Tuesday, June 23, 2009

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.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

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.