Chocolate Oatmeal Barley Cookies

Yes, barley. What a magnificent idea! Favorite and I were planning on tasting a very delicious sounding beer which seemed to need an equally delicious chocolate cookie to have with it. I of course turned to my trusty Ultimate Cookie Book, and found a recipe for chocolate oatmeal cookies. They looked dark, rich, and delicious, they used melted chocolate AND chocolate chips, and each was topped with a pecan halve. How could I lose? But, to make them even MORE special, Favorite had the brilliant idea of replacing some of the flour with crushed roasted barley, which he had of course in his brewing supply room. After I stopped beating myself up over why I hadn't thought of that before I got down to making the cookies. I only made a half batch since we also have cornbread, and marshmallows to eat. It was pretty much a typical chocolate cookies recipe, beat the butter and sugar, add the cooled melted chocolate, eggs, and vanilla, and then gradually add in the dry ingredients. I had taken 1/4 of a cup of roasted barely and used the grind feature on my mini prep to render it into dust with a few pieces of hull in there. I put this powder into the bottom of my measuring cup and added flour to make the amount I needed in total. I added this to the batter and then stirred in the oats (chopped a bit in the mini prep because they were old fashioned instead of quick cooking) and chocolate chips. I scooped the dough into heaps on my sheets, topped each with a pecan halve and put them in the oven. The smell was incredible.



The first batch, second batch and so on came out and all seemed to have on failing... they were all flat as pancakes!! Again I am having this problem. This time, however, I think I have REALLY found the solution. I had thought before that my dough was too warm, and tried chilling it; I thought that the butter was inferior, so I switched to brand name; I thought I was beating too much air into the mixture, so I became dainty with my beating of the butter. None of these "solutions" seemed to solve my problem, so I tried one more. I turned up the oven. My thought was, well if the oven is lower in temperature than it's saying it is, the heat would be enough to melt the dough without cooking it all the way. If I turn the heat up, the outside should cook faster giving it a better chance to set its shape.



So on my last batch I turned the oven from 375 to 385 and gave it ample time to heat up. I made sure to put the cookies on a sheet that was NOT still warm from the oven and I baked them for 9 minutes, right in the middle of the recommended 8-10. They came out... fatter!








I had used the same cookie scoop to make the cookies and you could clearly tell that the ones baked in the hotter oven were significantly smaller in diameter. They were chunkier, which meant they had more delicious interior to enjoy. I think I have finally found my cookie solution!

Coffee Chocolate Nut Cookies

Or something...



So I've been trying to catch up on my backlog. If you read my bean past buns post you may notice it is a little anemic due to my need to catch up with myself. Maybe you like that about it since I usually waste your time with many many words and not nearly enough good pictures. As it turns out too many words and too few pictures make boring food blogs. Oh well.


Here are my cookies. These are the cookies I promised to post the other day and didn't. Favorite and I made them a million years ago (re: this past weekend) when his parents came to visit. The cookie is flavored with instant coffee. It is flavored quite strongly so that they actually taste a bit like coffee ice cream. Yum. Then it has chunks of dark chocolate. Since I couldn't find my chocolate morsels, Favorite and I cut up Hershey's special dark bars. Boy, big chunks of chocolate somehow taste way better than chips. The squareness makes it more enjoyable somehow. Lastly there are some chopped up walnuts. Pretty tasty cookies. They went fantabulously well with all of the dark, highly alcoholic beers we sampled on Saturday.

Toffee Bars

This past Thursday night I was anxious to bake something. I had picked out Honey Nut Bars, a glorious looking combination of honey, walnuts, and coconut, but I wanted to bring these to my Mom's house and my Stepdad hates coconut. Add to that the fact that almost every goodie I've ever brought to their house has had coconut in it and I decided to make something else. Since toffee is one of his favorite treats I thought the Toffee Cookie Bars were a winning idea. They looked pretty simple and fast and tasty so I dove in.

