Milk & Cookies

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.

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!

Can you smell the fresh baked cookies?

This is one of the simplest recipes I have tried yet. There are only 5 ingredients! Yet somehow they ended up being one of the most difficult cookies to make. Don’t let that throw you off though… these cookies are worth it. Once again, this recipe is comes from Joy the Baker (you will soon realize this is a running theme), and once again, the cookies are delicious.

Here is the recipe:

Ingredients (makes about 24 cookies)

1 cup 100% Natural Peanut Butter
(I used creamy)
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 tspn. baking soda
(I made a double batch)

Directions

Mix the peanut butter and the two types of sugars in a large mixing bowl. Sounds simple? Well its not. These ingredients simply do not like to be mixed. I mixed them as well as I could for about 2 minutes, but they turned into a crumbly sticky mess. Maybe the next step will help?

Add the egg and baking soda and mix for another 2 minutes. I was hoping that the egg would help make this mixture turn into more of a dough, but it didn’t.  The end result was thick and very crumbly. My mixer was struggling just to keep turning. Oh well, faith in Joy the Baker kept me going.

Preheat your oven to 250°F and get a baking tray ready with some parchment paper.

Form the “dough” into balls about 1″ in diameter. Do not be discouraged by the doughs lack of effort. If you just commit to getting your hands in there, the dough ends up being fairly mold-able. Also, I found that when it comes time to place them on the tray and mush them with a fork, they are very happy to break apart into many pieces. To minimize this, I started making little disks instead of balls. This way the fork doesn’t need to be pressed down quite as deep and the cookie holds its shape better. You should be able to get 12-15 cookies on a standard cookie tray.

Bake the cookies for 8-9 minutes. I tried going for 10 minutes and felt that the cookies were just a bit too well done. The next batch came out a bit early and they were soft and chewy and just perfect. The cookies will harden a bit after you take them out of the oven, so let them sit for a few minutes before you move them.

In the end, I think these cookies were worth the extra effort. As an optional upgrade you can try placing some chocolate on the top of each cookie before you bake it.