Workin it out with Classic Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

One of the best books I bought on my last trip to America was about 1001 Cupcakes, cookies, and delightful treats. And the best thing about it was that there are pictures for each and every recipe. So, naturally I had to copy one and revise it for me. These cookies are soft, with a little bit of crunch on the outside, and are really just delectable. Oh and let me mention that they are semi-healthy too!

Ingredients: (Makes 30 cookies, give or take)

• 3/4 cup butter or margarine
• 1 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 4 tbsp water
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 4 1/2 cups plain oats
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• (optional) Add 1/2 cup of chopped raisins

Procedure:

1. Get out your baking sheet and grease it with butter or pam.
2. Preheat the oven to 350F/180C.
3. In a bowl, combine the butter and sugar and beat it together until it is light and pretty fluffy.
4. Add the egg, water, and vanilla. Mix it together until it is smooth.
5. Mix the oats, flour, salt, and baking soda together in another bowl.
6. Gradually mix the oat mixture into the creamy mixture. Combining with each new addition.
7. Once the mixture has all been added together, begin lumping spoonfuls on the baking sheet. (Add your raisins now if you'd like)
8. Bake the cookies for approximately 15 minutes or until golden brown.

I definitely have a sweet tooth...but it's no good to make something so yummy, and not share, so I brought these to some friends to enjoy. Of course, eat them in moderation, but definitely eat them!

The Workout Queen's Chocolate Chip Caramel Cookies

Merry Christmas eve to all you festive folk. Hope you're all keeping up with the diet. Traveling certainly doesn't help to maintain the diet, especially with all these amazing choices in every restaurant and supermarket. But these cookies are among the BEST choice that you can possibly make this holiday season, and will certainly put a smile on people's faces.

If you know how to make chocolate chip cookies, this is right up your alley...

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups of flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 stick unsalted butter
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp salt
• 12 oz bag of chocolate chip morsels
• 8-10 Caramel squares (Kraft company)

Procedure:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. In a small mixing bowl, combine the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.
3. Cut each caramel squares into 6 or 8 pieces.
4. Using a little dish, put the cut caramel squares into flour to coat them lightly.
5. Then, in a larger bowl, cream the sugars with the stick of butter.
6. Add vanilla.
7. Once the sugar mixture is creamy, add one egg at a time.
8. Gradually add the entire flour mixture to the sugar mixture. Mix well.
9. Add the caramels and chocolate chip morsels.
10. Place small globs of the cookie mixture on the pan. Bake for about 10 minutes, or until golden brown.

I LOVE chocolate chip cookies. They are a trademark for me and the family. I ALWAYS have them during the holidays. This year I just decided to make a spin on the cookies I love so much. I hope you all have a terrific holiday and enjoy the cookies.

Kicked Up Magic Cookie Bars

Would you consider yourself a baker? If the answer is no, these magic cookie bars are for you! Super easy, super delicious, and you don't even dirty a bowl or a spoon.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) of butter
• 1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 1 cup shredded coconut
• 1 6 oz package of chocolate chips
• 1 6 oz package of white chocolate chips
• 1 6 oz package of butterscotch chip
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. In a small sauce pan, melt butter
3. Pour butter evenly into a 13x9 baking dish so that it coats the bottom of the dish
4. Layer remaining ingredients evenly on top of the butter
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until bottom is golden brown
6. Let cool before cutting into squares

Sweetspot Cookie Bars

It seems like it's time for a cookie break.

When I start pining for a chocolate chip cookie, this is the one I want. Which is lucky for me because it's an easy recipe, one that produces a slight sugar crust, which is basically an envelope for some pillowey, chocolate- and vanilla-laced half-inch-thick sweet spot chocolate-chip-cookie action. The recipe originally came from the America's Test Kitchen mavens (Melted butter? An egg and a yolk?); my only real modification is to press it into a 9x13 pan rather than roll them into balls.

I never thought I'd turn into this type of person, but what makes these cookies dangerously easy is a scale. You do have to do some math that requires adding fractions. Otherwise just dump the sugar and the flour directly into the mixing bowls, and your only dirty dishes will be a whisk, spatula, mixing bowl, a 1/2 t measuring spoon, and the dish you melt the butter in.

