Yummy Cookies

This is one of the many cookie recipes that I only make at Christmastime.  When they're gone, you're out of luck!  Because these are dry by nature, they last a long time.  When other cookies have become stale and disgusting, these taste just as good (maybe better) than they did on Day One.
First:  Cream together two sticks (one cup) of butter (no substitutes) with 4 tablespoons of granulated sugar.  Keep that mixer going until you have the lightest, fluffiest, most beautiful creamed sugar and butter you've ever seen.

Like this!

While your mixer is churning away, add to a separate bowl two cups of finely chopped walnuts, and two cups of all-purpose flour.  Stir those together.

Back to the mixer!  Add 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract.  Now add the flour/nut mixture.

Chill the batter in an air-tight container for a few hours or overnight.

Line a baking sheet with parchment and scoop out the dough one tablespoonful at a time.  If you have a scoop, so much the better.  Scoop them all out leaving about an inch of space between them.

Deliciousness

Before baking, roll each scoop of dough into a pretty little ball.  (If the dough gets too sticky, pop it back into the freezer for a few minutes.)  Sadly, I have no pictures of this step.  But, the one below is what they look like after they've baked in a 350-degree oven for 15 minutes.  While you're waiting, get your hands on some mini-parchment cups and lay those out in rows, ready to go for the next step.

You can fit a LOT of these type on a pan.

While they're still warm, lift them off one at a time and roll them in powdered sugar.  Silicone gloves are useful for this step, or if you're good with chopsticks use those.  Be careful--not only are these puppies hot, they are also fragile.  Give them a nice coating, then oh-so-gently place them in a mini-muffin parchment liner.  The liner will keep them safe and snug and also prevent the powdered sugar from contaminating any other cookies they may find themselves sitting beside in the future, say on a cookie platter.

Oh the yumminess...

When they've been nestled safely into the parchment cups, you may shake more powdered sugar on top.  It's Christmas after all!
The Recipe
Mexican Wedding Cakes (yields approximately 45 cookies)
1 cup butter (no substitutes)
4 tablespoons sugar
2 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cup walnuts, finely ground
powdered sugar, to coat
Cream together the butter and sugar.  Add the vanilla. 
In a separate bowl, stir together the nuts and flour. 
Combine the flour mixture with the creamed butter and sugar. 
Roll the dough into 1 inch balls. 
Bake for 15 minutes at 350. 
While still hot, roll each cookie in powdered sugar.
Place each into mini-parchment cup liner.
Shake additional powdered sugar over the top when cooled.

Preparations

So much going on here!

We hosted Thanksgiving, though our kitchen is disgusting...bad floor, bad counters, bad decor. Bad, bad, bad. Not that it mattered! The food was good. The company was grand. Liam clung to his 20+ yo cousin that he sees about once/year (so that would be twice in his life) like he was his long-lost friend. So sweet.


Advent. Made a wreath for the first time ever. Sadly, it looks pretty bedraggled at the end of the third week--one more to go. I vacuumed up about 7,486 needles from the wreath alone yesterday! How do people get these to stay green for the full four weeks?


Christmas! If you know me at all, you know THIS is the stuff I get all excited about! Baking gazillions of cookies, making cards, decorating, wrapping gifts and crafting ornaments and goodies of all sorts. Sadly, all of my stamping and sewing supplies are still in their packing boxes. I have been filling the void with baking!

I love how they all seem to have a personality when they're decorated.


Liam was pretty proud of his creation.

The little baby has discovered the joys of bouncing! He is soooo happy in this thing.

Isn't he getting BIG? He's wearing 12mos clothes most of the time, though I will keep him in this 9mo sleeper until it won't stretch any further because it is so soft and cute. Why-oh-why won't Carters make soft, cuddly sleepers in sizes larger than 9mos? I would buy a dozen of them, if only they were available! (Are you listening, Carters?)

Baking

Baking for Easter Sunday brunch. After last year's brunch, none of us got hungry until about 7pm. I will not be planning a large dinner!
The menu: muffins. Lots of muffins (banana, carrot, and apple), omelets, waffles with homemade strawberry sauce, sausage links, mini bagels, berries, cantaloupe, and candy, candy, candy. More on that later.

Here's a Laurel-drawing for the fun of it. Dig the pristine kitchen? Yeah, not in this lifetime.

Pretzels for Lent

My oldest gave up desserts for Lent. I've been feeling sorry for her ever since Ash Wednesday. She never complains, but I still find myself resisting baking cookies or serving ice cream so as not to make her Lenten sacrifice worse than it needs to be.

Today the kids and I decided to participate in that centuries-old Lenten tradition: pretzel baking. These could hardly be considered dessert, yet would be a bit of a treat. I dug up a couple of recipes and set my chefs to work.

Laurel and Sean took turns stirring the wet ingredients, while Holly measured out the dry ingredients.


We dumped the wet into the dry and then took turns kneading the dough. This was a messy endeavor!


Sean found kneading easier when the bowl was placed in the sink.

Eventually the dough came together into a smooth, elastic mass. When that happened, we transferred it to a larger, greased bowl to rise. We placed it in the oven to rise for thirty minutes with only the oven light on for warmth.


