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:

Gingerbread Man wearing a diaper (or briefs, you decide)

Gingerbread Christmas Tree

Gingerbread Star

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.

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:

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:

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

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:

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!).

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:

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:

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

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:

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!

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:

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

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:

Cooled cookies:

Once the chocolate was spreadable, I spread it over a flat half of a cookie and sandwiched another on top:

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.

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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.

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….

Yikes! Sorry it took so long to post this! You wouldn’t think a little thing like packing up your whole house and moving to a new state would interfere with your bakin’ n bloggin’, but it really does!

On July 4th, Rob and I went to our friends Clint and Becky Reno’s house for some burgers and hang-out time. Our job was to bring desserts, so I thought I’d make some mini cheesecakes and black and white cookies.

The cheesecakes began with an Oreo cookie placed in a paper liner in a cupcake tin:

The cheesecake batter was then mixed up, and crushed up Oreo cookies were mixed in:

The cheesecake batter was evenly distributed over the Oreo ‘crusts’ and the cheesecakes were baked. Once they came out of the oven, they cooled to room temperature and were refrigerated:

The black and white cookies weren’t quite as easy to work with. The dough was incredibly sticky, and trying to put the balls of dough on my cookie sheets without an ice cream scooper was a little bit of a nightmare. The first sheet of cookies turned out like this:

The second sheet was a little better:

Once they were decorated, they turned out looking much better. They were a big hit:

Next week’s baking project (which I’m going to post as soon as I hit ‘submit’ on this one) will be a short, short, SHORT one! Pear Coffee Cake Muffins!

I absolutely cannot believe I’ve made it to the halfway point of this project. Twenty-six weeks have passed and I haven’t given up yet. This is some kind of a record for me.

This week, I decided I would bake some cookies for my dad for Father’s Day (seeing as how I’m not exactly rolling in cash right now). And I thought, “Hey, if I’m driving down to Zanesville to give my dad some cookies, maybe I should make my grandmother’s favorite pie too!” (My grandmother lives right next door to my parents.)

My grandmother absolutely loves Strawberry Pie. My aunt used to waitress at a Frisch’s Big Boy and would occasionally bring home Strawberry Pie for my grandma, who would flip out over it. As luck would have it, the current issue of Cook’s Illustrated features a ‘Diner-Style Strawberry Pie’ recipe and I couldn’t wait to try it.

The recipe started with a single pie crust. This was your pretty standard flour/sugar/salt/shortening/butter/ice water pie crust, which came together pretty easily. No vodka this time! Once the dough was gathered into a ball, it was wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated for an hour:

Once it had chilled, it was rolled out to fit into a 9-inch pie pan:

I had some trouble getting the dough into the pan. On my first try, I ripped the dough and had to roll it out again. I was more careful the second time and managed to get the dough situated, but I’m sure re-rolling it made it tougher than it should have been:

I got to buy a few new toys at Sur La Table for these projects, including some ceramic pie weights. I know I could have just used beans or rice, but these were under $7 and I love the jar:

The weighted pie dough went into the oven. It came out a little too brown for my taste, but, having never baked a single pie crust before, this may be perfect. I never see the top of the bottom parts of my pie crusts, because they’re covered with filling!

While the pie crust baked, I went to work cooking down some frozen strawberries. Cook’s Illustrated stated that it would take about 25 to 30 minutes for the strawberries to cook down to two cups of a jam-like goo. It took more like an hour. I’m not sure what I did wrong with that…maybe I didn’t have the heat up high enough, or maybe using the Dole frozen strawberries that the magazine strongly suggested I not use affected the time (the Cascadian Farms frozen strawberries the magazine wanted me to use were going to cost me around $12. No thank you!):

Once the strawberries cooked down, I added sugar, lemon juice, water and gelatin and the mixture was left to cool to room temperature. While it cooled, I hulled and sliced a pound of fresh strawberries, which were then folded into the cooled strawberry/gelatin mixture. This was poured into the cooled pie crust:

The whole thing went into the fridge overnight. The following morning, we loaded a cooler up with ice and packed up the pie. I was afraid that if I just held it on my lap for the drive, that it would turn into strawberry soup. The cooler worked really well! I highly recommend it as a means to transport icebox pies. Look at how pretty it turned out:

My parents, Rob and I trekked up to my grandmother’s house and cut into the pie. To my relief, it did not fall apart on me! I whipped up some cream cheese/heavy cream topping to dollop on the slices:

It seemed to go over very well. My grandmother kept the remaining three slices or so. I’m sure she ate all of them by herself!