Sweetspot Cookie Bars

• 6 oz butter (12 T), melted and then cooled slightly
• 7 oz light brown sugar (1 cup)
• 3-1/2 oz sugar (1/2 cup)
• 1 egg + 1 egg yolk
• 2 t vanilla
• 10-5/8 oz flour (2 cups + 2 T)
• 1/2 t baking soda
• 1/2 t salt
• 1 cup milk chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped toasted pecans or walnuts (optional!)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Whisk the butter into the sugars, mixing well. Add the egg, yolk, and vanilla, again mixing well. In separate bowl, combine the flour, soda, and salt, and then stir this mixture into the butter-sugar mixture until just combined. Stir in chocolate chips and pecans. Press into a rectangular 13x9 Pyrex dish. Cook for 25-30 minutes, until puffed up and golden brown in the center. Allow to cool for at least a half hour before slicing into bars.

Almond macaroons and Cherry Heering drinks

Never before have we memorized a recipe just by making it once, but without even trying we've committed these to memory, mostly because almost all the ingredients have the same measurements. It's great to have a super simple cookie/bar in your arsenal, and this one is so good that we immediately filed it away in our culinary memory bank. It's the first thing we've made from The Cake Club by Susie Quick, and we'll be returning to that book for more of her Southern specialties.

Macaroon seems kind of like a misnomer, since these don't have any coconut in them. But if you wanted to top them with some shredded coconut along with the almonds, it would probably be pretty great.

Almond Macaroons

¾ c (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter

1 ½ c sugar

2 large eggs (maybe because 1 1/2 eggs doesn't exist?)

1 ½ c flour

pinch of salt

1 tsp almond extract

½ c sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 350 and line a 10-inch skillet with foil, leaving a few inches over the sides to lift the cookies out. Combine everything but the almonds in a bowl, stirring with a wooden spoon. Spread the batter evenly on the bottom of the skillet. Scatter almonds over the top and sprinkle with about 2 tsp sugar.

Bake for 30 minutes or until lightly browned. Let cool in the skillet for 5 minutes, then remove and cut them into cookies. You could also use a biscuit cutter or heart cookie cutter to make these into nice shapes. They’ll be pretty soft, but thick enough to eat anyway. You could probably just make these in a baking pan, which would make it easier to cut them into squares.

Along with these, we tried a couple drinks with Cherry Heering, a cherry liquor that has a nice flavor, but won't take the paint off the walls (we're looking at you, Maraschino liquor).

The Cherry Cobbler: 4 parts gin, 1 tsp sugar, 1 part Cherry Heering, 1 part Chambord, 1 part lemon juice. Add soda and a slice of lemon if you like. This is a big drink but really the Chambord

combines with the Heering to give it a cough syrup texture (the technical term is mouthfeel but there’s no not-pervy way to say that).

For some more enjoyable mouthfeel (rim shot), check out The Hunter (2 parts Rye Whiskey and 1 part Cherry Heering), good for warming up after a long day of chasing big game, or The Hot Shot (juice of a ¼ lime, 2 parts light run, 1 part heering), a slightly tropical cocktail that still packs a punch. Drink it with a jet engine hot dog, perhaps?

Oscar cookies

We scoured cookbooks for days trying to find a nice, elegant-looking cookie appropriate for an Oscar party. The fare in The Art of the Dessert was too intense for a night of watching TV; the morsels in our easy cookie book, too simple. So we took it upon ourselves to combine two elements from our old standby, The Weekend Baker. The cookies are an easy standalone recipe and the glaze is from the Chocolate-Dipped Macadamia Brittle therein (but that's another post). The result is a cookie that takes no time at all and tastes as nice as it looks.

Toasted Almond Cookies
12 tbsp unsalted butter (at room temperature)
1/2 c sugar
pinch of salt
1 yolk from a large egg
3/4 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp almond extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup slivered almonds

1. Preheat the oven to 350 and toast the almonds -- spread them in 1 layer on a baking sheet and bake until fragrant and just turning brown, around 8 min. Be careful, because they'll keep toasting even when you remove them. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, beat butter, sugar, and salt on medium until well blended. Add the egg yolk, vanilla, and almond extract and beat until combined. Pour in the flour and almonds and beat on low until the dough clumps together and looks like, well, dough.

3. Spoon these in little balls onto prepared baking sheet, about 1 1/2 inches apart. Press down with your fingers to flatten them a bit and bake one sheet at a time, about 17 minutes (until the edges are golden and the tops are dry). Place the sheet on a rack and let them cool for about 10 minutes.


Chocolate Glaze
3 oz semi-sweet baker's chocolate, chopped
3 tbsp butter
(if you want them really chocolatey, up each of these to four)

1. Melt the butter and chocolate in a double boiler (aka, a metal bowl on top of a pot of boiling water) or the microwave, if you're feeling less fancy. Microwave for about 15 seconds at a time and then stir so the chocolate doesn't burn. You'll only need to do this for about 30 seconds.

