Coconut Lime Oat-y Cookies

Happy birthday to Stef and to Thidz!

Papa John and Mrs. Nice are staying with us for a couple of weeks and Papa John is a cookie fiend so I figured I’d whip up a batch of something a little bit different to keep him occupied for a while.  This recipe is adapted from one I found in Everyday Food.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line some baking sheets with parchment paper.

Whisk together 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.

Then, in the bowl of an electric mixer, beat together 1 cup butter with 1/2 cup granulated sugar and 3/4 cup packed brown sugar.

Beat them for about 4 minutes, until fluffy and pale.

Slide in 2 eggs, 2 tablespoons vanilla, and 1 250g package plain cream cheese (at room temperature) and beat that up as well.

Beat in the flour mixture gradually, then mix in 1 1/2 cups dessicated coconut (you can toast this ahead of time if you wish — I didn’t).

And 2 tablespoons freshly grated lime zest.

Aaaand 1 1/2 cups rolled oats.

Get that all combined.

Use a soup spoon to dollop quantities of dough onto your baking sheet.  They won’t spread too much but leave lots of space around them in any case.  Bake, rotating the pans halfway through, for 12-14 minutes.

Leave on the pan for a few minutes after removing from the oven so the cookies can solidify, then carefully scoop them onto a wire rack to cool completely.  Seal in an airtight container to maintain freshness.

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Gluten-Free Pumpkin Dog Treats

This is the last pumpkin post, I swear.  We’re finally rid of it.  Fortunately, there is one member of our family who will never tire of pumpkin, and that is The Short and Spoiled One.

Have we met?

This is a quick recipe that I put together with inspiration from Betty Crocker and Simply Sugar and Gluten-Free.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together 4 cups brown rice flour with 2 tablespoons ground flax meal (optional) and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.  It occurs to me after the fact that you could also use a mixture of brown rice flour and quinoa flour, seeing as quinoa is the new superfood for dogs these days.  Very trendy of you.

In another bowl, whisk together 2 large eggs with 1 3/4 cups (or 1 14 oz can) of pure pumpkin purée (not the pie filling) and 1/4 cup peanut butter (all natural, with no added salt or sugar, please).

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until a shaggy dough forms — you may need to use your hands.

Sprinkle with more flour and stir that in if it’s still tacky.

Take the dough and form it into a small ball with your palms.  Flatten it into a patty and place it on the baking sheet.  Angle your thumb sideways on one side of the cookie and press it into the dough.  Use the point of one of your fingers to make four indentations along the curve of your thumbprint.   So it looks like a wee paw print.  Cute, eh?

Bake for about 25 minutes, depending on the thickness of your cookie.  A finished cookie is crisp and dried out.

Allow them to cool completely on a rack and store them in the fridge to keep them fresh for a couple weeks.  At room temperature in an airtight container they’ll keep for about a week.

Gren obviously enjoyed testing them.  Here he is waiting for my okay.

Scarfing down the first piece.

Discovering the second.

Scarfing that one too.

Are there no more?

Gren was nice enough to share with some of my coworkers’ dogs, and this was the review:

Photo credit: E. Wright

Most Meta Milkshake

I had a meta moment the other day.  Hear me out.

So there are these Oreo cookies, limited edition.  Cookies and cream.   In a cookie.  With cream.

Cookies and cream is, on its own, a popular ice cream flavour, and by extension, a good milkshake.  Because it’s cookies.  In cream.  In fact, as you can see, the picture on the front of the Oreo package is of a cookies and cream cookie in a cookies and cream milkshake.  My mind was slightly blown.

So we of course made milkshakes with our cookies and cream cookies.  We would have used cookies and cream ice cream as well but we thought that might be pushing it.

Basic formula: take about 4 cookies per milkshake and crush them up in a food processor.

Crush them into crumbs.

Plop as much ice cream as will fit into the cup into which you will be putting your finished product.

Fill the rest up with milk.

Pour that stuff into a blender, together with your crumbs.

Blend and pour.

Enjoy your cookies and cream cookies with cream in a meta manner.

What Can You Do with Leftover Ganache?

I have more ganache leftover from the Red Velvet Comeback Cupcakes than is really good for my sanity.  There are/is/are about 3 cups of ganache sitting in my fridge.

The good thing is that you can freeze ganache.  Did you know that?  While it’s frozen you can figure out what the heck to do with it.

This particular ganache is just cream and chocolate, and has a consistency of chocolate pudding. Mmm, pudding …

So what can you do with ganache that’s lying around?

If it’s thicker,  you can make truffles.  If it’s thinner, you can make fondue.

