Double Chocolate Peppermint Cookies (p. 769)

I'm already failing at keeping the blog up again.  I'm two months behind but that's fine, I've decided I'm not going to stress over it and I'm not going to backdate posts.  I still have a lot of blog work to do--I have to finish the indexes, change all the side copy, and fix the keywords (to start).  

Cookie baking!  This is our new tradition, started in 2018.  On Christmas Eve Eve (the 23rd) we bake cookies.  Lots and lots of cookies.  The goal is so we have those cookies when people stop by, which they do.  I love holiday visits.  Do you bake cookies for the holidays?  What do you make?

I didn't get a final picture of these cookies because...well, because were attempting to make ten types of cookies and it got hard to photograph.  I'm not back in the swing of things yet.  We use a planning board whenever we cook big meals to stay on task.  Guests have gotten good at walking into the house and going over to the board to see what's on the menu.

The planning board--you will see this a lot

Double-chocolate peppermint cookies (p.769) use the same base as Soft and chewy sugar cookies (p. 768).  

Flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and salt were sifted into a bowl.  Remember, measure and then sift.

In another bowl sugar  and butter were mixed until light and fluffy. 

Spin spin spin

This takes longer than you think it's going to take.  Don't rush it.  I added peppermint extract and then an egg.  I know peppermint extract might not be something that everyone has in their pantry but you really need it if you want to bake a lot.  I love the smell of mint so it was nice and invigorating.  Side note: If you get the opportunity to go to the Celestial Seasoning tea plant, I highly recommend it.  The room where they store the mints is awesome--clears your sinuses it's so strong.  The most interesting thing I learned there is they clean with air because if you cleaned with water you make tea.

The flour mixture was added in.  Of course at this point I divvied up the dough into balls, completely forgetting the chocolate chips.  I had to add all the balls back into the bowl, add the chocolate chips, and do it all over again.  

The dough  was rolled into balls, then broken in half and rolled into balls again.  

We sprinkled turbinado sugar on top.  (What? You don't have a selection of sugars to use at home??  Plain brown or white sugar would have been fine).  They were cooked  for about ten minutes.

Remember, I forgot to take a final picture but they essentially looked like this, just cooked.  The cookies were extremely chocolaty and very, very minty.  The phrase "an Andes mint on steroids" was mentioned.  If you like chocolate/mint combos, make these.  You will love them and they aren't very difficult.

Random facts:

• Peppermint is a hybrid of watermint (wtf is watermint?) and spearmint.
• Peppermint is considered an invasive species in much of the world.  It's extremely fast growing.

Nora's Chocolate Chip Cookies (p. 770), Applesauce Cake (p. 732), and Quick Butterscotch (Penuche) Icing (p. 799)

Who doesn't love chocolate chip cookies?  I have to admit, I don't turn to The Joy of Cooking for cookie recipes at all.   Do you?  I tend to go to dedicated cookie cookbooks and I have historically not loved the TJOC chocolate chip cookie recipes but I was hopeful for this one because it's new to the  2019 Edition.  Readers, I didn't love it.  It was certainly easy enough (but not nearly as easy--or as good--as the recipe on the Crisco container).

I love my house and I love my kitchen but I do not love the lighting.  It's absolutely terrible and it will be improved at some point.  Fortunately, terrible pictures have always been a hallmark of TJOTJOC. 

Dry ingredients were mixed:

Ugh, these shadows

Butter was creamed with white and brown sugar (if you don't know what that means, google is your friend). Vanilla, an egg, and an egg yolk were added:

OMG I did not make this in complete darkness

The flour mixture was added in and then the chocolate chips.  We had two different types of chocolate chips left over from Christmas Eve Eve (otherwise known as "cookie baking day") so I just used those.  I got out the cookie scoop.  We have a lot of cookie scoops and they are all terrible except the one my bestie Rachel gave me.  I picked out "Amazon Choice" scoops.  I read a story online right after that about a terrible lady who takes money from companies that make garbage that they pay people to "review" on Amazon and that regularly become "Amazon Choice" and that really irritates me because I formerly trusted the rating.  It explains why I have had so many terrible purchases recently.  Scoops that don't scoop fall into that.  Rant over.  I had to scoop them twice because I used the wrong size.

