The New Adventures in Baking

Having declared last night's home made kettle chips a success, tonight I turned my attention to the Nearly-Perfect Cookies I wrote about last time. They've gone through a couple incarnations and I think I've got them just about right. I bumped the chili powder considerably, up to 1 1/2 tsp and reduced the cinnamon to 3/4 tsp. Also the first time the dough came out too dry and dry dough means hard cookies, so I adjusted the flour measurement by the amount of cocoa powder and the dough is pretty good now. I also made myself a shaker full of a cinnamon/chili powder mixture that I can just shake over the top of the cookies. It allows for nice uniform coverage.

Then it was time for peanut butter cookies. Last time I made them I added chocolate chips, but today I used up the last of my chocolate chips on the Nearly-Perfect Cookies. So I added a little cocoa powder to the dough for the chocolate and used peanut butter chips instead. A complaint about Reese's Peanut Butter Chips for baking: why is the bag 1 2/3 cups? Most recipes call for 1 or 2 cups of chips, but almost never fractions of cups. I ended up dumping the whole bag in. Oh well, my peanut butter loving husband isn't going to complain, I don't think.

True Confessions

I admit, I'm a lapsed blogger. I haven't blogged in like a year. I'm not really sorry though. I've been a little busy. I got married and I've been experimenting with all kinds of new and exciting foods in loaf-form. You know, meatloaf, banana bread and stuff like that. Along with the occasional foray into cookie-baking, my real passion. So without further ado...

Tonight's experiment is for tomorrow's Comadres get-together. The assignment was something Spanish-American or something like that. I bent the rules a little since we weren't supposed to make dessert, but since I have to drive an hour and a half to get there and entree is sort of out of the question. So: Spicy Cinnamon Double Chocolate Cookies.

It's basically Betty Crocker's chocolate chip cookie recipe with a few additions. Say what you will about Toll House's cookie recipe, but Betty is a rock star. She's the queen bitch in my book and her chocolate chip cookies k.o. toll house any day. So that's my starting point. To the butter/sugar/egg/vanilla stage of mixing I added 1 tsp of cinnamon and 1/4 tsp of chili powder. Then to the flour I added 1/4 cup of unsweetened cocoa. This made the dough a little dry so next time I think I'll reduce the flour. On the cookie sheet I always press them a bit flat so they'll spread a little faster. It seems to help. Then I sprinkled them with a mixture of cinnamon and chili powder. Eddie likes them, and he hates spicy food so I guess that means they're not too spicy. We'll see how they go over tomorrow at Comadres.

I'm still here

And there's been lots going on, but I've been too lazy to come here and update anything. Anyhoo, I'm getting married, I have a new job in New York soon, I'm thrilled to be leaving my job in Sedona because what I thought was a good thing turns out to be hell.

Yeah, maybe I'll write after the wedding...