Back to Cookies.

I posted this photo earlier but I never gave the recipe for the cookie! And it's really good, so it needs posting.

Chocolate Toffee Cookies
Adapted from Bon Appetit

1 lb dark, semisweet chocolate (chopped)
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 stick butter
1 3/4 cups packed brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
5 1.4 oz chocolate covered toffee bars (I used Heath)
1 cup toasted pecans or walnuts
sea salt for a final sprinkling.

Combine flour, salt and baking powder in a small bowl and set aside. Meanwhile, melt chocolate and butter in a large double boiler. Once melted, remove the bowl from the double boiler and allow to cool down to room temp.
In a standing mixer, beat eggs and brown sugar for 5 minutes, until they are smooth and thick. Slowly add in chocolate and vanilla. Next, sift in flour mixture, chopped toffee and nuts. Chill batter for 45 minutes. It is really thin before chilling, but it firms right up in the fridge.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a pan with parchment paper, and drop spoonfuls of dough 2 inches apart on the pan. Sprinkle with sea salt. Bake for 12 minutes- they are really good underdone. They should have a crackled appearance on top.

Cookie Party!

Merry christmas, Y'all. My brother is visiting and puking his brains out, so you can tell we are having a good time. Today while he moans and sighs around the house I am going to be roasting lamb bones and making duck confit. Yes, we are having cassoulet! I can't imagine that the smell of baked lamb bones will help his situation, but then, I don't care. It's worth it.
Also on the roster, cookies and danishes! I will be turing dough and taking photos for later when I can be a better blogger.
Enjoy your holiday and bake some cookies.

12 Days of Cookies!!!

via lottie & doof

I want to make them all!!!!! Maybe I will!!!!!!!!!

Also in my future:

Dinner tonight: Roast Chicken. It is SO cold in Portland tonight.

For holiday secret snacking 3 Layer Peppermint Bark

I need to find A replacement for Shane

Maybe I will drink a bowl of Aristocrat Sparkling Punch

And... I want to go to there.

Black Pepper Spice Cookies with Glaze

I wanted to make Tartine's glazed gingerbread when I woke up last Sunday morning. It was cold and rainy (shockingly) and I knew I needed to make a treat for teatime at a friends. The problem was that I didn't have ginger or cloves- two of the most important ingredients! So instead of gingerbread, I made black pepper spice cookies with plenty of salt and a light glaze. They were amazingly soft and satisfyingly spicy, salty and sweet. I burned the hell out of one batch and we are still can't stop ourselves from eating them. But then, we are pigs.

Make the dough one day in advance for best results, or bake it right away and it's still great.

Black Pepper Spice Cookies with Glaze

3 3/4 cups AP flour
1 T cocoa powder
2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
4 tsp cardamom
1 1/2 tsp Jamaican allspice
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temp
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup blackstrap molasses
2 T honey

Glaze
1/2 cup confectioners sugar
1 T water

Beat butter until creamy, and then add sugar and mix until smooth. Scrape bowl with a spatula and then add the egg. Next in, molasses and honey. Mix until blended, and scrape down the bowl again. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, spices, cocoa and baking soda. Slowly add this into the wet mix. Beat on low until a ball forms. At this point, you can either refrigerate the dough overnight or chill it for 20 minutes like I did. I'm sure its better if you let it sit overnight (it makes a world of difference with chocolate chip cookies).
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Flour your work surface and roll out dough to about 1/3 inch thick in the shape of a rectangle. You may now cut out cookies as I did, or gently roll over the whole thing with a patterned rolling pin. And if you have a patterned rolling pin, send it to me immediately and never expect to see it again! Cut the pattered dough into tiles that are 3" by 4", or whatever size you prefer. I made both teardrop cookies and circle cookies, and then I rolled over them with a fake ear of corn for texture. You can roll whatever textured items you may have laying around the house over the dough! This comes into play when you glaze the cookies and the glaze nestles into the pattern quite beautifully.
Place a sheet of parchment paper over your cookie sheet, and bake the cookies for about 7 minutes. I did one batch for 10 minutes and the bottoms were burned. The next batch I baked for a mere 7 minutes and they were slightly underdone. When they cooled down, they were perfect.
While the cookies bake, whisk together confectioners sugar and water for the glaze. After you take the cookies out of the oven, let cool for a few minutes and then brush the glaze over the cookies. Do not freeze these, though I don't know why you would even try.

Serve with coffee, or on the rim of a Guiness float with vanilla ice cream!

