More Cheese More Chocolate » Cookies

Warning: May Contain Bacon

Kirsten — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:51:21 +0000

When I bake sweet treats I usually only eat one or two servings before getting bored with whatever it is and end up doing one of three things: sticking the remainder in the freezer, pawning them off on friends, or letting them sit around until they get stale and throwing them away. Because of the guilt I feel for wasting baked goods, I don’t make them all that often. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t spend half my day clicking through food websites and finding tasty treats that I want to try.

Enter the Women’s Law Student Association annual bake sale, a three day event with the proceeds benefitting a very good cause. Now that I have an excuse to try out recipes and not have to eat all of the results, I’ve been baking up a storm. I wish we could have bake sales every week.

At the top of my list of things I wanted to bake were these Compost Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar, which I found on The Amateur Gourmet. They’re called Compost Cookies because you can dump in ingredients of your choosing from around the kitchen – baking items and snack foods. Some of the suggested snack foods are potato chips, pretzels, and goldfish crackers, and it was the potato chips that really sold me. Salty and sweet in cookie form? I’m in!

You get to add in 3 cups total of baking items and snack foods, so I added pretty much equal parts chocolate chips, caramels, pistachios, potato chips, cheez-its, and bacon. The bacon was kind of unnecessary, but once I had the idea in my head it would not go away and I had to go for it. To avoid upsetting any vegetarians at the bake sale I made labels warning of the possible presence of bacon. It’s unfortunate that they had to miss out on some great cookies.

Compost Cookies

From Momofuku Milk Bar, recipe available here

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

3/4 cup light brown sugar

1 tbsp corn syrup (I skipped this)

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

1 3/4 cup flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups baking ingredients (chocolate chips, candies, pb chips, caramels, nuts)

1 1/2 cups snack items (potato chips, pretzels, crackers, bacon – that’s a snack food, right?)

Cream the butter and sugars for a couple minutes until fluffy and pale. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Add the eggs and vanilla and mix to combine. Turn the speed up to medium-high, set a timer for 10 minutes, and let it go.

It will get even lighter and fluffier after the 10 minutes and look similar to this.

During the 10 minutes of whipping, you can get the other ingredients ready.

I had some salted caramels laying around that I chopped up into smaller pieces.

The baking ingredients: chocolate chips, caramels, pistachios.

Plus chips and cheez-its.

Plus about 1/4 cup bacon. I used more potato chips to fill up the measuring cup to hit the 1 1/2 cups mark.

Snacking + baking goodness.

When the 10 minutes have gone by and the mixture is light and fluffy, add the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Beat for 45-60 seconds until all of the dry ingredients have been incorporated, but don’t overmix.

Add the baking and snack items, and beat on low speed until just incorporated.

Use an ice cream scoop or a big spoon to scoop the dough onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. The original recipe tells you to use a 6-oz ice cream scoop, and I have no idea what size that is so I just scoop out portions that were about the size of a kiwi. A kiwi? I’m not very good with coming up with comparison sizes.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate for anywhere between 1 hour and 1 week. Do not bake immediately!

When the dough has chilled, preheat the oven to 400. Arrange the balls of dough so they’re 4″ apart on the baking sheets. Bake for 9-11 minutes, browned on the edges and starting to brown on the center. The cookies pictured above and below? Not quite done. I had to throw them back in for a minute or two.

These cookies are really, really, really good. They’re wonderfully chewy and full of exciting treasures. Remember those candles they sold in the 90s with charms and doo-dads that revealed themselves as the candle melted? These are those candles in cookie form. Next time I will probably skip out on the bacon and use pretzels or crackers, but experimenting by throwing in random ingredients from the cupboard is half the fun of it.

Filed under: Chocolate, Cookies

Oatmeal Raisin + Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Kirsten — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:04:02 +0000

Enough of the filler posts, it’s time for some food! I was on a big baking kick a couple weeks ago, and one of the things I made were these chewy oatmeal cookies. I divided the dough and did half oatmeal raisin and half oatmeal chocolate chip. While they weren’t quite as good as the oatmeal chocolate chip cookies they have at Potbelly, they were probably the best oatmeal cookies I’ve ever made. They’re more on the chewy side, and they have the perfect amount of spice to give them a little something without overpowering the raisins/chocolate chips.

Oatmeal Cookies

From Better Homes & Gardens

3/4 cup butter, softened

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups rolled oats

1-1/2 cups raisins, chocolate chips, chopped nuts, or any other add-ins (I split the dough in half and used 3/4 cup raisins and 3/4 cup chocolate chips)

Preheat the oven to 375.

In a small bowl cover the raisins with hot or boiling water.

Pour off the water after 10 or 15 minutes and you should have a bowl of plump, juicy raisins. Far superior to dry, stuck-in-your-teeth raisins. You might need to dry them off a little more with paper towels before adding them to the cookie dough.

