Baking Black and White Cookies

I know it has been a few weeks since I have made an entry, but with graduating from college and then moving the 400 miles back home….. Life has been a little hectic. I also have already found a job (Woo!!) working at a cider mill/winery/bistro. I will mostly be working in the kitchen but hopefully I will have the opportunity to do other things like working outside and maybe doing wine tastings. Another plus side note, my boyfriend’s parents gave me a hugely generous graduation gift of a Kitchen Aid Artisan mixer!!!! It is the Bay Leaf color and I love it so much. So of course, I had to find an excuse to use it!!

Buddy was MIA for most of this baking adventure because he is a bum. One of our other cats, Monty was more than happy to help out with the baking and he approved of my new mixer.

I have been wanting to make these cookies for a long time, probably close to a year since my mom got me a cook book called Easy Baking by Linda Collister. This book has simple recipes for more sophisticated desserts. I just haven’t made anything from it before now for lack of having quality ingredients. Anyway, I made these black and white cookies using my new mixer, they are pretty simple and really delicious. This yielded 28 cookies.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

1 stick unsalted butter at room temperature (I used salted butter and skipped the pinch of salt later on)

Scant ½ cup light brown sugar

1 large egg, beaten

Scant ½ cup self-rising flour (I just used all-purpose and these turned out fine)

½ teaspoon baking powder

A pinch of salt (skip if you use salted butter)

½ teaspoon real vanilla extract

1 ½ cups rolled oats

6 ½ oz. bittersweet chocolate-chopped into chunks

I used my mixer ( :-D ) and beat the butter until it was creamy and smooth, then add in the brown sugar and beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the egg and beat this mixture well. Sift in the flour, baking powder (and salt if you used unsalted butter). Add the vanilla extract and oats. Mix this all in together. Once this mixture is thoroughly mixed well, add in the chocolate.

I used bittersweet chocolate chips and I chopped them up roughly so there were still some chunks but also a lot of chocolate shavings.

You want to either have a greased cookie sheet, or a cookie sheet with a SilPat mat. I have a SilPat so I used that and didn’t have a problem with the cookies sticking. Put heaped teaspoons, spaced apart so the cookies can spread out a little, on the cookie sheet. Bake for 12-15 minutes, I think 13 minutes worked out well for me.

After the cookies bake, let them sit on the sheet for a couple of minutes before transferring them to either a wire cooking rack or a paper towel on a table. My cookbook says to store them in an airtight container and that they will keep for up to a week or you can freeze them for up to a month.

These turned out quite yummy, they didn’t flatten out like they are pictured in my book, but I think they are just fine the way they are. Hopefully I will be baking more often now that I am settling in back at home. And Buddy showed up right at the end, after I had taken the last batch of cookies out of the oven.

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Chocolate Crinkle Cookies With Buddy

I am heading into my last week of finals for my undergraduate-ever… weird. Anyways, a couple of friends and I went out to dinner the other night and we were trying to decide on dessert when I suggested that we go pick up a movie and then head back to my apartment and I would make these cookies that 17 & Baking did a few months ago and I have been dying to make. They are Chocolate Crinkle Cookies.

These cookies have a very simple recipe that can be brought together by hand, but make sure you read through the recipe because it will save you some sticky dough and headaches later on. When I finished the dough, I immediately started rolling the cookies out, and even though I had lightly oiled my hands, the dough was sticking terribly to my hands. Then my friend pointed out that the dough was supposed to be chilled for 4 hours before rolling out! So I finished rolling the first dozen cookies and I baked them and they turned out just fine, and to expedite the process of chilling the dough, I put it in the freezer for about an hour and a half. Once I put the dough in the freezer, it was so much easier to work with. After rolling out 2 dozen more cookies, the dough was getting warm again so I put it back in the freezer for about 10 minutes to finish up the final 2 sheets of cookies.

I ended up with about 4 and a half dozen of these cookies.

Here is the recipe, thanks to 17 & Baking who got it from All Recipes:

1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 cups white sugar

½ cup vegetable oil

4 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ cup confectioners’ sugar

In a medium bowl, mix together the cocoa powder, sugar and vegetable oil. Make sure this is mixed together well. Then, one at a time, beat in the eggs. You could probably use a mixer for this but I mixed everything by hand and didn’t have a problem. After adding the eggs, add the vanilla extract. At this point, your dough will look like brownie batter. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Slowly add this mixture into the chocolate mixture, the dough will thicken up.

