Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite kind.  This is my favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies.  I made these cookies last night.  Coincidence?  I think not!  They turn out just like the bakery's cookies, soft and chewy, but without all the weird ingredients.  Using butter makes them softer, and you get to skip out on all the yucky trans fats in shortening.  A double win!

Adapted from Pleasantview Schoolhouse.

Stir together:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

Blend in:
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 cup butter (not fridge-hard, but not completely soft, either)

Mix in 2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 bag of chocolate chips
1/2 cup pecans, if desired.

Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased baking sheet, about 2-3 inches apart.  Bake at 375 f0r 8-10 minutes.  Watch them carefully at the end, and when the middle is no longer shiny (the edges will probably be browning), take them out.  Let them sit on the pan a couple minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Returning

After an unintentional sabbatical from blogging and Etsy, I'm back! Spring is here already, and life is rolling along quickly. Here's a photo from the time off.

My lovely sister Beth and I, making rosettes, which, for the uninitiated, are pictured below with Mama. Think crispy, thin funnel cakes dipped in sugar. They are a scandinavian cookie, though many cultures claim them. This really isn't surprising because they're SO good!

An Update

It's about time, after all.

I like Joanna's ideas for changing the blog header.  Once I have access to photoshop again (i.e. once Chrissy brings her computer back from the speech and debate tournament), I will continue the editing.  The orchid did re-bloom!  

School is over until July!  I must say, my first year of college went by very quickly.  Overall, I enjoyed it much more than I expected to, and have had so many useful experiences.  Even if the classes won't all prepare me for "real life" (though most of them will), I've had many opportunities to interact with people - Christians and Atheists and everything in between - and these experiences are preparing me for real life, for sharing the Gospel with those around me.  It's really crazy what some people believe and why, but most of them have reasons, and it's good to understand those reasons, in order to address them.

As I type, there are cakes baking in the oven.  These cakes are most likely going to be failures.  The recipe said they were supposed to bake for 38 minutes, but are nearing 50, and still aren't done.  That's what I get for messing with a recipe (substituted coconut oil for shortening - it worked when Beth did it).   Ah, well, there's always Betty Crocker.  

After experiencing what seems like Brazil's rainy season (just colder) for a few weeks, I'm happy to say that the sun is shining today and Summer may have just arrived.  Please ignore the stormy forecast for the next three days.

Excuse me, that sounds like the timer...

After 55 minutes, the cakes are done!  They're still rather dense, but they'll taste good with strawberries and whipped cream.  Everything tastes good with strawberries and whipped cream, right?

More to come. 

Whole Wheat Biscuits

  
     Tender, flaky, and buttery aren't usually the adjectives that come to mind when I think about whole wheat biscuits.  I love whole wheat bread, but those little, round quick breads always come out of the oven like hardtack. Now, hardtack isn't bad as hardtack (at least it wasn't when I was 13 or 14 and in the throws of a Civil War obsession), but hardtack makes really lousy biscuits.

     The batch I made today was flaky, tender, and buttery.  I altered our usual Better Homes and Gardens recipe.

Whole Wheat Biscuits

     Mix together 4 cups whole wheat flour, 8 tsp plus a little baking powder, 4 tsp sugar, 1 tsp cream of tarter, and 1 tsp salt.  Cut in 1 cup chilled butter, cut into chunks.  It's very important that it's chilled.  Cut it in until the largest chunks of butter are the size of peas.  Make a well in the middle and pour in 1 1/3 cup milk. Stir the dough until it sticks together, then dump onto a floured surface, and need about 10-18 strokes.  Pat the into a round about 3/4" thick, cut into 12 wedges, and transfer to an ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 450 for 10-12 minutes, until the tops are brown.

There's really no need to butter these while they're warm. Enjoy!

Dutch Baby

Bless you, Rachel.

Her family served a German pancake while I was at their house on Saturday.  It was close enough to a Dutch baby to remind me to make one (and it was absolutely delicious).  Pair that reminder with complaints that Chrissy and I never make good breakfasts anymore (the complainer doesn't like eggs, apparently...), and we had a Dutch Baby for breakfast this morning!

Mama wanted peaches, so we had those on top.

Dutch Baby

Melt 1/4 cup butter in a medium-large (about 2-3 quarts) skillet in a 450 degree oven.  Meanwhile, whip 3 eggs until foamy (or, if you suddenly realize you only have one egg, just stick with that.  It works!).

Whip in 3/4 cup of flour, and 3/4 cup milk (or 1 1/4 cup, if you only had one egg).  Take the skillet with the melted butter out of the oven and sprinkle it with cinnamon, then pour in the batter.

Return to oven and bake for 20-25 minutes.

When done, remove from oven and top with fruit, syrup, or powdered sugar.  This recipe serves about three people generously, or six people can each have a smaller slice.

Calzones

Once a week, I'm stranded on campus over the lunch hour.  I'm way to cheap to pay three to five dollars for lunch every time (it adds up fast!), so I've been making food on Monday afternoons (when I'm home) and freezing it until it's needed.  So far, I've made pot pies (Pyrex, I love you) and pumpkin soup.  