Liam really, really wanted the "light OFF", and so this step was a bit more challenging than I had anticipated.

"Off!"


"What's wrong with you? I said, 'OFF!'"

While the dough was rising, I got the soda-bath ready. This is where the newly-formed pretzels would be plunged until they floated back to the surface, ready for the oven.

Rolling out the dough was a lot of fun. Sean (6) had some trouble with sticking, so after a few attempts I rolled and he twisted.



The girls (10 and 13) had no trouble rolling out the dough.

Laurel's latest nail designs.


Each pretzel got a soda bath. This one looks more like a blob, but I'm sure it was yummy.

After boiling, they went into a 450-degree oven for 10 minutes. Once out of the oven they each got a slight coating of melted butter and were then sprinkled with one of three toppings: Parmesan cheese, coarse salt, or sesame seeds.


I found a recipe at allrecipes.com that I tweaked just a little. If I ever make these again (and the kids are already asking when we can do it again!) I will either use Reynold's Release wrap on the baking sheet, or else I will grease the baking sheet. I really hate the process of greasing bakeware, so I always use parchment instead. Usually this works great. This time, it was a bit of a disaster. The pretzels stuck like glue to the parchment. By the time I discovered the error of my ways, I had only enough dough for three more pretzels but those got the royal Reynold's Release wrap treatment. They slid off the pan like nobody's business.

These came out a little darker than I prefer, but I think it had more to do with the scant number of pretzels on the pan rather than what was used to coat the pan.

Not the most beautiful, but delicious nonetheless.

Building Laurel's Cake

She requested "yellow cake with chocolate ganache". My pleasure!

The birthday-girl wanted to help make her cake. Here she is mixing the batter. I always put the mixing bowl in the sink because it's easier to reach that way.

Into the oven.


Thirty-three minutes later and voila!


Since the man of the house had a birthday earlier in the month, I had a half-batch of ganache already whipped up and ready for Laurel's cake. Unfortunately the whipped portion, which is used as a crumb coat, was too dry to spread.

What to do? Heating it on the stovetop would turn it into a runny mess. After some thought, I channelled Duff Goldman and "busted out the power tools". A few blasts of the heatgun was all it took and the ganache was workable once more.


Crumb coat applied.


We let the cake chill for a few minutes in the fridge to harden the crumb-coat. Next, we drenched the cake in warm ganache and allowed it to cool again.

I normally decorate birthday cakes with whipped ganache, but I was out. Instead, we placed mini-marshmallows around the bottom of the cake, and used melted chocolate for the rest.

We started by standing a disposable piping bag inside a glass, then filling it with melted chocolate.


I piped out some butterfly wings onto waxed paper, then sent them to the fridge to cool.


I piped the words onto the top of the cake, and arranged the butterflies around the cake using melted chocolate "glue" where needed.

Ta daaaa.

New Word

"Coo-KEEEEEEEEEE"




Eight tiny reindeer.

Baking Notes

We make dozens and dozens of cookies each year. It's one of my favorite parts of getting ready for Christmas. This year I had lots of help from Patrick and the kids.

These are some reflections about things I learned this year. I always learn something, even if I am making the same varieties year after year.

These thumbprints, for instance, could be spaced much closer together than the recipe states. Two inches apart...what were they thinking? They don't expand that much.

Also, filling these babies using a squeeze bottle for the jelly worked like a dream.


Next, Mexican Wedding Cakes. I may never make these again. What a mess! Some of them crumbled during the coating process, breaking into a million pieces and causing me to make unkind remarks about their brittleness. The recipe called for baking at 300F for 40 minutes. Forty minutes? Who has that kind of time. I baked them at 350 for 12. Maybe that was the problem. Still. These things are sticky after the first coat of powdered sugar, and fragile. I decided to put them in mini-parchment cups to control the mess. The second coating came via a sugar-shaker.



Next up, the family favorite: Carolers. These are a not-sweet cutout-cookie, meant to frost and decorate. I watched an episode of Martha recently where she touted the ease of rolling out any variety of cutout-cookie dough onto a silpat, then placing that onto a baking sheet, cutting out the shapes directly and whisking the whole shebang into the freezer for a couple of minutes. She then removed the "negative" pieces of dough and baked the cookies as usual. Oh, this sounded like a real time-saver.

Ha! and Double Ha! What it was, was a mess. I ended up using my offset spatula to clear the baking sheet of all dough and starting over with my own (tried and true) method. Witness the simplicity. Even a child can do it.

First, place a piece of plastic wrap on your work surface. Scoop out a heaping tablespoon of chilled cookie dough onto the wrap. Place another piece of wrap on top.

Use your super-wham-o-dyne pastry sticks (not sure what these are called, but you can use square moulding too, which is commonly available at hardware stores) to guide your rolling pin and achieve a uniform thickness of dough. Note that with this method, you only roll out enough dough to cut one cookie.


Remove the top layer of plastic, cut out your cookie, then use the bottom layer of wrap to lift the cut-out from the workspace and in one fell swoop you are able to remove the "negative" dough, and deposit the "positive" dough onto your prepared baking sheet. Viola! A perfect cut-out.