I didn't get home until 9:30 because I have a class on Thursday nights, but I wasn't worried because it was just a matter of mixing and layering a couple ingredients, no big deal. So I threw together the cookie base which was mostly brown sugar and butter (YUM!) with flour and an egg yolk thrown in to make it a bit more substantial. This got pressed in the bottom of the pan that had been prepared with a greased parchment bottom and greased sides and baked for 20 minutes. Next was the sweet stuff. I was to mix a can of sweetened condensed milk with butter and cook until thick an bubbly. Now is where I hit a roadblock. I had NO sweetened condensed milk. My last minute change in dessert direction had me minus an ingredient! So I looked up some substitutions on the internet. One said use evaporated milk with added sugar. Ok, but I only had a tiny little 5 oz can of that. I ended up using th evaporated milk, plus about a cup or so of regular milk, plus a bunch of sugar. It took HOURS to concentrate the milk to a point I thought was thick enough. Then I added the butter, got it all bubbly, and poured it over the base. I baked this for another 12 minutes or so, covered it in chocolate chips, another couple minutes in the oven, spread the chips out into a smooth, consistent layer, and topped it all with toasted pecans.


I let the bars set overnight in the fridge after they had come to room temp. I then chopped them up with my trusty Wilton Cookie Shovel. I have to tell you, the recipe did not call to cover the bottom of the pan in greased parchment, but I am sure glad I did. I have never had much luck getting anything bar-like out of a rectangular pan in one piece, but the parchment allowed me to get the bars out much more easily, and without injuring the bottom of my pan.

These bars ended up delicious, but very, very sweet. I'm not even really sure the consistency was right due to winging the ingredients a little, but they are good with a strong cup of coffee. Oh! And Charlie (my Stepdad) thought they were great!

Cinnamon Chocolate Macaroons

Okay, so I'm trying to make up for lost blogging time. This is my second post of the day because I did manage (despite completely forgetting about daylight savings time!) to carve a spot out of the day in which to bake.

I was back into my Ultimate Cookie Book today and it has produced another winner. I wanted to do something simple and already had my mind on meringue when I nearly opened the book right up to Cinnamon Chocolate Macaroons. Splendid!

I separated out my two whites and set them in the Kitchenaid bowl to come to room temperature while I prepared the rest of my ingredients. I chopped a half cup of pecans, got a cup of coconut, grated 1/2 an ounce of chocolate and even ground a teaspoon of cinnamon from the stick with the new hand powered spice grinder I bought (think the peppercorn grinders but with smashed cinnamon sticks in there instead).



After about a half an hour I started whipping up the whites with the vanilla until soft peaks. I then added the cinnamon and 2/3 cup of sugar gradually and beat until I got to stiff peaks. It already looked like I wanted to eat it at this point. I then folded in my nuts, coconut and chocolate.





The mixture then got plopped on parchment paper by the teaspoonful and sent into a 375 degree oven. The recipe said to bake them for 20 minutes, but I found that they were dry on the outside and set at about 17 minutes. Actually they probably could've come out at 15 or 16 minutes, as most came out a little hollow and with less chewy inside than I'd hoped, but they were still quite delicious.



When they came out they cooled for a bit on the pan and then the cooling rack. They didn't hold their heat for long and then Favorite and I were stuffing them in our faces. Sweet, nutty, chewy and fantastic! They could stand a little more chocolate, but the coconut, pecans, cinnamon, and chocolate are in amounts that compliment each other and adding more chocolate, though delicious, might detract from the other components.

All in all I would say these cookies were a success. They are great at satisfying a sweet craving but are so light you don't have to feel guilty about eating a couple. This, of course, is in complete contrast to the Bocca di Nonna of the last post which were overly rich and greasy with very little in the way of satisfaction.





That's all for today!! Hopefully I will be back soon to detail another foray into the adventures of tasty treats. I can't imagine these macaroons will last long...

Bocca Di Nonna - Back to Blogging

Oh boy have I been lax again! I took a week or so off from baking and it turned into a month! As it turns out after my small baking hiatus I got sick with some kind of flu-like wonder and it turned right into bronchitis which put me out of commission for a while. Then once I started baking again I seemed to be too busy catching up on stuff I neglected while I was sick that I didn't have any time to blog it. Well I am back. Sadly I only have one offering right now, unlike my sister's epic posts that tend to have 5-10 delicious treats at a go, and frankly it was quite disappointing.

