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Week Forty-Nine: Gingerbread Cookies

December 16, 2009 in "Martha Stewart Baking Handbook", Cookies, Weekly Baked Good | 1 comment

(This week’s recipe came from “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook”.)

Oh, Martha, is there anything you can’t do?

I knew I had to make gingerbread cookies at some point this holiday season, and when I quizzed a couple of my co-workers on what kind of treat they’d like me to bake, they immediately said gingerbread cookies. Who am I to deny my fans?

Martha’s recipe is a little bit different from most gingerbread cookie recipes, in that it incorporates fresh ginger into the cookies. The recipe is incredibly simple to put together, although I found it took some convincing to get the dough out of my mixing bowl and onto a sheet of parchment without crumbling into bits. I had to manhandle it a little bit to get it rolled into a ball.

Martha recommends chilling the dough in the fridge for at least an hour before rolling it out, which I agree with. But then she gets a little crazy. She suggest you roll out the dough onto a cookie sheet, then freeze it for 15 minutes before cutting out the shapes, and then putting the shapes on another cookie sheet and freezing THOSE for 15 minutes before baking. I don’t know about all that. My dough never really got too soft, and after I froze the first sheet of rolled out dough for fifteen minutes, I couldn’t get a cookie cutter through it for about ten, which seemed to me like it canceled out the freezing…but whatevs. I’m sure Martha had a reason for all the freezing. I just found it unnecessary.

Once my cookies were baked and cooled, I went to work trying to make Royal Icing once again. If you’ll remember, back on Father’s Day, I tried to make Royal Icing for the hammer and saw cookies I made for my dad, with disastrous results. This time, it went a little better. My icing was still a little too runny, and no amount of powdered sugar could get it to the consistency I wanted. As you’ll see in the photos of the finished cookies, my icing didn’t spread too much, but it still wasn’t perfect. I’ll keep trying in 2010.

Unfortunately, once again, I took zero photos of the production process of these cookies. But here are a few of my favorite finished cookies:
Diaper Gingerbread Man
Gingerbread Man wearing a diaper (or briefs, you decide)

Christmas Tree Gingerbread cookie
Gingerbread Christmas Tree

Star Gingerbread cookies
Gingerbread Star

Cyclops with Claws Gingerbread Man
Gingerbread Cyclops with Claws

Whew! I’m caught up again! Only three more weeks in this project..it’s crazy to think that I’ve actually stuck it out and can see the finish line just around the corner.

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Week Forty-Seven: Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

December 16, 2009 in Cookies, Internet Recipes, Weekly Baked Good | 1 comment

(This week’s recipe came from allrecipes.com)

A few weeks back, Rob and I went to visit our friends Alison and Brian in Scarsdale. They have two kids who are four and two, and it was my responsibility to bring dessert. I tried to think of something that kids and adults would like that wasn’t just a chocolate cupcake or sugar cookie. I found a recipe for Pumpkin Whoopie Pies and thought, “Eureka!” Pumpkin is a flavor that adults and kids both seem to enjoy, and who doesn’t like a nice, thick layer of sweet creamy filling?

The recipe started with a really thick batter. It definitely did not have the consistency of a chocolate chip cookie dough, but it was thicker than a cake batter:
Pumpkin Whoopie Pie dough

The batter went down on cookie sheets and, as I learned from the Iced Pumpkin Cookies, I put it down in exactly the way I wanted the cookies to turn out, as pumpkin cookies don’t spread much:
Pumpkin Whoopie pies

They baked up into beautiful golden cookies that were slightly springy and moist:
Pumpkin Whoopie pies

The filling for the middle was made of Crisco and sugar and a few other things and was delicious. I spread a thick layer on half the cookies, and then sandwiched another cookie on top:
Cream filling for Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

The cookies were a big hit. Brian and Alison both loved them, and their kids worked on those cookies for the better part of ten minutes (they were pretty big cookies), licking up every crumb. I’m so happy that they enjoyed them, because I was living in fear that they’d take one bite and then spit it out.

Kid-tested, mother (somewhat) approved (the kids did run around like crazy people after all the sugar!).

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Week Forty-Three: Iced Pumpkin Cookies

October 21, 2009 in Cookies, Internet Recipes, Weekly Baked Good | 3 comments

(This week’s recipe came from allrecipes.com.)

Autumn is definitely here in New York. The trees in Prospect Park are changing colors, and hints of Christmas shopping are starting to show. The weather’s gotten chillier and that means it’s time to bust out pumpkin recipes.

I was getting a little tired of baking cupcakes, so I decided to find a nice pumpkin cookie to bake this time around. I scoured the Internet for recipes, and finally found one that looked delicious. And it included a glaze as well! Wonderful.