2. Dip half of a cookie into the chocolate and place on wax paper or parchment. Let these set -- they'll go faster and be less likely to melt if you put them in the fridge. Sift some powdered sugar on top for a finished look.

Drink-wise, we wanted to try some variation on the Champagne Cocktail. Champagne seems like the obvious choice for an Oscars party, but when you're tightening your budget and opting for $5 bottles of Andre you need to add something extra to spruce up the drink. We opted for the Chicago Cocktail --well, something like it. We skipped the Angostura bitters and didn't have any orange bitters on hand, which would have been perfect. Instead we measured 2 parts cognac to 1 part orange curacao, added champagne. and called it a night.

And by "called it a night" we mean "Who won Best Picture again?"

anna the red ...

... is amazing. I'd seen her really clever Where the Wild Things Are bento before a few places, but it took the post Moue did to actually click on her link. And she does non-Bento stuff too!

She makes Raving Rabid Cookies:



And Shadow of the Collosus Grilled Cheese:

The best ginger snaps you'll ever have

This recipe is an adaptation of an adaptation. Originally by Nelle Branson in the 1982 edition of the Trinity Episcopal Church Recipe Book, it appeared in the New York Times in 2005, and then joined the repertoire of Shake's inestimable roommate. The version below incorporates her changes to the original recipe. I doubt we could improve on it.

Swedish Ginger Cookies

1 1/2 sticks of butter (original calls for bacon fat, but... gross)

1 cup sugar, plus 14 cups for dusting the cookies

4 tablespoons dark molasses

1 large egg

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper.

2. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, combine all ingredients. Spin until dough forms.

3. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for a few hours at least. The roommate suggests at least freezing the dough overnight, but more than one night is actually good.

4. Form into (very small) balls, roll in sugar, space 2 inches apart.

5. Bake in the oven for about 6-7 minutes until dark brown. Let cool on baking sheet for a few minutes outside on your fire escape. But watch out for squirrels!

Lemon Firecracker cookies and Blue Hawaiians

This week we decided to deal with our election-day anxieties the only way we know how: baked goods and cocktails.

Our drink is the Blue Hawaiian, in honor of another Blue Hawaiian. It’s another tiki drink, though much simpler than the Zombie. Really it’s just a Pina Colada with a liberal (ha!) dose of Blue Curacao.

For the dessert, we thought about a Baked Alaska, but because we didn’t take the time to vet the recipe in advance we decided not to risk it (yes, this metaphor is a stretch). Instead we went for a spicy cookie that might fit better with Fourth of July than earlier November. But hey, sometimes we need a change.

Blue Hawaiian

Mount Gay, Bols, Boing? this drink has a lot of issues to work out.

• 1 oz. Light Rum
• 1 oz Blue Curacao
• 2 oz Pineapple Juice
• 1 oz Cream of Coconut

You can serve it straight up, over ice, or blended. We tried it straight up, which is delicious.

Lemon Firecrackers

• 2 sticks butter, softened
• 1/2 c sugar
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tbsp grated lemon peel
• 1 egg
• 2 1/4 c flour
• 1 ts cayenne powder
• 1/4 ts salt
• 1/4 ts baking soda

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the lemon juice, lemon peel, and egg; beat well. Sift together the flour, cayenne powder, salt, and baking soda. Beat dry ingredients into the butter mixture. Drop dough by rounded tablespoons onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8 minutes or until cookies are lightly browned.

This is a crumbly, light lemon cookie and the pepper gives a little explosion in the back of your mouth.

Vegan Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

As a contribution to a dinner party with both vegan and non-vegan guests, we made these easy, crowd-pleasing cookies found here.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup margarine
• 1 1/2 cups brown sugar
• 1 cup table sugar
• 1 ripe, mashed banana
• 5 tsp vanilla
• 2 tsp vanilla soy milk
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder stirred into the flour
• 2 1/2 cups rolled oats
• 2 1/2 cups chocolate chips (check if there is milkfat in the chips. We ended up using Ghiradelli

Instructions:

Beat together the margarine and sugars. Add the mashed banana and mix well, then add the vanilla, then the soy milk. Keep mixing and add the dry ingredients, in the order above.The final batter should be almost too dry to hold the chocolate chips. As the original post says, "Dry batter is good, since any chips that fall off the batter can go directly into your mouth, and no one will miss them."

