Tag Archive: cookies

Just another hat I wear

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Wed. December 16, 2009

Today was that Markham RR charity event that we had in store. Many toys were collected, and I’m sure they will go to some wonderful people in need in the community. There were a lot of post run treats there donated by a lot of people. I decided to join in by donating cookies. Yes, those glazed lemon shortbread cookies I made the other day were for this event. In addition to those, I made a maple cinnamon version of the cookie last night while doing that bit of work I offered to do last night. When I woke up I made the maple cinnamon glaze. I didn’t have enough icing sugar, so I made a half batch. For these cookies, I dipped the tops in and really made sure to drain any excess back into the bowl. I needed to make it last. Anyway, after it was all dry I put all the cookies back into the fridge to make them all harden. To me, both types of cookies were great, but I wasn’t sure how they’d be received.

I brought them in in a small grey basket that came from that gift basket I won earlier in the month. There were arranged kind of nicely to separate the flavours. After the ride over though they kind of got jumbled up. So, they joined the big table of treats that were there. There sure was a lot of food. Maaaaan. Of course, we weren’t allowed to go near it until our respective runs were done. For my group, we had a night of hill training to contend with. With four hill repeats on the schedule, I knew that it wouldn’t take that long, and that we’d all be pretty hungry when we got back. The actual running wasn’t so bad. I was in a great mood so I paid more attention to the people that were having a rough go at it. All I could do was give encouragement, and unless I was imagining it the encouragement was working well. The roads were covered with a thin layer of snow with icy patches here and there. It was a little bit harder than usual, and I really felt it in my quads. The snow caused my footing to shift by small amounts, but that was enough to really make my muscles work harder to stabilize things. So, long story short, everything went well. By the time we were done, everyone had a smile on their face knowing that they had completed a tough workout. Plus, the thought of all of the treats back in store made us rush back.

So, really, when I made it inside, as much as I wanted to try the things that other people brought, I wanted to get reactions for what I made. The simple truth is that I had nothing to worry about. The reviews were amazingly positive. I had apparently hit the right level of sweetness without it becoming cloying. I’m sure the lemon and maple cinnamon flavouring in both the cookie and glaze created this double impact effect that was maybe unexpected. So yes, I’m really pleased.

I couple of people there were pretty surprised that I had made the cookies myself. The common reaction was “What?! You made these yourself?” Is a guy that cooks/bakes that rare? It shouldn’t be. A couple of people joked that I should be a baker in another life. I can see that. To be honest, if time and money wasn’t an issue I’d probably be doing this more regularly. At this point it’s just not in the cards. Maybe I could start something on the side. Heh. I don’t know. Anyway, the positive reviews are giving me drive to hone my skills more and more. Nothing wrong with gaining more renown, right? This whole food thing is just another hat I wear. Got to keep working at it.

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Lemon shortbread

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Mon. December 14, 2009

I’ve an evening monitoring shift, so I was here at home for most of the day. Due to an upcoming event I decided to use my time to make some shortbread cookies. I decided to use Anna Olson’s shortbread cookie recipe as a base. Judging from the ingredient list I knew that it’d be pretty easy to slap together. Given the success of the last shortbread I made I decided to modify the recipe to make orange shortbread. I really enjoy making substitutions and modifications like this. I mean, the changes are often pretty easy to do, and the results often end up being something special or unexpected. Like I wrote a while ago, the tweaks are sometimes spectacular failures, but even then the results turn out to be a good lesson learned.

