Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love Mom's Big Book of Cookies. This Lauren Chattman book is full of reliable, trusty cookie recipes. When I use the chocolate-chip recipe from this book, I have found that I get great results if I refrigerate the dough for a day before I bake it. I also add extra flour to the cookie dough to get the consistency I like. (I'm of the big, soft, and chewy chocolate-chip cookie camp.) For this batch, I used a straggler bag of raspberry-swirled chocolate chips, something Nestle had out last year.

A Trip to Houston

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Texas for the Houston Marathon. Because the holidays had put me in a cookie-baking frame of mind, I baked a lot of cookies to bring along and share with the friends who were also going to be at the race. I relied on recipes from three books.

From Mom’s Big Book of Cookies by Lauren Chattman, I made:
Benne Wafers: excellent cookie, with an unusual flavor from the sesame seeds.
Sour Cream Chocolate Mint Chip Cookies: soft, cakey. I didn’t love these cookies, truth be told.
Snickerdoodles: a thinner, crisper version than the ones Ryan usually makes on Cookie Day (from a recipe in The Good Cookie by Tish Boyle).
Mexican Chocolate Chip Cookies: pretty good, a chocolate chocolate-chip cookie with cinnamon in the dough.

From A Baker’s Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies by Dede Wilson, I made:
Double Chip Browned-Butter Oat Scotchies: excellent. Oaty, butterscotchy.
Coffee-Toffee-Chocolate Chunk Cookies: a classic.

From Cookies by Jill Snider, I made:
Lemon-Poppy Seed Balls: nice and tender, but in need of a bit more lemon flavor.
Key Lime-Coconut Macaroons: didn’t like them at all; they had a rubbery texture. I made the dough in advance and refrigerated it for a day before baking it. I wonder if that contributed to the unfortunate texture.

Also, to fulfill a promise, I brought along a Sweet Potato Pound Cake, from a recipe in Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott. I’ve made this one before, and absolutely love it.

Finally, I made a couple of flourless treats for my good friend Enid, who can’t consume wheat-based baked goods. Although I really like baking for friends in general, I get a special bit of joy in baking for Enid because I know that homemade baked goods can be harder to come by for those who can’t eat wheat. So for Enid, it was a batch of Cliff's Brownies (from Gluten-Free Baking by Rebecca Reilly) and a batch of Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies from Lauren Chattman’s book. It’s a brilliantly simple four-ingredient recipe (peanut butter, egg, vanilla, sugar) that I augmented with some Ghirardelli dark-chocolate chips.

Lemon Squares

When I make lemon squares anymore, they are a complete disaster. For many years, I used a lemon square recipe by Emily Luchetti. It had always worked until the last few times I made it. (Clearly, the problem has become me, not the recipe!) Because I had some lemons that were close to turning the corner, I decided to try a lemon-square recipe from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie. Zesty Lemon Squares had a lot of appeal: plenty of lemon juice in the filling, plus a brown-sugar crust spiked with crystallized ginger. I followed the recipe, and I think that was my undoing. The crust is baked before the filling is poured on it. I allowed the crust to cool before adding the filling, and apparently, the crust contracted enough that the filling all oozed under the crust.

Serving the bars was essentially a rescue operation. I flipped the baked bars over onto a cutting board, and served them upside down. They were very lemony, as a good lemon square should be, but they definitely were not something to pick up and eat out of hand.

Even More Cookies

Before the excitement of Cookie Day even began, I learned that some friends in Philadelphia were planning a get-together: a Sunday-morning run followed by a cookie exchange. When I asked Ryan if he was interested in heading to Philly for the shindig, he said yes. So we made plans to participate in this year's Philly event.

The run was a lot of fun; we really lucked out with a mild December morning. The cookie swap was a lot of fun, too. I wish I'd done a better job of keeping track of what other people brought. There were some great meringues, some tahini cookies, blondies, and more.

I brought along the following:

Mom's Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Lauren Chattman's Mom's Big Book of Cookies; I made these with a tablespoon (or so) of orange zest in the dough. Very nice. These cookies were the ones we left out for Santa this year, too. Awesome. I add 1/4 to 1/2 cup more flour than the recipe calls for; the extra flour makes for a cookie that spreads less, which I like.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies, also from the Chattman book; a chocolate cookie with peanut butter and peanut-butter chips in the dough. Excellent.

