Lemon Ricotta Cookies

I do love my lemon, and I will not apologize. I like it strong and unabashedly tart, especially in desserts. So I decided to give this recipe by Giada a whirl -- lemon ricotta cookies. Now I've used ricotta cheese in desserts before, but never as part of a cookie batter, so I was anxious to try it out.

Easy Favor Packaging

I have now made cookies favors for two different events, both baby showers. The first was for my cousin, where I baked up really cute Mickey Mouse sugar cookies, and packaged them to be consistent with the Disney theme that her mom chose for the shower.

The second were the Grover Cookies of my previous post, which were for my friend Allie's baby shower.

Since the process of making these favors was pretty much the same both times, and since it really can be applied to almost any favor that you would like to make, I thought a separate post that just talked about favors and favor packaging might be useful to some people wanting to create tidy-looking favors for an event. The two examples I have listed here are both edible, obviously, but this method of packaging can also be used for non-edible favors, if you like the look.

Grover Cookies (Cookie Favors)

Presenting the further adventures of everybody's favorite hero. A monster who is faster than lightning, stronger than steel, smarter than a speeding bullet. It's...SUPERGROVER! (And he's cute, too)!


This posting is about a month overdue. I had some deadlines at work to deal with, and my baking/posting predictably suffered accordingly. But within the next few weeks, I hope to be entirely back on track.


This posting isn't technically a recipe.It is a decorating and packaging idea for making Grover cookies (which could easily be adapted to make pretty much any Sesame Street monster into a yummy cookie. And, because of their very nature, they are also a great thing to make with kids!!!

Easy Pistachio Chip Cookies

This is my first Christmas cookie posting of the 2010 Christmas Baking season, and I'm starting out with a brand-new cookie recipe that is super-easy but big on taste!


My Christmas cookie baking is fairly constant from year to year in terms of variety, but I try to roll out at least one new variety per year, to test. Sometimes, the new ones make the cut and transition to perennial Christmas cookie staple...and sometimes they don't. These pistachio cookies definitely make the cut, for both their taste and ease of assembly. Let's face it, when you are making many different kinds of cookies, convenience definitely becomes an important factor. I tore the original recipe out of a Betty Crocker mini cookie magazine, but it is also available online here.  The original recipe calls for cranberries, but I modified it, because I prefer chocolate!

Quick and Dirty Creepy Treats: Easy Halloween Food Ideas

Now that October is here, I'll still be posting Autumn-themed stuff, obviously, but I also wanted to get started on some Halloween-themed posts. So, for the next 4 weeks, my posts will be Halloween-centric with some smatterings of Halloween history and lore thrown into each post.

For this post, I am dusting off some really old ideas and pics (I was notoriously bad about documenting my creations before I became a blogger) of quick and easy Halloween treats that come together in a snap but are super fun to do. These treats are collected from ones that I and my friend Lauren made years ago when our lab hosted our Department's Halloween Social. Everyone in my lab pitched in and made Fall and/or Halloween-themed desserts, and this post is dedicated to just a few of them, the "quick and dirty" treats, to borrow a phrase we use often in lab. They are not very sophisticated, but they are cute and easy, and would make a great starting point for brainstorming new Halloween treats. These are all great ideas especially if you want something to do with little kids, because they are all decorating-oriented and not oven-oriented. For this post, we have quick Witch Hats, Critters, Ghosts, and Dirt. Unfortunately, I made these a while ago, so I don't have pictures of intermediate steps, but the directions are straightforward so this shouldn't be a problem. To be honest, they are so simple that, in most cases, you can just figure out how to assemble them from the pictures!

Thumbprint Cookies (Strawberry Rhubarb and Raspberry)

Last month, my cousin Jennifer brought cookies to my house, delightful little thumbprint cookies. They were perfect, with their jeweled colors and melt-in-your-mouth buttery goodness. But do you know what made them extraordinary? My husband loved them. My husband, who is indifferent to almost all baked goods known to man, not only ate them, but pronounced them his favorite cookie of all time.

Well.