Bake them for 10 or 12 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 375F on an ungreased cookie sheet. Let them congeal on the sheet for a moment after removing them from the oven, then cool on a plate or a wire rack.

The banana and large amount vanilla give these cookies a great flavor. And one excellent bonus of vegan cookies is that you can eat as much batter as you like without the dangers of raw egg.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup all purpose flour
  
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
  
• 1 cup (2 sticks, 1/2 pound) butter, softened
• 1/2 cup raw sugar
  
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups chocolate chips
• 1 cup chopped nuts (pecans, almonds, walnuts)

Directions:

1. preheat oven to 375deg
2. mix flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl
3. beat butter, sugars and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy
4. mix in eggs one at a time to butter mixture, making sure to beat well after each egg
5. slowly mix in flour mixture
6. once everything is well mixed stir in chocolate chips and nuts
7. scoop a rounded tablespoon onto your baking sheets.
8. bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown
9. cool and serve

Commentary:
I know you are thinking "whole wheat cookies.....?" Yeah I made them! It was honestly b/c I only had 1/4 cup regular flour and already started mixing the butter and sugar. I was pleasantly surprised how well they turned out. There are only subtle differences between them and ones made with white flour, but it doesnt really matter b/c they are good and healthier then cookies made with all purpose flour. I didnt add the nuts to mine but like cheese nuts make just about everything dessert taste better. I hope you enjoy!

Vampire cookies and Zombie cocktails

Happy Halloween! With the recent popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight franchise and HBO’s True Blood, it’s pretty obvious that vampires are everywhere. Including our kitchen. And when we came across this recipe from the Baking Bites blog for Vampire Cookies, we decided it was time to pay culinary tribute to tribute to the most ubiquitous, and sexiest, of all of the undead.

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ sticks of butter, softened
• ½ cup sugar
  
• 1 egg
  
• ½ tsp vanilla
  
• 1/8 tsp almond extract
  
• 1 ½ cups flour
  
• ¼ tsp salt
• approx. ½ cup red jelly (use any flavor but make sure it’s not chunky or seedy, kind of like what your mom used to put in your PB&Js)

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until light. Beat in egg and extracts.
Add flour and salt to the bowl and mix them into the butter-sugar mixture at low speed until dough is just combined.

Important to note, lest you begin baking late into the evening: Wrap dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

For your own Vampire Weekend (yeah, we went there): While you’re waiting, make some cocktails and watch an ivy league kid channel John Cusack and Robert Smith:

Preheat oven to 325F. Roll dough out on a lightly floured surface until it is about 1/8-inch thick. Use a cookie cutter to cut out 2-inch rounds.
Place rounds on a baking sheet, put a teaspoon of jam on each of them and cover with another round of dough. Press edges down lightly, pinching the edges onto the cookie sheet. Use a toothpick and poke two small holes (like a vampire bite) in the top of each cookie.


They look like little ghosts!

Here's the thing: this dough is damn nigh impossible to roll out. No matter how cold it was or how much flour we used, it still became a sticky mess on the rolling pin and our hands. We finally abandoned the cookie cutter method and rolled the dough into balls, then smushed them ourselves into little jelly pockets.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until cookies are set.
Cool for about 5 minutes on the baking sheet, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Dip a toothpick in some extra red jam and re-insert in the “bite” holes you made before baking to emphasize them, if not already red. Draw a blood trickle down from one of the bites with the jam, because that looks pretty badass.

The result was scary.

These expand a lot, some ending up completely flat, and they didn't end up looking how we hoped (see Baking Bites for a picture of our hopes). But if nothing else they are tasty, and the hot jam squirts into your mouth when you bite into the cookie, which is just the kind of vampire effect we were looking for.

Though they aren’t as sexy, zombies are also pretty popular:

The Zombie was created before WWII by Donn Beach, the man responsible for the popularization of tiki drinks in America. As the story goes, Beach served the first Zombie to a patron as a hangover cure. How did the drinker feel after? Like the living dead, of course. (For the longer version of the Don the Beachcomber story, plus other great details about rum in general, pick up Wayne Curtis’ And a Bottle of Rum.)

Like the Mai Tai and the rest of the tiki clan, the Zombie’s a massive combination of tropical fruit juices and liquor. And there are scores of recipes for it, all with their own tweaks. The basic gist of most of them is several types of rum, lime juice, pineapple or other tropical juice, often a shot of apricot brandy, then garnished with mint, powdered sugar and a float of 151-proof rum.

