TWD: Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops, Take Two

Yeah yeah yeah, I've made these before. But here's the problem with being one of the first dozen or so members of TWD - there just aren't that many recipes chosen that I haven't made! There's flan and creme brulee and pecan sticky buns, and that's about it. And with a four day vacation in Asheville this past weekend, none of those seemed particularly appealing. Lots of work, and no real way to pass them off to others. But chocolate malted whopper drops? Yep, those sounded just about right. I ended up making a half batch and tucking them away into a couple gift bags of assorted cookies.

I'm just going to assume that they were quite appreciated - as you can go back and read, my reaction to these was *ahem* quite positive. While there aren't too many recipes from Dorie's book that have been made multiple times in my kitchen, this was one I felt deserved it. Happily, so are these cookies, the peanut butter version without any chunky add-ins. Logs of the dough are happily chilling in my freezer for the time when I'm no longer in a sugar coma. So, probably in a month or so.

In the meantime - look! We had a white Christmas!

Last Week: Cardamom Crumb Cake
Next Week: Midnight Crackles

TWD: Cardamom Crumb Cake

Every year on Christmas morning, we do the exact same thing. It's actually scary how fine-tuned it is, actually. My sister is never able to sleep, so she'll get up around 4 or 5a and just sit in one of our wingback chairs and stare at the Christmas tree. If, as is most often the case, she has been the final decider on tree choice, the angel at the top will hit our ceiling. The rest of us tend towards smaller trees, but Rach always pushes for it to be as tall as possible. By 6a, my mom is up, feeding the animals. When we were younger, that meant horses, dogs and cats. Horses went, then came back, then went, sheep came and went, and now we have goats and chickens. Dogs and cats are always around. I'll be up by 6:30a or so, my dad shortly after. We'll make it down just in time to see Rach and Mom start mixing up the coffee cake. It's the same coffee cake every year - a sour cream coffee cake from the Silver Palate cookbook. Right before the bundt pan gets slipped into the oven, my dad will brew coffee, my mom will steep tea, and we'll settle around the tree. Our presents are even in the same places each year, by age, counterclockwise. Rach and I will open our presents (I always take longer, as I can't help but meticulously peel away the wrapping paper. I've never been a rip-into-the-presents person.). By the time my parents start opening theirs, the coffee cake is out of the oven and cooling. Thirty minutes out, and we're settling around our dinner table with fresh cups of coffee and tea and wedges of coffee cake.

 
Thinking about this makes me a bit sad that I'm not going home for Christmas this year. Rach isn't either. It makes me wonder if my parents are still going to make that coffee cake. I would, if J and I weren't going to Asheville over Christmas. I highly doubt the Grove Park Inn would let me use their oven on Christmas morning just so I could have my standard, treasured Christmas morning ritual. And anyway, it wouldn't be quite the same - I'd have made it instead of my mom and sister. Another big change would be that once it gets turned out (and we breathe a sigh of relief if nothing sticks to the bundt pan), J wouldn't know to fight me for the streusel. Because, as everyone knows, the nutty crumbly streusel is the best part of any coffee cake.

Luckily, I at least got a bit of an early taste of streusel this year. It uses walnuts instead of pecans, but I'll forgive it - the cardamom and the perfect amount of crunch it gives to this cake make up for the swap. Oh! And the cardamom! I got to use my whole cardamom that I had picked up at Cost Plus World Market months ago - painstakingly peeling the shells from the cardamom itself and giddily using our new spice grinder for the first time. The kitchen smelled amazing, even after leaving out the orange (I didn't look very closely at the recipe before my grocery trip...) While I packaged most of the cake up for gifts, J tried a piece soon after I made it. No words, just mmm's. It won't dethrone the Silver Palate coffee cake, but it's a pretty darned good substitute when home is so far away.

On a slightly related note, when the weather starts getting colder (it's snowing as we speak! errr, as I write!), I inevitably turn to the Silver Palate cookbook. I have the original version, but a 25th anniversary edition came out a while ago as well. In it are some of my favorite meals: simply perfect pasta carbonara, a fantastic chili (it has olives!). If I had been a bit more crazy, we would have made the food for our wedding ourselves, and their pork and fruit ragout and winter vegetable soup would have been placed center stage. I find it funny that I leap on every new cookbook and baking book, but always turn back to the same cookbooks I grew up with - the Joy of Cooking is another standby. This is just to say - for those who struggled deciding what cookbook to buy a loved one? Old reliables should be a part of any kitchen.

Last Week: Apple Cranberry Family Muffins
Next Week: Rewind! (you'll just have to come back and see, huh?)