At this point, you are supposed to cover the dough and chill for 4 hours. Like I said before, you can put it in the freezer and have chilled dough in less time if you are impatient like I am.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. After the dough is chilled, it is time to roll it out. Put the ½ cup powdered sugar in a bowl. You want to lightly oil your palms and will need to keep oiling your palms about every 4 cookies or so (you will know when you need more oil because the dough will start sticking to your palms). Using a teaspoon, scoop a small amount of the dough onto your palm and roll the dough into a ball. You could really make the ball any size you want, I think I made mine bigger than Elissa did over at 17 and Baking, but they turned out well. So I’d say about the size of a walnut for the dough. Then roll the ball of dough in the powdered sugar until coated and place on a cookie sheet. You want to bake these for 10-12 minutes.

Allow the cookies to stand on the cookie sheet for a couple minutes before removing them. I just use a piece of paper towel laid out on the table since I don’t have wire cooling racks.

These cookies are more cake-like in texture, and best eaten right when they are warm from the oven. But they remain delicious when they are cooled.

I will probably be baking more this week as I have more free time and need to get rid of ingredients and food before moving home from college, so look for more posts this week!

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Cinnamon Rolls with Buddy

With the semester winding down, I am finding less time to bake, but more need to bake from being so stressed out. As an equine science student at my University, we have barn finals the week before regular class finals. So when normal college students are enjoying their last week of classes or actually having time to work on major projects that are usually due the last week of classes, I don’t. Our barn finals are held as a 5 day long horse show where you show off what you have gotten done with your horse over the course of the semester. It is so stressful, I can’t even explain.

So Sunday morning I decided to try making cinnamon rolls-from scratch. The recipe really isn’t very difficult or challenging, but it does take a lot of time just because there is yeast in the dough and you need to let it rise.

I previously tried to make this recipe and failed because I walked away from my hand mixer and it proceeded to topple my bowl of half-made, really sticky dough on the floor. Needless to say, I was very angry and it has taken me a couple months to re-attempt this recipe.

I used the recipe from my Betty Crocker cook book. The recipe says that it makes 15 rolls, so I halved the recipe and it still made 13 rolls, they weren’t very big-about the size of the ones you get from the tube.

Here is the pre-halved recipe:

Dough:

1 ¾-2 Cups Flour

2 ½ Tablespoons + ½ teaspoon sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 package Yeast (2 ¼ teaspoons)

½ cup warm milk

2 Tablespoons butter, softened

½ egg

In a large bowl, mix half of the flour (1 cup), sugar, the salt and the yeast. Add the warm milk (I just put the milk in the microwave for about a minute), the ½ egg and the butter. Beat this mix with an electric mixer for about a minute on low; make sure you keep scraping the bowl as you go to get everything in the mixture. Add the rest of the flour, and beat again.

Place the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead the dough for about 5 minutes (warning-the dough is very sticky at first). The dough should be “smooth and springy”. Grease another large bowl with shortening and put the dough in this bowl and turn the dough until the whole thing is greased. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise for about an hour and a half. The dough should roughly double in size. When the dough has risen, you should be able to leave an impression in the dough when it has risen.

Mix the filling in a small bowl/dish and set aside:

2 Tablespoons brown sugar

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

On a lightly floured surface, take the dough and flatten it with your hands or a rolling pin. The original recipe calls for a 10x15 inch rectangle and that is about what mine ended up being, so you might want to roll the dough somewhere between ¼ and ½ inch thick. Spread butter on the dough and sprinkle the filling evenly across the rolled out dough. Beginning on the long side, roll the dough tightly and then pinch the dough to seal the roll. Using either a serrated knife or dental floss, cut the roll into about 1-inch rolls. I used a serrate knife and it worked well. Grease a pan and place the rolls slightly spread out in the pan. Now cover the baking dish loosely with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise another 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and then bake the rolls for 30-35 minutes. I only baked mine for about 25 minutes and they were still brown and fully cooked.

While these were baking I made the glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

5-6 teaspoons milk

I doubled the glaze so that it would cover all of the rolls, above is the pre-doubled recipe.

After the rolls are done, remove them from the baking dish to a plate and allow the rolls to cool for a few minutes, glaze them with the icing you have made, and enjoy!

These were pretty good cinnamon rolls, but not the best I have ever had, and they were very time consuming, so it was a very good learning opportunity.

