Salted Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

Chocolate chocolate chip cookies are always good, but add Reese's Pieces and Maldon sea salt and you've got something really quite special.

Cookies for Passover

The thing about baking for Passover is that it makes you think a bit more about what you are baking. But past thinking a bit harder when you choose your recipes, it doesn't really change things. Okay, yes, no flour unless it's matzo meal, but how hard is that? It's rather like keeping gluten-free (assuming you aren't using matzo meal). In fact the coconut macaroons and the chocolate walnut cookies are staples of my year round gluten-free repertoire. The third cookie, a nutty and floral macaron, will definitely be added to that repertoire--but more on it in a minute.

Mint Chip Meringues, Black Forest Cookies, and Sugar Cookies

My mom loves meringues and always asks me to make them. For some reason, I really don't enjoy making them, though. Probably the time and care that goes into them isn't offset by it being interesting for me to make. But I'll give it to her, they really are delicious--and homemade ones are so much better than store-bought.

Bourbon Balls and Gingersnaps

Both of these recipes come by way of "Baked Occassions," the Baked Brooklyn boys' newest cookbook. I love all their cookbooks and I hadn't had a chance to use this one yet. It's up to their usual high standard. (But it's more fun--it's organized by holiday. For example they, apparently, celebrate the Ides of March with Blood Orange Tiramisu. See? Fun!)

I digress.

Christmas Cookies, 2014

As usual Christmas in my house means an extraordinary amount of baking. This year, seeing as I am still breaking in the kitchen, I only made five cookies. And no cakes or chocolates. Since that was the case, I really tried to go nuts with the cookies. I'll talk about each varity in other posts, but here's a summary: gingersnaps, decorated sugar cookies, bourbon balls, mint chip meringues, and Black Forest cookies.

I thought those worked nicely together for gift boxes: one very chewy (the Black Forest cookies), one sort of chewy (the gingersnaps), two crumbly (the bourbon balls and the sugar cookies), and one crunchy and chewy at once (the meringues). Or put another way: one chocolate, one mint and chocolate, one spicy, one boozey, and one "plain"--I think you can figure out which is which yourself. Most importantly, I think they looked lovely in a gift box, what with the colors of the decorated sugar cookies and the meringues and the variegated brown hues of the other cookies. I'd be happy getting that as a gift!

Chocolate Chip Brownie Cookies~With Recipe!

These aren't quite as brownie-ish in texture as the name implies, but the flavor is quite like a brownie. A brownie with chocolate chips. Who doesn't like that? I hope you like that because below is the recipe for these moist chocolate cookies.

Gluten Free Desserts, Sightseeing, and my Dissertation

I stayed with my cousins for the last couple weeks of dissertation writing. I can't thank them enough for putting me up and putting up with me during such a stressful time. In an attempt to thank them, I baked quite a bit for them. Below follows a stream of consciousness post including some gluten free baking and some miscellaneous non-food photos.

 

Triple Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies~With Recipe

These are exactly what they sound like: oatmeal cookies with three types of chocolate. I used one of my favorite normal chocolate chip cookie recipes (I like the recipe because you don't need an electric mixer) and substituted steel cut oatmeal for some of the flour. Instead of one type of chocolate chip, I used white, milk and dark chocolate chips. And a lot of them.

They were chewy and delicious! Not too oaty, but still noticably an oatmeal cookie. Plus you can't go wrong with three types of chocolate crammed into one cookie!

And because I'm so sweet, here's the recipe:

Passover Dessert

After such a lovely dinner it's hard to know how we had room for dessert. But we did. Unlike the dinner, the desserts were all gluten-free, not just unleavened. So everyone could eat everything. And everyone did.

Hamantaschen for Purim

There are many different explanations for why we eat hamantaschen on Purim and why it's triangular. I'll always go with the story I heard: the pastries are triangular to symbolize Haman's hat (which had three corners, three corners had his hat--we used to sing that at the Purim carnival at synagogue.) I'm not sure why we would be eating the villian's hat, but I like hamantaschen, so I don't argue.

Playing Card Cookies

For those of us without dates on Valentine's Day, it's a rather depressing holiday. Netflix, apparently, knows this and decided to release the entire season of "House of Cards" on Valentine's Day. Now I've seen the original British series and I wasn't a huge fan. I think Kevin Spacey is an excellent actor and definitely improves the show. But, as much as I like him and political dramas, I just can't get into the show--perhaps it's because the actors (well, just Kevin Spacey, I suppose) break the third wall or maybe I just can't see how the plot (which worked relatively well given the UK's parlimentary system) can possibly work in the US. Regardless of that, I decided that spending Valentine's Day hanging out with a bunch of my political communications classmates and watching "House of Cards" would be more fun than spending Valentine's Day alone.

Wedding Reception Tea

Remember that wedding cake tasting we did? This afternoon tea was for that couple. Instead of the one cake, we catered an afternoon tea wedding reception for 30 people. For this afternoon tea, we served tea sandwiches and assorted desserts.

Football Cookies (and some simple things to do with royal icing)

In honor of the Super Bowl, I whipped up some football cookies. They are made from chocolate sablée dough. Pâte sablée dough is a French sugar cookie dough that makes wonderfully tender cut out cookies as the high fat and sugar content inhibits gluten development even when you roll and reroll the dough. To chocolate the dough up I added some cocoa powder and a drop of brown gel food coloring.

Salted Almond, Chocolate Chip Cookies

There's nothing more relaxing than making (and subsequently eating) chocolate chip cookies. I've made all sorts of chocolate chip cookies but I've never tried salted ones. I decided it was time. I based these off of Tate's bakery's "chubby Tate's” chewy chocolate chip cookies. Their recipe uses corn syrup to make the cookies nice and chewy. I then added chopped, blanched almonds and sea salt in addition to the dark chocolate chips.

The Best of 2013

It's that time. The time to look back over the previous twelve months and see where you've been and what's happened in your life, both good and bad. For me 2013 is the year I started grad school. It's also the year I made a wedding (okay, anniversary) cake for a real couple, crafted a TARDIS out of chocolate cake, made hundreds of chocolates for the holidays, and so much more. So here's to 2013.

New Year's Eve "Party"

I was invited to New Year's parties, but I don't do New Year's parties. Ever. My family has a rule that you must wear stretch waist pants on New Year's Eve. We eat snacks and party food and go to bed at 12:01 (which is earlier than we normally go to bed, but that's not the point...) The point is, this year my mom, my friend Adriana, and myself stayed in and ate our way into the new year.

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.

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!

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.