Cookie Frenzy

Homemade Big and Chewy Cookies

After a tiring day of  baking 4 cakes, guess what I am gushing about? It’s cookie baking day! What can I say, I think I’ve developed a terrible addiction to baking.

Okay, so this is not really baking for baking’s sake. Haha! Apparently, the samplers of soft-baked cookies that were brought to Father’s office have been well-received and a few of the folks there are apparently itching to order. So what do I do? Well, you know me. I don’t want to give  people what they expect, lol. So in lieu of  packs of soft-baked ginger cookies, I’ve decided on making a Cookie Jar Assortment! Yay!  I’m making two different cookies packed in beautiful, transparent cookie jars (with my label of course).

Can you see how giddy I am with the prospect?  It also helps that I have a kilo of Callebaut Chippits and a bagful of walnuts just begging to be used.

I don’t like crisp, crumbly cookies. I want chewy cookies, so that’s what I’m making.  Last night, I made the dough for the cookies  ( Cinnamon Molasses and Choco Chip)  and dunked them in the ref. to settle. One thing I’ve learned in cookie making is that, chewy cookies are chewier and the dough is  easier to handle if you allow the dough to develop in the ref for a couple of hours.

After setting aside a few cookies (okay maybe two dozen cookies) for us at home, I was able to make about five jars of cookies.

~Cookie Jars for Christmas~

The recipes for the cookies are loosely based on the following:

Big, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Soft Baked Molasses and Cinnamon Cookies

Chocs + Vanilla + Orange = Happiness

One of my business partners threw an order yesterday for some cakes she’ll bring to her Lola tomorrow.  Pick up time was tonight. Her orders: 2 chiffon cakes and two fudge brownies. With less than 12 hours preparation (from morning to afternoon), it was a bit of a challenge. For one,  though for a time a few years ago, I was making brownies almost every day, I haven’t made brownies in more than a year. My taste for cakes at the moment is geared towards dense pound cakes. As for the chiffon cake, well, I have only made chiffon cakes twice in the past, so this was  certainly going to be a challenge.

Since I did not bring with me cake boxes from Manila, I was a bit worried how to pack the cakes. Thankfully, I found the only baker’s supply shop in Davao: Baker’s Best in Tionko St. Went there early today to buy the boxes. Got a bonus too, since the Callebaut Chipits (chocolate chips) and a few of Callebaut’s semi-sweet bars were on sale!  Got them at only 30% the normal price! The expiration date  of the stuffs on sale was January 2010, but I know that the goodies I’ll make with the chocs won’t even last till Christmas haha so yes, I was very elated! I thought, what a great send-off to a busy baking day.

Because my oven was pretty small,  I had to bake the stuffs in batches. It took me the whole afternoon to bake all four cakes. Sigh. I’m counting the days till I get my hands on the big (well at least bigger than the normal, home ovens) oven.

For, the brownie I used the ever-reliable Baker’s One Bowl Brownie as my base recipe. I  then concocted a white chocolate+whipped cream frosting which I drizzled over the brownies.

For the orange chiffon cake, I based my recipe loosely on  The Joy of Baking recipe with some substitutions.  For the frosting,  I sealed the crumbs thinly with the leftover frosting from the brownies, then made a vanilla + reddi whip + milk frosting for the cake.

Here are the results:

Round Orange Chiffon Cake with Vanilla Frosting

Square Orange Chiffon Cake with Vanilla Frosting

Rustic Brownies

Today’s Mission…Accomplished!

Taste

It always begins with taste. And taste begins with the eyes—the contrast of colors, the perception of textures, of softness or brittleness, the interplay of form and function. Then the feeling, is the roughness excused? Is its smoothness, its feel to the skin natural? Does it matter to your enjoyment that it is warm, scalding , cold or frozen? Does it matter to your enjoyment that it is warm, scalding, cold or frozen? We taste it most fully, first with our nose, even before our lips part, even before the flavor profile hits our tongues. It’s a miniscule second that separates the scent and the burst of flavors in our mouths, the neurons zapping to and from the brain with a verdict.

It’s the taste that counts, yet taste itself, is as unique as the confluence of all our senses. But that is the challenge. And if you ask me truly, deeply, why I am doing what I’m doing now. And if you have time, then I’ll tell you. It’s the pursuit of that unseen gold medal, to venture into creating something that meets my standard of taste.

Nobody opens a food business, no matter how small, with only money in mind. It is always a need to please. In my little soon to open pie shop, aside from the entrepreneurial part of it (the market research,the demand for the products etc.) I find a chance to indulge in one of my fantasies, one of those passions I carry with me no matter what transpires or where I end up in life, it is this one little chance to create to the best of my skills something that honestly tastes good, or something that’s at par to what for me is good food.

If I had millions of moolah, I’d live like a nomad, and trample all around the world to eat the food that up till now I’ve only devoured in books and blogs. I want to know what tastes good for Alinea’s Grant Achatz, a taste of Napa Valley’s French Laundry, or understand the methods and madness of El Bulli’s Ferran Adria. There are hundreds of chefs that wield such immense devotion, such worship, those who stand on the merits of their achievements and courage—for following and sticking to what for them tastes good. And though my little shop would in no way be in those levels, it is in my awe of their greatness that has made me so determined to go through with it. It starts and begins with taste, though the incredibly daunting and often frustrating steps to putting up such tiny shop sometimes distracts my attention. In the end taste is all that matters, in life as in food.

