIONS

These cookies are very straight forward to make, just like any chocolate cookies. Start off by setting up a double boiler to melt the bittersweet chocolate and the butter together. Be sure to keep the temperature low so not to burn the chocolate. Mix these two together until evenly melted and creamy.

In a separate bowl combine the sugar and eggs. Beat them together until smooth and a bit frothy. Now add the melted chocolate and butter mixture and mix it in. Finally, stir in all of the remaining ingredients.

Refrigerate the dough if you like, to make the cookies a bit softer and chewier, as well as easier to scoop.

Preheat the oven to 325°F and line a couple trays with parchment paper.  Start placing tablespoon sized scoops onto the trays with a least an inch of clearance around the dough.   These cookies will spread a bit, but not as much as many other cookies.  Cook each tray for 11-13 minutes until the tops just start to crack like brownies.

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!

First batch, ready to go!

This week, once again there were issues with the cookie poll. I even got rid of the old version and installed a newer *better* plug-in, but now it appears that most people can not vote at all, and are just stuck indefinitely with a loading graphic. I’m sorry. At this point I am not sure what to do, because I have tried many different approaches to fixing this issue, and I am just about out of ideas. Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.

This week’s cookies come from a couple different sources. It is really a mash-up recipe combining a handful of different recipes from all over the internet. The directions below will be for a single batch (about 30 cookies), even though I made a double batch (which was a large mistake on my part).

Ingredients

• 8 oz (1 pkg) cream cheese
• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 egg
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tspn baking soda

Directions

I think these cookies are probably very easy to make. I managed to make it very hard on myself by doing a double recipe when my mixing bowl and electric mixer were just not big enough to handle the task. In the end I did a lot of mixing by hand, but I think that can be avoided by not being an idiot. Here are some more tips to make these cookies much easier:

1. Soften the butter in the microwave for 30 seconds before mixing it in.
2. Soften the cream cheese by letting it sit out for an hour or so before making the cookies.

Ok, to make the dough start by combining the butter, sugar, and eggs in the mixer. Blend them up until they are nice and fluffy. You can optionally add the cream cheese into the mixer now, but I chose not to for reasons I will point out later. Now, melt down 1/2 of the chocolate chips in either a double boiler, or by microwaving them in a plastic bowl for 30 seconds at a time and stirring until they are fully melted. Mix this melted chocolate into the dough. Now add in the flour, baking soda, and remaining chocolate chips. At this point the dough should be pretty thick and gooey. Now add in the cream cheese and mix it sparingly. The goal here is to try to obtain a marbled look, where the cream cheese leaves streaks in the cookie. Now stick the dough in the fridge for a bit to let it thicken up (this will make the cookies softer in the end).

Get the oven preheated to 375°F, and prepare some baking sheets with parchment paper. Start plopping down tablespoon sized balls of dough about 2″ apart on your sheet. I was managing 12 cookies per batch. Let them bake for 8-10 minutes. As usual, let them cool off for a bit before moving them to a tupperware, serving tray, or your mouth (recommended). If you want some really fancy cookies, save a little bit of the melted chocolate until the end and drizzle it on top of the cookies.

Moo!