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Coffee Cake and Ginger Snaps with Buddy

This week I kind of went a little overboard. Let me tell you why we have 2 recipes this week…. So I am on my university’s Stock Horse Team and we had our spring show this Saturday. I figured the only night I would be able to bake anything would be Thursday night and I decided to rid myself of the sugary baked goods, I would make something to take to the barn with me on Saturday morning to feed the team and the students planning on showing and participating on Saturday.

I have this awesome recipe for coffee cake and I have made it more times than I can remember and it is always awesome. I have experimented with this recipe as well-making double the topping and putting half in the middle and half on top of the coffee cake (which was AAAAAMAZING!!). So I decided to make the coffee cake in a way that it could be had by more people than what an 8x8 pan would normally allow. I decided to go with coffee cake muffins.

Coffee Cake:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

1 ½ cup flour

¾ cup sugar

2 ½ teaspoons baking powder

¾ teaspoon salt

¼ cup oil

¾ cup milk

1 egg

You are supposed to mix the dry ingredients and then the wet ingredients separately. I have done this and honestly, with this recipe, I do not think it makes much of a difference if you just throw everything in a bowl and mix until combined. The batter will be mildly thick (if that makes any sense). Make sure the mixture is smooth, you can use an electric mixer if you desire, I just normally use a rubber spatula and keep stirring and folding until everything is mixed smoothly together.

Now normally, you would grease an 8x8 pan and pour in the batter (don’t worry if it does not seem like it is thick, this batter will rise!). But, since I was doing muffins, I lined a muffin tin with paper muffin cups and filled each cup half way. The halfway thing is very important because these do rise up to a full muffin size. (My mixture made 15 muffins)

Then you top each with the topping:

1/3 cup brown sugar

¼ cup flour

½ teaspoon cinnamon

2 Tablespoons butter or margarine

With the topping, you want to mix the brown sugar, flour and cinnamon all together until everything is well blended, then add the butter and using a pastry blender (or a fork if you don’t have a pastry blender) mix this up until it is crumbly. The butter should be in relatively small chunks (like the size of mini chocolate chips) and spread evenly throughout the mixture.

You want to evenly spread the topping over the cake or muffins. If you are making the cake, you want to bake it for about 25 minutes. If you are making the muffins, 18 minutes was the timing I found that worked out, but you always want to check the center with a toothpick.

This coffee cake is one of my favorite recipes, so enjoy!

I know I said I did two recipes this week, and so here is the second recipe. I got this sweet and simple cookbook for my birthday last year and all of the recipes I have made from it are awesome. It is a Gooseberry Patch cookbook. I highly recommend it.

Meme’s Molasses Cookies

¾ cup shortening

1 ½ cup sugar, divided

1 egg

4 Tablespoons molasses

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground cloves

1 teaspoon ground ginger

In a mixing bowl, blend the shortening, 1 cup of the sugar, egg and molasses “until fluffy.” I used a hand mixer to do this and it worked out just fine. I had to guess where the “fluffy” point was, I just kept mixing until everything was blended and the cookies still turned out awesome.

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger together. Slowly add the dry mixture into the molasses mixture. After you get about half of the flour mix into the molasses mixture, the dough starts to really form and get thick, I had to up my mixer to the next speed so it could power through the mixture. Then you want to cover the dough and put it in the refrigerator to cool for a half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

After your dough is cooled, put the ½ cup of sugar you haven’t used yet into a bowl. You are going to roll the dough into little walnut sized balls and roll that in the sugar. Place the rolled dough on an ungreased cookie sheet. Repeat this process until you have filled up the cookie sheet. Make sure you keep enough space between the dough so that the cookies have space to spread out as they cook.

Place the cookie sheet in the oven for 10 minutes and then cool on the sheet for a minute or two before transferring them to a cooling rack or just a sheet of paper towel laid out on your table.

The recipe says it makes about 4 dozen cookies, I think I made mine a little larger and came out with exactly 3 ½ dozen. This was my first time making these cookies and they came out very good. My roommate said that they taste more like ginger-snaps. I do not know because I have not ever had molasses cookies or ginger-snaps. I know, craziness.

Well, that is all for this week, hopefully 2 recipes will hold me over til next week.

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Baking Spice Cake with Buddy

So, for this edition of Baking with Buddy, I wanted to make something for my family for dessert for Easter dinner that I knew my family would really enjoy. I know that my dad loves chocolate cake, but that is too easy. Then I thought back to one of my dad’s birthdays and remembered that we made spice cake for his birthday one year and he loved it-and so did everyone else. So, I decided to make a spice cake from scratch. I know spice cake is normally more of a fall-season dessert but I really wanted to make it now, so I found a good recipe and went with it.