I can't wait to make them again.

Adult Spaghetti O's

As expected, Saturday was a long and strenuous night of waiting tables. And still I followed through (which, for some reason was greeted with surprise) and made us a staff meal. When I was creating the menu in my mind for this night I really thought about the things I want out of staff meal- something warm and fun, and dessert, and I went from there.

Actually, the preparation started on Friday with the creation of 36 hour cookie dough. The key to perfect chocolate chip cookies is letting the dough rest in the fridge for a while-24 to 36 hours. Saturday (perhaps the sunniest and nicest day of the year so far) I worked in my kitchen lovingly preparing tiny meatballs, fresh cherry tomato red sauce and homemade blue cheese and buttermilk dressing. My idea was to have adult spaghetti O night, but I could only find alphabet pasta so that was the downside. I made the wonderful sauce and then pureed the shit out of it, so it was thin and saucy like the canned kind. Then I added in the tiny meatballs, and finished the whole deal with shakey-can cheese. I really know how to party.
I still had 4 tables when I started pulling the meal together at work. The kitchen, I guess pretending to mimic me, started asking about dinner at like 9:15 so I knew I had to hustle. It was very stressful, but if they were trying to teach me a lesson it did not work. I got right back there, bossed people around and got the meal going. I had already made the cookie dough and the pasta sauce with balls at home- at work I needed to boil the pasta, cut the iceburg lettuce into wedges and artfully drizzle with blue cheese dressing, and bake the cookies off. Meanwhile, I also had to dazzle my customers and keep everyone happy. Somehow it all came together perfectly. All of our customers left, we pulled the tables together, and sat down as a family. It started out so nicely, with lots of gratitude and sweetness. Things turned less sweet when bodily fluids and 7-11 became the focus of conversation, but everyone shut up again once the cookies hit the table. Warm, chewy and crispy cookies with a sprinkle of sea salt on top. Try this recipe- it can actually make boys stop talking about their penises for 2 minutes.

COOKIE PARTY!!!!

There was a stowaway yolk in one of the eggs I got at the farmers market. Does a double yolk mean that there would have been twin chicklets? It breaks my heart to think of it since twins are my fave, but I guess since they went into chocolate chip cookie dough it was a fair break. Yay! Cookies for lunch!
Here was Kevin's questionable quote of the day: "I don't like warm or soft cookies". Things like that keep me up at night, worrying about his health.


CHOCOLATE CHUNK COOKIES WITH CRYSTALIZED GINGER

2 sticks of butter (room temp)
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 large eggs (one with a double yolk, if you're lucky)
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. fleur de sel
2 cups AP flour
1 cup pastry flour
1 lb. 70% cacao chocolate, chopped.
1/4 cup crystalized ginger, chopped.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. I used my kitchenaid mixer for this whole process and you should too, if you have one. Fit the mixer with paddle attachment. First cream the butter and sugars together until smooth and wonderful. Don't forget to scrape the bowl a few times throughout the process. Add the eggs one at a time, beat after each addition. Then add the vanilla. I usually add too much on purpose, but maybe I shouldn't tell you that. Put the mixer on medium-slow and add the rest of the dry ingredients in the order that I list them. If you only have AP flour, you can get away with it. Have a few glasses of wine and you won't give a damn about finesse. Otherwise, pastry flour really does make a difference. Drop small amounts of dough onto a cookie sheet and bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Here is my favorite trick: shape the dough into a small ball, but then twist the ball and pull apart- this splits the ball in half and leaves you with jagged sides. Stick the pieces back together, but with the jagged sides facing up. This texturizes your cookies and makes them look like models. I did not do this step today so please examine my photo to see what a smooth finish looks like. I'll tell you what- it doesn't look half as good as the textured finish. Again, this is minutia and should be ignored if you are drinking.

Happy VD

Though not with my sweetheart this Valentines day, I'm celebrating very seriously with my mom and brother, in Maine. My grandmother's funeral is tomorrow, and so we all came home for the weekend to celebrate her life and to be together. My mom just made a thousand shortbread cookies for the funeral- check them out! She is a professional- sometimes I forget that she owned an all-cookie bakery in Portsmouth, NH before I was born called Harts and Oats. She CLAIMS she didn't name it after Hall and Oates, and that her last name is Hart and her partner's last name was Oates, but I think we all know better. If I can wrestle the recipe out of her later, I will post it. They are amazing cookies, hardly sweet at all.