Category: Sweet

Chocolate Chip Cookies. Need I say more?


I must say, I really like cooking and baking, but cookies (especially those for Christmas, named in German “Weihnachtsplätzchen”) never seemed to be right. Either they’re bland and boring. Or burned.
So when I first made this recipe, it was for Cookie Dough Ice Cream, not cookies. But after making a whole batch I realized I only needed half of it for the ice cream. Then I decided to give it a try and bake the rest of it – and to my surprise, it was a full success! Since then, I like baking cookies, at least based on the recipe below.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
adapted from Ben & Jerry

100 g / 1 stick / 1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract OR 1 package vanilla sugar
1 cup / 125 g flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup semisweet chocolate, chopped
1/2 cup pecans, chopped


Measure and put aside all your ingredients. The cool thing about this recipe is that you need each measuring cup once. So no messing up other bowls.

Get the butter out of the fridge and let it get to room temperature. If the butter is very cold and you’re in a hurry, here’s a little trick: cut the butter in to cubes (approx. the size of the dice in a regular board game). Let some water boil and put it into your mixing bowl. When the bowl feels hot on the outside, toss the water out, dry the bowl quickly and put in the butter cubes. They will soften in minutes, but will not melt.


Put the paddle attachment on your mixer, and beat the butter with both sugars on medium speed until it looks light and fluffy, and until some sugar crystals have dissolved. Slow down a bit, add the egg and vanilla, speed up again and beat it until you have an emulsion, that is no streaks of egg left.

In my opinion, you should take out the egg out of the fridge with the butter to get to room temperature. This first step of the creaming method is about getting an emulsion between the fat in the butter and the water in the egg. And that simply works best if both ingredients have the same temperature (see mayo post for more insights into emulsions).


Continue with medium speed and add the flour in 2 to 3 installments (slow down for adding, then speed up to mix it all in). With the last installment, add the salt and the baking powder. You want a dough that is soft but keeps its shape.


Go to low speed and add the pecan and chocolate bits. Grab a spoon and taste it. Yum!


In my opinion, this makes a tremendous amount of cookies, especially if there’s just two eaters and the half of the dough is perfect for making a liter/quart of Cookie Dough Ice Cream. Just freeze it in a flat shape between sheets of plastic wrap, cut into pieces and add in the last minute of the ice cream process.

As I like rather smaller cookies, I used my measuring tablespoon to get out equally sized heaps of cookie dough on a parchment paper. As you can see in the photo, those are way to close to each other for baking – that would result in one big rectangular cookie. No, I froze the batter this way and when those little balls were rock-hard I filled them into a Ziploc bag with the baking instruction written on it.

So every time I need cookies, I preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F, take out the amount of cookie dough I think will be enough (of course it never is) and bake them for 12-14 minutes. Yes, with a stopwatch.

Macarons. First take.

As I have said in my Carbonara post, I have tons of egg whites in my freezer. And that gets even worse when I make Pasteis de Nata (a sweet that reminds me of vacations), you need 6 (six!) yolks for one muffin tray. So I’m looking for ways to use those egg whites, apart from the plain white meringue. Quite a few food bloggers post about macarons, about how delicious they are and how difficult they are to make. A way to use those egg whites and a challenge – what could be better?

Have you ever eaten macarons? It’s a French sweet, a bit like a sandwich made of almond meringues and with ganache in the middle. I first tasted them last September in Bordeaux, so apart from being delicious by themselves, they taste like holidays for me… The drawback is that they’re really expensive and they’re – of course – only available in France. There also seems to exist a Swiss variant, named Luxemburgerli.

After reading several posts and recipes, the one presented by David Lebovitz seemed the most reasonable one – hey, he gave it seven tries! Click on this link for the RECIPE and INSTRUCTIONS…

This is my first try – doesn’t look too bad:

macaron

Well, not perfect either. I must say that in my case, 2 egg whites may not have been enough – the batter was quite hard and I could hardly squeeze it through the pastry bag nozzle. Nothing like the described “lava consistency”. Also, tapping the baking sheet several times did not make the macarons any flatter; I had to use my moistened finger tips to make the tops more even. They came out pretty thick: the macaron pictured here is 5 cm high. And I only had enough batter for 7 pairs.

But: preheating the oven a bit hotter than you actually need it (and then reducing the temperature when putting the meringues in) really helps generating the little “feet”, i.e. the crumpled meringue you see in the picture.

Needless to say, the chocolate ganache was really easy to make and tastes delicious, maybe because I added 1 teaspoon of rum. As I did not have enough macaron shells, I made truffles as described by Alton Brown.

No question I will make macarons again, as they are really really tasty!

Gugelhupf. With new-world twist.

A couple of days ago, the weather turned cold and bad and I had a craving for traditional cake made with yeast. Then, I browsed through my pantry and my collection of cook books and found just the right things: a packet of dried yeast, candied lemon peel and dried fruit. And this is what it looked like when I was ready:

01_gugelhupf

(see here for a better picture: Gugelhupf)

Now you might think: so, what’s the new-world twist? oh, I felt creative that day and put in pecans and dried cranberries…

Here’s the recipe:

GUGELHUPF / KUGELHOPF / BUNDT CAKE

500 g flour
125 ml / 1/2 cup milk, body temperature
100 g sugar
1 packed dried yeast
2 eggs
100 g / 1 stick butter, room temperature
lemon peel
50 g shaved almonds
50 g pecans, chopped
100 g raisins
100 g dried lemon and orange peel, mixed
50 g dried cranberries
3 tbs rum

Put flour in mixing bowl, make a dip and pour in the sugar, the tepid milk and the yeast to “wake up” the yeast. Add the eggs, the butter cut into pieces and the lemon peel and mix/knead until the dough doesn’t stick anymore to the bowl (do that either by hand or with the dough hook of your food processor). That takes about 10 minutes. Cover and let it rest/rise in a warm place until it reaches the double size (if you have the time, place it in the fridge for 24 hours – the taste will be much finer).

Cover the dried fruit with rum and put it in the microwave for 3 minutes and let cool (saves you soaking them over night). Knead the fruit and the nuts into the dough until they are evenly distributed and put it into a greased bundt cake pan (mine is made out of silicon). Bake for 1 hour at 190°C, remove the cake from the pan and sprinkle with powder sugar. Enjoy!

02_gugelhupf