Then, a few nights ago after I decided on spice cake, I literally could not fall asleep because I couldn’t figure out what kind of frosting I wanted to put on it. I knew buttercream would be good, but I wanted to branch out and do something different that I hadn’t done before. Because, let’s be honest, that is the purpose of this blog, to get me to go broader in my baking. So I texted my friend over at beinguncreative.blogspot.com and we went though some different frostings, one of which was cream cheese. Call me insane (I know I am) but I don’t like cream cheese. I love cheese cake but not straight cream cheese. So I was wary about cream cheese frosting, but once I found my spice cake recipe, I found an all-spice cream cheese frosting. I was sold.

So, here it is in all of its glory-Spice Cake with All-Spice Cream Cheese Frosting!!

I one and a halved this recipe because the recipe called for a 9x12 pan, and I wanted to do a 2 layer 9-inch round cake. If I were to do this again, I would double the recipe because my round cakes came out very thin. I found both my recipes on Recipezarr.com.

Here is the spice cake and here is the all-spice cream cheese frosting.

The pre-one-and-a-halved recipe for the spice cake:

1 ½ eggs (to get the half egg, put it in a small dish, stir up the egg so the yolk mixes into the white and then pour half the egg in and you can dispose of the other half)

1 ½ cup sugar

2 ¼ + 6 Tablespoons Flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 ½ teaspoon baking soda

¾ cup vegetable oil

1 ½ cup water

1 ½ teaspoon cinnamon

1 ½ teaspoon nutmeg

1 ¼ teaspoon cloves (I didn’t adjust this from the original because the people who reviewed the original recipe said they would cut down on the cloves so I just didn’t adjust it)

1 ½ teaspoon all spice

Preheat the oven to 375.

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, and just stir it. You could probably use a hand mixer but I just mixed it all by hand with a rubber spatula. I had 2 larger soup bowls that are exactly the same so I knew I was splitting the batter in half. So I poured half the batter in one bowl and the other half in the second bowl. This worked out very well. Seeing as I only have one 9-inch round pan, I had to bake one at a time. So grease and flour the pan (or pans) and pour the batter in. Baking these went about 18-20 minutes.

While allowing these to cool, I made the frosting.

3 ounces cream cheese, softened

1/3 cup butter, softened

¾ teaspoon ground allspice

4 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 teaspoons milk

Using a hand mixer, beat together the cream cheese, butter and allspice until they are well blended. Then one cup at a time, add the powdered sugar. At about cup 3, I added the vanilla and one tablespoon of the milk because the frosting was looking dry, and it worked out well. Then I added the final cup of sugar and the tablespoon of milk. It came together amazingly and tastes awesome.

Once you have your frosting and two round cakes, you want to find a plate that the cake fits on nicely. Put the first cake down and frost the top of it, then place the second cake on top of the first and frost the top and sides of the whole thing. My cakes came out with very round tops and so my sides have nice big gaps in them, but I don’t really mind since the cake is going to be enjoyed here by my family. I tried to cover up the gap a little bit while I decorated the cake; it didn’t really work too well but these things happen. I went through several tips, just playing around with the designs and such seeing as I am still really in the experimental stages of decorating cakes.

This cake turned out nice and moist and the frosting complimented the cake so perfectly!

Enjoy!

~Jenn

Non-baking with Buddy

Well, I know I said this was going to be a weekly endeavor, but this past week and a half has been absolutely insane. I know I mentioned that I am an equestrian student, but this week was full of being at the barn until 10pm, lack of sleep, finding out why your favorite horse is lame, and testing on other horses. It has been crazy. Anyhow, when I took the cake from the previous post to the barn, the instructor with the biggest sweet tooth did not know of the cake until it was all gone. So, he requested these no-bake cookies. This is a recipe I have made many times, and it just is so easy!

Before getting started with the cookies, you are going to want to line cookie sheets with wax paper. I lined 3 cookie sheets because you can fit about a dozen cookies on a sheet.

Depending on the size of the cookies, this recipe yields about 2 ½ to 3 dozen cookies.