Anyway, after the dough was put together, I went to the fridge to pull out an orange. In the back of the fruit and veg box though was a bag of lemons that were being neglected. So, I decided to use those instead. To the dough, I mixed in the juice and zest of one lemon. It all came together well. Lemon zest is some potent stuff. A small amount is enough to make its presence known. Instead of using the drop method that the recipe called for, I chilled the dough before rolling and cutting. I probably wouldn’t have put in the extra effort but knowing that other people would see these I wanted the results to be uniform. I ended up rolling the dough out really thinly in an attempt to get a big yield. The oven timing was a little bit weird; some batches cooked unexpectedly quickly. I took it upon myself to eat dispose of the really brown ones. Overall the cookies were tasty. The lemon was mild, but definitely there. I’m not sure why I decided to glaze the cookies, but hey, why not? The glaze consisted of the juice and zest of one lemon whisked with 1.5 cups of icing sugar. Yeah…pure sugar, right? Crazy. Well, you can see the results down below.

Lemon shortbread cooling on the rack

They look tasty, no? They’re pretty sweet. Combined with the tart character of the lemon it’s sort of a one-two face punch. I’m actually happy enough to present these to others. No shame with these ones, eh? Going to take some resistance to not eat them beforehand.

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Learning from culinary failure

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Sat. December 5, 2009

Maybe, due to all of the food posts I have on this blog, or on my Twitter account, it might seem like I have this whole thing down pat. Well, it should be obvious that this all takes hard work. I’m still very prone to making some big mistakes when baking or cooking. Each time I kind of get down on myself about it, telling myself things like “I should have known better!” Then it settles in that I have to end up eating the darn lot, which sometimes just compounds the whole thing. No matter the case, each time this happens it’s a learning experience and I end up becoming a stronger cook.

I often tell myself that I need to learn how to make more Filipino style home cooking. Sure, I can visit my parents whenever I’m in the mood for it, but I still want to learn it for myself. Years from now it’ll be up to me to carry these things forward, right? A little while ago I wanted to make some chicken and pork adobo. I cut up all of my meat, added all of the ingredients and stuck it all in a plastic container to marinate overnight. Knowing this, I added some extra liquid thinking that it would help soften things. It was going to be awesome! The next evening I dumped it all into a pot and started simmering the heck out of it. The liquid was taking forever to reduce. Thirty minutes became ninety. As time passed, I noticed that the chicken was starting to fall apart. At first I kind of laughed, but over time it got worse. By the time all of the liquid ran dry all of the chicken was pretty much shredded and the pork was starting to go too. Well, that was a failure. I was really disappointed at it all. I called my mom about it and told her that I was letting it simmer for almost two hours. She told me that it really should have been cooked for only 30 minutes. Next time I should use less liquid. Well, duh, right? If it all fell apart, of course it meant that I boiled it way too long. Maybe I should have used bigger cuts of chicken too. Oh well. Next time I know what to do, and it’ll be awesome.

A week or two ago I made some cranberry pecan orange shortbread cookies. They turned out extremely well. I feel kind of bad that I didn’t take pictures of them. They were truly awesome, and everyone that I gave them too seemed to enjoy them. I even had one person tell me that it was simply the best cookie she had ever tasted. I was floored and told her “those are some pretty big words.” She insisted though, so who am I to argue? Those shortbread cookies require me to chill the dough for a while, roll it out and use a cookie cutter. Anyway, tonight, I’m not sure what came over me but I had an urge to bake cookies. I didn’t want to do the shortbread cookies again, but I had the right things for that chocolate chip cookie recipe I posted on this blog. I also had left over pecans from the last cookie recipe, so I settled on making chocolate chip pecan cookies. Since the shortbread method worked so well, I decided to do the same for this recipe. I made the dough and chilled it. Hours later I rolled it out, cut out circles and put them in the oven. The first batch surprised me. After 8 or 9 minutes I was about to take them out but I noticed that they were still shiny. As such I left them in the oven for another minute or two. After 10 or 11 minutes they were still shiny. At 13 minutes I just took them out. The resulting cookies were flat, crispy, and brown. I wasn’t happy with them. With the second batch, I cut the time down to 11 minutes. I figured that the warmth of the oven might be better now after having done one batch. Well, the results were also flat and crispy, just not as brown. For the third batch, I cut it down to 9 minutes. The results were flat and crispy, but pale. What the hell was going on?