If it’s as it is, you can ice cakes and brownies with it.

You can pour it into hot milk for hot chocolate.

Add it to your coffee for a mocha latte.

Today, however, we are going to make ourselves some cookies, then make ganache sandwiches with them, then FREEZE them.  It’ll be like ice cream sandwiches, but wayyyy better.

I picked our recipe for margarine chocolate chip cookies, because they’re the biggest and fluffiest.  But I made them twice as big.  I ended up with 28 cookies.

Make sure your ganache is super chilly.  To be on the safe side, chuck the mixing bowl you’re using in the freezer for a while as well.

Whip that ganache up to a frothy amazingness.

Spoon fluffy ganache in-between your cooled cookies.  Sandwich them together.  Otherwise they ain’t sammiches.

Wrap them in waxed paper, seal them in a plastic bag, and chuck them in the freezer.

The Pie and I each ate one before freezing.  The sweetness was sweeeeeeeeeet.

Also there was a wee bit of ganache leftover, but neither of us could pluck up the nerve to eat any more.  These babies are pretty intense.

Espresso Cookies

Miss Awesome and P-with-an-E served these to us with tea after one of those long Sunday lunches that you don’t think about leaving until it’s nearly dark and you have to figure out how you’re going to eat dinner.

Yes, I know, we’ve done the whole espresso deal with our espresso brownies, but who says you can’t make a cookie out of everything?  I had to modify the recipe a bit as it involved using a pre-mixed chocolate chip cookie dough as a base, but I think the result is quite good.  And I will pass on Miss Awesome’s warning: DO NOT EAT AT BEDTIME!

Preheat your oven to 375°F and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Whisk together in a medium-sized bowl:

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

3 tablespoons instant espresso powder

1 tablespoon ground coffee

What I like about mixing dark powders with light powders is that I can easily see how well I’ve mixed the coffee in, so the logic is that if the coffee is well blended then so is the stuff I can’t see, like the baking soda.  Of course, if you shoot it in macro, you can see EVERYTHING.

In a large bowl, cream together

1/2 cup butter, softened (That divot is because I stuck my finger in it to check if it was soft.  It was.)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup granulated sugar

Crack in and blend well

1 large egg

Stir into that

1/4 cup Kahlua

Stir the flour mixture into the butter mixture and blend well.

Add in

3/4 cup chopped pecans

1 cup chocolate chips

And because we need a chocolate chip extreme closeup:

Use a tablespoon to plop your dough onto the baking sheet.  Space them out as best you can because they will spread quite a bit.

Bake the cookies for 9-12 minutes and leave them on the pan for another five minutes before removing them to a wire rack to cool completely.Then you can eat them.  Or just look at them.  Or whatever.

Gluten-Free Dog Treats

In honour of Ruby’s first birthday, Cait and I got together and concocted some fabulous dog biscuits for her and Gren.  Being a corgi and therefore very food-obsessed and prone to obesity, Gren only took home a few to try, but they were still enjoyed by all.  I even had one, as I won’t feed my dog anything I wouldn’t eat myself.

Ruby murders Gren

Fortunately, we were able to easily find a dog treat recipe online that conformed to our philosophy of feeding our dogs biologically appropriate food.  That means most definitely no corn, no wheat, and no soy, and none of those other things that people seem to think dogs need, like salt, sugar, and artificial flavours or colours.  This recipe from Sandra over at dog-nutrition-naturally.com totally fit the bill and was easy to do.  We tripled the recipe so that there would be plenty of birthday treats for everyone.

First, peel yourself a large sweet potato.  And I mean LARGE.  Cut that sucker up.

Plop the potato pieces in a pot and boil them silly until they’re mashable.  Then of course mash them.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and lightly brush a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil.

In a large bowl, plop in 1lb ground meat.  We used extra lean ground beef, but you can use turkey, chicken, pork, or lamb — or really, whatever you want.

Add to that 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder (not garlic salt) and a large egg.  Drop in 5 tablespoons large flake rolled oats as well, just for cohesion purposes.

Chuck in the mashed sweet potato and mix it well.

Spread it flat on the prepared cookie sheet and smooth the top.

Bake for about an hour.  The cookie will shrink and pull away from the sides.  Now you can score the cookie into smaller pieces, or use a cookie cutter to make fun shapes.  A pizza cutter is handy about now too.

Reduce the oven heat to 250°F and pop the cookies back into the oven for another hour or so to dry out.  Keep an eye on them so they don’t burn.

Tada!  That’s it.  Now SIT.