I made a batch of cookies called Bocca Di Nonna. From the recipe the cookies appeared to be similar to florentine lace cookies with and earl grey chocolate ganache sandwiched in the middle. Although I made them from a recipe book you can also find the exact recipe posted online HERE (along with my less than stunning review of it). The recipe seemed simple enough. Like one of my sister's recipes for walnut cupcakes it uses a large amount of ground nuts, in this case almonds, for the bulk of the cookie. There is also a HUGE amount of butter. Herein lies my problem with these cookies. The cookies spread out a lot more than they were supposed to even though I used cold butter to begin with and chilled the dough after processing. I also made sure to allow the pans to cool between batches. There was nothing that could be done, they just contain too much butter. After removing each batch of cookies from the parchment paper they were baked on I could see rivulets of buttery grease that had been left behind. The cookies were also exceptionally brittle. After preparing and cooling the earl grey ganache (which was actually quite interesting and tasty) I endeavored to spread it on half the cookies so I could top them with the other half but the edges were so extremely fragile that I probably ended up with a few whole cookies worth of crumbs by the time I was finished. At this point I still had a feeble amount of hope that they might end up ok because they actually looked rather nice. This all being despite the fact that the ganache was oozing through some of the thinner parts of the cookies and that my hands were getting covered in grease from handling the buttery abominations. Well, I decided first to layer the cookies in paper towels. Maybe after absorbing some of the grease they would be salvageable. Then I decided to put the paper towel layered cookies in the fridge; maybe hardening up the grease would at least make them more palatable. Well nothing made me satisfied with these cookies. The flavor components are not substantial enough to hold up to the overwhelming flavor of greasiness. The only way Favorite and I have been able to dispose of them down our gullets is to break up the cookies and smother them with vanilla ice cream and cowboy sauces (chocolate and brown sugar dessert sauces made with beer). I may try these again someday, with a good amount of the butter removed from the recipe, but more likely than not, if I get the urge to make these again, I will just make florentines and add the earl grey ganache to those instead.

In defense of my lack of baking, you should know that I also made some allergy free brownie bites right before I got sick that were pretty darn tasty, but I have no pictures of them. I used the recipe posted HERE. Despite the lack of flour and eggs and dairy these little brownie nibbles were very chocolaty and satisfying. I'm sure they would be good with a dairy free ice cream if you wanted to go vegan all the way, but I know for a fact they were splendid with the good old cow ice cream that I ate them with.

So, for lack of stunning dessert pictures I will now pummel you with some adorableness. Prepare:


Peanut (the big headed guy) seems like he knows when I am taking pictures and endeavors to be supremely adorable. His charisma easily translates to pictures.








Marmalade (the mountain lion looking guy) doesn't appreciate the camera as much as he knows he ends up looking ferocious and fearsome. While I don't doubt his ability to take down a gazelle given the chance, this guy is the biggest mooshy love bug you will find.





Well that's it for this post. It is already the end of the weekend, but perhaps I could whip up something tasty as an offering to the gods of baking so that they may forget about the greasy cookies I made. I must atone for this baking catastrophe.

Salvaging and Valentine's Cupcakes

So I have concluded that the divinity disaster could probably be attributed to a combination of things. The first thing is that rule number one of making divinity is to never make it on a humid day. Although I am pretty darn sure it couldn't be called a humid day I am not so sure it isn't humid in my apartment. Between all the cooking and beer making that occurs here it wouldn't surprise me to find out we generally have a relatively high humidity level. I also think I may have not achieved stiff enough peaks in my eggs. I was worried about over whipping and busting down the protein structure so may not have whipped quite as long as I should have either before OR after adding the sugar syrup. Rest assured this recipe will be tried again. I will not accept candy defeat! Anyhow, the nougat was still tasty even if it lacked the fluff so I figured out a way to salvage it. I did what any smart person would do when trying to fix a sweet-gone-wrong: I doused it in chocolate. Here is my pile of candies:


As you can see I've tried (in vain some of the times) to put fancy designs on the top. They don't exactly look professional, and there are definitely no two of the same size and shape, but they impressed my coworkers at least. I DID have a little trouble with my chocolate however. I am not awesome at tempering chocolate so throughout the "enrobing" process the amount of temper changed. Here I have an example of bad, ok, and good tempering:The chocolate at the far left has a hefty amount of "blooming" caused by chocolate that has been completely melted and cooled at an undesirable rate while not being properly seeded with well crystallized chocolate. So the chocolate becomes a little chalky, melts too quickly when handled, and generally looks less delicious. The middle chocolates don't have any blooming but do have less than awesome texture and also melt very quickly. The far right chocolates have been seeded well with chocolate of good texture that was not overheated to break down the seeds' crystallization. The result is a dark, smooth coat, able to stay at room temperature without any degradation in texture or appearance. Win! I ended up keeping most of the candies in the fridge until just before eating (to soften the nougat) so I could avoid the possible blooming since I wasn't sure how many (or which ones) were tempered correctly.
Here is a (bad) shot of the nougaty insides:

