Sarah Bernhardt Cookies

Holy moly, these are slooooppy! The first couple of steps were a breeze, then, similar to the marshmallow surprises, the frosting process proved a difficult task.

These are explained as a "truffle" of a cookie. A firm cookie, topped with a mousse of sorts, then dipped in chocolate. The recipe suggests starting with the filling mousse- a good idea since it's supposed to set in the fridge for about an hour before you use it. It's just simple syrup, egg yolk and melted chocolate folded into an egg white mixture. No sweat.





The cookie part is an almond wafer- just almost paste and egg white, extract, some salt and sugar. Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.





The wafer dough gets piped and baked, topped with the mousse, then into the freezer.



At this point, they need to set. Luckily for me, my husband arrives home just as I'm closing the freezer door so I don't have a chance to polish off the leftover mousse filling before dinner. While the filling sets, I grill up some shrimp, orange pepper and boil some orzo. It's a nice summer dish for this cold crappy winter night. The noreaster hit us hard and it is disgusting outside. Ice everywhere, not even a convenient place to walk the dog.

Anyway...we hang around the table after dinner discussing our planned workouts for the week, trying to outweigh the guilt of an impending chocolate binge.

Once the dishes are in the washer, I melt the rest of the chocolate (for dipping).



This is where things get a little tricky. Recipe calls for a chocolate fork. I own a lot of forks, but none of them are chocolate.

I did a combo of dipping and drizzling. This worked ok for the first 6 or so. The chocolate hardens pretty quickly on contact with the frozen mousse. The next 6 were a bit harder, and messier. After that, I felt the mousse was thawing a bit much to continue, so I stuck them back in the refrigerator, and tried to warm the chocolate a bit more.

I must have gotten some water in my choc, because it hardened up and congealed. I had to melt down my back up dipping chocolate (good thing I keep some of that around.) Needless to say, the cookies dipped in the alternative chocolate didn't turn out quite so well, and Scott ended up eating about 2 sans delicious chocolate shell.

Although sloppy, they taste amazing. The combo of chewy almond wafer with mousse and chocolate shell is divine. They are extremely rich, though. I'd pair with a nice tall cool Budweiser...I mean glass of milk.

3 posts in 3 days- it's a new record!

Old-Fashioned Sugar Cookies

These remind me of the big big cookies at Balducci's. The lemon zest in these makes it, although they are a bit chewy for my taste. I like the crispier type that I make for Christmas a little better, but the flavor of these guys is on point.

Recipe's pretty easy. I think I'm starting to appreciate the quick cookies- the ones with dough that you don't need to refrigerate. I start by sifting my dry ingredients:



Cream the wet- including lemon juice, lemon zest, lemon juice, sugar and butter:



and combo it in the mixer w/ some eggs.

I used my 2" ice cream scoop to drop, sprinkled with turbanado sugar and baked- they came out huuuuge!



I might make them smaller next time around. I finished these in about 30 minutes, so definitely worth the time. Like I said, I was wishing for a crispier texture given the amount of butter I had to use, but they tasted awesome.

Macaroons, Macaroons and More Macaroons

Sorry this is a bit late. I made this triple play of cookies last weekend, but hadn't gotten around to putting it up until now. So here we go...

This has to be the easiest recipe in the book. It's just coconut, (I used flaked coconut as opposed to the shredded called for in the recipe- I feared the shredded would produce a stringier consistency)

egg white,



vanilla and a pinch of salt. Sooo easy!

Shaping these guys was a bit of a task. The only binding they have is the egg white, and not a lot at that. You have to have a pretty light hand to keep them airy, but it does require some packing so they don't just crumble apart in the oven.



I made a full batch and split into three different varieties. Plain, chocolate chip, which is made by simply adding some bittersweet chunked chocolate to the mixture before forming, and straight up chocolate. Made by melting some butter and cocoa powder. After the oven for 20 minutes or so, they look perfect!

Being so super simple, I had some doubts about this recipe. I tasted after they came out of the oven and again the next day. Initially, they were a bit dry, and surprisingly after a day or so, seemed to soften, perhaps from the storage Glad I was using. All in all, I've had better macaroons. I felt like I was just eating handfuls of coconut out of the bag. The flaked coconut seemed a better idea than the shredded, but i think it could have been an even finer ground. I might try food processing it next time.

Blueberry Bonanza Bars

This was a process! These cookies took longer to make than most 3 course meals. It was a 3 step ordeal for a 3 layer cookie bar. Don't let me scare you, although it was time consuming, the recipe is pretty fool proof, I don't think there's much chance that you can really mess this one up.