That was that, as they say. I've never had any desire to make fruit thumbprints before (I inevitably lean towards cookies filled with chocolate etc), but I immediately requested the recipe from my cousin, so I could take a look at it. A little searching turned up the fact that this recipe originally came from the book Williams-Sonoma Collection: Cookies, under the moniker of "Ruby Jewels."

The Cookie Buffet: Pumpkin Bread Bites

I've never attempted a pumpkin cookie before, even though autumn is my favorite season, and nothing screams "Fall" more loudly than pumpkin-flavored goodies. Most of the time, I content myself with pumpkin pie, but I knew from the beginning that I'd definitely want to include pumpkin cookies in the cookie buffet at the shower.  I found a Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe on the FoodNetwork online courtesy of George Duran. I tweaked the recipe a significant amount, changing the amount of sugar, spice, and pumpkin.

The Cookie Buffet: Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies. Where would a cookie buffet be without them? Believe it or not, this was a new recipe. I normally make the good ol' standby Tollhouse recipe, which is yummy to be sure. But I didn't want to make the same old thing for the shower. I've been wanting to branch out and experiment with chocolate chip cookies that use both butter and shortening for a while now, and this was the perfect opportunity. A little gumshoe detective work turned up this recipe from the lady herself, Paula Deen. It uses both butter and shortening, and three kinds of chocolate.

That's right. And nuts. Well, at least it did by the time I was done tweaking the recipe.

The Cookie Buffet: Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

I decided to include a gluten-free selection in my shower’s cookie buffet, for one of my best friends and bridesmaids, Rachel, whose dietary needs necessitate gluten-free living. Now, I wasn’t sure how to go about making gluten-free cookies, but luckily my main man, Alton Brown, came to the rescue with this gluten-free chocolate chip cookie recipe. I can not say enough good things about Alton Brown in general, or this recipe in particular. Believe it or not, these cookies taste pretty much like any other chocolate chip cookie, no mean feat considering that there is not a smidgen of wheat anywhere in sight.

Alton’s secret, so I am told, is through his choice of alternate flours and their proportions. His recipe calls for a combination of brown rice four, tapioca flour, corn starch, and xanthan gum, which comes as close to recapitulating the taste and texture of wheat flour as you can get…without actually using wheat flour.

The Cookie Buffet: Pierniczki

Because I had included Greek cookies in my cookie buffet, I figured it was only fair to include some Polish ones too -- the only problem was that I didn't know of any! A little research online, and I found what seemed to be the perfect cookie choice: pierniczki, a Polish ginger-honey cookie. These are traditional Christmas cookies. They are also traditionally rolled out and cut into shapes with a cookie cutter, but I decided to bypass that and convert the recipe into a drop cookie dough. In order to do that, I adapted the flour to fat ratio of one of Paula Deen's ginger cookie recipes, and tweaked it into a pierniczki dough that could be dropped by a cookie scoop.

The Cookie Buffet: The Greek Cookies

When I finally decided to do the cookie buffet for my bridal shower, I knew that I had to include some Greek cookies to honor my heritage. My favorite Greek cookie of all time, finikia, is a honey-dipped spice cookie perfect for autumn, but believe it or not, I've never gotten around to making them before. I usually just make the rounds of local Greek festivals to get my fill. So, because I didn't feel like debuting yet another new recipe (I already had 2 other new cookie recipes planned), I decided to stick with what I know.

In my house, we make two kinds of Greek cookies, mostly around the holidays: koulourakia and kourambiedes. I forgot to take pictures while baking, so I included a later pic of koulourakia as an example of the traditional shape. The pictures of the cookies in the basket below are the ones from my shower.

The Cookie Buffet: Details

I knew fairly early on that I wanted a sweets buffet as part of my bridal shower. Well-coordinated candy buffets have such a stunning effect, that I fell in love with the idea of a Halloween or autumn themed candy buffet, something gorgeous like this or these. But, budgets are always an issue, so I downgraded to the idea of a Halloween candy buffet, for the reason that there would be plenty of Halloween candy around in the middle of October, so it would be easier and more economical. I was right on this point, it would have been cheap (relatively) and easy, but something about the concept of a Halloween candy buffet 2 weeks before Halloween still wasn't sitting right with me. And then I hit upon a great idea, and I have no clue why I didn't think of it earlier: a cookie buffet filled with homemade cookies!


