Christmas Cookies: Insta-dition

January 4, 2015May 25, 2015 CarmenLeave a comment

Happy New Year! I hope dieting was not on your list of resolutions this year, because there are cookies coming your way. Many cookies! They’re all excellent. Since I was running around with flour hands for two days, I thought it best to stick to my phone for the majority of Christmas’s photo-documentation. As a result, I have created a fun photo/recipe link post à la Instagram. Though none of these photos has seen Instagram as of this moment, I edited these 12 photos on my phone as if they were going to be grammed. With minimal staging, and no further ado, I present the 2k14 Christmas cookies, in square format.

First up: ginger molasses cookies! Or molasses spice, or gingersnaps. I go with the first because I make sure these come out nice and soft so they fall apart in your mouth/hand if you’re not careful. These are particularly great in the getting cold/freezing seasons, but make what you want, when you want. Recipe from Smitten Kitchen here.

Round two: chocolate chunk cookies! Folks, I’ve been working hard at the next best recipe for these things. So many variables, so many tests, so many possibilities! I’ll give you a hint while I finalize the next post: brown butter, light folding. Vanilla beans don’t hurt, either. In the meantime, find out about all things chocolate in your chocolate chunk cookie here.

This year’s MVC: the Citrus Snickerdoodle. Introduced to me by my friend Adriel, these cookies throw you for a loop, then make you question your relationship with snickerdoodles altogether. I asked for the recipe he used, but he geniusly made it himself – here’s what he wrote out for me:

Faux Citrus Snickerdoodles
1 1/2 c. sugar
1 c. butter, softened
2 eggs, room temperature
2 3/4 c. all-purpose flour
1 T. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 orange
1 T. freshly squeezed lemon juice (optional)
1 T. freshly squeezed orange juice (optional)

1/4 c. sugar, set aside
approx. 1 T. ground cinnamon, set aside

1) Preheat oven to 400°F.
2) Cream sugar, butter, eggs, & juices if using. Add flour, baking powder, salt, & zests.
3) Shape dough by scant tablespoonfuls into balls; roll in cinnamon-sugar mixture.
4) Place 2 in. apart on ungreased (dark) cookie sheet.
5) Bake until set, golden & slightly crisp, about 8 minutes. Cool cookies immediately on wire rack.

Yield: 3-4 dozen cookies

Do make sure to chill this dough for a bit; it will make it a lot easier to work with.

Winner of best wrap-up to 2014 goes to the lavender shortbread. You see, I brought back the lavender from my stay in France for the first half of the year (memories/mishaps found here), and tried my first lavender shortbread in San Francisco, where I spent the middle of the year. But I still have a whole bag of the stuff (taking suggestions now). Here’s the recipe that I doubled, with too much butter here. Will most likely have an updated recipe later because these were frachement excellents.

No I did not arrange the sink like this, nor did I plan on taking a photo of it, but I thought it looked kinda cool so, here you go. Dishes.

Here’s to finding the mathematical equation for eating many baked goods while staying extremely fit, right? Happy New Year!

Christmas Bread

December 28, 2014May 25, 2015 CarmenLeave a comment

Happy holidays! We’re reaching the end of the year already? I’ve finished school, which hopefully means I will be living in the kitchen, learning all sorts of exciting things, and documenting them. Stay tuned for new developments with this new time on my hands. In the meantime, enjoy the first steps: my first EVER solo bread loaf! It came out pretty great! Just in time for New Years; dig out your scale and flour and try your hand at some yourself.

Randomly selected ingredients/add-ins from the local co-op:

Dried apricots, dried cranberries, golden raisins and walnuts!

This picture was an accident, but I thought it looked better than what I was going for.

Essentials: Water & yeast, flour, and Ratio by Michael Ruhlman:

how to make anything from bread to sausage to soup with a simple ratio for each,

just add nuts/pepper/cheese etc.

No dough hooks or paddles necessary! Just add the water,

grab a wooden spoon and mix until you’ve got a dough.

Heyy check out my mom’s photography skills! Apparently you’re supposed to knead for 10 minutes; you can add your particulars halfway through this. I’m still working on the kneading thing…my
dough was kinda dense but that also may have been the pastry flour I was using…oops.

Woot feast your eyes on the jam-packed super-bread. Only four ingredients,
apart from the fruit and nuts. If you think you’ve added too much and bits
are falling out, fret not! It will all be okay.

