Milk & Cookies

My mom always made these dates as an appetizer/snack/dessert food for family holiday parties. She says Thanksgiving only, but I swear I remember them from both Thanksgiving and Christmas! As a kid I would totally stuff myself on these and ruin my appetite for dinner. (Get it? Stuff myself? Ha.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

They are incredibly simple. Ingredients:

• Pitted dates
• Peanut butter
• Powdered sugar

Directions: Slice pitted dates along one edge. Put peanut butter inside with a butter knife. Roll in powdered sugar. Eat. You see? Simple.

Of course the devil’s in the details, so here are all the details. Mind you, these will still taste great even if you don’t worry about the details. But here goes.

Date type: My mom recommended using Medjool dates since they supposedly taste the best. But I used Deglet Noor dates since the Medjool dates at our store cost 3x as much, were 2-3x as big (not bite sized) and weren’t pitted! The Deglet Noors came out just fine.

Peanut butter type: I also used “natural” peanut butter since I thought that would make them seem fancy. However, in the future I think I will use regular peanut butter. (A) Why bother using peanut butter with no added sugar, when you’re about to put the peanut butter in a sweet fruit and roll it in sugar? (B) The natural peanut butter separates and the oil gets on the outside of the dates, making them sticky, which means you need even more sugar to make them not sticky! I stirred the peanut butter really well but it was very oily. I suppose maybe I should have poured off some of the oil from the top, then stirred. But next time I’ll just go with my cheap-o, homogenized peanut butter.

Stuffing method: The dates are pitted like an olive, so there is a cylindrical hole down the middle. Like I said in the directions, I sliced the dates along one side and stuffed them with peanut butter, kind of like a sub sandwich. But I suppose if you were really fancy you could use a frosting bag (or just a plastic bag with the corner cut off) and squeeze the peanut butter in one end. I may try that next time for better looking dates.

Sugar timing: I made these dates the night before, rolling them in sugar until they weren’t sticky. By the next morning, the sugar had sort of coalesced with PB oil and they were sticky again! So I rolled them in sugar again. They still tasted good and weren’t tooooo sweet (at least for me), but one sugar roll would surely have been enough.

We went to a cupcake party! Melissa and Patrick did a really good job. They made everything and all we had to do was put it together. There were yellow, chocolate, and lemon cupcakes. Dulce de leche, whipped cream, buttercream, chocolate ganache and cream cheese frosting. And a TON of different topping options. Mmmmm…

Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera to the party, but I took some pictures of our “leftovers” the next day. Here are some pics of some of our favorites.

The fabulous five cupcakes that we brought home as leftovers. Chocolate cake with dulce de leche and chocolate/peanut butter chips, yellow cake with dulce de leche and butterfly sprinkles, chocolate cake with whipped cream and crushed oreos, chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting and decorative sugar, chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and Andes mints bits.

Chocolate cupcake, dulce de leche, chocolate and peanut butter chips on top.

Chocolate cupcake, cream cheese frosting, decorative sugar

For Serious? I am highly skeptical of these cookies...

Zoe is gone. She left me…

Well, I guess I don’t need to be so dramatic… she will be back in two weeks. While she is off playing physics-genius in Brazil, I have the whole kitchen to myself. Yep, a deprived meat-eater suddenly has the freedom to cook anything he wants. This could be trouble…

After my first steak and potatoes meal in well over a year, I was looking online for an interesting cookie to make this week and I stumbled upon this crazy creature: Joy’s Peanut Butter Bacon Cookies. Now, I’ve tried chocolate bacon before under the pretense “It’s Chocolate + Bacon…. how could it go wrong?”. Well, I hated it. But, Joy has rarely steered me wrong with her cookie recipes. After some waffling, I decided that if I ever wanted to give it a shot, this was the time to do it. So here goes… cookies + bacon…

INGREDIENTS (makes 12-15 cookies)

• 6 slices of bacon
• 1 cup Peanut Butter (all natural)
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tspn baking soda

DIRECTIONS

Start with the bacon. Cook it up in a skillet like normal, until its nicely cooked. Let it cool on a plate with some papertowels to absorb the extra grease. Then chop it up into bacon bits and set it aside.

Preheat your oven to 350F, and line a tray with parchement paper.

Combine the peanut butter and both types of sugar in a mixing bowl. Mix em’ together for about 2 minutes. Add the egg and baking soda and mix for another 2 minutes. The dough stays crumbly so it doesn’t really mix very well. Just keep going until you either get tired of it, or it looks mixed enough. Lastly, fold in the bacon by hand. That’s your dough.

Making the dough into balls is the most difficult part about these cookies. It’s messy, and the dough really doesnt want to stick together very well. Just dive in and get your hands dirty. Make the dough into ~1.5″ balls (ping pong ball size). Optionally, you could roll the balls in extra granulated sugar if you want. I did not. Place the balls a few inches apart on the tray and use a fork to mash them down a bit. Crisscross the tops or go crazy and make your own pattern!

Bake the cookies for 9-10 minutes. Then let them cool for a few minutes before transfering them to your belly.

So, are they good? I don’t know yet… I am not eating mine until cookie time.

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.

first four

In the past couple weeks I’ve talked to two different friends who both claim that the best cookies they’ve ever had were no bake cookies. The idea of no bake cookies was sounding really good to me because (a) the most fun part of cookie making is the stirring and all that, not the baking and (b) the heat from the oven plus summer heat plus lack of air conditioning can add up to some seriously unpleasant heat trapped in our upstairs bedroom on cookie nights.

But alas… despite my super advanced planning by asking for the recipes at least 12 hours before I needed them neither of these supposed best cookie recipes have materialized. Anyways, I looked around online and apparently there is a very popular no bake cookie recipe which sounds a lot like the one my friend Alex was talking about. So I will try it out and she can tell me if it looks right or not.

first four at a boil

Recipe:

• 1/2 cup butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 Tbsp. cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 3 cups dry quick set oats

Here’s the thing about no bake cookies. Instead of baking them, you cook them on the stove. I thought this was cheating a little because cooking and baking are very similar. But I guess until I can find a way to get cocoa powder, sugar, milk, and butter to turn into chocolate without heating it up (blender?), I’m stuck with cooking.

check out the new camera

So you put the first 4 ingredients in a large pot and bring them to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, not more! Then remove from heat and mix in the next 3 ingredients. I decided to add the vanilla and peanut butter first because that seemed to make the most sense. But maybe it doesn’t matter. The peanut butter and vanilla mix in pretty easily.

Then you just spoon the batter onto parchment paper and let it cool and harden. Even when it’s cool, it’s not 100% hardened, it’s a little mushy. Oh well.

Personally, I like these cookies but I think they’re a little too sweet. Maybe next time I will cut down the sugar to 1 1/2 cups or so.

P.S. There are many copies of this recipe on the internet, but one of them claims that these cookies are healthy. Apparently the oats and peanut butter give this cookie a low glycemic index. Just tell yourself that while you’re eating them.