Good dog.Make sure to store your treats in an airtight container, and of course remember that treats should never be used as a substitute for your dog’s regular diet.  Yum yum!

Cranberry Orange Cookies

These cookies garnered the approval of Il Principe and his mother.  And the Pie.  And they were really easy.  Which might be why I adapted them from EasyCookies.com.  But I’m just guessing here. In changing the recipe, I left out the salt, as usual, and accidentally added twice the amount of butter I should have, which ended up giving the cookies a lovely crunch I think they needed.  I also added zest to boost the orange aspect of what would otherwise be a pretty plain cookie.

There is nothing more cheery than citrus in the winter, and my mother will tell you that any time you wave an orange at her at any point between November and April.  But she’s right.  Citrus is a remarkably happy-making thing.  Orange being the Pie’s favourite colour, I made these citrus-y cookies with all our citrus-y implements.

So first you want to preheat your oven to 375°F and line some baking sheets with parchment paper.

Next, gather yourself the juice and rind from 2 oranges and set that aside.  You should have about 1/2 cup orange juice and about 2 tablespoons rind to show for your efforts.   While you’re at making things to set aside, whisk together, in a measuring cup or small bowl, 3 cups all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.  And, well, set that aside too.

In a large bowl, cream together 1 cup butter, softened, with 1 cup granulated sugar and 1 cup packed brown sugar. 

Add in 2 eggs.

Pour in your reserved juice and rind.  Mix ’em.

Slowly add your dry ingredients, mixing the whole while.

Stir in 2 cups dried cranberries.

It won’t look like you’ve produced a lot of dough, but trust me, this will make you a whole whack of cookies.  And I MEAN a WHOLE WHACK.  Like 6 or 7 dozen maybe?Drop the sticky dough in heaping teaspoons (not tablespoons, mind you, these cookies are meant to be small) onto the parchment-lined baking sheets.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating your sheets halfway through, until lightly golden and firm on top.  Let the cookies sit on the sheets outside the oven for a little bit, then remove the crunchy wonders to a rack to cool completely.

If you end up having any left, you should store them in an airtight container so they don’t go stale.  I also froze some dough for later.  Because it’s so sticky, I couldn’t pre-form the cookies before freezing, so I will have to defrost the whole batch of dough before baking.  Alas.

Chewy Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cookies

This recipe is an interesting one, and the Pie pointed it out to me.  He loves peanut butter, but isn’t a huge fan of the peanut butter cookie, finding it too crumbly and dry.  So he found me this recipe in Baked’s first cookbook, and I thought I would try it out for one of my research participants.  The participant in question, poor fellow, just broke his collarbone in two places.  I got a one-armed hug for my cookie efforts.  It helped that I also brought along some of the ever-popular peanut butter cups.

And, because my lovely Baked book is back in St. John’s, I used the instructions of Laura over at Kitchen Illiterate — thanks Laura!

I doubled my recipe and am going to attempt to freeze half this dough and see how it turns out.  As always, I left out the salt, because my butter is salted.

So get your mis en place all set up:

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour, whisked or sifted together with 2 teaspoons baking soda

1 cup butter, softened and cut into pieces

1 cup granulated sugar and 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup peanut butter (I used all-natural crunchy)

6 ounces chocolate, chopped (I used dark chocolate)

If you’re not sure how fine to chop your chocolate, remember that, unlike chocolate chips, bar and slab chocolate does not retain its shape when it’s melted, so think carefully about the size of chocolate goo you want wandering around in your cookie and you’ll be fine.

First, beat the butter and the sugars together until they’re totally fluffy.  If you find your mixture is too dry and crumbly, your butter needs to be softer.  You can chuck your mixing bowl into the oven at 250°F for a few minutes and that will do the trick nicely.

Add each egg one at a time and beat until fully incorporated.

Then you can plop in your peanut butter and the vanilla.  I found it mixed easier if I softened the peanut butter as well, but it depends on the type of peanut butter you use.  Beat that until it’s just mixed.

Add about half the flour mixture and beat for 15 seconds (just following the recipe here, folks).  Add the second half and beat until just incorporated, though you want to make sure you don’t have any pockets of flour anywhere.

Now you can add in your chocolate.

Cover your bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.  I am a bad person, and only had time to do it for 2 hours, but I don’t think it makes a whole lot of difference.  The dough might be a little harder to handle, but you get used to it.

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and use a tablespoon measure or small scoop to drop rounded balls of dough onto the sheet. 

The secret is in the roundness of your implement.

Make sure they’re at least 2″ apart, because these babies will spread like the Dickens. (Incidentally, does anyone know where that particular turn of phrase comes from?)