Beat the butter on medium to high speed for about 30 seconds.

Add the sugars, cinnamon, cloves, baking soda, baking powder and salt.

Beat until it’s all combined into this sugary mixture.

Add the eggs and vanilla.

Beat until combined.

Add the flour, and beat until combined.

Using a spoon and a little muscle, stir in the oats.

I split the dough in half at this point, mixing raisins in with half of it…

…and chocolate chips with the other half.

Yum.

Drop by the spoonful onto an ungreased cookie sheet. A rounded-teaspoon drop of dough will make about 48 cookies. I used a regular spoon and ended up with somewhere between 24 and 30.

Bake for 8-10 minutes (slightly longer for larger cookies) until the edges are golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

The oatmeal chocolate chips are best eaten warm, while the chocolate is melted.

Filed under: Chocolate, Cookies

Run, Run, As Fast As You Can

Kirsten — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:08:00 +0000

Last night I took a break from (thinking about) studying for my last final to make gingerbread cookies. My mom always makes spice cookies around this time of year, which I suppose are pretty much the same as gingerbread cookies, except they’re rolled into a ball and coated with sugar instead of being cut into the shape of a man. A man is so much more exciting than a circle, though, with one exception* that you will see later.

I used a recipe from Simply Recipes, and it turned out to be a cinch to make and produced quite tasty results.

The best part of the recipe, which I suppose is true of any cut-out cookies if you put your mind to it, is that you don’t need any special cookie cutter. You can either make a stencil or, as I did, freehand it. I ended up with a few pretty freakish gingerbread people, but generally they turned out well.

Once you get bored with cutting out little people, you can cut out other random objects. I made letters, a dreidel, a crown, some blobs, an apostrophe and something even more exciting that you will see below.

Hog pile! Or Russian (gingerbread) dolls.

*Pac Man!

These cookies are decent on their own, but a big glob of frosting makes them even better. I had some leftover frosting from my last batch of these, which allowed me to focus my attention back on thinking about starting to study instead of on whipping up a batch of frosting. What a relief that was!

Update: A smear of Nutella on a gingerbread cookie is absolutely wonderful.

Posted in Cookies

Peanut Butterfinger Crunch Cookies

Kirsten — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:23:00 +0000

These cookies are so good. If you’re at all a fan of peanut butter cookies, you will love them. If you’ve ever considered eating a peanut butter cookie but went for a chocolate chip instead, you will try them and you will love them. My mom and her friend spent a summer on a quest to find the perfect peanut butter cookie, and this recipe was the winner. I’m not really sure where it originally came from, but it came to me via an email from my mom. I just copied and pasted the recipe, so read it, bake the cookies, and don’t waste your time on another subpar peanut butter cookie.

Peanut Butterfinger Crunch Cookies

3/4 cup sugar
2/3 cup golden brown sugar
1/2 cup unsalted butter; room temperature
2 large egg whites
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 1/4 cup peanut butter, chunky (do not use freshly ground or “old-fashioned” style peanut butter)
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
5 2.1 oz. Butterfinger bars; cut into 1/2″ pieces (about 15 fun size bars)
Chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease 2 cookie sheets. Blend sugars, butter, egg whites and vanilla until fluffy, stopping once to scrape bowl, about 1 minute. Add peanut butter and mix until combined. Add flour, baking soda and salt and blend until just combined. Stir in chopped Butterfingers. Mound dough by 1 1/2 Tbsp. onto cookie sheets, about 2 in. apart. Flatten slightly. Bake until dry in appearance and centers still slightly soft to touch, about 15 minutes. Cool on cookie sheets 3 minutes. Transfer to rack and cool completely. Store in airtight container.

Combine the sugars, butter, egg whites and vanilla in the bowl of the mixer.

Beat for about a minute, until it looks something like this.

Add the peanut butter, and mix until combined.

Then add the baking soda and salt to the flour. I just wanted to show off my new salt container. I get so annoyed when I’m baking and I have to pour salt out of the little spout and into a measuring spoon. It always up everywhere, and I waste a ton of salt in the process. I finally got fed up and bought this $.99 jar at Hobby Lobby. It is so convenient, and I’m thinking about dropping another buck to get a container for my baking soda. That little flap on the box will no longer be getting in the way of my measuring spoon.

Add the flour mixture to the bowl, and mix.

Add the Butterfinger pieces and a handful of chocolate chips. I don’t think the original recipe called for this, but my mom does it. And who am I to disagree?

Mix by hand until all of the delicious parts are evenly distributed.

I used an ice cream scoop to spoon out the cookies. Place them about 2″ apart on a greased cookie sheet.

Bake for about 15 minutes.

I took some of these over to a friend’s for dessert for our pre-class dinner, and they were eaten as both an appetizer and as dessert. Yum yum yum.

Posted in Chocolate, Cookies