The recipe started with flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves and salt being combined in a bowl and set aside:
Pumpkin cookie dry ingredients

Next, butter and sugar were creamed together and pumpkin puree, eggs and vanilla were added once the mixture was creamy. Finally, the dry ingredients were added:
Pumpkin cookie dough

The cookies were dropped by tablespoon full onto cookie sheets and baked:
Pumpkin Cookies

The most important thing I learned about baking pumpkin cookies is that however the batter goes down on the sheet is pretty much the form the cookie will take. I tried to flatten my cookies down so they wouldn’t be mounds of pumpkin, but some of them still turned out kind of peaked. Eh, a little glaze will take care of that. The glaze was a combination of confectioner’s sugar, milk, vanilla and melted butter, and it was delightful. It added such a pretty touch to the cookie as well as just the right amount of sweetness:
Glazed Pumpkin Cookies

These cookies were a bit hit with my coworkers. One of them asked me if there was really pumpkin in the cookie before he would take one, claiming that he didn’t really care for pumpkin. He then took one bite and said, “Oh my God…”, then shoved the rest of the cookie in his mouth.

Stay tuned for last week’s project, Tarte Tatin Cupcakes with Caramelized Apples. As soon as I post it, I’ll be caught up! But that’s not going to happen tonight!

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Week Forty: Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies

September 30, 2009 in Cookies, Internet Recipes, Weekly Baked Good | 3 comments

(I’ve failed! I neglected to bookmark this week’s recipe, and now I can’t find it. I’m pretty sure it came from allrecipes.com, but I can’t seem to find it.)

This week, I took a much-needed break from cupcakes. I haven’t made cookies in a couple of months, so I thought I’d find an interesting recipe and go with it. I really wanted to make some kind of sandwich cookie, and when I found the recipe for Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies, I knew I’d found the right one!

The recipe started as a pretty standard chocolate chip cookie recipe, but with peanut butter added:
Peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough

The dough was scooped out into small balls and placed on My Precious:
Chocolate chip cookies

While the cookies baked and cooled, I mixed up peanut butter, chocolate chips and powdered sugar. Then I boiled some heavy cream and poured it over the peanut butter mixture, stirring until everything melted and became smooth. This mixture went into the fridge for about an hour until it reached a spreadable consistency:
Peanut butter chocolate sauce

Cooled cookies:
Chocolate chip cookies

Once the chocolate was spreadable, I spread it over a flat half of a cookie and sandwiched another on top:
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip sandwich cookies
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Sandwich cookies
Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip sandwich cookies

These cookies turned out quite good. The peanut butter wasn’t as pronounced as it would be in just a regular peanut butter cookie, and the peanut butter/chocolate sauce in the middle of the cookies was heavenly. I typically don’t care for the peanut butter/chocolate combo, but that sauce was just fantastic. My co-workers were equally impressed.

The only issue I had with the cookies is that while they were in the fridge overnight, three of my cookies sort of slid apart. That is to say, that the cookies wouldn’t sit flat because of the placement of the chips and the top of the cookies slid almost completely off the bottoms. There was no rescuing these cookies as the chocolate had hardened, so they were the ones I left for Rob. Oh well, the rest of them turned out fine.

One of my co-workers specifically requested blueberry muffins with crumb topping this week, as Crumbs Bakery apparently didn’t make them for four days in a row. A blog post about these muffins will be coming shortly.

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Week Thirty-Four: Lemon Sugar Cookies

August 22, 2009 in "The America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book", Cookies, Uncategorized, Weekly Baked Good | Comments closed

(This week’s recipe came from “The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book”.)

This week marked the first time I’ve brought baked goods into my new coworkers in Times Square. Now that I’m not driving myself to work, the baked goods I take in for my coworkers have to be fairly easy to transport. I don’t know if any cakes will make their way into that building. Pies, maybe, but the idea of taking a cake on the subway makes me cry.

So, for the first experiment, I thought cookies would be good. And what’s more sturdy and stable than a sugar cookie? But I couldn’t make just a boring old sugar cookie – and my cookie cutters are in storage, so I couldn’t even make cute shapes. I’d have to amp up the flavor.

Luckily, “The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book” had variations on their sugar cookie recipe that included a Lime Sugar Cookie. Sounded pretty delicious to me!

The recipe started with rubbing some lime zest into sugar, which the cookie dough balls would be rolled in prior to baking:
Lime sugar

Next, a fairly straightforward cookie dough was made, with the addition of some more lime zest:
Lime Sugar Cookie dough

The first batch of cookies didn’t turn out so hot. I made the balls way too big and forgot to flatten them out before baking. So they turned out like this:
Lime Sugar Cookies

I made the cookie dough balls smaller the second time around and remembered to flatten them out. I also sprinkled some additional lime sugar on top to give them an extra crunch:
Lime Sugar Cookies

Much better. Unfortunately, I didn’t take very many pictures as I needed to get out the door with these cookies! My coworkers seemed to enjoy them quite a bit:
Lime Sugar Cookie

Last night, I made the next baked good in my series: S’mores Cupcakes. I plan to write about them this weekend. Highlight: Check out the reviews of Crumbs Bakery on Yelp! One of my coworkers said my cupcakes were better than the ones at Crumbs.

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