TWD: Apple-Cranberry Family Muffins

As a quick note regarding the chewy / cakey / crispy cookie debate that has evidently entered our little household, J dropped another bombshell on me. This was shortly after letting me know that my cakey sugar cookies slathered with frosting were not welcome, and it came in the form of the brownie debate. People, he likes cakey brownies. Cakey. Not fudgy, not chewy, not chunky with chocolate and nuts. Cakey.

Who is this man I married?!?!

Is it too early to file for divorce?!

(On a side note, our joke that started mere hours after getting married is to threaten each other with divorce. Now that I think of it, I believe it started a day or so before getting married, in the debate on whether it was too soon to file for divorce. This is obviously a joke, as he does laundry and dishes and provides me with wine and dinner after stressful days in lab.)


So. On that note, I defiantly went and turned a cake that neither of us would eat into one that I would eat. So there. Out went the coconut, in went the cranberries! After my desperate rant about not being able to find my beloved Ocean Spray cranberries, they exploded into stores - the day before Thanksgiving. I guess cranberries are divas who require being fashionably late to any party. All that meant was that I frantically stocked up on, oh, four or five bags of cranberries, shoved them in the freezer, and promptly... did nothing with them.

That is, until I saw this week's TWD pick (for those asking, TWD stands for Tuesdays with Dorie, where we bake weekly from Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours) - apple coconut family cake. Containing a cup of shredded coconut, I knew that this would not do. I only had a couple options - leave it out and hope for the best, replace it with walnuts or pecans, or replace it with cranberries. And after the upsetting cookie and brownie realizations, I needed a me-only sweet - cranberries it is!


Except that I'd like to be able to hop in the hot tub when we go to Asheville over Christmas, so mini-sizing them was a necessity. What?!? I don't have classes anymore, and can't bank on my grad school peeps to still be around to eat them for me! So half recipe. Muffins. As is often the case with Dorie's recipes, these weren't huge risers, probably due to the amount of apple weighing them down. I used sour cream instead of yogurt because we don't eat yogurt and I already had sour cream for making cheesecake this coming week. And instead of placing apple slices on top (which some people mentioned not liking), I just sprinkled some sparkling sugar on top for some festive flair. Look at me, I'm Martha Stewart!

And while we don't normally post recipes unless we're hosting that particular week, I feel I've made enough tweaks that I should post the recipe as I made it. It's below the TWD picks.

Last Week: Translucent Maple Tuiles
Next Week: Cardamom Crumb Cake


Apple-Cranberry Muffins
adapted from Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours

1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp salt
1 small apple, peeled and cored
1 large egg
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup sour cream, yogurt, or Greek yogurt
3 Tbsp canola or vegetable oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup cranberries
granulated, raw, or sparkling sugar, optional

Preheat the oven to 350*F. Spray 6 or 7 cavities of a muffin pan, or line with muffin papers.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, ginger, and salt in a medium bowl.

Cut the apple into a small dice. Slice the cranberries in half (yes, it may seem fiddly, but it means more even cranberry distribution in the muffins = win!).

In a measuring cup (because I'm lazy and refuse to wash more than I absolutely need to), measure out the sour cream. Add the oil, egg, vanilla, and sugar. Whisk or stir until combined. Pour over the flour mixture and stir just until combined. Add in the apple and cranberries and stir until evenly distributed (less is more).

Using a large cookie scoop, fill the muffin cavities to the brim. Again, this isn't a vigorous riser, so there won't be batter catastrophes. You'll get 6-7 muffins. Sprinkle the top with granulated, raw, or sparkling sugar if you'd like. Bake for 18-20 minutes, or until a knife inserted comes out clean. Pop them out of the pan right away (otherwise they will get soggy) and cool on a rack.

Virtual Cookie Exchange: Chewy Sugar Cookies

It's funny that the minute you say you bake for fun, people draw back. They ooh and aah and flat out refuse to bake anything for you from then on out. Or if they do, it's with all sorts of apologies - I know it's not as good as you can make or some nonsense like that. Bah. It makes doing things like cookie exchanges difficult. Not that it isn't difficult already for me, since most of the grad students in my department hightailed it home after finals were finished or projects were turned in. Not so many people here in the area still who would do a cookie exchange with me. (That's probably a good thing, as I really don't need more cookies in my life...)


But the thought behind it stays, even if you're doing a virtual cookie exchange. These events can be approached in a few ways: you bake a cookie with family history, you bake a cookie with mass appeal, or you bake a cookie that's a bit off-the-wall as a way to stretch your friends' palates and brains when it comes to Christmas cookies. Any way you look at it though, you're baking for them, no one else. So when Di invited a big group of us to take part in a holiday cookie recipe exchange, I was thrilled but didn't know what angle I wanted to take. I've already shared my thimble cookies, and there are so many "weird" cookie recipes that I've made thanks to TWD... So I had to go with a cookie that had mass appeal. Chewy sugar cookies.