But for how much us New Yorkers like to boast about having everything at our fingertips, we weren’t able to find a few common ingredients. If you know where to find orgeat syrup or falernum in the city please tell us. Otherwise one of the upcoming posts will involve making our own falernum. We also opted out of the usual jigger of apricot brandy.

Despite skipping a few pieces, we still have a hell of a lot of ingredients:

There were so many recipes, all of them different from one another, that we improvised a bit. Here’s our first version:

• 1 1/2 oz Bacardi white rum
  
• 1 ½ oz Bacardi gold rum
  
• Dash Angostura bitters
  
• 1 oz Passion fruit nectar
  
• 1 oz Pineapple juice
  
• 1 oz Papaya juice
  
• ½ oz Pernod

Shake with ice and strain into a tall glass filled with ice. Top with a float of Bacardi 151, powdered sugar, mint sprig and fruit garnish (in our case papaya and pineapple).
For the number of bartender’s guides that call for it, we can’t understand why anyone would want this drink with Pernod. The liquorice aftertaste turns it from a tropical drink into something medicinal. In our second try, we skipped the Pernod and added a little maraschino liqueur and a smidge of superfine sugar.

Much better, but next time we'll probably add BRRAAAAAAINS...

Apricot oat-style cookies and Applejack

This cookie recipe is from a random little book called Cookies and Bars that we received as a gift, and it turns out that it's pretty good. Most of these recipes are ridiculously simple, but very interesting, and each is accompanied by a full-page photo.

However, the writing's a little unordinary. The list of ingredients includes "corn oil, for oiling" and "polyunsaturated spread". That just sounds gross, so we're calling it "margarine". Also, the book doesn't say how much honey to use, so we winged it.

ingredients

• 3/4 c margarine
• 1/2 c raw brown sugar
• something like 3 tbsp honey
• generous 3/4 cup dried apricots, chopped
• 2 tsp sesame seeds
• 1 1/2 c oatmeal

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a shallow cake pan. Combine margarine, sugar, and honey in a small pan and cook over low heat, but don't boil. Stir in apricots, sesame seeds, and oatmeal. (This, by the way, takes no time at all.) Spoon into cake pan and bake for about 20-25 minutes, or until brown. Remove and cut into bars, letting them cool completely before taking them out of the pan.See how easy that was? Also, delicious. If you eat this before it's completely cooled, it becomes very similar to the crumble we made a few weeks ago. There are a lot of variations to make on these cookies.













After last week's cider excursion we decided to try a few cocktails using Laird's Applejack. We're big fans of calvados and Pommeau (a mix of cider and calvados which you can find at New York's Jimmy's No. 43). Applejack is the all-American version of calvados. George Washington asked the family for the recipe, Abe Lincoln served it at the tavern he owned, and William Henry Harrison may have won the presidential election because of how much of it he served at political rallies. If only politics today were still the same... (For a full history of our hard-drinking ancestors, check out Laird's page of interesting facts.)

The first cocktail we tried was the Jack Rabbit Cocktail.

• 1 1/2 oz Applejack
  
• 1/2 oz maple syrup
• 1/4 oz lemon juice
• 1/4 oz orange juice

Shake with ice and strain into a glass.

This cocktail is a winner. Look again at how much maple syrup is in there! You really can't disappoint anyone with a cocktail that sweet (though you can still taste the tartness of the lemon juice and the warmth of the liquor.)

Next up: Jack Rose.

• 1 1/2oz Applejack
  
• 1/2 oz lemon juice
  
• 1/2 oz grenadine
  

Shake with ice and strain.


Okay, so this is a very basic cocktail, but a lesson in the dangers of grenadine. Grenadine is a bottled syrup, very sweet, and usually only worth a dash or two in a drink. Combined with the lemon juice the drink ends up tasting pretty medicine-y. It's a classic, and Shake's had a good one using calvados but perhaps the Applejack is too simple for it. If you're going to try it, then use lime juice instead of lemon (or mix them) and go use less grenadine. The classic New York Bartender's Guide calls for essentially that. The Applejack Cocktail might also be a better variation.

So for the next drink we went for something much more natural: The Bee's Knees Variation.

• 1 1/2 oz Applejack
• 1 oz lemon juice
• 1/2 oz honey

Shake with ice and strain.

Shake is a big fan of the original Bee's Knees, which uses gin instead of Applejack, but this one is the all-around crowd-pleaser. You can clearly taste the apple, the lemon, and the honey. There is not much to say about this, because we're too busy drinking.