While I was working on the pie, I was also trying to deal with the cookies I was baking for my dad. Two of the toys I picked up at Sur La Table were cookie cutters that fit my dad to a T:

Yup, that’s a hammer and saw. My dad’s a construction worker.

The cookie dough was a pretty simple combination of butter and sugar, a little salt, a couple of eggs, vanilla and flour. That’s it. No chemical leavener. It was rolled up into two discs and refrigerated. I was planning to cut cookies out of both discs, but it turned out that one would be quite enough. The dough was refrigerated overnight (it can keep up to a week in the fridge – I still have another disc in there that I need to bake!)

Cutting out the cookies went just fine, as did the baking. They came out golden brown and have just the slightest crunchiness to the edges. The centers have a great toothiness to them:

(I sneaked a corgi in there too! Some friends gave us a corgi cookie cutter, and I had just enough dough left to make one little corgi cookie!)

Once the cookies had cooled, I went to work making Royal Icing. I was super excited, as I have always wanted to make and work with Royal Icing. Since I was only making half my cookies, I decided to half the icing recipe as well. So I doled out half the confectioner’s sugar, half the meringue and half the vanilla. And then I dumped in the full amount of water. Yup. And didn’t even realize it! I was mixing and mixing and the icing was not fluffing up at all. I stared at the recipe for a good five minutes before I realized my mistake. So I added the other half of the sugar, meringue powder and vanilla, but my icing never did reach a good consistency. I divided what I ended up with and colored one batch gray and the other red. My plan was to make the handles of the ‘tools’ red and the rest gray. I spooned the gray icing into a piping bag and started in on a cookie.

It was a disaster. The icing immediately started running off the cookie, leaving a lovely blue/gray stain. I got so frustrated that I threw out all the icing and cracked open a can of (gasp) Pillsbury white icing:

My dad didn’t seem to care. The point of the cookies was the shape, not the icing, so I’m trying to not beat myself up too badly about screwing up the icing. I will try it again someday, but maybe not for a while. I need to wrap my head around it.

This weekend is ComFest!, the greatest three-day outdoor free local music/art festival ever! It’s a big gathering in Columbus’ Goodale Park that features local music on about six different stages from noon to ten Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Rob and I help run the Band Merch Booth where we sell the performing bands’ CDs and t-shirts. Set-up is always a fun but trying time, so I thought that some homemade muffins might make the day a little better. So I’m going to bake some blueberry muffins and maybe some cranberry ones as well. Might as well start the weekend off right, and get some food in people’s stomachs before they start drinking!

This week I decided it was time to do some savory baking. Pizza crust it was!

This pizza crust started with flour, sugar, salt and yeast. Water was added and this dough was allowed to rise until doubled in size. Once it had risen, it was punched down and then allowed to rise one more time.

Meanwhile, I worked on the tomato sauce for the pizza. I used my hands to squish two cans of whole peeled tomatoes in a bowl and added in some dried oregano. This went into a pot on the stove and was supposed to simmer for fifty minutes to thicken.

After the second rise, the dough was cut in half and one half was wrapped in plastic wrap and left at room temperature:

The oven was preheated and a baking stone was placed in the bottom of the oven.

The other half of my dough was allowed to sit for five minutes, and then it was shaped into a round. My dough was being cranky with me; parts of it would stretch beautifully and part of it would rip almost immediately. I finally got a good shape formed and placed it on a cookie sheet that was sprinkled with cornmeal.

My tomato sauce never thickened up. The recipe indicated that I should have cooked the tomatoes in a skillet, but I don’t have a skillet large enough to accommodate 56 ounces of tomatoes. I cooked mine in a large stockpot with the lid on. Maybe I should have left the lid off. I dunno. I ended up with more of a tomato juice than tomato sauce. It would have to do:

Once the sauce was down, I placed some sliced fresh mozzarella on the pizza:

On top of the mozzarella, I added pepperoni, chopped red peppers, chopped onions and Parmesan cheese:

The pizza was supposed to be slid off the cookie sheet (or pizza peel, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those) directly onto the baking stone. I couldn’t for the life of me get my pizza to slid off the cookie sheet, so I just put the cookie sheet on top of the baking stone. I probably would have ended up with a crunchier dough if I’d put the pizza right on the stone, but I was pretty happy with my results:

While the first pizza baked, the process was repeated with the second round of dough.