This had all the elements I wanted: homey, rustic, baked, etc etc. And although I love baking anything and everything, cookies make me especially happy. So I chose my cookie types and got to baking, starting about 3 weeks before my shower. And I had to figure out a way to turn this: into the cookie buffet of my dreams!

Peanut Butter Cookie Perfection

Peanut butter is basically my favorite thing. Don't get me wrong, I love other desserts too, and I won't always go for the peanut butter option depending on my mood, but peanut butter is pretty much a sure thing for me in terms of enjoyment. And, PB cookies are my fiance's absolute favorite (much to my chagrin, he is not a sweet tooth, and rarely eats what I bake, so the opportunity to make something he'll eat is also a huge motivating factor). So, needless to say, I have been looking around forever for a peanut butter cookie recipe. A great recipe. A recipe that is a bold, yet traditional PB cookie. All of the cookies I've tried are not peanut buttery enough, or the consistency is wrong, or they don't have the right color/look. Up until now, my efforts have been in vain. But then I spied, on Bakerella's blog (where else?), a peanut butter cookie recipe. And the thing that caught my eye was the ingredients list -- there were only 3 primary ingredients, and none of them was flour!

Could it be true? Could the answer to the perfect peanut butter cookie really be so simple? I couldn't wait to find out, so I tried the recipe, detemined to make a Valentine's Day gift to Charlie out of them if they turned out well. And...they did...oh, they did.

Tuiles with Lemon Pudding and Blueberries

This month's challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

My very first Daring Baker’s Blogroll (http://www.thedaringbakers.com/) monthly challenge! Although I was excited about this challenge, January was a very busy month for me as I had several grants to write. Predictably, I wasn’t able to give this challenge my full attention, and left it until the very last minute, with the result that my tuiles weren’t quite what I had hoped for. I originally had dreams of being super fancy, maybe pairing my tuiles with a homemade mango mousse, but it was not to be. In the end, I have to say that I was only moderately pleased with the result, since I cut a lot of corners (literally as well as figuratively!). However, the recipe worked well enough that I can envision making tuiles again, and being infinitely more pleased with the results.

For those who do not know (neither did I until this challenge), tuiles are a lightweight, dry, crispy French cookie. The name actually means “tile” in French, because its traditional shape has the slight curve reminiscent of old-fashioned roof tiles. To my eyes, traditional tuiles look kind of like Pringles potato chips, although I’m sure pastry chefs everywhere would cringe at the comparison. They can actually be made into a variety of shapes, almost anything you want. The catch, however, is that the cookies can only be molded into shapes while they are still warm which, given their thinness, isn’t a whole lot of time.

There are a few different ways to make tuiles, but because they need to be so thin, spreading them over a stencil seemed the easiest to me. There are a number of sites that carry commercially available pre-cut tuiles molds (for example http://www.bakedeco.com/dept.asp?id=170). After some careful consideration (and a lack of time and budget) I decided to make my own round stencil, and make cup-shaped tuiles that could be filled. To that end, I bought a silicone mat, and traced a large circular cookie cutter to make 6 holes. I also grabbed a few little tartlet pans (which were only $ 0.59 each at BB&B) to use as molds.

We were given a choice of 3 recipes on the Daring Baker’s site, and I chose the basic sweet tuiles recipe taken from a book called “The Chocolate Book”, written by female Dutch Master chef Angélique Schmeinck. I, as it so happens, am NOT a master chef by any stretch of the imagination, and making this recipe underscores the tremendous amount of talent such baker-artists have.

