Milk & Cookies

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!

Almost done.

That's an awfully large cookie for such a small cow!

Apparently Some Crust Bakery in Claremont, CA has some famous mocha cookies. How I never discovered this during my 4 years there is a mystery. I guess my college bubble didn’t extend past about 6th street. Anyways, at the Alumi Weekend about 1 1/2 weeks ago, my friend Trish took me there and we ate their delicious mocha cookies. Yum!

Anyways, they’ve made the recipe available to the public so here it goes (here’s a link):

• 4 1/2 oz unsweeted chocolate (100%)
• 9 oz bittersweet chocolate (70%)
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 4 eggs
• 3 Tbsp. instant espresso
• 1 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup pastry flour
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 8 oz bittersweet (70%) chocolate chunks

The main ingredients

Basically, you melt the chocolate and butter in a saucepan. Meanwhile, mix the eggs, espresso, and sugar in an electric mixer. Add the melted chocolate and mix more. Add the flour (plus baking powder and salt),  mix a little more. Finally, fold in the chocolate chunks. Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

It was a tough job but someone had to do it.

We couldn’t find pastry flour so we used regular flour. And we couldn’t find instant espresso so we used regular espresso. If you find a little piece of crunchy stuff, that’s probably espresso. Kind of like eating those chocolate covered coffee beans. Finally, I think our oven runs a little hot so the first batch came out a bit overdone. For the second batch I turned it down to 300 and only left them in for 14 minutes. Hopefully the second batch came out better, I just couldn’t bring myself to try one after I had already eaten one from the first batch plus I licked all the batter from the beaters. They’re VERY rich.

See? Even the cow wants to eat it.

This week was my turn for cookies, but the beginning of the week was pretty tiring and I never had a really inspiring cookie idea. So I re-used a recipe that I had tried a month or two ago: cherry chocolate oatmeal cookies. The recipe is from Joy the Baker. I modified it because I don’t believe in white chocolate, so I just used regular chocolate. I also don’t believe in only putting 1 cup of chocolate chips in cookies. That is definitely not enough chocolate. So I put 1 1/2 cups. Believe me, I wanted to put a whole bag, but I thought with the cherries that would probably be too much. I managed to hold back.

The great thing about these cookies is that they are “healthy”. That is, I have no idea what the nutritional information is, but the fact that they have oatmeal in them is enough for me to consider them a breakfast food. Baking cookies every week is really adding up, we constantly have leftovers at home. So if I can eat them for breakfast, that helps a lot.

Anyways, onto the cookies. Here’s the recipe.

• 8 oz unsalted butter
• 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 cups old fashioned oats
• 1 cup dried cherries
• 1 1/2 cup chocolate chips

You know the drill. These cookies are much like any others. Preheat oven to 350 C. Cream sugar into butter. Add vanilla and eggs, mix. Stir in dry ingredients (mix them together first – flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon). Mix in oats, cherries, and chocolate chips. Bake 10-12 minutes or until the tops look brown.

Ta-da!

These cookies were definitely better the second time around. The first time I made a few mistakes. One was failing to mix everything in well enough. The first time around, there was a bit of batter at the bottom that didn’t really get enough oats mixed in. Without the oats, the batter doesn’t hold together very well and then kind of caramelizes, so there were some cookies with funny brown splotches on them. Actually, I still thought these parts tasted okay… Second mistake was using very large dried cherries. Different brands come in different sizes. The second time around I used smaller cherries, and I think the result was much better. A very large dried cherry kind of overwhelms your taste buds. I think I also put more chocolate chips in this time, but I’m not sure. In case you couldn’t guess… more chocolate means better cookies in my opinion. Yum.