I never know how much they are going to spread so I always put them too far apart.

After:

Toooooo crispy.  I don't like my chocolate chip cookies that crispy which is why I tend to use Crisco.  I love Crisco.  I could work for Crisco.  The recipe lies.  It calls these chewy, thick cookies--they were not.These will not be made in the future.

The Joy of Cooking Applesauce Cake came next.  The other day I looked in the refrigerator to find a freaking enormous jar of applesauce.  To the best of my knowledge nobody in this house is a big applesauce fan so it was odd.  Jeff said that it was really cheap so obviously he bought it.  Obviously (eye roll).  So I looked in TJOC for a recipe that would use some applesauce and found Applesauce cake (p. 732).

Gwen helped me mix sifted flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, salt, allspice, and nutmeg.  Two points here:

1.  EDUCATION!  If it's "sifted flour" you measure after sifting.  If it's "flour, sifted" you measure and then sift.  I'm not sure everyone knows that and it's super important.

2.  I have Gwen taste all the ingredients as we are cooking including all the spices.  I'll be damned if she's one of those people on a cooking show who fail the tasting challenge--they should all be ashamed of themselves.  Let your kids taste things when they cook with you!

Butter is beaten and sugar is added.  I used brown sugar but you can use white or a combination.  An egg is cracked in and then the flour mixture and the applesauce are alternately added.  I was optimistic about this recipe.  It smelled good and wasn't too sweet.  You can add nuts or dried fruit.  I'm always going to opt in to nuts and dried fruit so I added walnuts and dried cranberries.

The whole thing as cooked for about a half hour.  I decided to use the square pan rather than the loaf pan option.

After cooking:

It popped out extremely easily, which makes sense, as I used about a stick of butter on the pan.

I'm always going to opt in to icing.  I lllloooovvvveeee penuche so I was happy to see Quick Butterscotch (Penuche) Icing (p. 799).  It was easy because all icing is easy.  Butter, brown sugar, evaporated milk, and salt were mixed over heat until they were combined and let cool in a bowl:

Powdered sugar and vanilla were added:

Tell me you don't want to reach into this picture for a taste...

I liked both these recipes!  The applesauce cake was not very sweet and reminded me of the zucchini cake we made every summer to get rid of the huge excess of zucchini.  The icing was absolutely amazing--smooth, brown sugary, fantastic.  Next time I will make the cake in a loaf but I will make it again.  Possibly with the same giant jar of applesauce.  Fast and good.

But I had extra icing so what to do with it...

Sandwich it between cookies!!!  It was amazing.  Penuche icing belongs between cookies.  

Even though I didn't like these cookies I do think they would make fantastic ice cream sandwiches.  For Gwen's second birthday we made homemade ice cream sandwiches and they were really popular.  You have to be careful with the cookie that you pick because they can get way too hard and I think these would have been sturdy enough while soaking up some of the moisture from the ice cream to soften.

What kind of chocolate chip cookies do you like?  Does the rest of your household agree or is it an argument every time? Tell me below!

Note: All three recipes are vegetarian, the icing is GF. 

Fortune cookies (p. 780)

Sometimes I open my big mouth too early. And by "sometimes" I mean "often". I don't like when recipes fail. I know that nobody likes a recipe to fail but failure for some people gives them the kick in the rear they need to accomplish bigger and better things. Not me. If a recipe totally is a loss, I move on to making something else most of the time.

"So what?" you are thinking. "Interesting (sort of) but what does it have to do with TJOC?"

Well, still on my high of winning my category in the chili cook-off (sure, I was the only entry in "vegetarian chili" but I refuse to let that diminish my win!) I came up with the bright idea of making Fortune cookies (p. 780) for the one-year anniversary of my awesome coworking space, Cohere. I told everyone about how I was going to do this, with custom "truth or dare" style "fortunes" inside. And then I tried making the cookies.

I stirred together egg whites, sugar, and salt.



I added melted butter, flour, and vanilla (one ingredient at a time):



Eventually, the dough looked like this:



I dropped them on parchment paper and cooked them:



They were failures. Big failures. They were way, way too cookie-like to work as a fortune cookie. A fortune cookie needs to crisp up a lot so that after you fold it, it holds it's shape. That didn't happen with the TJOC version. At this point I wanted to consider the recipe a loss and move on with my life. They were never going to work, frankly, I don't believe the recipe works as a fortune cookie at all.

