Posts tagged ‘chocolate chip’

May 29

2 Awesome Quick Breads

I really love quick breads. I have a collection of many different kinds, but my favorite is always banana bread. We’ll start out this post with a banana bread recipe, but this particular one has two interesting twists, one of which may be new to you.

I’m not sure how I found this recipe, it may have been FoodGawker or TasteSpotting, but as soon as I found it, I bookmarked it. The photos from Food o’ del Mundo look fantastic, like the perfect banana bread.

The bread is spotted with chocolate chips, which isn’t much of a surprise, but it also includes the addition of crystallized ginger, which definitely surprised me! I had never had crystallized ginger before so I made this recipe a high-priority.

Mar 23

2 Comments

Chocolate And Apricot Chip Cookies

Do you like baking with your kids? Generally, I do not. I really want to let them help, to get them interested in baking and to experience the fun of turning a few simple innocent-looking ingredients into something amazingly tasty. But they’re too messy, and while I’m trying to keep them from pouring a whole bottle of vanilla extract into the butter/sugar/egg mixture, I lose track of how much baking powder I just added to the flour mixture! So I generally try to occupy the kids with something else while I bake.

However, while my daughter was at preschool last week, I decided to enlist the help of my 2-year-old son to help me make an interesting-looking recipe on the back of a bag of dried apricots. The recipe was for chocolate and apricot chip cookies; like a chocolate chip cookie with chopped dried apricots.

Jan 20

3 Comments

Review: Bangerang Bake Shop

I have long been eyeing Bangerang Bake Shop‘s cupcakes-in-a-jar. They always looked so appealing – a large cupcake filled and frosted with creamy frosting and smooshed into a cute little jar with a ribbon! I made a goal that one of the things I had to try before I left the US was a Bangerang Bake Shop cupcake.

I placed my order in October for a Chocolate Chip Off The Ol’ Block, and a Banana Butterscotch Bad Boy. I was so excited to try them, but unfortunately there was a problem with the shipment and I did not receive it in the specified time frame of 2-3 days. I emailed customer service, and also phoned the post office. Apparently the shipment had not been scanned from the sender’s post office, so tracking was telling me that it wasn’t even in transit yet.

Bangerang Bake Shop was so kind and reshipped my order about a week later, but surprise, my first order arrived before the second did! I was a little wary about their freshness, as it had been a week since these cupcakes were shipped. I put them in the refrigerator and hoped for the best. A couple of days later, my second order arrived in the specified time frame. Now I had four Bangerang cupcakes-in-a-jar!

Oct 23

10 Comments

Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies

If you’re a lover of chocolate chip cookies, like I am, then you probably have your favorite recipe and you may even remember when and where you tasted the perfect chocolate chip cookie. For me, my favorite recipe is Cook’s Illustrated’s perfect chocolate chip cookies and I do indeed remember where I tasted my all-time favorite chocolate chip cookie, although I don’t exactly remember when.

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Aug 3

4 Comments

Costco Chocolate Chunk Cookies

Members of Costco look forward to their monthly coupon booklet, and if other members are like me, they get super excited when there’s a coupon for something from the bakery! Imagine how I felt when I saw a $2 coupon for Costco’s “gourmet chocolate chunk cookies” this month!

The cookies came in a pack of 24. After taste-testing one, I froze the rest of them to make them last as long as possible. The cookies are absolutely fanastic. They are soft and chewy, and the chocolate chunks are huge and delicious.

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But with 24 of these cookies, I wanted to try to do some more creative things with them, rather than just eat them as is, one by one. So first I made an ice cream sandwich.

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Which was great, but two of those huge cookies, plus vanilla ice cream, plus mini chocolate chips was a bit too much to eat all at once!

Next, after being inspired by a post from Our Best Bites about frozen pudding pops, I made vanilla pudding pops (using half and half) with chunks of Costco’s cookies and ribbons of fudge sauce.

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Okay, so that fudge sauce really didn’t work out very well! It gets solid in the refrigerator, so I thought it would freeze up solid in the freezer, but the warm water I need to use to unmold the pops melted the fudge sauce. Despite the horrible messy look to these pudding pops, however, they tasted amazing!

You might think that the chunks of cookie that went into these pops would freeze up too hard to bite into, but you’d be wrong. The pudding actually kept the cookie pieces soft and easy to bite into.

My last creative adventure for Costco’s cookies was simply a chocolate chip cookie sundae.

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I warmed the cookie in the microwave until it was really soft and the chunks were really gooey, scooped vanilla ice cream on top, as well as fudge sauce and a cherry.

But most of the cookies actually got eaten plain! I had stored in them in the freezer, but let them thaw out completely to room temperature before eating them. A quick zap in the microwave once they were at room temperature made them taste like they had just come from the oven. My crazy daughter preferred to eat them straight from the freezer!

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On a totally separate note, I’d like to say that I’m now 37 weeks pregnant. I have a habit of going early with my pregnancies, so anytime from now if you notice that I haven’t posted in over 4 days it would probably be safe to assume that the baby has arrived! I may take a brief hiatus from updating The Sweetest Kitchen for a few weeks after that, although I have a few other recipes currently waiting to be posted that I will try to go through first. Don’t worry though, because I will return! :)

Apr 11

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies Update

As you may remember, I was refrigerating a portion of the dough from this recipe to do my own refrigeration test on it, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while now. I believe that letting the dough rest in the refrigerator for 36 hours is recommended, but I decided to bake them about 6 hours earlier!

I lowered the oven temperature to 350F, instead of 375F, and also needed to bake them about 3-4 minutes longer. What I first noticed about the cookies that had been refrigerated is that they actually stayed puffier, even after cooling.

At first, I thought the taste result would be inconclusive. But, I had eaten a semi-warm cookie (I personally think that these cookies taste better when they are at room temperature). I waited until they had cooled down to room temperature and I did a side-by-side comparison test with the non-refrigerated cookies. I personally thought that the taste of the cookies that had been refrigerated was richer and deeper and even more of that browned butter taste came through. They were also a bit chewier, and of course, puffier than the dough that had not been refrigerated.

In the end I decided that the refrigerated cookie dough cookies were slightly better than the non-refrigerated ones. It wasn’t a huge difference, and I don’t think I could wait that long to bake the chocolate chip cookies each time I made up the dough. I wouldn’t even have noticed a difference, I don’t think, if I hadn’t eaten them side-by-side.

I can tell you with certainty, however, that this new Cook’s Illustrated recipe for Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies will now be my go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Apr 9

7 Comments

Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

When it comes to chocolate chip cookies, I like them chewy and gooey and warm. Out of all the chocolate chip cookies I’ve personally baked (both on this blog and off), Alton Brown’s The Chewy has been my favorite. Read more