Flatten the balls with your fingers, but just a little bit.  They’ll do the rest on their own.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, rotating your sheets halfway through baking, until the cookies have just started to brown on top.  You may find that your oven is hotter or more efficient than this and your cookies end up a bit darker or slightly burnt on the bottom. I always burn my first batch anyway.  My dad loves it because it means more cookies for him.

I ended up cutting the baking time down to 8 minutes, rotating halfway through.  It might even be better to cook them at 350°F instead, but I guess it depends on how thick your pan is.  I used two kinds of baking sheets, one rimmed and one not, and the ones on the rimmed sheet did not turn out as dark.

Remove them from the oven and allow them to sit on the baking sheets for a few minutes to firm up before you transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.  Then you can stuff your face.  Go ahead.  You know you want to.

Cocoa-Caramel-Pecan Cookies

At the end of October I dog-sat for one of my neighbours, KDB.  She has two Scottie dogs, Hamish and Flora.

I wanted to leave her something nice to come home to, and to take advantage of the fun that is her kitchen.  It’s blue.  All of it.  And whatever isn’t blue tends to have the image of a Scottie on it.

Kristopf came over to help me make cookies (but in reality to use my computer).This is a recipe that I kind of invented myself, adapted from the basic Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.  I hope you like it.

Preheat your oven to 375°F.

Soften 2 cups butter and plop it in a large bowl.Cream it together with 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar and 1 1/2 cups brown sugar.Crack 4 eggs into a bowl and whisk them silly.

Add the eggs to the butter stuff and mix well.

In a separate bowl, mix together 4 1/2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 6 to 8 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa.  Add this to the goo mixture a little at a time and stir well.

Now, stirring the whole time (you may need to use your hands at this point as the dough gets hard to handle), add in 2 1/2 cups pecan pieces, 2 cups butterscotch chips, and 2 cups chocolate chips.Drop spoonfuls of the dough on ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 9 to 11 minutes, rotating halfway through for even baking.  After removing them from the oven, leave the cookies on the sheets for a few minutes, then remove them to a rack to cool completely.

They are super good with your afternoon tea.

Try not to eat them all at once.

 

Coconut Cream Cheese Cookies

There is a new god in the pantheon and its name is COOKIE.

Holy SMOKES these are wicked good.  And I don’t even really LIKE cookies.

I was going to make cream cheese brownies to give to the Pie when he came to visit for Thanksgiving, but I figured I should probably go with something new that he hadn’t had before, and besides, I had a lot of cream cheese on hand.  What goes well with cream cheese?

Coconut, of course.  This recipe was adapted with thanks from Dawn Finicane at Vanilla Sugar (who made some adaptations of her own) and it’s fantastic.  FANTASTIC. 

(Just note that this is a two-day cookie to make.  And yeah, I doubled the recipe, as usual.)

DAY ONE:

Preheat your oven to 325°F.

Line two rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper and divide 5 cups unsweetened shredded coconut between them.  Seems like a lot, I know, but trust me on this one.

Bake for 10-20 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes or so, for even toasting.  When the coconut is a golden brown, take it out and let it cool.

Melt 1 1/2 cups butter and let it cool to room temperature.

Whisk together4 1/2 cups flour with 1 teaspoon baking soda and set aside.

In a large bowl, plop in two 400g packages cream cheese.

Add to this your now-cooled butter.

Use an electric mixer to cream the crap out of it.

Add 2 cups packed brown sugar, 1 cup granulated sugar, and 4 teaspoons vanilla extract and mix until thoroughly combined.

Add your flour gradually and mix at a low speed until just combined. 

Stir in your cooled coconut.

Cover the dough and chill it overnight.

DAY TWO:

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line your baking sheets with parchment paper.  For this amount of cookie dough you’ll need to use your pans several times, so I prepped four pans, to bake two at a time.

Drop the dough onto the parchment — the cookies will not expand much but might settle slightly during baking.

Bake for 12-14 minutes or until the edges of the cookies are set and the bottoms are light brown.  You have to be careful not to overbake these babies. Cool the cookies on the baking sheets until you can lift them without breaking them. Place on wire racks to cool completely.

Store in an airtight container until you eat them all up!

Next time I think I might add a bit of lime juice and grated lime peel to the recipe.  I think that would boost its godliness to new heights.  It will be like the creamy coconut lime cupcakes, but in cookie form.

*** Ali’s Note, 31 January 2010: I added the juice and rind of two limes to this at the cream cheese stage.  The result? OH.  MY.  DO IT.