Unfortunately, remember the beginning of this post? Yeah, I still had people happily tweeting me about their excitement to eat homemade fortune cookies and sending me Facebook messages with their ideas for the truths or dares (which was awesome, I'm not creative enough to come up with all those on my own). So I sighed, went looking throughout the internet, and found another recipe.

Which worked.

I made mountains of fortune cookies:




They were beautiful, surprisingly tasty, went over extremely well, and almost won a cupcake competition that they weren't even entered in (obviously, as they are not cupcakes)--they almost won through write-in votes). They were obnoxiously time-consuming but very rewarding if you like accolades as much as I do. And they were far, far more delicious than your average restaurant fortune cookie!

Pecan puff (p.769)

I was sort of excited about the Pecan puff (p.769) recipe because they looked the nut balls that we make in my family for Christmas. I like those nut balls and would be happy to have a lot of them to eat.

The recipe was really simple. I beat my butter until soft and added sugar, which I beat until creamy:



I used my old-fashioned but awesome nut grinder to grind up a cup of pecans:



I stirred the pecans and some cake flour into the butter mixture:



I rolled the dough in to balls and popped them in the oven:



Uh oh:



Can't say I know what went wrong with this recipe but the balls flattened out, which they aren't supposed to do. I was supposed to roll them in powdered sugar and pop them back in the oven but that didn't happen because they were too flat. They tasted good--not very sweet but crumbly and full of nutty deliciousness. I'm sure they would be even better had they retained their ball shape.

Random facts:

• "Pecans are the soft, fatty seeds of a very large tree..." (On Food and Cooking, p. 511). Does that make them sound appetizing to anyone?
  
• Pecans and walnuts have some of the highest oil and unsaturated fatty acid contents among nuts, which means they oxidize and stale faster than other nuts (OFaC, p. 511)
• The pecan tree is the state tree of Texas (Wikipedia)
  
• Cake flour is finely milled wheat flour, which has a lower protein content than all-purpose flour (Wikipedia)
  

Chocolate icebox cookies (p. 776)

I have been eying the giant list of icebox cookies for some time. I know exactly why they haven't been made, too. I really hate when I have to refrigerate cookie dough. Usually it means I'm in the mood to cook when I start but then have to take a break and I'm usually not in the mood to bake when I need to finish the cookies. This is also why I never make sugar cookies.

Even so, there are seven icebox cookie recipes in TJOC. I read them to Josh, he picked the chocolate chip version which requires tiny, expensive chocolate chips. Instead of making his choice (much to his dismay), I decided to make Chocolate icebox cookies (p. 776). Same thing, right? RIGHT?

So I mixed flour, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl I beat butter and sugar until fluffy, finally adding in an egg, melted chocolate, brandy, and some vanilla.



I rolled the whole thing up with parchment paper and popped it in the fridge:



The dough was really sticky and did not like rolling up. The next day it was extremely hard. I cut it in to slices:



And baked them:



These are odd cookies. They are thin and crisp. I think they would be an absolutely delicious ice cream sandwich. This particular version was chocolate-y without being overboard. The addition of brandy was excellent--it added some depth to the chocolate. That all being said, I hate making the dough and then having to finish the cookies hours later so I doubt that icebox cookies will ever be at the top of my list of favorite cookie recipes.

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (p. 768)

I have a never-ending love for oatmeal cookies. When I was a child, my mother and I used to make them constantly. In fact, in Campfire in elementary school we were supposed to write down all the ingredients and steps of a recipe from memory, and then compare it to the real recipe. Everyone's recipes were extremely wrong--except mine. I forgot baking soda and my temperature was slightly off. That's how often we made them.

I was optimistic about Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (p. 768) because although I know that dried fruit is delicious in oatmeal cookies, Josh disagrees. My previous TJOC oatmeal cookies had been pretty good, although I like my oatmeal cookies cakey rather than crisp, so they weren't ideal.

The recipe was essentially the same as the one linked above except it had no cinnamon or nutmeg (hooray! I don't like cinnamon!) and used chocolate chips instead of raisins:



They were flat but not as flat as the original oatmeal cookies.



