Hiatus

Two deaths in the family in less than a month have forced the cookie project to be placed on a back burner for the time being. Hopefully, will return before the end of the season.

The Tree Party

Days 2 and 3 flew by so fast, they might as well have been one single moment. The chunky peanut cookies I planned for Friday (replacing the original choice of peanut blossoms) were postponed after a certain baker drank a few too many Smirnoff coolers while visiting with Best Boyfriend's brother. In my defense, it was my first Friday evening since returning to work, and the boys were playing Madden, so there was little else for me to do that would have been equally enjoyable. (And, for the record, if the buttons stick every time you get sacked, people stop believing you. Wink wink.)

I entered the evening with every intention of baking, going so far as to buy all the materials I would need for the cookies so I could bake them at his brother's place (figuring I would need the extras later in the month anyway), but after chasing toddlers all day and quickly whipping up a baked ziti for the boys, I was pooped. I went to bed resolved to bake not one but two cookies for the tree decorating party, figuring that my previous posts exonerated me from missing a blog day.

Nothing I've written, though, excuses missing yesterday as well, and for that, I ask for mercy. See, over the course of the morning, as I was grocery shopping and the like, the tree party morphed from "small, Christmas-themed excuse to cook a nice dinner" into "our parents are about to meet for the first time." From that moment on, I was pretty much a crazy person.

The pernil (my first solo) went in the oven at 11:15 a.m. and at noon I realized I completely forgot to stuff it with garlic. That sums up my mentality nicely, I think, seeing as the pernil recipe has exactly two steps: stuff with garlic; bake. Once that was rescued from bland oblivion, I turned to the cookies at hand.

Since the roast required six hours in the oven, I decided to turn making the cookies into an event for the evening. Knowing that I had two recipes to fulfill, I chose one that needed refrigeration and a drop cookie that could be put together while the first was baking, which would be after dinner. Thankfully, Best Boyfriend's mother arrived early and helped with the dough for the cookie project's first home run: dutch chocolate cookies. (Modifications to the recipe are bolded and explained.)

Ingredients
2 cups of all purpose flour
¾ cup Dutch-process natural unsweetened cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 ½ sticks of butter, unsalted and at room temperature (you can get away with salted butter here)
2 cups of raw sugar, plus a little for “dusting”
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla

Methodology
1. Sift/mix together the first four ingredients together [sic], then set aside.
If you're starting to suspect that I'm pretty liberal with recipes, then you are correct. In my defense, I went to three grocery stores and consulted Google before making the great cocoa switch. Dutch cocoa is preferred because of added alkali and reduced bitterness, but for this recipe the difference is negligible.

2. In second bowl, combine the butter and sugar until well mixed. Add the vanilla to the butter and sugar, and then the eggs, one at a time.
Once again, I used the stick blender, but when the top part began to overheat I finally conceded that it's the wrong tool for the job. Luckily, the butter was sotftened well enough that everything could be finished by hand. If only I hadn't spent al my extra money on the party, I could get myself a proper mixer. *le sigh*

3. Add flour mixture a little at a time until completely incorporated. Wrap the dough in plastic and chill until firm, usually about one hour.
I bolded the time stamp there because we made the dough before dinner, and so it refrigerated for about three and a half hours. That meant that it needed a bit of sitting time before it softened enough to roll, which gave us the perfect window to start on the chunky peanut cookies (below).

4. Roll the dough into 1 inch balls and roll in raw sugar to completely coat.
This is where it got fun. Together with my mom and Best Boyfriend's sister, we assembly-lined production and knocked out the entire batch in seemingly a few moments. I chose sugar in the raw versus refined sugar as suggested by the original recipe mainly for the aesthetics. What's prettier than chunky sugar crystals covering a well-baked treat?

5. Bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes until set in the middle.
After the first batch of each, we mastered the timing for two-rack baking. Double the fun!

They came out marvelously, and were the official fan favorite of the evening. It's a wonderful recipe, and nice and easy to crank out. Made 63 cookies.

Phase Two

At the request of Best Boyfriend, the next cookie is in the peanut family. I found a decent recipe that I modified by using chunky peanut butter and adding white chocolate chips. I love white chocolate, and it's a personal pet peeve of mine that somewhere along the lines somebody decided that all things white chocolate must be paired with macademia nuts or walnuts. Puts a serious damper in my cookie enjoyment when I have to take eight Benadryl after an allergy attack. So, I defiantly added the not-even-really-chocolate chips to my chunky peanut recipe, and voila! A hit!

Ingredients

4 c. sifted flour
1 tsp. soda (I operated under the assumption that the baker meant "baking soda," rather than carbonated cola.)
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. shortening
2 tbsp water (wouldn't want to wind up with dehydrated dough again!)
1 c. peanut butter
1 1/2 c. packed brown sugar
1 c. sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 c. white chocolate chips
1/2 c. 1% milk (explained below)

1. Sift flour, soda, baking powder and salt. Set aside.

With enough wine and beer consumed over dinner, the kitchen was a pretty happy, boistrous place when it came time to start on the peanut cookies. Best Boyfriend was given the distinct honor of sifting because he offered and I really don't like doing it. We made another educated guess here and added the baking powder to the mixture as well, seeing as that ingredient was left out of the rest of the recipe. I wish I had gotten a picture of that, but my hands were busy with the wet ingredients.

2. Blend shortening, water and peanut butter; add sugar, gradually. Beat until smooth. Add eggs, beating well. Add vanilla. Blend in flour mixture until smooth.