Oatmeal Cookies with Cranberries and White Chocolate Chips, also from the Chattman book. The recipe was developed with butterscotch chips, but I used white chocolate instead. They went well with the dried cranberries.

Orange Poppy Seed Spirals, from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie. In the end, not a bad cookie, what what a pain making them. I ruined the first batch of poppy-seed filling, which involves just scalding 2 tablespoons of whole milk and 1 tablespoon of honey. Good grief! That liquid is then combined with poppy seeds ground in the food processor with sugar, cloves, and lemon zest. It's then swirled into rounds with an orange-spiked cookie dough. The cookies tasted terrific; the orange and clove are great partners. In fact, the cookies smelled and tasted a lot like Constant Comment tea.

Mojito Shortbread, from a recipe in Cook's Country magazine. In 2006, Ryan and I put this cookie on the list for Cookie Day. We didn't make it. In 2007, we put it on the list for Cookie Day. We didn't make it. Because I had purchased fresh mint (again), I finally had to make it. It seemed like a great idea for a cookie: a shortbread with lemon and lime zest baked til lightly golden, then sprinkled with a combination of mint and sugar chopped together in the food processor. I don't know. In the end, I was really underwhelmed, maybe mostly because after the mint-sugar coating hardened on top of the shortbread, it crumbled in big chunks and fell off. Also, I think I bought some lousy mint that just lacked flavor. This shortbread just left me with a shrug.

More Cookies

After the rigors of Cookie Day, I still had more cookies to make. For years, I'd wanted to try Benne Wafers. On Cookie Day, I actually made the dough for these cookies, then didn't bake it off til a few days later. I used a recipe from Lauren Chattman's Mom's Big Book of Cookies. I love these cookies. The toasted sesame seeds give them an exotic flavor and nutty crunch; they're so good that I almost don't care when the sesame seeds get stuck in my teeth.

I also made Banana Granola Cookies from Jill Snider's Cookies. These cookies were not too bad, soft and cakey. They're yet another recipe I'll add to the pile I turn to when confronted with overripe bananas.

Then I made a batch of Mexican-wedding-cake-type cookies, with ground walnuts and "holiday" swirled white chips from Nestle. Pretty straightforward. I made these last year, too, and everyone liked them. I have to stop buying goofy "holiday" baking products, though.

Finally, on Christmas Day, I made a batch of Boston Cream Pies, from the Rosie's Bakery Chocolate-Packed, Jam-Filled, Butter-Rich Cookie Book (pause for a breath here) by Judy Rosenberg. It's one of two books written by the owner of this Boston-area bakery chain. Loved the idea, but the reality was troublesome. First, the pastry-cream filling set up into a solid, immovable mass. With the quick work of some extra cream and my immersion blender, I managed to save the pastry cream. The yellow cakes for these small sandwich cookies mostly baked up OK. But the chocolate glaze for the tops was a nightmare, far too thin and runny to adhere to the cakes, even when it was cool. I ended up adding enough powdered sugar to make a frosting instead of a glaze. Then, after all the bonus effort, the Boston Cream Pies were good to go. (I'm tempted to roll my eyes at this point.)

Pumpkin Pie Muffins

I needed to make something to donate to a bake sale. Given my ongoing need to use up various ingredients, I was able to finish off a can of pumpkin puree with these Pumpkin Pie Muffins from Mostly Muffins, a classic (published in 1984) by Barbara Albright and Leslie Weiner. These are pretty much what they would seem to be: muffins with the flavors reminiscent of pumpkin pie, especially those spices: cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg. These muffins also have chopped pecans and dried cranberries (I strayed from the dates called for in the original recipe). I also sprinkled a little cinnamon sugar atop each muffin before I baked them.

Cookie Day 2007

Many years ago, we used to host a holiday party featuring only desserts. It was a lot of fun, but a grueling amount of work. There's nothing like making cookies for the holidays, though, and I was glad to learn that my running pal Ryan also liked to bake. A few years ago, we got together for our first-ever Cookie Day, a preholiday celebration of flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and chocolate.

The first two years of Cookie Day were major throw-downs. Last year, the first pan went in the oven at around 10:15 a.m., and the last batch of cookies didn't come out til around midnight. Although this Cookie Day format was fun, this year we decided to approach things differently. Each of us prepared a bunch of doughs ahead of time to bake off on Cookie Day. All in all, this worked out really well, making for a far-less frantic day. In the end, we prepared only a few "live" doughs; the rest was stuff we'd done in advance.