Recipe:Yields: 20 small butterflies/6 large (butterflies are just an example)

Preparation time batter 10 minutes, waiting time 30 minutes, baking time: 5-10 minutes per batch

65 grams / ¼ cup / 2.3 ounces softened butter (not melted but soft)

60 grams / ½ cup / 2.1 ounces sifted confectioner’s sugar

1 sachet vanilla sugar (7 grams or substitute with a dash of vanilla extract)

2 large egg whites (slightly whisked with a fork)

65 grams / 1/2 cup / 2.3 ounces sifted all purpose flour

1 table spoon cocoa powder/or food coloring of choice

Butter/spray to grease baking sheet

Directions:

Preheat oven: 180C / 350

Using a hand whisk or a stand mixer fitted with the paddle (low speed) and cream butter, sugar and vanilla to a paste. Keep stirring while you gradually add the egg whites. Continue to add the flour in small batches and stir to achieve a homogeneous and smooth batter/paste. Be careful to not over mix.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes to firm up. (This batter will keep in the fridge for up to a week, take it out 30 minutes before you plan to use it).

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or grease with either butter/spray and chill in the fridge for at least 15 minutes. This will help spread the batter more easily if using a stencil/cardboard template such as the butterfly. Press the stencil on the bakingsheet and use an off sided spatula to spread batter. Leave some room in between your shapes. If so desired, mix a small part of the batter with cocoa or food coloring and a few drops of warm water until evenly colored. Use this colored batter in a paper piping bag and proceed to pipe decorations on the tuiles.

Bake in a preheated oven (180C/350F) for about 5-10 minutes or until the edges turn golden brown. Immediately release from baking sheet and proceed to shape/bend the cookies in the desired shape. These cookies have to be shaped when still warm, you might want to bake a small amount at a time or maybe put them in the oven to warm them up again. (Haven’t tried that). Or: place a baking sheet toward the front of the warm oven, leaving the door half open. The warmth will keep the cookies malleable.

If you don’t want to do stencil shapes, you might want to transfer the batter into a piping bag fitted with a small plain tip. Pipe the desired shapes and bake. Shape immediately after baking using for instance a rolling pin, a broom handle, cups, cones….

The batter came together quite easily, and spread easily. My stencil worked like a charm, and my cookies held their shape wonderfully. I kept a careful watch on them in the oven, I think I ended up baking them about 7 minutes or so. But when they came out, that’s when the problems started. The cookies set up faster than I thought they would, mostly I think because I overcooked them a tad, so the edges set up almost the instant they were pulled out of the oven. The tartlet-pans-as-molds didn’t work quite the way I had envisioned, no doubt because the cookies were already partially set, so I ended up with tuiles that were only vaguely curved as opposed to the tart-shaped tuiles I had pictured in my head. And the second half of my batch set up before I even got the chance to mold them. But, the cookies tasted good – light and crisp. Several recipes online have additives: orange zest/juice; lemon zest/juice; almond extract; ground almonds, etc. I think that, if I repeat this recipe, I’d like to add a citrus flavor, either lemon, lime or orange.

The instructions for this month’s challenge said to pair the tuiles with something “light and fruity.” I bandied around several (labor intensive) ideas before I finally settled on lemon pudding with blueberry garnish, because I am a sucker for a lemon-blueberry combination. Then I downgraded it to lemon curd instead of pudding, because I realized I wouldn’t even have time to make a cooked pudding. Then I downgraded it again to lite lemon yogurt because…well…I already had it, and I didn’t have time to go to the store. My baking is all about the juxtaposition between my job needs and everything else. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and I have to choose my battles. But the way I figure it, not only were my tuiles light, but lite. I definitely think lemon pudding (or even curd) and some whipped cream would be great, but they were still tasty with the yogurt, and the blueberries added a nice contrast.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate this challenge as a 6, mostly because of my own doing. There is definite room for me to improve, although with so many other interesting things to bake, I’m not sure I am motivated to do so. Even if the tuiles had come out looking perfect, I am not entirely sure that they would be worth the effort, even though I am leaning towards trying again at some point. I have to admit, I would like to take some time to master their cousin, the fortune cookie. I actually attempted a fortune cookie fold with one of the tuiles, having watched the technique on tv, but mine basically just looked like someone had taken a round cookie and folded it into quarters.