Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

We had family friends visiting us yesterday and both of their daughters like baking--well one really likes baking, the other likes baking but prefers eating the baked goods. I decided that I didn't really want to use my mixer or generally do anything too elaborate or messy (I guessed that clean up wouldn't be the girls' idea of fun and I didn't want to have a hard clean up on my own.) I've made brownies with them before so, while everyone likes brownies, I thought something new would be more fun. I decided on chocolate chip cookies from Nigella Kitchen. They used melted butter instead of creamed butter so they are quicker to make and have an easier clean up.

Christmas Day

I love Christmas in London! The city is beautiful, everyone seems to celebrate (even Jews like me!), and I have a delicious lunch with my family in Clapham. Jeff is an excellent cook and he made turkey, veg, roasted potatoes, bread sauce, and chestnut stuffing. Yum!

Chocolate Peppermint Cookies

I had left over cookie dough from the chocolate wafer cookie crust I made for my Mississippi mud pie, so I sliced it to bake off. But plain, crisp, chocolate cookies, while very nice, don't thrill me on their own. So I asked myself, "self, what could kick these up a notch?" (I love Emeril!) Since it's the holiday season I figured peppermint would do the trick. I happen to have a jar peppermint "snow" (basically crushed candy canes but with out and of the resulting powder or giant chunks), which I mixed with some plain and some red sanding sugars, to make a topping for the cookies. I make the mixture since the peppermint snow would melt a bit during the cooking process but the sanding sugars would stay nice and sparkly.

Oatmeal, White Chocolate, Cranberry Bars

These are adapted from a blondie recipe in Nigella Kitchen. I disagree with terming these (even before my adaptations) blondies. They really don't resemble a blondie in ingredients or final product. But that's okay because they are excellent anyway! I think, if you did them with raisins they'd be the perfect oatmeal cookie bar. But who wants raisins when you can have dried cranberries and white chocolate? They were delicious and the texture was excellent---chewy, think oatmeal raisin cookie chewy, but still a bit caky. Yum.

By the way, I chose cranberries and white chocolate because they seem like good holiday flavors and I was bringing these bars into class just before winter break. They weren't as big of a hit as the peppermint brownies (but what could be?), but they were certainly very well received!

Peppermint Brownies

Remember the Baked brownies? These are them, but with about two tablespoons of peppermint extract added to the batter. They were just like the usual Baked brownies--fudgy, rich, dense, chocolaty, and delicious--but with a rich yet subtle minty undertone.

Thanksgivukkah

As I'm sure you heard, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah overlapped this year (on the 28th of November), a rare occurrence that (apparently) complicated things for American Jews who had to have celebrations two nights in a row. Since I'm currently studying in the UK, I had class on Thursday until 6:00pm, so no chance of a proper Thanksgiving regardless of the timing of Hanukkah. So we combined both celebrations and pushed them until Saturday so that our British family (who had to work Friday) could come over, enjoy the day, celebrate Hanukkah and, of course, eat lots of turkey.

TARDIS Cake and Jammie Dodgers

Hi everyone. I'm Mercedes and I'm a nerd. I love Doctor Who (as you may have noticed when I dressed my yorkie up as the Doctor for Halloween). As you can imagine, I was very excited about the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who that aired last weekend. In celebration of the landmark episode I made my dog dress up again--she was not happy--and I baked quite a bit.