Ryan brought along a variety of items:

• Chocolate-peanut butter pinwheels
• Caramel-pecan biscotti
• Chocolate sticks (a biscotti-like chocolate cookie)
• Magic in the Middles (a chocolate cookie dough wrapped around a peanut-butter filling)

My advance doughs were the following:

• Cranberry-cornmeal cookies
• Lime-coconut cookies
• Oatmeal cookies with dried mango, coconut, and macadamia nuts
• Ribbon cookies
• Chocolate-cherry-pistachio swirls
• Dark chocolate crackles

The live doughs:

• ANZAC biscuits
• Snickerdoodles
• Espresso-toffee chocolate-chunk cookies

All the recipes I tried were new for me except for the espresso-toffee-chocolate chunk cookies, which I blogged about earlier this year as the best chocolate chip cookies ever, and the ribbon cookies, which we made for Cookie Day 2006; both are Dede Wilson recipes.



Of these new doughs, I'd rate the oatmeal cookies as my favorite. They're soft and chewy, and can you go wrong with dried mango? The cranberry-cornmeal cookies are also very good; it's an unusual combination for a cookie. These two are from Lauren Chattman's Mom's Big Book of Cookies, which was published in time for Cookie Day 06 but somehow never was used.



The dark-chocolate crackles, an Abby Dodge recipe from Fine Cooking's December 2007 issue, are superb; the dash of orange zest really brings them to life. I keep thinking that there are interesting ways to tweak the recipe with different-flavor chips and/or zests.

The final two cookies I made were also from the Lauren Chattman book. I liked the lime-coconut cookies enough, but felt that they could use a bit more lime zest to really make them jump. The swirled cookies were my only real disaster of the day. The cookie dough is very soft, and in hindsight, I think it would have benefited from chilling prior to being rolled out. The first batch of swirls rolled up OK, with a bit of difficulty, but the second roll was a nightmare.



This just in: comments from Ryan!

Here's my feelings about the cookies I made. Feel free to edit and append to your blog entry if you'd like.

* Chocolate-peanut butter pinwheels

I've made pinwheel cookies a couple of times before using different recipes. The recipes for both doughs came from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion. I was disappointed with the doughs. They both went from being cold and unmalleable to warm and sticky quickly with no middle ground. This made rolling them out and then together a joyless experience. Further, the texture of the cookie isn't that good. It could be that I slightly underbaked them but they aren't crispy.

* Caramel-pecan orange biscotti

Biscotti ships well but in previous Cookie Days, making it has been a real time hog since it has to be baked twice. So, since I was making it in advance (I prepared it through baking the log), no reason not to make a fancy recipe. This comes from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie, a cookie book that I adore and cherish. The recipe calls for making caramel and then letting it harden over chopped pecans on a cookie sheet (doing this on a silpat worked out nicely). I like the flavor this brought to the cookie.

* Chocolate sticks (a biscotti-like chocolate cookie)

This is also from the KACC. They have a lighter texture than biscotti. It is both chocolaty and crunchy. I would definitely make these again. They seem ideally suited to dunking in a glass of milk or a cup of coffee.

* Magic in the Middles (a chocolate cookie dough wrapped around a peanut-butter filling)

Another recipe that would demand too much time to make on Cookie Day. The recipe from KACC calls for rolling sweetened PB into balls, rolling the chocolate dough into balls, flattening the chocolate dough balls, and reforming them around the PB balls. I've made this before and it did not disappoint this time around. It's the closest one can come to a Reese's PB cup in cookie form.

* ANZAC biscuits

I've seen these in several cookie books and I've been curious. ANZAC stands for Australia and New Zealand Army Corps and the biscuits were shipped to soldiers in WWII. So, they are fit for shipping out on Cookie Day, too. They're pretty simple with just oats and butter as the main flavors. There's also some coconut, which seems to mainly add a bit of chewiness to the texture. They're interesting cookies and I like them. I might add chocolate chips to them if I make them again. Or dried fruit.

* Snickerdoodles

A classic New England cookie and one that I always enjoy baking. I used the recipe from The Good Cookie. For whatever reason, Tish doesn't call them snickerdoodles but cinnamon crinkle cookies but in the description she says they're snickerdoodles. I don't get it. Whatever she calls them, it's a good recipe that came out pretty well.

P.S. I'll be back later to update links.