Back to the peanut butter chocolate chip cookie cake.  This is a cross between a gigantic peanut butter chocolate chip cookie and a cake, so it’s sort of difficult to classify it as either a cookie or a cake, in my opinion.  It has the texture and appearance of a cookie, not the soft, tender crumb of a cake.  The only way in which it resembles a cake is that it’s about 10 inches in diameter.

You can call it whatever you like, but chances are when you taste it, the only thing you’re going to be calling it is absolutely delicious.

I baked mine in a tart pan with a removable base because I don’t have a 10-inch round cake pan.  It made it super easy to remove the cookie cake when it was cool (er, well, it was almost cool when I removed it, I just couldn’t wait any longer!).

This has got to be one of my most favorite foods that I have baked.  My only regret is that I over-baked it just by a couple of minutes (it was slightly dry, not gooey-looking like the pictures at Almost Bourdain).  My oven is hard to figure out.  It’s basically brand new (just about 7 months old) and it is fan-forced.  It doesn’t really brown anything, so it’s sometimes hard to figure out when something is done.

No matter, this cookie cake was just the most scrumptious thing ever.

And I will definitely be making this one again soon.

The original recipe that inspired Ellie from Almost Bourdain to make this cookie cake called for semisweet chocolate chips to be used, but Ellie used milk chocolate chips.  I decided to use milk chocolate chips too.  I normally don’t like milk chocolate that much, but coupled with the peanut butter I thought it would taste great.  I made sure to choose a good quality milk chocolate (I chose Cadbury, which isn’t top of the line, of course, but I do like Cadbury milk chocolate) to give me a better chance of liking it!  Even though I loved the cookie cake with the milk chocolate chips, I’ll try semisweet, or even dark, chocolate chips next time I make this.

This was a big hit with my 2-year-old son, who even sneaked into the cupboard and stole some when I wasn’t looking!

Recipe Source
Ellie from Almost Bourdain

And on a separate note, just a quick reminder that coming up on July 1 the first ever Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge ingredient will be announced. For more information on this brand new monthly cupcake challenge that I have started, read this page.

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.

And it is definitely delicious, I think.  The ginger keeps this bread interesting.  I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not, actually.  I definitely did not like the crystallized ginger by itself, but it did taste okay in the bread.  I probably would not choose to add crystallized ginger to banana bread again, however.  For a different sort of taste experience though, this bread is definitely a winner.

For our second quick bread, let’s go with coconut bread, from Almost Bourdain.  I probably found this recipe on FoodGawker or TasteSpotting as well, but can’t be for sure.  All I knew about it was that it look fabulous and moist and that I had to make it.

In fact, it was so delicious that this was the only photo I could manage to take of it.  That’s a dessert cookbook in the background, in case you were wondering.  This coconut bread tasted amazing with a cup of coffee.  It is now officially my new favorite quick bread – move over, banana bread!

For this coconut bread, I did not follow the recipe word-for-word.  First, I decided to use 150ml skim milk, and 150ml coconut milk, instead of “300ml milk”.  Next, I used 2 cups of all-purpose flour, but used 1/2 cup of almond meal to make up the “2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour”.  For the shredded coconut, I had to use some desiccated coconut that I had leftover in the pantry, because I didn’t have quite enough shredded coconut.  I also did not use the butter or icing sugar that the original recipe suggested for serving.

My bread baked up beautiful and moist, I absolutely loved it and will definitely be making this one again.

What’s your favorite quick bread?

Sources
Banana bread with chocolate chips and crystallized ginger: Food o’ del Mundo
Jamaican coconut bread: Almost Bourdain

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.

And do you know what?  Blake did an amazing job with helping me.  To be honest, this was the first time I let my son help me bake.  He’s generally a tornado and destroys everything in sight, from toys to books, from CD and DVD cases to kitchen cabinets, you name it, so I thought that if there was any child I would not allow in the kitchen to help me bake, it would be this boy.  But I felt extra patient that day and decided to give it a go.

He was more than happy to help.  I measured out the ingredients, and he poured them into the bowl as needed.  He stirred the flour into the dough and mixed in the chocolate chips and apricots.  He was so proud.

His cookies were really nice.  They were sort of cakey and chewy, definitely not crunchy.  The apricots were an interesting addition, and one that Blake didn’t actually like that well in the end.

I bought some sea salt for my chocolate salted dulce de leche cupcakes a couple of weeks ago and since I had seen chocolate chip cookies with a sprinkling of sea salt on other blogs, I decided to try a sprinkling of it on these cookies.  It was an addition that I could have done without, although some sea salt fans might appreciate it.