You see, the only masses I'll be baking for during the next few weeks are, well, J. And he patiently puts up with my more random baking adventures with strange ingredient combinations. He overlooks my chocolate + mint hatred despite loving the combo in anything possible. But when I mentioned making sugar cookies using the recipe from my mom's neighbor growing up, he got a bit of a pained expression on his face. You see, he likes chewy cookies. Not cakey, not crisp, chewy. And I can handle that when it comes to chocolate chip cookies, molasses cookies, ginger cookies and peanut butter cookies, but sugar cookies? For me, sugar cookies are for cakiness and slathering on of good ol' American buttercream frosting. I hemmed and hawed.


But in the end, chewy it was. Because this is a cookie exchange, and it's the holidays, damnit. Which means thinking of others and all of that tinsel-lined and ornament-bedecked goodness. It means baking what he wants rather than what I want. Which, in the end, means I get to see him grin goofily after his first bite into one - game, set, match. This baking for others thing? I could totally get behind it.

Di will have a roundup of all the sugared craziness by the end of the week - I'll try to remember to post a link to it here so that all of you can hunt for new Christmas cookie favorites!

Chewy Sugar Cookies
from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

3/4 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup light corn syrup
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 large egg
2 1/2 cups flour
additional 1/4 cup granulated sugar, for coating

Preheat the oven to 375*F and line a baking sheet with parchment.

Beat the butter until it is soft and homogeneous (no cooler lumps, it should appear smooth). Add the sugars, corn syrup, vanilla, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Beat until thoroughly combined before adding the egg. Stir in the flour - it will be quite stiff and difficult to get all of the flour into the sugar mixture, but just take your time. It'll get there.

Place the 1/4 cup granulated sugar in a shallow bowl. Using a teaspoon cookie scoop, scoop out cookie dough and roll into balls. Drop each into the sugar, rolling around until they are fully coated. Place them on the prepared baking sheet, leaving at least two inches between each one.

Bake the cookies for 7-9 minutes (I baked mine for 7). They will have just the slightest hint of browning at the edges and will still be quite puffed and rounded - don't worry, they'll fall flat when they get out of the oven and cool a bit. Transfer them to a cooling rack immediately, but be careful since they will be a bit fragile.

Makes about 4 dozen cookies

TWD: Translucent Maple Tuiles

Oh yeah, I am all over this. Two more days of class, then a day off, then one final Friday, one Saturday. Let's do this shit.


At least, that's what I'm trying to say to myself. Really, what I want to say is - Let's blow this popsicle stand and make some cookies. Because people? People! It snowed on Saturday. And the snow stuck. There were adults, college students, and lots of little kids racing around, bumping into each other because they couldn't look where they were going. They were too busy watching the snow fall. Mesmerized. Me? I was more than thrilled - snow and sub-freezing temps? Only a couple months late, but it's go-time. Go-time for tea, for soups or long-cooked sauces, for cookies, for Christmas music. (The jazz holidays station on Pandora? Best. Thing. Ever.) There has been lots of tea drinking and book reading under blankets. I keep restraining myself from baking sugar cookies and decorating them, because I know I'll eat them all. (Except I don't have to restrain myself too hard - whoever heard of a grocery store running out of flour mere weeks before Christmas?!?)


And. And. I got to bake with people. Yes, they live hundreds of miles away, but I never get to bake with them. My schedule is teh suck (at least until this coming Sunday - hee!), and stoopid classes keep getting in the way. So when I chatted with Kayte, Nancy, Tracey, and Margaret and the timing actually worked to Twitterbake with them, I was over the moon. Because while baking is fun in and of itself, baking with people is beyond kickass. I miss my Wisconsin baking buddy like whoa, and have yet to find similarly crazy baker people in the Chapel Hill area.


So tuiles. They were baked, with much chatter about size (I made mine slightly bigger than marble-sized) and baking temperature (350*F for me, but my oven runs hot so that'd be ~375*F for most people) and shaping methods (to shape or not to shape!). I was not the only one to thank god this was a much sturdier tuile recipe than the one from a Daring Bakers challenge a while back - no cracking, no weirdness. I could scoop them off the parchment with my offset spatula and drape them on a rolling pin and voila! Pretty little curved tuiles. Now, I've been eating them plain, but I have a hunch that there are a couple good options for these. If you're fussy and patient (of which I am neither), I'd suggest rolling them around something with a very small diameter and making cylinders out of them. Whip together some whipped cream, mascarpone, and a splash of rum, and fill your little cigar cookies. If you're less patient, leave them flat or just slightly curved, and just pipe or dollop the same mixture on top. Plain or adorned, these would make a really wonderful and different addition to a cookie tray.


Last Week: Devilish Shortcakes
Next Week: Apple-Coconut Family Cake