Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love a good simple cookie sometimes.  Chocolate chip is just that perfect cookie.  There isn't too much chocolate, just the right amount of vanilla cookie and, when fresh out of the oven, speak to my inner child.  Over the years I have toyed with a variety of cookie recipes.  Through a process of trial and error I have mished and mashed several recipes together to get the best dough and my favorite cookie.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup of butter softened
1/2 cup of vegetable shortening (although I usually make them with all butter.  Half shortening tends to make them a bit more chewy)
3/4 c. sugar
3/4 c. brown sugar packed
2 eggs
2 T. milk (trust me on this)
1 t. vanilla extract (if using artificial vanilla use 2 t.)
1/2 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. baking powder
2-1/4 c. flour (although this varies anywhere from 2 cups to 2-1/2 cups depending on humidity)
1-1/2 c. mini chocolate chips (although you can use any, I like the way that mini chips spread through out the dough)

Using a mixer add all the ingredients in order, mixing well before adding the next.  You can add 1/2 - 1 cup of chopped pecans, although I seem to be the only one in the house that likes nuts in my cookies, so I rarely get to have them.)  When the dough is thoroughly mixed, using a spoon.  Eat it.  OK, don't.  OK, do.  OK, technically you aren't supposed to eat cookie dough that has raw eggs in it, but in all my forty-something years of eating cookie dough I have never had a bad reaction.  And cookie dough is just so yummy.  But if you insist on baking cookies (which you really should because if you ate that much cookie dough you will get a tummy ache and it won't be because of raw eggs) heat your oven to 350°F and bake them on a baking stone for 12-14 minutes.  If you don't have a baking stone, then I recommend using parchment paper on a metal sheet.  It won't be as good as on a stone, but it will make clean up easier and you don't have to worry about your cookies sticking to your pan.  After they have baked eat them as fast as you can.  Have a glass of ice cold milk with them or a cup of tea.  It's best that way.

Birthday Cakes!

Today is my birthday. My forty-sixth birthday. I'm not afraid of "growing old" or reaching a big number like fifty or sixty or ninety. In fact if I reach ninety I'll be tickled pink. Although my goal is to get to my eleventy-first birthday and then I'm going to have a hobbit birthday party and give everyone presents. But today I am just forty-six. It's just a number. Saying I am twenty-nine is not going to make me twenty-nine. And besides when I was twenty-nine I had a two-year old and was pregnant, so it wasn't very fun. I like being where I am. I've enjoyed growing in maturity, wisdom and understand (stop laughing) and still retaining my youth and frivolity.

Cakes and birthdays go hand in hand. And I love birthday cakes. I would have to say that my very favorite birthday cake is actually yellow cake with a traditional real buttercream frosting. Although yellow cake with a creamy chocolate frosting is pretty high up on the enjoyment list. I'll never refuse chocolate cake, though. In preparing for this post, I wondered what kind of cakes are made around the world and throughout history. I went to that compendium of never-failing information, Wikipedia (yes; you may laugh at that) to see what it had to say about birthday cakes. They're pretty old. In fact there are references that date back to the Greeks and Romans. I knew about medieval birthday cakes, but the recipes I have found for medieval cakes are more like sweet breads rather than what we think of as cake today. They were yeast risen and contained fruits and nuts. Think more German Stolen than Betty Crocker. It wasn't until the the middle of the eighteenth century that we started getting cakes that actually look like what we envision as birthday cakes today. Tiered cakes dripping in icing and floral decorations.

When searching for literary references for birthday cake, Google was somewhat a failure in producing anything truly useful. Although there was a Wiki question asking what color Bella's Birthday cake was in New Moon (It was pink.) And I did find this quote: “Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake.” So go eat cake. (BTW, cake wasn't referring to cake when Marie Antoinette suggested that the peasants go eat cake. The actual word was brioche not gateau. Brioche was a savory bread made with eggs and milk rather than starter and water. Both, though, require flour, which the bakers had none of, but Marie did not know this and thought one was just a substitute for the other. And it is also doubtful that Marie Antoinette actually uttered the words.)


This is my favorite recipe for a good basic yellow cake:

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
2-1/2 cups white sugar
3 eggs
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2-1/2 cups buttermilk
3-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
2-1/4 teaspoons baking powder
2-1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Bring the butter, eggs and buttermilk to room temperature!