They weren’t quite as good the next day and I thought they benefited from being warmed up in microwave for a few seconds.  The cookies are very easy to make and I would definitely recommend them if you’d like to try a nice variation on the chocolate chip cookie.

Chocolate And Apricot Chip Cookies
Adapted from the back of a Sunbeam Foods Turkish Apricots bag
Makes approximately 1 1/2 dozen

Ingredients
3/4 cup Sunbeam Dried Apricots, diced
100g butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk or dark choc bits

Method
Cream butter and sugar in a mixing bowl until light and creamy. Add egg and vanilla essence and beat well.

Add flour and baking powder and combine with a wooden spoon. Stir in apricots and choc bits.

Place tablespoons of mixture onto tray and press down to flatten. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 180°C.

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!

I knew I’d like the chocolate chip one the best, so I saved it for last and tried the banana butterscotch cupcake first.  Bangerang even included two plastic forks!

The first thing I can tell you about this cupcake is that there is no mistaking that this is banana!  It’s obviously made with tons of real bananas, and the butterscotch is so rich and creamy.  Delicious!  The cake itself was definitely delicious, but it wasn’t as soft and moist as I had expected.  It was more of a muffin texture, but a very yummy muffin!

Next up, the chocolate chip one.  This was one of the Cupcakes For A Cause, where the proceeds would go to the CancerCare For Kids program, so it included a sugar smiley face.  This program has ended, so the smiley faces are no longer included in this cupcake.

As I expected, this was definitely one of the best cupcakes I’ve ever eaten.  It’s the only chocolate chip cupcake I’ve had that actually tasted like a chocolate chip cookie.  The cake was softer and moister than the banana one.  The vanilla bean buttercream is to-die-for.  The addition of the mini chocolate chips brings everything together and you get one of the most amazing tastes that have ever entered your mouth!  This is an amazing cupcake, I was so glad I had two of these babies!

I kept my cupcakes in the refrigerator and reheated them in the microwave before I ate them.  I really recommend doing this yourself as well, as it makes the cupcake taste like it’s almost straight from the oven.

If you are looking for a big yummy cupcake for yourself or someone else as a treat, Bangerang Bake Shop‘s cupcake-in-a-jar would definitely be the way to go!  :)

Note that I have not been paid from or asked by Bangerang Bake Shop to write up this review, I just wanted to share my experience with others!

I was young, and staying with a babysitter throughout my school’s summer vacation.  I must have been around 7 or 8 years old.  One day we had went to my babysitter’s mom’s house, just down the road.  My babysitter’s mom was very elderly, but still perfectly capable of living on her own.  I don’t know if she was a busy cook or baker, or if she just had a couple good recipes that she threw together, but her chocolate chip cookies were the best I’ve ever tasted.  I think that I was allowed to have two, yet I begged for more.  They were warm from the oven, chock full of chocolate chips, the browning was perfect and they were the most perfect level of soft, chewy and gooey.  I’ve never tasted a chocolate chip cookie like that again, which is unfortunate, because you just hate to lose a good thing.  Both my babysitter and her mom have passed away and that recipe for her chocolate chip cookies has vanished.  But that’s what makes it so special now.

I’ve made so many chocolate chip cookie recipes and I always end up subconsciously comparing my batch of cookies to my babysitter’s mom’s cookies; none have been quite as good as hers, or at least not as good as I remember them being.

The browned butter of the Cook’s Illustrated perfect chocolate chip cookies, and their chewiness, make this my favorite recipe.  I have recently found my second favorite recipe, however, and it comes from a very unexpected place; the inside of a box of unsalted butter.  Land O’ Lakes butter, to be exact.

I had cut this recipe for chewy jumbo chocolate chip cookies out of the Land O’ Lakes unsalted butter box a long time ago because the recipe looked okay and I tucked it away into my recipe book; I was just reluctant to try it out because I didn’t have much hope for a recipe that came from inside a box of butter.

However, I came across a post from Cooking On The Side for this exact same recipe from Land O’ Lakes and the pictures of these cookies looked very tempting.  Kathy, like me, was originally skeptical of this particular recipe, but gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised with the outcome.  So I decided to pull out my cut-out recipe and finally try it for myself.

The two photos in this post so far show the result of this recipe.  While they don’t bring me back to the cookie I tasted nearly 25 years ago, they have earned the status of my second favorite chocolate chip cookie, and with me being so picky about my chocolate chip cookies, that’s saying a lot!  The cookies turned out crisp around the edges and chewy in the middle.

But wait, I have a related cookie (at least in that it also has chocolate chips) to share with you in this post; the monster cookie.  This is a cookie I’ve never heard of and first found at Sophistimom.  I did some searches for monster cookie recipes online, but out of all that I found, Sophistimom’s recipe was my favorite.