The most interesting part of the instructions for me was the first step- which included processing my own almond paste from slivered almonds. I think adding almond paste may have been a little less laborious. Hopefully this procedure gives the crust some of it's crumbly-ness, otherwise, it's probably not worth it.

I know I said I was going to halv these for portion control, but as it turns out, a lot of people enjoy tasting cookies- including co-workers and family members, who knew :) I made a full batch of these.

The Crust

The rest of the dry ingredients required no sifting of any kind. That's always nice. And once all the dry are incorporated, you just add in eggs and cold diced butter and poof- you have instant pie crust. This is the easiest way to make crust I've come across. So I'm not much of a baker, and probably should have figured this out a while back, but I'm not complaining. I'll certainly be using this technique in my future backing escapades.

The Second Layer- Blueberry Bonanza I used Trader Joe's Blueberry Preserves for this recipe and I couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome. The amount of whole blueberries that came out of that jar was unbelievable. After pressing the crust into the baking pan, blind baking and cooling, I commence layering in the preserves.

Numero Tres- Granola Topping

To rewind for a second. I made the granola before I "preservified" the crust, the granola requires baking itself, so you're in the oven for about 1.5 hours total. Crust, Granola, then Crust, Blueberry and Granola. Keep that in mind to make time management more effective.

The rest of the slivered almond and coconut go into the granola along with some other filler and sweetener. Here's where I say the recipe goes a little nuts- literally. The amount of granola produced would cover this bad boy about 3 times. You can certainly store it for another use, but you could cut the granola production in half or even to 1/3 and your bars would come out full crunchy with no future snacking offenses with which to concern yourself- if you concern yourself with those types of things. My leftovers are in the pantry for yogurt topping.

They're very texture rich. I like the contrast of the crust and crunch of granola. I have to say that with both the crust and topping being sort of thick, I probably would have opted for more filling, but who ever knows- extra filling means extra slippage. They're pretty moist and actually pretty light in the mouth although I know they look like they'd weigh you down like a ton of bricks. Certainly worth it if you've got 2 hours to make cookies. If you want a quick sugar fix stay tuned for macaroons- next week.

Cheers!

*Photos by Scott Homa

Chocolate Surprise Cookies

The current protocol is to let Scott choose the cookie for the week. Since I'm an organized sort of a person, I sense we'll probably move to a more systematic approach. I'm currently halving the recipes as even my cookie loving husband can't stomach 3 dozen cookies at a time, and I sure as heck don't need more than a couple.

For now though, I'll discuss some of the niceties and not-so-niceties of these "surprise" cookies.

I know from experience that sifting your dry ingredients is always a good way to make sure you have a refined, non-lumpy end product. So I commenced sifting. I have to confess that the recipe called for cocoa powder that wasn't "Dutch Processed", but I failed to read that when crafting my grocery list for the week, so Hershey's Dutch Processed Cocoa Powder it was.

Mixing the wet and dry ingredients included adding the dry to wet in 1/2 c. batches, which seems slightly silly to me, but I did it anyway, and I assume it helps the texture of the cookie. The resulting "batter" if you can call it that was almost a paste consistency. (It sure tasted good though).

Recipe instructed me to use an ice cream scoop to portion and shape these suckers, but after seeing how thick the batter was, I figured it might be a bit easier to spoon them. While this probably was easier, they certainly didn't spread during the bake like some other cookies I know. Mine came out a bit rough around the edges.

Additionally the "surprise" marshmallow needed a bit of flattening after baking as they had essentially puffed up the the same height as the cookie.


And so after twice baking, cooling and frosting creating- here's the final product. They certainly tasted great, but the real surprise was the mess they make. I see no way around the oozing frosting pools from all the drippage.

I recommend for choco-holics and families who can eat these in a sitting. I doubt they pack very well, although I didn't try.


Happy Baking!

An Introduction

He's really sweet- which is, no doubt, somewhat related to his daily sugar intake. My husband Scott has a cookie capacity that most only dream of. I've seen him polish off a whole carton of cookies in a sitting without so much as a stretch and yawn. He is also magically immune to love handles, spare tires and the like...must be nice.

I don't know if his Christmas gift of Martha Stewart's Book of Cookies was motivated by a subconscious dissatisfaction with my baking skills or what, but hey, if the man wants cookies, cookies he's going to get.

I can't lie, I much prefer cooking your standard roast or ragu- there's just more of a relationship there. You get to know your meat and veggies; the different personalities, who can take the heat, who needs to rest or simmer a bit longer. All the measuring and precise timing of baking has always left me cold. My baking endeavers are the only times I feel uncomfortable in the kitchen- and that's going to change this year.

I don't know if I'll get through them all, but I'm going to do my best to exhaust Martha's Cookie Bible- and hopefully in the end I'll own the art of cookie creation and not the other way around.