Tuesday, February 23, 2010

TWD - Honey Wheat Cookies

This week, Michelle from Flourchild, chose Honey Wheat Cookies from page 81 of Dorie Greenspan's "Baking: From My Home to Yours". You can also get the recipe from Michelle's blog if you stop by for a visit. I was really excited to see that the description of these cookies included the words "soft" and "chewy"! Faaaaantastic - my favorite kind! I was never a big honey fan until spring of 2009 rolled around and I discovered Green Toe Gardens at my local farmers market. All their hives are local and the flavor is fantastic! I can now add "honey" to my list of snobberies. I used Wild Detroit Honey for Dorie's Honey Peach Ice Cream and for this recipe I used Eight Mile Road Honey.
These cookies are easy to make and are delicious! Dorie's recipe calls for the addition of lemon zest but I forgot to by lemons so I forged ahead with it and the cookies were still wonderful!
I did want to try one little experiment with the dough ... A couple weeks ago I wandered into Sur La Table and discovered cookie cutters on sale for 60 cents each. Seriously? Sixty cents? I picked up a bunch of cutters, including an extra large bee hive! This cookie dough is really soft but I refrigerated, rolled, refrigerated, cut, refrigerated and finally made these into a soft and chewy cut-out cookie. The next time around I may need to throw the freezer into the mix because it was very difficult to transfer the cut outs to the baking sheet.
Please visit the rest of the TWD bakers to see what they did with this weeks recipe selection.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

TWD - My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

This week's selection is from Kait, from Kait's Plait, who chose "My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies". You can find the recipe on Kait's blog or on page 68 of Dorie Greenspan's "Baking: From My Home to Yours".

Right out of the gate the following words fill my heart with dread ... Thin. Crunchy. Cookie. In case you missed the memo. I do not like Thin. Crunchy. Cookies. My mission this week became three-fold. Part one - make something my son will like, part two - make a cookie that is neither thin nor crunchy and part three- make them Valentine's Day appropriate. Mission impossible?

My son recently became hooked on ice cream sandwiches made with chocolate chip cookies so I thought I would try to make ice cream sandwiches for him. With the first batch of cookies, I scooped the dough with a big disher and refrigerated them before baking in order to reduce spreading. That didn't work out ... I got Thin. Crunchy. Cookies. that were oddly shaped (as opposed to the perfectly round cookies I was shooting for!)


Next! I moved on to Valentine's Day appropriateness with a silicone heart-shaped muffin pan. I had some difficulty with the edges of the cookies climbing the sides of the pan and some sinking in the middle of the cookie but after a bit of playing around, I managed some good heart shaped cookies! These cookies were thick but still a little on the crunchy side.

With two-thirds of my mission complete, I decided to go back to part one - "kid friendly". I went with heart-shaped ice cream sandwiches using Dorie's recipe for vanilla ice cream and they turned out thick and delicious! I can see the appeal of these yummy treats!

Please check out the rest of the TWD bakers to see how their spins on these chocolate chip cookies.