Holiday Baking 2011

A quick rehash of this season's holiday cooking: because I've been a negligent blogger.

My last Thanksgiving treat - leftover cranberry sauce bread. I view such recipes as a reason to make extra cranberry sauce, not get rid of it!

I also made the standards: cinnamon rolls, pecan pie...

apple pie...
and pumpkin pie, not pictured this time around.

My main Christmas baking this December was gingerbread men. Lots of gingerbread men:

But for the holiday dinner, I made up a three layer cake from this recipe - a caramelized apple spice cake with brown sugar swiss meringue buttercream:

The finished dessert (and yes, that is a pie in the background as well)!

Happy Valentine's Day!

It may be a little cheesy, but hearts and valentine's day do go together, so I made up this recipe to celebrate:
Tempted as I was to use a blueberry jam filling, I stuck with the raspberry jam so that I wouldn't be presenting friends with black hearts.

These cookies are not very interesting until they get shaped, but here is the butter, sugar, peanut butter and eggs, all creamed together:

The dough, rolled into balls and flattened:

And with preliminary heart indentations:

And the finished cookies, after baking, filling and baking again.

(Almost Vegan) Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I altered the recipe for these delicious and (almost) healthy cookies from another running food blogger, Vegan by Valerie:
Although I'm not vegan (or even vegetarian) I love Valerie's site because she always considers nutrition and how she is going to be fueling her body for her running.

The recipe works like one for a quickbread. First, the dry (note - instead of using pumpkin pie spice, I used a combination of cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg):

and then the wet ingredients (note - here I used pumpkin puree I had made from a fresh pumpkin rather than canned, and I used an egg rather than egg replacer after speaking to a vegan friend. Incidentally, my vegan friend told me the egg would probably taste better than any replacement I could try):

Mix it all together, add your chocolate chips and bake!
Full Recipe:

Ingredients:

1 1/4 c. whole wheat pastry flour (or regular whole wheat flour)

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. baking powder

spices: about 1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp. ginger, 1/4 tsp. nutmeg and 1/4 t. cloves

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 c. sugar

1/2 c. pumpkin puree

1/4 c. maple syrup

2 tsp. vanilla extract

2 T. canola oil or coconut oil

1 egg (large)

about 3/4 c. chocolate chips

Instructions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine all dry ingredients

3. Combine all wet ingredients and whisk until smooth

4. Slowly add in the dry ingredients to the wet, stirring until fully mixed in.

5. Stir in the chocolate chips.

6. Form sticky balls from the dough (tablespoon size at least, I like mine larger) and place on buttered or oiled cookie sheets

7. Bake for 12-13 minutes, or until cookies are cooked through.

Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

This is what I think of when I think of oatmeal cookies, no matter whether they are adorned with raisins, chocolate chips or coconut: oats, cinnamon, flour and eggs:

But this particular chocolate oatmeal recipe is built more like a brownie recipe - melted chocolate and butter, to which the other ingredients are added:

The shiny chocolate mixture getting the final crucial ingredient:

and ready to bake on parchment!

Chocolate Chip Coconut Cookies

They don't look like much here:

I was interested in this recipe because it's written similarly to a brownie recipe - mix together eggs and sugar, then add chocolate melted with butter:

Add flour:

And in this case also add coconut, and bake!

Giant Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love chocolate chip cookies. Who doesn't?

This recipe is even better: only 6 cookies fit on my giant cookie sheet. I use about 1/3 cup dough for each cookie, and 1/2 butter, 1/2 shortening in the recipe so they remain nice and soft:

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

It should come as no shock to see peanut butter waiting to be mixed into the soft butter in my mixing bowl:

Once that was creamed nicely with the sugars, eggs were added, followed by flour and leavening:

A few chocolate chips were needed and I scooped them on to my cookie sheets:

Yum.

Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Once in a while I like to pretend that cookies can be good for me. In reality, this means "less bad." Here, I've mixed peanut butter into my creamed butter and sugar for a hit of protein in an old classic:

A lot of peanut butter:

That wasn't quite enough, so oats, too, went into these cookies:

The cookies, pre-baking:

After, they had a little bit of a healthy look with the oatmeal texture, but it was entirely erased by the delicious taste (and the chocolate).

The Cookie Project: December 2009

I made a LOT of Christmas Cookies this year:
The table above has about a thousand cookies, of a dozen varieties.

I started a week before I was planning on baking, by mixing up cookies and wrapping the dough in plastic to be stored in the fridge:
For cookies I hadn't made before, I wrapped them with the recipe.

For simpler cookies, I made a note of the cookie type, and how they needed to be baked:

Here's a video of the process when it was finally underway:


It took two days of baking, but cookies were shipped far and wide, and brought to many friends locally.

When Christmas got bit closer, I pulled the remaining cookies out of my fridge and added a few varieties that my family always makes, including Rugelach!

And a classic sugar cookies - Sand Tarts, from my grandmother's recipe:

On Christmas morning, I also made cinnamon rolls. Here they are, ready to be flipped out of the pan:

To really celebrate December, I also made time to make latkes. It was my first attempt, but fried potato tends to be well received...especially when you add a little sour cream and applesauce!

Earl Grey Tea Cookies

My fridge is slowly filling with logs and packages of dough like this, ready to be baked into Christmas cookies:
The dough log above is from this recipe - a friend sent it to me a few weeks back thinking that it would be a perfect elegant and quick treat for unexpected guests. After all the Christmas cookie baking is done, I'll need to keep a log of this dough in my freezer!

The recipe is quick - first the butter is creamed:

Sugar is added, and then you add flour, leavening and ground tea - I used a green tea with mango instead of the Earl Grey called for in the recipe.

Slice the chilled log of dough, bake and eat!
You may have noted that I didn't follow the recipe directions here - I don't keep a food processor on my counter, and although that makes this recipe easier, this is a recipe that is easily adapted to a hand mixer - or even just a sturdy spoon.

College Cookies

I like magazines, and I also like cookies. I'll at least glance through a free magazine for things that might be useful, like cookie recipes, and as luck would have it, MORE Magazine came through with a free issue distributed at the MORE Magazine Marathon and Half Marathon Expo. And it involved butterscotch, which I never use, so I pulled it out for the start of cookie season!

The recipe is a fairly basic creaming of butter, sugar and milk at the start, followed by adding eggs, then spices, flour and leavening:

Then a few treats: oats, raisins, nuts and then butterscotch chips:

The resulting complex and sweet cookie is a keeper for my recipe box:

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Semi and White Chocolate Chips and Macadamia Nuts

Sometimes I just want plain chocolate chip cookies. Other times, I would be content to eat the cookie dough:

I decided to take classic chocolate chip cookies and use a mixture of white and semi-sweet chocolate chips, with a few macadamia nuts for good measure, in these not so classic chocolate chip cookies:

I used a King Arthur Flour recipe that, sadly, is not online, just to try a different method. This recipe starts with sugars creamed with butter, here, dark brown and regular sugar:

Next, egg, added one at a time:

After that the leavening is mixed into the wet ingredients before the flour is added:

And finally, flour:

I then added all of the chocolate chips and nuts:

Once they were baked and cooled, I decided that an ice cream sandwich was in order!