On Saturday, we went to the farmers market and I planned to buy peppers and tomatoes for a pizza.  I left with just peppers and detailed instructions on making paprika.  Today, the time came to bake, and I realized that pizza is a difficult thing to carry in a backpack.  But I still had the peppers and I still wanted pizza.  Hello-o?  Calzones!  

 

Yeast proofing in a hot-water bath.  

The dough before kneading.  Yes, the yellow bowl makes it look more spectacular than it really is.

Dough after kneading.  Yup.

This photo I'm adding simply for it's beauty.  It reminds me of Norman Rockwell or Andrew Wyeth.  I wrapped the bowl in a dish towel and stuck it in the warm oven.  It was warm because we had just made frozen pizza.  Sorry, we don't live glamorous lives where frozen pizzas are unheard of.  

Farmers' Market peppers. Aren't they gorgeous?  The pumpkin lookalike on the right is the kind they make pimentos from.  I wrapped them in foil and olive oil and baked them at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.  Then I chopped them up, along with tomatoes (my garden), basil (the farmers' market), and garlic (my Arabian uncle).  

(Ok, fine.  Kroger).

By this time the dough was stretchy.

 Self-explanatory.  Baked at 450 for about 20 minutes.

 

Done!  If you make calzones, do me a favor and brush them with egg whites or milk before you bake them.  I always forget to do that to breads, so they're never shiny.  Please take a picture of your shiny bread and send it to me.  That way, I'll know someone has learned from my mistakes (because I sure haven't).  

Mind you, making calzones is not a mistake.  Oh, no.  I can hardly wait to be stranded on campus this week!

P.S.  They're really easy. 

Breakfast, Anyone?

Beth made these for my birthday breakfast.  They are so good!  The recipe is from Joy the Baker, I think.

Egg Custard

     Custard is so good!  And this is a good, creamy recipe.  I changed it a bit from this one, and I didn't use a crust. 

Creamy Egg Custard

    First of all, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  In a saucepan, mix together 1 1/5 cup milk, 1/2 cup cream, 4 tablespoons sugar, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.  Heat it up until it bowls.  Stir it every so often.

     In the mean time, beat 4 eggs in a bowl with a whisk.  Beat them really well.  Once the milk is boiling, slowly pour it into the eggs, beating with the whisk the whole time.  Beat it for about half a minute after.  Pour it into an oven proof glass dish, sprinkle with a lot of nutmeg, and bake for about 15 minutes.

Chewy Chocolate Cookies

For years, Beth and I have been hunting for the perfect cookie recipe. Thin and chewy, not dry and puffy. We've tried many recipes that claimed to be chewy and moist, but none of them delivered (it may have been operator error). Not so with these. I don't remember where I found the recipe, but it's good. Eureka!

Chewy Chocolate Cookies

Beat 1 cup of softened (but not melted!) butter with a wooden spoon until it is smooth. Add 3/4 cup white sugar, and 3/4 of a cup brown sugar, and beat it until it's creamy. You'll know when you're done.

Stir in two eggs and 1 tsp of vanilla. Then add 1/3 of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder. Stir. Add 2 cups of white flour (you can replace part of it with whole wheat flour if you'd like), 1 teaspoon of both salt and baking soda.

Then comes the fun part! Add 1 1/2 cups of dark chocolate chips. REALLY. It's best if they're dark, not milk or semisweet. But semisweet will work...

Place tablespoons of the dough (it will be very soft) about 2 1/2 inches apart on a baking sheet lined with tinfoil (dull side up). Bake for 8-10 minutes in a 375 degree oven (Fahrenheit). You can tell they're done when the very edges are firm. The centers will still be very soft.

Pull the tinfoil and cookies off the baking sheet and let them cool on the counter. Hide them somewhere out of sight, or they will be gone too fast.

I will be making them again soon, without any cocoa powder for regular chocolate chip cookies.

Pecan Shortbread

I mentioned shortbread in my last post. Before last night, I'm not sure I'd ever had real shortbread. I like it (in small doses), but the rest of the family gave mixed reviews. Dad and Mama really enjoyed it, but my siblings all took one bite, and called it done, which means that Mama and I get to finish it off. Pity.

I used the recipe for Ginger Shortbread from Pleasantview Schoolhouse, but as no one in our family likes ginger very much (I promise, we're not really that picky), I skipped it and added a handful of chopped pecans instead.

Over all, it was very rich (like I said, baked butter), and almost toffee-like. I would post a picture, but Chrissy's camera is out of commission.

Apple Pie

The other day, everyone wanted apple pie. We didn't have much white flour on hand, so we ground some wheat flour and found a recipe for a whole wheat pie crust. Bad idea. I ended up putting it together more like a graham-cracker crust than a regular crust (you can see how crumbly it was) , which was awkward. Thankfully it didn't affect the taste!