The funniest part about the whole mixing process is that we had a very small counter to work with, and while I am right-handed, Best Boyfriend is a lefty. After a few frustrating but ultimately harmless collisions, we switched sides only to realize that we  now had to reach over each other. At this point I'd given up on the stick blender entirely, and my manic whisking was really the source of all our problems. Yet again, proof I need a real mixer. I freed him of his duties shortly after and combined the two myself. Best Boyfriend gratefully retreated to the family room to talk about wood working. Isn't it nice when everyone gets along?

The dough just seemed still too dry for my liking, so at this point I added the milk. My mom suggested that in the future, I add softened butter any time I need to moisten up cookie dough. I'll file that away for later in the month.

3. Drop on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees for 8 to 9 minutes. 8 dozen.

I almost had a stroke at this point. Once again, my cookies didn't spread.

Seriously? Seriously? I began to wonder if it's just me, if there's something wrong with my electromagnetic field or something that was continuously causing my cookies to scone-up on me (at this point, the picture-perfect dutch chocolate cookies hadn't made it out of the oven yet). Frustrated at this new turn of events, I was inches away from adding more milk to the dough when my mom made another suggestion. Roll them as we did for the chocolate ones, and press them flat a little. Bake one tray, and see how they turn out. Deep, cleansing breaths.

 Not too bad, huh? My mom's one smart cookie (punny!).

The recipe suggested it would yield eight dozen; in reality, it was closer to six. Just like two servings of instant pancake mix never actually makes eight pancakes.

So, we all came out of the experience a little wiser in the head and wider around the middle. The families got along nicely, and by the time everyone said goodbyes, it was almost 10 p.m. We hadn't done Christmas cards, or gotten around to the tree. I was ready to call it a night when Best Boyfriend coaxed me into the living room with a glass of wine and some Christmas carols, and somehow, we found the energy to decorate the tree, dance by the fire, and have a wonderful end to a wonderful day.

Tonight, I'll be modifying this recipe for pinwheel cookies. It's another refrigerated-dough recipe, so I'll bake them tomorrow. Hopefully, they'll be alongside another cookie so I can stay on track for Days Four and Five.

Wingin' It

Full disclosure: I chose oatmeal cranberry cookies for the first day because I already had all the ingredients. Or so I thought. I wasn't as prepared for Day One as I intended (big surprise there!). The first batch of Oatmeal Cranberry cookies are baking as I type. It's 7:30 p.m., I just finished my first full day at the preschool, and though Best Boyfriend fell asleep on the couch watching SportsCenter, the kitchen is chiming with Christmas tunes (courtesy of Pandora) and a festive chain of kid-friendly expletives ("Oh, fluffernutter!" [hat tip to my old coworkers for that gem]). But before we get to the process, first, the recipe:

I modified the recipe for Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies available on the Quaker Oats website (modifications are bolded for your easy reference).

Ingredients

8 tablespoons vegetable shortening

3/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

0 teaspoons baking soda (yeah, I'll get to that)

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon salt (optional)

3 cups Quaker® Oats (quick, uncooked)

1 cup dried cranberries

The (Just Shrug It Off and Go With It) Process 

1. Heat oven to 350°F. In large bowl, beat butter and sugars on medium speed of electric mixer until creamy.
Okay, so it got interesting right from the beginning, when I realized that A) I never got around to buying an appropriately sized mixing bowl, and B) I'm pretty sure this isn't the kind of electric mixer the recipe would prefer:

2. Add eggs and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda**, cinnamon and salt; mix well. Add oats and raisins; mix well.
In regards to the bowl, I found two medium-sized bowls that I thought would work. Silly me, though, I wasn't thinking about how to actually combine the two:

Lacking any better options, I opted to go with the crock from the crock pot. At least everything fit!

**Yeah, so about the baking soda. Probably because I kept thinking about it before going to the grocery store, which Murphy's Law tells us is a great way to forget something, I forgot to buy it. Combine that with a massive food coma courtesy of Best Boyfriend taking me for sushi to celebrate my new job and total exhaustion from dog-related drama all night (side note: for reasons completely unrelated to the cookie project, Molly now smells of oatmeal cookies rather than muddy garbage. Gracias, PetSmart), and you get my complete and total reluctance to go back to the grocery store for one measly ingredient. Yes, I opted to wing it. Let's see how this plays out, shall we?

3. Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.
Easy enough. I chose to make rounded balls by hand.

4. Bake 14 - 15 minutes or until light golden brown. Cool 1 minute on cookie sheets; remove to wire rack. Cool completely. Store tightly covered.
At this point, the kitchen smells divine. I'm totally psyched to watch the doughy mounds melt and bubble and brown through the oven window. The original 8 minutes suggested by the recipe passes, and... wait a minute. From what I can tell, they're still doughy balls. I checked again after I typed that, and yes, not one of the cookies melted or flattened out even a little. And before you get all smart-alecky on me, yes, the oven is on, and yes, it's the right temperature. I checked that too, because believe you me, it's not outside the realm of possibility for me to have forgotten something like that at this stage of the game. I add minutes (six, to be precise), and still, nothing but goldeny brown, warmed oatmeal cranberry balls. I guess we'll just have to wait for the taste test.

So, while the cookies are cooling, I did a bit of internet research. I really, really, want to know at which point I simply compromised too much. Betty Crocker offers this great cookie FAQ which I've bookmarked for future cookie-project reference. I've diagnosed my problem as under-hyderated dough, a problem that will be easily solved in the future. I've discovered (alas, too late for this round) that using shortening instead of margarine or butter requires the addition of water, as illustrated right there on the packaging by the helpful folks at Crisco. Silly me, I didn't realize that my butter-substitute came with a recipe of its own...

The thing is, they really don't taste all that bad. A bit on the dry side, but not unpleasantly so, and unnoticeable when accompanied by a sip of milk. What a relief.

Day one is officially a success.

(made 61 cookies)