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.

Tonight the Charoset, Tomorrow Passover

Yay, my first blog post ever! Or something. Since I have no readers or anything yet, I'm going to post a link for nobody to an awesome collection of charoset recipes, none of which I'm making for tomorrow night's Seder. Here's the link Ok, so I sort of took suggestions from all the recipes, but I've got picky eaters to cater to, so no raisins for my dad, change up the walnuts for pecans for my mom, mashed banana just sounds kind of wierd in charoset to me, and so on. So my charoset recipe is as follows:

3 apples (whatever looks good)
walnuts
almonds (the sliced kind, although I guess if you're gonna chop them up it doesn't really matter)
dates
red wine
cinnamon
powdered ginger

Then you kind of chop everything up and mix it all together. It's not supposed to be pretty, y'all, it's supposed to look like mortar. Amounts are totally however much you feel like putting in, and pretty much the ingredients are up to you too, with the exception of apples, nuts and red wine. Technically it's supposed to be kosher wine, but I hate that thick Manischevitz shit, so I chose an Australian Shiraz that was on sale for dirt cheap. Some recipes seem to call for sweet red wine and some call for dry. I know absolutely shit about wines, so I chose what was on sale.

Oh yeah, that link also has a recipe for something called Huevos Haminados, which is some kind of hard cooked eggs, all Sephardic style, which sounds pretty awesome. I'm gonna have to try it one of these days.