Voilà! Despite the different lighting, it did not take too long to make this bread,

just some waiting. All worth it! Now we have a yummy bread chock-full of

nutritious things! It still looked kinda foldy before I threw it in the oven so it was dense but
IT’S COOL, still tasted great.

This is what the dining room table looked like by Christmas morning. Turkey? Nah,
cookies. And bread. Stay tuned for cookie recipes shortly! In the meantime, enjoy the leftovers of the holidays before your resolutions kick in.

Dried Fruit and Nut Bread

Adapted from Ratio by Michael Ruhlman

20 oz bread flour

12 oz warm water

1 packet or teaspoon active yeast

2 teaspoons salt

2 cups of your choice of dried fruit and nuts

1 cup water and cast-iron skillet for steam

Put your mixing bowl on the scale, zero it out, and measure out the flour. If you have a stand mixer, you add the rest of the ingredients, zeroing as necessary. With no mixer, get a second bowl and measure out the water using the same process, and add the yeast and salt. Add this to the flour and combine with a wooden spoon.

Once you get a homogenous mixture, take out the dough and knead it on a floured surface for 10 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and elastic. Halfway through, gradually fold in your fruit and nuts. After kneading, place the dough back in the bowl, greased and/or floured, and let sit until double in size (an hourish).

Take the dough out and knead again to get rid of excess gas, or punch it down, then let it sit again for 10-15 minutes. You can then shape the dough into a boule by rolling it on the counter until it is a round ball. Place it on a ceramic surface or pan and let sit one more time for an hour. You can also refrigerate the dough at this time for up to a day, allowing it to come to room temperature for 2 hours before baking. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees, and put a cast-iron skillet on a rack to heat up for steam during baking.

Take the boule and cute an x, pound sign or any other pattern you want at the top to allow the dough to expand in the oven. Pour the cup of water into the skillet to create steam in the oven. This process helps to create a thick, crisp bread crust. Do it: it’s important and impressive! Bake the dough at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, and then at 375 degrees for another 45 minutes or so. When the bread is done, it will sound hollow when you tap the bottom. Cut and enjoy naked or with anything on top!

Shout out to my mom for helping with the lighting 😀

Very Merry Cookies

December 27, 2012 CarmenLeave a comment

Dear cookie chops,
     Come back to me! I’ve been out of practice, and it showed in my annual Christmas cookie production. I usually do chocolate chip cookies and always gingerbread cookies. Of the four cookie recipes I executed this week, only one turned out to my satisfaction. First, there were these petits fours from my huge cookie bible; I really should be more skeptical of the thing; it gave me a recipe for sugar cookies without sugar. These petits fours had no flour, though the photo looked suspiciously like coconut macaroons. Needless to say, I did not get very far. Poor powdered sugar…
     Next came the chocolate hazelnut oatmeal cookies. Sounds like a mouthful, feels like a mouthful. Seeing as the only ingredients were butter, oatmeal, hazelnuts and nutella, the ratios are very important. Less than a cup of nutella, hazelnuts and butter each, with two whole cups of oatmeal? The texture didn’t particularly tickle my fancy, but the nutella melted with the butter made for a nice, dare I say, umami factor. Will definitely be reproduced at some point, with varying proportions.
     Then came the snickerdoodles. I’ve definitely made snickerdoodles before, so I’m trying to figure out just what choice it was that made the cookies sad and flat. It may have been the substitution of two egg yolks for a second egg, or the brief hour in the fridge, but these snickerdoodles weren’t quite ready for the oven. I put them in the first time, and after five or so minutes, the dough started melting off the cookie sheet and onto the bottom of the oven. No one was concerned, until five more minutes when the smell of smoke started to fill the living room. The cookie side effects included a new smoky flavor that was…not completely unwelcome, though probably dispensable.
     It’s a good thing for tradition, because I don’t think I could possibly mess up the gingerbread things. Every year I make gingerbread cookies with my cello, camel, palm tree and moon cutters. And every year I make icing with whatever additions I feel like at the time – orange zest, cinnamon, vanilla. Fills your mouth with all the spices!
     Next year I’ll go back to the cookie press and the chocolate chips. And by next year, I mean next week. Hoping your new year is full of good times and better food!