Grease three 8" or 9" pans. I like to sprinkle mine with a little flour as well. Preheat your oven to 350°F. Using a mixer, cream your butter and sugar together until it is soft. Next add in your eggs one at a time and beat this for a good 5 minutes. You want a nice light fluffy cake. Add your vanilla and buttermilk (if you don't have buttermilk you can substitute regular milk, but add a dollop of Greek yogurt or sour cream to add just a pinch of tartness to it which will work well with the amount of sugar that is in this cake).

While your wet ingredients are beating away, sift together your flour, baking powder and soda. You do not need salt because everything you need is in your powder and soda. Trust me. It will be fine. Slowly add your dry ingredients to your wet ingredients, scraping the bowl as you go. Let it mix for just a few more minutes. Evenly divide the batter into your three prepared pans and bake for 35 minutes or until it tests clean.

Remove them from the oven and let them sit for 5 minutes before removing them from the pans and letting them cool on racks.

Sometimes I like to add a bit of orange or lemon zest to this recipe just because it is so darn good. In those instances I will sometimes bake this as a loaf and slice it, toast it and put butter on it. No frosting needed. But most of the time I put frosting on it.

What kind of frosting you ask? OK, here's my favorite recipe for that: Go to the store, look for the tub that reads, "Duncan Hines Milk Chocolate." Spread liberally. But when I do make my frosting from scratch this is what I use:

1/4 cup butter
2 cups confectioners' sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons milk

It's pretty easy and fairly foolproof. Just mix the first four ingredients adding the 2 tablespoons of milk a bit at a time until it is spreadable. It's simple, basic and so delicious on cake.

Some of my favorite things

Unfortunately in the wonderful Richard Rodgers' song, it fails to mention anything about cookie baking day. I love a cookie baking day. Today is one of those days. I'm making several different varieties for a cookie exchange with my knitting group and since I couldn't decide which cookie I wanted to bake I'm making a sampling from some of my favorites. From very easy (butter, sugar, flavoring (I used orange) and flour) to more intensive time consuming ones that require one to actually decorate and paint the finished cookies. But it's one of my favorite things to do, so I don't look at it as work.

My first recipe called for me to roll the cookies in powdered sugar. This meant I had to get down my sugar rolling bowl. This is a pottery bowl that my mother made probably thirty years ago. I've retained ownership of it and its twin and when cookies need to be rolled this is the bowl that comes down. It doesn't matter if it is powdered sugar for mocha crinkles or cinnamon and sugar for snickerdoodles. It's all the same. This is the perfect rolling bowl. It isn't too deep, it isn't too wide and it isn't too large. It allows for perfect hand movements and is large enough to hold three or four little balls of dough without crowding each other. It is one of those warm and comforting objects that is ingrained in traditions. I am quite sure as my children move out of the house there will inspections made to make sure that this bowl doesn't leave with them. They will fight over who gets it at my death. And if, by some horrid chance, it breaks we will have a service to remember all the wonderful times we had rolling cookies in sugar in this bowl.

Bread bread and more bread

The weather has finally started to cool off and with that I get a major bug to start baking. I was recently introduced to the book The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I am loving the concept of slow fermenting breads. I've played a bit with this concept in the past but never to this extent. I've made several of the breads and they have been quite fun. The hardest part is that we aren't eating the bread as fast as I can make it and most of the recipes come in two loaf variations. This is a delightful large book filled with fabulous recipes. Reinhart talks of bread as though he is wooing it. It is near poetic erotica how he speaks of bread and describes it. Just reading his description of crumb and crust will make you salivate and yearn to get your hands into flour. I highly recommend this book for any true bread lover. Oh and just a word of caution. If you make poolish and put it in a 1 quart jar because it fits and then you forget to put it in the fridge after a few hours you will come home to find poolish all over the counter, down into the draw that houses your bags and wraps, inside the door of the baking pans and in a puddle on the floor. The next day when you go to use said poolish you will only have enough for one large loaf of bread. I don't think you need to ask me how I know this.

The biggest problem that I am having with some of the wetter breads like the ciabatta is that I'm not getting the nice big open holes that these breads are known for. Mine tend to have a really nice crumb and great taste, but I'm missing the holey experience. I'm thinking that I am handling them too much between letting them rise on the cloths and putting them on the pants. The next time I make one of these I am going to let it do a final rising after they are on the pans and see if I am just degassing them too much when I move them to the pans. My friends are enjoying my efforts (though I think that their waistlines are not).

My last bread I made was a lovely egg enriched challah which had just the most wonderfully tender insides. It made you just want to use it for a pillow and it was quite delicious. I have several loaves to make for this upcoming weekend and I am going to make sure that this is one of them.