OK! Next up! I wanted to make Favorite something sweet and tasty for Valentine's day. I knew we wouldn't be going crazy this year because we are trying to save for a house, so instead of a romantic weekend away he would have to settle for some Sticky Toffee Squares. This recipe was very interesting as the batter for the cake-like base had NO sugar. The sweetness instead comes from reconstituted dates. The dates are roughly chopped and then boiled until they are soft and a little goopy and then baking soda is added which makes it all foamy and crazy!
The date mixture is then added to a bowl in which butter, flour, eggs, vanilla, baking powder, have been mixed just until combined. The recipe cautions often against overmixing and since I had used cold butter, due to my impatience, I ended up with a VERY lumpy mixture. I was suppose to bake these "bars" in an 8 X 12 pan, but I decided to go for cupcakes. The recipe made a dozen pretty perfectly. Then it was time for the topping. This is where the Sticky Toffee part comes into play. The frosting on these babies is brown sugar, butter, milk, and powdered sugar. VERY sweet. The instructions for the bars are to pour the frosting on, spread it out, and sprinkle some walnuts on top. Since I made cupcakes, and didn't want walnuts, I ended up frosting the cupcakes individually (which meant a thinner layer of frosting) and then rolled the tops in ground pecans. Here they are in various stages of dressing:
Favorite LOVED these babies! He was unsure of the topping at first because he is not a frosting kinda guy, and he wanted me to leave half naked, but once he tried one with frosting and nuts he wanted them all like that. The cupcake itself was just lightly sweet due to the flavor of the dates, and the sweetness and nuts of the topping combines to make this an utterly tasty treat. He especially liked the cupcake split, warmed and topped with vanilla ice cream. Sounds good to me. They really do look pretty yummy.

The last baking of the weekend was not such a success unfortunately. From the same book the Sticky Toffee guys came from I tried a recipe for baked rice pudding. It looked so tasty in the book! It appeared to be a cross between a creme brulee and a silky rice delight. Not so. This dessert tasty more like flan then either creme brulee or rice pudding. I know some people might think "Ooo, flan!" but I do not appreciate this version of custard. It is far too eggy, and especially with this dish, that had no sweet caramel to cover the flavor, the egg was just overwhelming. Trying not to hurt my feelings Favorite offered that maybe it would be good to eat for breakfast, where and egg flavor is more expected, but I think it should just be scrapped and never made again. Sometimes there's just nothing you can do to make a recipe taste good.

New Oven = Tons of Yummies!

I have been baking up a storm! My fiancee and I just moved into a new apartment together at the beginning of the month and the change has brought me a wonderful opportunity in the form of a practically brand new oven. The oven I had been using previously never had any idea of what temperature it was or what is was supposed to be. As a result I was somewhat limited to cookies as they are much more forgiving than cakes and more delicate pastries (plus cookies still taste pretty good even when they are lightly burnt or a little dry). Well I have made up for all of the time spent with the crappy oven (2 years) in the span of the last month. Since moving in I have baked:

pumpkin scones (twice)
cinnamon scones (twice)
orange scones
graham cracker bundt cake
strawberry rhubarb pie
pumpkin pie
peanut butter oatmeal cookies
chocolate dipped peanut butter shortbread cookies
german chocolate sandwich cookies

Okay, so maybe none or these items have really CHALLENGED the new oven. I haven't tried any souffles or cream puffs or anything, but nothing got burnt and nothing dried out and it all slid very nicely out or off of whatever it was baked in or on. The unfortunate thing is that most of these baked goods got eaten before they could be captured on film. I guess I will just have to make them all again so I can do a glorious photoshoot. So I know that my new oven can perform, and so can my glorious new kitchenaid (it has certainly been broken in) now the only question is; what to bake next?