Aug 30
Chocolate chip cookies straight from the oven – what could be better? My favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe has been the Cook’s Illustrated version, the “perfect chocolate chip cookie“, because of the use of browned butter. Read more
It was just one of those weeks. My son had conjunctivitis in both eyes; my daughter was too ill to attend her ballet class; I didn’t have any butter. You know how it goes. Read more
Cake pops and cookie pops are becoming quite popular; they’ve even inspired pies, brownies and other yummy treats to hop onto sticks as well. It’s the latest craze for food these days. Read more
Wouldn’t you know it? I got my new camera and then I had a string of failures in the kitchen. They were tasty failures, but they were definitely not blog-worthy or even worthy of photographing with my new camera. Read more
I have a thing for peanut butter cookies, and I’m really picky about them. They have to be peanut buttery and chewy, and preferably without the crunch of crunchy peanut butter or added peanuts. Read more
Aug 6
I love food magazines. I currently have three favorite ones – MasterChef Australia, delicious., and Good Taste. A few issues of each of these are scattered on my coffee table and I find myself frequently flipping through them. It seems that different recipes appeal to me on different days – one recipe that I don’t like so much one day may be a recipe that I love on the next day.
The recipe I’m about to share with you was one of those that I didn’t like one day, but fell in love with the next day – dark chocolate cookies with pistachios and milk chocolate chunks. It comes from the August 2010 issue of delicious. magazine, and was created by Bill Granger.
I’ve never been keen on pistachios, which is why I originally skipped over the recipe. Sure, the picture of the cookies in the magazine looked droolworthy, but when I read that there were pistachios I just turned the page. But the next time I looked at the magazine, these cookies basically screamed out at me to make them immediately. I had everything on hand already, except the pistachios. I chose a bag of pistachios that were already shelled so that I wouldn’t have to waste time in shelling them myself.
Jun 8
Here’s a little scenario. You have a craving for something chocolate. A chocolate cake, or cupcakes, or brownies perhaps. You dig out your favorite chocolate recipe to make sure you have all the ingredients… you realize you’re out of eggs… you don’t have a block of chocolate… your baking powder has expired… oh great, you can’t make anything after all! But wait…
Don’t give up! I have something for you! It’s buttery, it’s tender, it’s chocolatey, it’s chocolate shortbread!
Mar 23
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.
Nov 17
Martha Stewart’s COOKIES book is simply amazing. I often look through the book just to look at the beautiful pictures. What I don’t like about the book is that most all of the recipes (and pictures) are already on Martha Stewart’s website. If I had known this before I bought the book, I probably would not have bought the book.
I presume this is the same with the CUPCAKES book, but I’m not sure; I haven’t yet purchased this book. I probably will eventually though!
But back to the COOKIES book, one of the pictures and recipes that I kept coming back to were the giant chocolate sugar cookies. I put off making them for so long because I thought sugar cookies were supposed to be soft; the chocolate sugar cookies were supposed to be a little more sandy in texture, I believe. I didn’t think I’d like that in a sugar cookie. Read more
Oct 23
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.
Sep 16
I’m not sure if I was looking in the wrong place, but it seems I had a hard time finding a chocolate oatmeal cookie recipe. I could have just made up my own recipe, or a sort of Frankenstein combination, if you will, of a few different cookie recipes, but just as I was about to give up and do that, I found what I was after at Hershey’s Kitchens.
A dark chocolate cookie with oats and chocolate chips! I used Hershey’s Special Dark cocoa powder for these, and replaced the nuts in their recipe with semisweet chocolate chips.
These cookies are so dark! I had a little trouble baking them, as I found that the middles stayed quite gooey, which made me want to bake them longer, but that resulted in a crunchier cookie. They’re actually quite chewy, and very chocolatey, although they become a little crunchier anyway the next day.
Oddly enough, the kids weren’t too fond of these; they’d eat about half of a cookie and leave the rest. That was fine with me though, it left more for the rest of us! :)
Jamieanne has a passion for food and baking that dates back to her early childhood. She is the author of The Sweetest Kitchen blog, which features her favorite recipes from magazines, cookbooks and other food blogs. Keep up to date with Jamieanne and her blog by following on:
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