Chocolate Oatmeal Drops

1 stick (8 tablespoons) of margarine or butter

¼ cup cocoa powder

2 cups white sugar

½ cup milk

½ cup peanut butter

1 Tablespoon Vanilla

3 cups Oatmeal (instant)

You are going to want a large saucepan for this. First, you melt the butter in the saucepan and add the cocoa powder, sugar and milk. Try to either not heat the butter on high or have your other ingredients ready to go in, especially if you are using real butter because you do not want it to burn. After these ingredients are mixed, allow the mixture to boil for about a minute and then remove it from the heat. Here, you want to add your half cup of peanut butter and the tablespoon of vanilla. (A little tip about the vanilla, get the peanut butter melted before adding the vanilla that way your mix has cooled a little and you don’t get a sizzle of evaporation when you add it.) Stir this until the peanut butter is dissolved.

Once the peanut butter is dissolved, add your 3 cups of oatmeal and mix it in until all of the oatmeal is coated with the chocolate mixture.

After everything is mixed well, take a teaspoon (or a tablespoon if you want bigger cookies) and just scoop the mix up and drop it onto the lined cookie sheets. As you are finished placing cookies on the sheets, place them in the refrigerator. (It helps if you clear some space in the refrigerator before you get started on everything.) They probably take about 20-30 minutes to set up and cool completely.

Once they are cooled, you can remove them from the cookies sheets and put them in a storage container of your choice.

That is all for now, hopefully things will calm down a little bit and I can get down to business with my baking.

Enjoy everyone!

Baking Chocolate Cake With Buddy

Baking With Buddy #1

Hello everyone. My name is Jenn, Buddy is my nosy and obnoxiously lovable cat. I am a senior in college where I lead a stressful life riding horses (no sarcasm there). Anyways, I enjoy baking and I am going to a local college where I will be going for a culinary certificate next school year. I want to bake once a week and this is my way of keeping me committed to it. So, without further ado… I will share my first baking project of the blog!

For a cake with no butter in it, it is very tasty and remains incredibly moist. I love this recipe for chocolate cake.

I made a simple chocolate cake, one layer in a 9 inch pan. The recipe is from Hershey’s website and I halfed it. The original recipe is available here

Here is a pre-halved version of the recipe:

• 1 cup white sugar
• ½ cup + 6 Tablespoons flour
• 6 Tablespoons cocoa powder
• ¾ teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• ½ cup milk
• ¼ cup oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ cup boiling water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix the dry ingredients in a medium to large bowl (depending on if you are doing half or a full recipe). Then add the milk, eggs, oil and vanilla and mix with a hand mixer for 2 minutes on medium speed (this isn’t completely necessary, I just mixed it really well by hand with a spatula). Then add in the boiling water and mix that in well. When you first put the water in, it looks like you aren’t going to be able to mix it in but trust me, it does come together just fine. The batter will be thin, so don’t panic.

You are going to want to both grease and flour the pan you are using, I have found that sprinkling some flour in and making sure it covers all where you have greased makes for a very easy removal of the cake.

Once you have greased the pan, pour the batter in and stick it in the oven for 30-35 minutes. I have made a full recipe of this in a 13x9 pan and it needed the better part of the time (closer to 35 minutes) but this time I used a 9 inch round spring-form pan and I set the timer for 32 minutes and that was the perfect amount of time. But when the time is up, use a toothpick and poke the middle of the cake and make sure it is done by not having any gooey cake on the toothpick.

Then you want to let the cake cool, if you want once it is cool enough to remove, you can put it on a wire cooling rack.

For frosting the cake, I cheated this time and used store-bought frosting ONLY because I got a 56 piece frosting tip set recently and I really wanted to try out frosting something without having to make my own frosting. But I promise, no more cheating!!

With the frosting tips, I used the couplers that came with my set, and I figured that just using a gallon size plastic bag would be suitable for piping frosting. Boy was I wrong. I busted the seam on the first bag I used then with the second one, I somehow busted a hole right along the coupler. So, the next day I went out and bought some Wilton’s brand decorating bags, both disposable and I spent the money on a good, real, washable decorating bag. Using the disposable ones, I over-decorated the cake. I ran out of vanilla frosting so I started using some of my roommate’s chocolate frosting that she had in the fridge (unfortunately, sorry, also store-bought). Which intermingling the frosting in the same bag made for some awesome looking frosting (picture below). I think I will be mixing frostings in my decorating bag more often because of how it turned out. I think the cake turned out very well. I took it to the barn and left it for the staff to devour and it was gone within 2 hours of me leaving it and everyone that had a piece had nothing but great things to say about it.

Enjoy!

~Jenn~