They were good! They also stayed soft, which was nice. I still think they needed nuts to be truly tasty but I deferred to Josh's hatred of nuts in cookies because I knew I wouldn't eat them all.

So what do you think? What do you like in your oatmeal cookies? Raisins, nuts, chocolate chips, other?

Random facts:

• Oatmeal is common in Scottish cooking because oats were far more suited to the wet growing season in Scotland than corn or wheat (Wikipedia). Haggis, anyone?
• Oats can be eaten cooked or raw (Wikipedia). I guess I knew this but I never thought about it. I eat raw oats in granola or on bread relatively often.
• There is no actual Quaker connection for Quaker Oats. The original marketers at QO thought the image of a Quaker man holding a scroll that read "pure" represented "integrity, quality, and honesty" (Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (p. 487).

Brownies cockaigne (p. 762)

Disclaimer: I don't like brownies. I'm probably the only person in the US who doesn't like brownies. So it's a real mystery why I decided to make Brownies cockaigne (p. 762) when there are so many tastier looking cookies in the chapter. This recipe has appeared in every edition of TJOC since the original 1931 edition (one of only 9 recipes to be in every edition, I think).

I melted butter and baker's chocolate in a small saucepan, then let it cool down completely (TJOC threatens utter disaster if the chocolate doesn't cool completely).

I beat eggs and salt in a bowl until foamy:

I beat in sugar and vanilla, then added the cooled chocolate:

I mixed the chocolate into the sugar mixture with a couple strokes, then added a cup of flour until just combined. TJOC mentioned that if I wanted the brownies to be cakey, I should make the brownies in a 9x9 pan rather than a 13x9 pan, which I did.

I cooked the brownies for about 30 minutes but they weren't done. So I cooked them a little longer. I finally took them out and they looked like this:

Very odd. The top was as hard as a rock and the inside wasn't completely cooked. It was like the top was a cookie and the inside was molten. The brownies were good heated up and with ice cream but, even then, I can't say it was even a decent brownie, much less the best I've ever had. Maybe I needed the bigger pan because of the altitude?

I'm not sure why this particular disaster occurred. Does anyone know what happened?

Butterscotch nut cookies (p. 771)

I've been on a real kick of making recipes from the Randomly Selected List (mostly because I like creating the lists and need to finish this one before making a new one). I decided to make Butterscotch nut cookies (p. 771).

I've never liked butterscotch. I especially don't like those hard butterscotch disks. My father has always tried to convince me that caramel and butterscotch were the same thing so if I liked one, I should like the other (and I like caramel, so I should like butterscotch). That is not accurate in any way but is what I always think of when I see butterscotch. When I told that story on Facebook while making these cookies, my father replied that my brothers never bought that explanation either.

The cookies are essentially butterscotch blondies with a tiny bit more flour, chocolate chips, and nuts. Before starting this recipe I couldn't figure out what would make them butterscotch--wouldn't they really just be vanilla brownies made in to cookies?

No, it turns out.

I melted butter in a small saucepan and cooked it until it was a light golden brown (that must be the butterscotch part!):



In a bowl I mixed together flour, baking powder and soda, and salt (I didn't take a picture of that step, it was a bunch of white powder, you can use your imagination).

I added brown sugar and white sugar to the butter:




I let it cool until barely warm and added in an egg, and extra egg yolk, a little corn syrup, and some vanilla:



I mixed in chocolate chips and flour mixture. I decided to do the whole thing in the saucepan so I could make less dishes.



I didn't add the nuts. This actually hurt me--I love nuts in sweets but Josh doesn't and I knew I would have to eat all the cookies myself if I added them. It was a mistake because Josh didn't like the cookies and I ended up eating them all myself any way.

I mounded the cookies:



And cooked them:




These cookies started out with the deck stacked against them--I don't like crispy cookies, I like cakey cookies, and these were flat and very crispy. I have to say, they were actually good. They were very butterscotch-y in a pleasing, butter-y sort of way. I actually recommend adding the chocolate chips, coconut, and nuts (all the optional ingredients) because I think they would really round out the flavor.

I'm not a huge cookie person but I would make these again.