Milk & Cookies

Last year we posted about “don’t eat and drive” rum balls, a family recipe from my dear friend Sarah. This year we tried a different type of rum ball, also instigated by a friend. This time it was our friends Shannon and Malcolm, who invited us to their apartment for a cookie night! (Apparently my family is deficient because we don’t have our own rum ball recipe. I must make do with friends’ recipes. Making cookies with friends… it’s a hard life!)

Eat me!

Shannon and Malcolm have an amazing apartment in San Francisco. Their roofdeck is about 200 feet from Coit Tower which means you see Coit Tower in one direction and amazing views in the other three. I kicked myself for not bringing my camera! We also almost died trying to drive up the hill to their place, but that’s another story. Next time we’ll park at the bottom of the street and walk up. On the plus side, it’s 3 days later and Jason’s car has finally stopped smelling of burnt clutch, so that’s good. Eek!

Here’s Shannon’s recipe:

Dough

• 16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), softened but still cool
• 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons light rum
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour , sifted

Coating

• 16 tablespoons unsalted butter (2 sticks), melted
• 1 1/2 cups walnuts , finely ground
• 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

Using stand mixer, mix brown sugar and butter for dough. Add rum and mix. Add flour and mix. Add a little extra flour if necessary until it truly looks “doughy”. Roll the dough into thirty-six 1 inch balls (ours ended up more like 1 1/2″ or 2″ – they came out fine). Put in refrigerator overnight, or freezer for an hour. (We did refrigerator for about half an hour. They came out fine!) Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Then bake dough balls for 15-20 minutes, or until light brown. They should still be soft in the middle but fully cooked on the outside.

Cool cookies for 30 minutes (we didn’t do this either…). In the meantime, set up the coating. Put walnuts in food processor until finally ground. Add sugar and cinnamon. Melt butter in a saucepan. Then, take dough balls and one at a time, dip them in butter and then the coating mixture. Let cool… okay, just eat them!

This recipe called for a lot of downtime, which is not what you want on a Thursday night. We rushed through some of the various cooling steps and they came out fine! Actually they came out great. Yum! I think that since they are baked, the alcohol evaporates from the outer portion of the dough, but the inside remains a little alcholic. So… don’t worry, you can drive after eating these. Even on San Francisco hills! (Well, I can’t. But that has nothing to do with the rum.)

Okay, I totally failed to get a picture from Shannon and Malcolm’s awesome roof deck. Instead, here’s a picture from our front window in Fremont. It’s no Coit tower, and it has gross construction out front, but still… the trees are nice! This is what the weather has been like recently. Gray gray gray. I think we will have a gray Christmas…

December in California

In addition to the Saltine bark I made yesterday, Jason made some chocolate golden raisin walnut cookies. (Somebody didn’t believe that dessert with Saltines in it would taste good!) We had a little contest today to see which our friends liked better. Saltine bark won, but it was close! Here’s a nice outdoor picture of the golden raisin walnut cookies.

Delicious flaky exterior

Camouflage

Congratulations to my dear sister Lucy, who graduated from college this May! I had this Saltine bark at her graduation party and decided I had to try making it myself. So she gave me the recipe and it’s delicious!

Ingredients list:

• About 1 (maybe a little more) sleeve of Saltine crackers
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 1 11 oz. package of semi sweet chocolate chips
• 1/2 to 1 cup of walnuts (I substituted hazelnuts)

A Saltine platoon

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350
• Cover a cookie sheet with foil. Line up the saltine crackers on the sheet to completely cover it. It should take 1 sleeve of crackers or a little more.
• Mix the brown sugar and butter and boil/heat it for about 3 minutes (microwave or stovetop).
• Pour mix over saltines.
• Bake 7 minutes.
• Remove tray from oven and cover with chocolate chips. Wait for them to melt and then spread the chocolate evenly over the crackers. Sprinkle the nuts on top.
• Put in freezer to cool.

Yummy

Basically, this is a layer of saltines, a layer of caramelized sugar/butter, a layer of chocolate and a layer of nuts. Hard to go wrong with that! The only problem I had is my caramel layer is a bit too chewy. I’m not sure how I could have fixed that – maybe bake it less time? Anyways, I think it’s worth it. Picking caramel out of your teeth is a small price to pay for something this delicious.

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.