Last time I made these cookies, the results were awesome; these were just embarrassing. I knew that the big difference was cooking method. So, while the third batch was in, I took all of the cookies I had precut and balled them back up. I put them on the pan and flattened them a little bit. The resulting cookies looked better, but still not exactly what I wanted. I was planning on taking pictures of these cookies, but I’m passing this time around. When I balled up the dough, it worked out a little bit better, but I think the act of rolling out the dough changed the character. I don’t think chilling made too much of a difference. It looks like chocolate chip cookie dough is more suited to a drop style of baking. Shortbread uses more butter and flour and seems to need chilling and rolling. Next time I do these cookies I’m just going to ball the dough right away and bake them without chilling. Now I’ve got 30 or so cookies that I need to get through over the next while. I’m going to have to figure out ways to fit these into the diet. Hah.

So yeah, I’m still learning. Cooking and baking are great skills to have, and I think I’m lucky to have the mind and patience for both. I’m only going to get better with time. Hopefully that will mean less spectacular failures and more successes to share with everyone.

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How to: chocolate chip cookie

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Sat. May 30, 2009

OK, so this recipe was found off the Internet, but the notes are all my own.

Chocolate chip cookie

What you’ll need:

The dry part

  • 2¼ cups of all-purpose flour
  • 1 tsp. of baking soda
  • ½ tsp. of salt

The wet part

  • 1 cup (2 sticks) of soft butter
  • ¾ cup of sugar
  • ¾ cup of packed brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tsp. of vanilla

The special part

  • 2 cups (1 pkg.) of semisweet chocolate chips

OK.

  1. Heat your oven to 375°F (190°C)
  2. First, take your soft butter and add the two types of sugar in. Soft butter does not mean it’s melted into liquid, nor does it mean that it’s hard out of the fridge. I guess it’s easiest if it’s room temperature. In my case, for my father’s sake I used Splenda instead of sugar. That allowed him to at least eat a few and not feel left out. Now, cream together the butter and the sugar. If you have a hand mixer, just go at it. I kind of like using a spatula and creaming it manually at this stage–there’s something kind of satisfying about doing it by hand. You know you’re done when it all kind of looks fluffy/creamy. Shouldn’t take much effort to get to that point
  3. Add in the eggs one at a time and blend them into the butter. At this point I like using a hand mixer. Also add the vanilla. When you’re done, it should look like a nice even brown goo.Mmm: goo.
  4. In a separate bowl, add the flour, baking soda, and salt. Stir it all together just so that everything is kind of distributed evenly. You don’t want a salty clump in the middle of a cookie.
  5. Take about half of that flour mixture and add it to the wet stuff. Use your hand mixer to blend it in. The mixture will start getting hard. Add the other half then blend it in. By the end, you should have a stiff dough. Now, why didn’t we add all of the flour at once? If you added it all the flour would’ve probably flown all over the place when you blended it.This stiff thing is your base cookie dough.
  6. By hand, just take the package of chocolate chips and dump them in. You have to work them in by hand with a spoon or spatula because the dough is too thick at this point for the mixer to be useful. The chocolate should be evenly distributed throughout the dough.If you wanted to, you could add 1 cup of a secondary ingredient. In my case, I took some Australian almond nougat, crushed it into coarse pieces with a mallet then added it in. I made a mistake here by only using a ½ cup of stuff. With only ½ a cup it’s easy for that ingredient to kind of get lost in the cookie.
  7. Spoon some mounds onto an ungrease cookie sheet. Kind of flatten the mounds slightly to get a flatter cookie or else you’ll get a chubby round thing, which is still tasty, but not as cool as the usual cookie shape. Allow room for the cookies to kind of spread out. Bake for 8-10 minutes.Depending on your cookie sheet it might be on the lower or higher end of the range. I used a dark cookie sheet for my first batch, and after 9 minutes the cookies were kind a bit dark around the edges. For the second batch I used an insulated pan and it took 10 minutes. Anyway, just bake it until it doesn’t look too pale.
  8. Let the sheet and the cookies cool down completely. Restrain yourself! If you try to use a spatula to get them off right away, you’ll end of breaking them all apart. The result would be a tasty, but disappointing mess.This recipe yielded me about 2 dozen cookies.