Baked Macaroni Comforts Me

There are days when everything seems sullen.  Days like today. I felt sick waking up.  The head throbbed all throughout the day. Not painful enough to warrant a visit to the doctor, but there it was, a dull ache.  It seems that the sinusitis is acting up again.

A development came which literally pulled all my plans into fast forward.  And I have to work  twice as  fast  to  make sure that the pie shop will open in time before I move to another, more demanding project.  On top of that, I had to go out to ship a few stuffs for the online shop, which is pretty fine in itself, but the sun in Davao at noon is unforgiving. The heat was enough to make me a bit dizzy.

An afternoon of typing up the plans and reading up on biz stuffs and I know I needed something comforting at the end of the day.  Something delicious and simple enough to make.

I checked the pantry: tomato sauce, quickmelt cheese, bell pepper, a pack of chorizo,  corned beef. Perfect for a down home Baked Mac.

I’ve made countless variations of baked mac in the past ten years.  My standby recipe had rosemary and dried basil in the red sauce. I even made it into a sort of sideline, selling baked macs in small  aluminum  trays the size of a Harry Potter Hardbound  in the office  for PHP 65.00 about six years ago.

As you might have noticed from my past recipe postings, I have the habit of getting a recipe and changing it alltogether depending on what ingredients I have at hand.  For this batch of Baked Mac, I used Ms. Veneracion’s Baked Mac recipe as a loose guide.

I didn’t have ground beef so I made do with a can of Purefoods corned beef. I had no italian sausage but  there was a pack of chinese chorizo, so off it went to the sauce.

For the red sauce, I added  paprika, italian seasoning, and a dash of cream (just because there was an open container of cream in the ref).

I usually don’t use bechamel for the toppings in baked mac, relying on a can of cream of mushroom soup and grated cheese for the thick cheese layer but since I didn’t have a can of mushroom soup, I made do with bechamel sauce. For the Bechamel (white cheese sauce) I omitted the water, added an additional half cup of milk, omitted the cream cheese and added a dash of pepper and a pinch of nutmeg. For the cheese, I used the usual Quickmelt Cheese.

It turned out okay The bechamel was a bit too brown perhaps because I used evap milk which has a darker, dirty white color instead of the fresh/skim milk from the carton. But the cheese flavor was spot on and I loved the sweetness that the chorizo bits gave to the red sauce. Pretty yummy and utterly comforting.

Something Sweet, Something Cheesy

Parmesan Garlic Mounds and Soft Baked Ginger Cookies

I woke up with low energy.  I had to finish some errands in the morning, and by midday I was craving for something easy to do which can fill the need to be, well, sort of  fulfilled.

So that’s how I came to make a batch of  Parmesan Garlic Mounds and three dozens of soft baked Ginger Cookies.

Parmesan Garlic Mounds right off the oven

I adapted the recipe for the Parmesan Garlic Mounds from Smitten Kitchen’s Cheese Straws recipe.  Only, my dough was a bit too grainy to handle so instead of cutting them into long sticks, I made them into mounds.  As always, I made do with what I had in the pantry and substituted grated parmesan for the cheddar cheese. I had no chili flakes so I added some Pizza Seasoning and garlic powder for the flavor.  They turned out pretty good, with a sharp zing of saltiness balanced by the herby flavor of the garlic and the oregano (from the italian seasoning).

Parmesan Garlic Mounds

Making the cheese mounds put me in the groove for cookie making so I perused another old recipe for sweet, fragrant and Christmassy cookies,  soft baked Ginger cookies rich with the flavors of cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and ginger.  These cookies do look plain compared to, say, chocolate chip cookies but of all the cookies I’ve baked, these ones always come out great and people are often surprised how such ordinary looking cookies can have  a yummy flavor with a soft, melt-in-the-mouth texture. One  thing about the recipe I use though, it turns out quite a lot of cookies. This batch turned out 3 dozens of  cookies.  Here’s the recipe I use for the soft-baked Ginger Cookies.  I used dark brown sugar in place of molasses. One note about making these cookies though,  after making the dough, you have to refrigerate it for about an hour to make it easier to handle.

Ginger Cookie dough

The scent that permeated the kitchen and the house while I was baking the ginger cookies was amazing! It was spicy, sweet and oh so Christmassy!  This cookies are perfect for the holiday season and best of all, they are so easy to make!

Soft Baked Ginger Cookies

Goin’ Bananas

What do you do when you  need to prepare a feast for 20 people with short notice. Me? I went bananas! Or to be accurate about it, I checked on what was available in the kitchen (bananas! lots of it from Sultan Kudarat) and decided,  I’ll scrap the old boring salad for dessert and instead make a banana cream pie! But then, I saw my spanking new mini-tart pans and decided, well, why not make them individually sized  for easy munching? (Okay, Full disclosure here. I’m opening a small Pie Shop soon, and what greater way to get product feedback than a party? !).  So here are the finished products:

Oh and I made everything from scratch. From the pastry shell, to the pudding. I was out of heavy cream so instead of piping out whipped cream, I topped the  mini-pies with chocolate shavings.

Verdict: Pretty good! The pudding was delish! The chocolate shavings were a bit sweet though, next time I’ll use a more bitter choc. or perhaps just top the pie with whipped cream, as was my original plan.

RECIPE  tweaked from:  RecipeZaar’s Old Fashioned Banana Cream Pie