These cookies are fully packed with oats and peanut butter and they are jumbo!  You could eat these cookies for dinner and be stuffed full!  But wow, they are great.  Next time I make these (and there will be a next time), I might add a bit more chocolate chips, not much, but maybe a couple tablespoons more.  The dough was a little crumbly and the chocolate chips had a tendency to stick together in clumps for some reason.  These are super chewy cookies and they stayed gooey in the middle after baking.  I made half of these cookies jumbo-sized (for super quick breakfasts!), and the other half I made regular sized with a generously rounded tablespoon of dough (for deserts!).  I froze the leftover cookies and they have frozen well.

Find the recipe for Sophistimom’s monster cookies on her website.

For the recipe for chewy jumbo chocolate chip cookies from Land O’ Lakes…

Chewy Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies
Adapted from inside Land O Lakes unsalted butter box
Makes 26 jumbo cookies

Ingredients
4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt*
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 cups unsalted butter
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 1/4 cups firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 (12-ounce) package (2 cups) semi-sweet chocolate chunks or chocolate chips

Method
Heat oven to 375°F.

Combine flour, baking powder and baking soda in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Combine butter, sugar and brown sugar in a large bowl. Beat at medium speed, scraping the bowl often, until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla. Continue beating, scraping bowl often, until well mixed. Reduce speed to low. Beat, gradually adding flour mixture, until well mixed. Stir in chocolate chunks.

Drop dough by 1/4 cupfuls, 2 inches apart, onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 10 to 14 minutes or until light golden brown. (Do not overbake.) Let stand 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from cookie sheets.

*Note that it may have been a mistake on the box that the salt was left out of the recipe; Kathy from Cooking On The Side added salt to her recipe, and if you read the recipe for these cookies on the Land O’ Lakes website you will see that salt is indeed one of the ingredients.  The recipe I posted here is from the Land O’ Lakes website, although 2 teaspoons seems like a lot of salt (I used 1 teaspoon).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

—

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!  :)

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.

The process of making chocolate chip cookies is pretty uniform throughout each recipe.  Cream butter and sugar with a mixer, add eggs, then flour, roll into balls, etc.  Some recipes call for melted butter, some for room temperature or softenend butter.  Whichever though, the process is pretty much basic.

When I came across the recipe for Cook’s Illustrated Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies, I was instantly intrigued, for their brand new chocolate chip cookie recipe was quite different than any recipe I’d seen before for this type of cookie.  It does not use a mixer; it uses a mix of browned butter and regular butter; it requires a few resting times in between whiskings.

The blog where I found the recipe, The Way The Cookie Crumbles, posts beautiful step by step photos of this process.  The blogger, Bridget, was also interested in these new tricks called for in the recipe.

So this morning I got out all the ingredients for making these cookies and started browning the butter – okay, so the butter ended up a bit more brown that it should have been, that’s what happens when your two young children suddenly decide to go nuts when you can’t leave the stove!  Anyway, it wasn’t ruined, but I think it made my dough and finished cookies look more brown than it should have, also perhaps made it taste a little toffee-ish.

This new process of making the dough was really very simple.  When the dough is finished, the recipe suggests using approximately 3 tablespoons of dough for each cookie, or a #24 cookie scoop.  Well, I don’t have that large of a cookie scoop, and I didn’t want my cookies that large.  I used 2 tablespoons of dough for each cookie, and in my oven it took 11 minutes for them to bake.

One of the most important things to remember with chocolate chip cookies is to not overbake them.  Something Alton Brown said that I’ll always remember is if the cookies look done while still in the oven, then they are overbaked.  In the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, it specifically tells you when to take out the cookies – “until cookies are golden brown and still puffy, and edges have begun to set but centers are still soft.”.  Please do not bake any longer!

I also rotated my tray halfway through baking, since food towards the back of my oven brown faster than the front.

Okay, end result?  I ate a cookie when it was still warm, and I thought it was so-so.  Then I ate one when they had cooled off, but while the chocolate was still gooey, and I thought it was simply fantastic.  The taste of the browned butter really stood out, giving it a really nice, rich flavor that I’ve never tasted in a chocolate chip cookie before.  I was highly impressed.

I baked 12 of these cookies today.  I’ve always wanted to do my own refrigerator test on chocolate chip cookie dough – a trick that became popular from a New York Times article – so I reserved the rest of the dough in the refrigerator until tomorrow.  I have 8 cookies left to bake.  And I will post my opinions on the refrigerated dough tomorrow after baking.

Update – be sure to check out the refrigeration test results on this post!