On Thursday, I decided to attack something a little different and make almond macaroons. I’ve been obsessed with macaroons since eating a Framboise-flavored one from Pistacia Vera a few months ago. There’s a recipe for French Almond Macaroons in Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook and it didn’t look too scary, so I went for it.

The recipe started with two ounces of almonds being ground into a fine powder. This was mixed with confectioner’s sugar. In the bowl of my KitchenAid stand mixer, I whisked egg whites until they were foamy, then added a pinch of salt and granulated sugar and whisked until the mixture reached soft peaks. Half of the sugar/almond mixture was sprinkled over the eggs and folded until just combined. I then added a little vanilla and the remaining sugar/almond mixture and folded again until just combined:

This mixture was transferred to a pastry bag. Martha suggests that one should dip a one and a half inch round cookie cutter in flour and then mark circles on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets to use as a stencil. I tried this, but apparently used a cookie cutter that was quite a bit larger than one and a half inches. My first round of macaroons went on My Precious looking a little like this:

And of course, once they’d baked for twenty minutes, they came out looking like this:

Epic fail. Luckily, I realized as I was piping those macaroons that they were going to be way too big. So I free-handed the rest of my macaroons and the second batch looked much better:

So I ruined most of my vanilla macaroons. Luckily, I’d planned to make chocolate ones as well, so at least I had some more ingredients to work with. I whipped up a chocolate batter that was almost identical to the vanilla, except that two tablespoons of cocoa powder were mixed in with the sugar/almond mixture:

These ones came out much better:

The chocolate ones came out much better than the vanilla ones. I ground the almonds a little finer for the chocolate which I think made a big difference as far as texture is concerned. And the vanilla ones had an almost popcorn-y flavor, which was strange. I definitely want to make these again. I’m planning to experiment with different flavors. I think a mint macaroon might just be incredible.

Next week I’m planning to bake a Strawberry Pie especially for my grandmother and some sugar cookies for my dad for Father’s Day. I need to make a trip to Sur La Table to pick up some cookie cutters that are right up his alley…

This week, I wanted to do something a little simpler than last week’s Hi Hats. So I decided to go for some cookies. The first was Alphabet Cookies, which were intended to be cut into the shapes of letters. I don’t have letter cookie cutters, so I used flowers, stars and hearts.

The recipe called for the dough to be mixed in a food processor. After the nightmare I had with the brioche, I am skeptical of mixing anything in a food processor. I decided to use my KitchenAid mixer instead. Unfortunately, when I added the flour, the dough turned into a crumbly mess:

I ended up just mooshing the dough together with my hands. I finally got it all incorporated together and rolled out:

I cut out the shapes and baked them for 12 minutes. Once they were cooled, I mixed up the icing, which was a combination of powdered sugar, milk, light corn syrup, vanilla extract and food coloring. This icing could have stood to be a little thicker, but as I was adding the milk, I lost my grip on the carton and an extra teaspoon came splashing out. I added more powdered sugar to make up for it, but I think something was lost. It still worked, though, for the most part:

I put the icing in a zip bag and snipped the corner so I could pipe the icing onto the cookies:

The icing leaked over the edges of several of the cookies, which I believe was due to it being just a little too runny. It seems to be setting up just fine now, nice and shiny. I finished each cookie off with some sprinkles:

Quite tasty! Meanwhile, I also worked on Cream Cheese Cookie Bars. These started out with chocolate and butter melted in a bowl over a pot of simmering water (I used to think that I needed a double boiler, but I’ve become a pro at the bowl-over-the-pot trick). Sugar, eggs and vanilla were mixed in next (by hand!):

Flour was mixed in next and the batter was poured into a 9″ x 13″ pan lined with parchment paper:

Next, cream cheese and sugar were beat together and chopped semisweet chocolate was added. This mixture was dropped by spoonfuls on top of the chocolate batter and swirled with a knife to create a marbled effect. This was baked for 30 minutes and came out looking like this:

This brick of cookie was transferred to a cutting board and once it was cool, I cut it into bite-sized pieces:

These bars and very interesting, because by looking at them, you think you’re getting a brownie. But they’re definitely more of a cookie texture and far less fudgy than a brownie. Still pretty good though.

Next week I’ll be making Mint Meltaway Cupcakes that I’ve already got my co-workers drooling over. They sound fun: Fudge-covered, mint-fudge sandwiched sour cream chocolate cupcakes. Mmm mmm!

Also, if anyone knows where I can buy Baker’s Ammonia (AKA Ammonium Carbonate) in Columbus, please let me know. It’s available on King Arthur Flour’s website, but I would prefer to purchase it in town.