July 2009

(All three cookie recipes this week came from “Big Fat Cookies” by Elinor Klivans.)

Since my last two posts were so weak, I decided this week I would bake a few things. My co-workers haven’t been the recipient of treats for a while (I seem to have had lots of events lately that I’ve taken baked goods to), so this week was for them.

I started with Chocolate Chip Cookie in a Cookie. This recipe begins with a fairly standard chocolate chip cookie dough:

You then scoop out ten cookies and place them on a cookie sheet, or in my case, My Precious:

Those cookies are baked and left to cool:

Mine baked into each other because I put them too close together. But it didn’t matter, because once the cookies cooled, I broke them into little pieces and mixed them back into the cookie dough. I didn’t let my cookies cool quite enough, and I ended up mixing melted chocolate into my cookie dough, rather than chips that had re-solidified. I don’t think it mattered too much though. Once the cookie bits were stirred back in, the cookies were scooped out and baked:

Next up was a Peanut Butter Cup Cookie. This is your fairly standard Peanut Butter Cookie, except that it has about nine ounces of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups chopped and added to the dough. I love how the chopped Peanut Butter Cup pieces look like little pies:

The Peanut Butter Cup pieces were stirred into the cookie dough:

The cookies were scooped out and baked:

The final cookie was a S’mores Crisp, which I was super excited about. It was made up of crushed graham cracker crumbs, mini marshmallows, milk chocolate chips and a few other standard cookie ingredients. A problem presented itself fairly quickly, as soon as I started to form the balls of dough. There were far more chocolate chips and marshmallows than binding ingredients. The balls of dough didn’t want to stick together, and there seemed to be a TON of marshmallows. The recipe indicated that most of these marshmallows would caramelize (which the cook seemed very happy about), but I knew that if those marshmallows were on the bottom of the cookie, they were going to melt all over the place.

And I was right:

Those melted marshmallows formed brittle, sharp edges (that I was mostly able to snap off once they cooled). But the bigger problem was that lack of binding ingredient. Anywhere were too many chips or marshmallows had touched each other was soft and separated. Boo. I ended up throwing out about half the cookies after they’d baked because there was nothing to keep them together.

The cookies that survived though, got drizzled with melted chocolate:

And here are the finished products:

These went over very well with my co-workers. The S’mores Crisps seemed to be the most popular, with the Peanut Butter Cup Cookie a close second. I have to say, the Peanut Butter Cookies were pretty awesome. I’m not the biggest Peanut Butter Cookie fan, as they always seem to be dry and crumbly. These had almost a chewy texture (almost, but not quite, which is perfect, as a chewy Peanut Butter Cookie would be weird), and didn’t crumble! Maybe the chocolate from the Reese’s Cups added a little moisture? I dunno, but they were grrrreat!

I’m pretty sure my next two projects (the final ones for Columbus! sniff sniff) will go to my co-workers as well. I haven’t decided what next week holds, but I just got a new cookbook today, so maybe I’ll find something in there….