Chocolate Chip Cookies

Last Friday I was a man possessed in the kitchen. Mandy and I whipped up a batch of mac'n'cheese with bacon and I baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies. The mac'n'cheese came together faster than ever before, mainly because I remembered to start the sauce before I did anything else.

But anyway, onto the cookies. I like my cookies chewy. Not "cakey", not crisp. Chewy. Once again, I was using a modified Alton Brown recipe. His calls for bread flour, which I did not have. In theory, it should produce a chewier cookie because of the extra protein in the flour, but I've also had mixed results with it in the past. As I just picked up a large bag of bread flour for Mandy's bread baking, I'll probably try using it again someday.

Once again, our oven gave me some issues. It runs on the hot side, and definitely has hot spots towards the front of the oven. The first batch came out a little too done, but the second batch was just perfect.

If you find yourself interested in baking cookies (and more specifically chocolate chip cookies), the Good Eats episode "Three Chips for Sister Marsha" is recommended viewing. You can search for it on youtube. It explains some of the science behind egg whites, flour and sugar types in baking. Good stuff.

Molasses Cookies

Traditionally, my grandmother would bake enormous amounts of cookies for all of my family during the holidays. And they were all delicious.

Unfortunately, these days it falls to jokers like me to make some of those same cookies if I want them.

I hadn't had molasses cookies in a few years, so I decided to try my own hand at them. My mom had actually unearthed my nan's recipe a little while ago, so I basically used that (I didn't have any ground cloves, so I subbed in a little all-spice instead).

After baking I let the cookies cool for a little bit and then ate one. I was a bit disappointed because they weren't particularly chewy (which is probably the best thing about these suckers). After letting them sit for a day they took on the usual super chewy texture. I was then quite pleased with baking prowess.

Molasses Cookies (Yields about 3 dozen cookies)
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup molasses
2 eggs, lightly beaten
4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
2 1/4 teaspoons ground ginger
1 1/2 ground cloves
1 1/2 cinnamon

Cream together the butter, shortening and sugar until light-colored and fluffy. Beat in molasses and eggs; set mixture aside.

In another large bowl, combine flour (no to to sift), salt, baking soda, ginger, cloves and cinnamon. Blend thoroughly with wire whisk. Gradually mix flour mixture into creamed ingredients until dough is blended and smooth.

Roll dough into 1 1/2 inch balls. Dip tops into granulated sugar; place 2 1/2 inches apart on greased cookie sheet.

Bake at 350 for 11 minutes. Do not overbake. Cool on wire rack.

Pear Pie

I do not bake often. In fact, the only baking I've ever done consists of chocolate chip cookies and out of the box brownies (the cookies are quite tasty though).

I've never baked pies because there has always been someone around who can actually do it a lot better than me (my grandmother, mother, sister and now Mandy).

A couple of weeks ago, refrigerated pie crust was on sale, so we bought a box just to have around.

So for some reason this week, I got it in my head that I wanted to make a pie with the ready-made crust (taking the hardest part of pie-making out of the equation). I somehow settled on making a pear pie. Pears are sorta in season. So yeah.

The recipe was fairly straight forward. It had me just pour the sugar/flour mixture over top of the pears once they were in the pie crust instead of pre-mixing. I thought this was a little weird, but I followed the directions anyway.


We were pretty impatient and wanted to eat pie, so we only let it cool for about 45 minutes. The resulting pictures show that it hadn't really firmed up yet and was ridiculously wet. Subsequent pieces have been great.

I thought it was a little too sweet the first day also, but I actually don't think I'd change anything in the recipe.

Well, the first pie didn't kill anyone (yet), so maybe I'll attempt another with a greater degree of difficulty in the future. Ideally I'll try my hand at some pie crust, but no promises there.

Pie Filling:
5 Large Pears (I think I used Bartlett)
1 Cup Sugar
1/4 Cup Flour
1/2 Teaspoon Lemon Zest
1/2 Teaspoon Cinnamon
1/8 Teaspoon Salt
2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice (drizzled on top of the pears and sugar mixture)
2 Tablespoons Butter (cut up and thrown on top of the sugar mixture)

Beer Bread

Mandy was a little bored the other night, so she decided she was going to bake some bread. She found a "beer bread" recipe online and wanted to give it a shot. I'm not sure what exactly was in it besides a bottle of Sam Adams lager.

It came out pretty dense (I guess that's what happens when there's no yeast involved). The bread smelled like beer. It also had this weird bitter aftertaste which is attributable to the hops in the beer. I'm guessing something lighter, like a hefeweizen or fruit beer or something would work better and not impart the same bitterness. It really just made me want some irish soda bread.

After two days on the counter, we still haven't had any more slices since that first night. So yeah. You be the judge.

Pie!

Mandy pointed out that every entry so far has started with a "P" so I'm not going to stop now.

Unfortunately, I didn't actually cook (or more precisely, bake) anything for this entry. All credit goes to Mandy. Except you might see her secret ingredient in one of the pictures.

Mandy baked me this cherry pie for my birthday using my grandmother's recipe. It was pretty darn delicious and didn't last very long in the apartment.