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Failover cookies

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Fri. May 29, 2009

ike I mentioned yesterday, I was already in the process of making a batch of cookies. I originally had plans to continue baking throughout the whole maintenance window, but due to a sudden stroke of amazing efficiency I was able to finish my work two hours early. So yes, I was able to work quickly all while baking cookies. And these were the results:

Chocolate chip cookies with almond nougat piecesSheet full of cookiesCookie closeup

After seeing how many cookies this batch yielded, I decided that one batch was enough. The last thing I wanted was a huge pile up of cookies lying around the house, because, really, who else is going to end up eating the cookies? Exactly. In honour of the maintenance window, I nicknamed the batch my “failover cookies.” The name still amuses me.

Yes, I’m going to post a summary of the recipe, though not in this post. Maybe tomorrow? Instead I just wanted to touch on some interesting points that baking seems to bring up. Now, as I was making the cookies last night I had full intentions of bringing them in to work to share with my colleagues. Nice, right? It’s not the first time I’ve brought in baked goods. In the past I’ve brought in brownies and lemon squares, both of which were received really well. Today was no exception. Everyone gave my cookies rave reviews as far as I could tell. Everything was great, although, there was one thing that struck me as surprising. Someone I gave a cookie to asked me whether my wife or girlfriend made it.

Eh…? Well, that’s interesting. Yes, nothing was meant by it, but I’m fascinated by the question. Is it really that out of the ordinary for me, as a manly man, to be the one to have done the baking? What’s even more interesting for me is that this isn’t the first time someone’s asked me that. Sometime last November I brought in some stuff and someone asked me if my wife or girlfriend was sending me in with all of this food. Hah.

For anyone wondering, yes, I’m single.

I’m not even going to go into detail about analyzing all of this because the things at issue are pretty much obvious, aren’t they? Whatever. I get a kick out of surprising people with my talents.

You know, on a related note, I’ve noticed some other interesting trend in terms of assumptions people make about me. I’m assuming that the facial hair I was sporting a little while ago (I shaved two days ago) was making me look way older, but I didn’t think it was that drastic. Maybe it’s unrelated, but this one guy who’s only known me with facial hair seemed to make the assumption that I was married and had kids.

¿Que?

Sure, it’s not really that big a deal, but it’s an interesting jump to make. I don’t talk about having a spouse because, well, I don’t have one. I don’t say anything about my non-existent parenting skills. So, why make that assumption? Do I look old? Do I somehow carry myself in such a way that I’ve got this weird mature dignity thing going? This is something that I can’t figure out.

Anyway, enough pondering. The recipe will follow sometime in the next few days.

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Baking through maintenance

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Thu. May 28, 2009

So, it just so happens that I have the on-call pager this week. Joyous! Well, its also my luck that whoever has the pager this week is the lucky person that has to take care of this maintenance window that occurs between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.

Yeah, no kidding.

Well, about an hour or two ago I mentioned on Twitter that the hard part was waiting for the period to start:

@jnery Have to be awake for a maintenance window between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. Waiting for it without nodding off is the hard part.

Minutes later, I got a suggestion from MississaugaKids to either bake or have a short run. In the end, I opted for the latter former. As I’m blogging I have a batch of chocolate chip almond nougat cookies going in the oven. Depending on how these turn out, I think I’m going to continue baking for the whole period. Heck, if I’m working at home I might as well do something fun. Going into 3 a.m. we’ll see how much I end up making.

Pictures to come!

Maybe!

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