Though it may not seem that way from the written description, I think that this method is faster than the traditional method, and certainly more successful (for me anyway) than Martha's method. Once you get a rhythym going, you'll be filling baking sheets in no time flat.

Incidentally, the way I like to decorate these types of cookies is to frost with white, then decorate with sprinkles, m&m baking bits, nuts, nonpareils, etc. The kids get very creative. Can you make out the word "peace" spelled out on the girl's dress below? The bonus for me is that it doesn't require the mixing of twenty-seven different colors of frosting.


When all was baked and decorated, we wound up with eight varieties of cookies, plus many dozens of turtles to build our cookie plates.

Liam got exhausted watching all the action.


His favorite are the date-nut pinwheels.

Cake in a Mug

Here's a fun way to make a quick dessert. It's so easy, a kid could do it. I hesitate to show this to my own kids, for fear they'll be whipping these up every day. If you try it with yours, let me know how they liked it. ;)

I got the recipe from Cheryl at nfptalk.

You'll need:
1 Coffee Mug that can withstand the magical forces of the microwave
1 Fork

Ingredients:
4 Tablespoons All-Purpose Flour
4 Tablespoons Sugar
2 Tablespoons Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
1 egg
3 Tablespoons Milk
3 Tablespoons Vegetable Oil
3 Tablespoons Chocolate Chips
1 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract

Directions:
Coat the inside of the mug with cooking spray. Add dry ingredients to the mug and mix well with the fork. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Add the milk, oil, and vanilla and mix again. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Place mug in microwave and cook for 3 minutes on full power (depending on your microwave...mine is 1100 watts).

Ooh and ahh as the cake puffs up beyond the constraints of the mug! (The photo didn't turn out. You'll have to use your imagination.)

Serves one. Or two if you're the generous sort.

Perhaps it would be better to serve it in the mug.

Birthday Cake Tutorial

Step one:
Bake some cakes. I used box mixes this time, due to a butter shortage I didn't know I was having. These are Duncan Hines Chocolate Fudge, which is my favorite box mix.

This day I was trying out my new 5" round pans. It turns out that half of the box mix filled the two pans nicely. I used the other half to make a dozen cupcakes.

Step Two:
Make an insane amount of ganache. I used the recipe in Martha's baking book, which makes about 7 cups. I had enough to coat and decorate an 8-inch tier cake, a 5-inch tier cake, and a dozen cupcakes. There is also about a cup left in my fridge right now.

Step Three:
Chill half of the ganache. I poured half of the hot ganache into the bowl of my stand mixer, and put the whole thing in the freezer for hmmm...a while...probably 20 minutes. Normally when I take it out and try to whip it up, it doesn't whip well, so I end up returning it to the freezer for another stint. After two or three more tries, it whips up beautifully and I have to resist the urge to dive head-first into the mixer bowl.
Leave the remaining ganache in the pan. We’ll return to it in a later step.


Step Four:
Devise a make-shift cake stand. Those of you lucky enough to already own an appropriately- sized pedestal can skip this step. An inverted lunch plate double-stick taped to an inverted cereal bowl worked well for my 5” diameter cake.

Steps Five, Six, and Seven:
Level your cakes, if necessary (or even if not necessary...maybe just do it to give yourself some cake remnants to sample) with a serrated knife. Place one layer of cake on a wire rack and coat the top liberally with whipped ganache. An offset spatula is a handy tool for this job. Carefully place layer two on top and coat all visible cake surfaces with the whipped ganache.

This is your chance to correct any surface defects in the cake--whipped ganache is sort of like cake spackling. You won't be sanding the cake though. You'll have to make do with just the spatula.

When you think you've got the thing as smooth-looking as possible, place the cake in the fridge for thirty minutes or so--enough time to allow the coating to stiffen.

Step Seven-Point-Five
If you want to induce a chocolate coma, add another coat of whipped ganache after the first coat has hardened. Chill after applying, as before.

Steps The Rest:
Remove the cake from the fridge and place the cake—wire-rack and all—on a sheet pan. Photos would be helpful here, but ha! There are none. I apologize.

Remember the ganache you left in the pan up there in step 3? Check that it is still warm. You want it to be in that magical temperature range where it is easily poured, but not so warm that it melts away the whipped ganache coating on the cake. You may need to rewarm it slightly.

Pour the ganache onto the cake. Marvel as it spreads and drips down the sides of the cake. Gravity will coat the entire cake for you—just keep pouring until the cake is completely covered.

Now place the cake (still on the sheet pan) in the fridge again for another twenty to thirty minutes. Feel free to use this time to "clean" any remaining ganache off of the mixer attachments, rubber spatulas, bowls, pans...

When the outer coat of ganache has firmed up, it’s time to transfer the cake to its pedestal. Use an offset spatula in a sweeping motion under the cake to encourage its removal. Grab a pancake turner in one hand, and an offset spatula in the other and ever-so-carefully, pick up the cake and set it on the cake stand. This is not a job for the faint of heart, but the less time you spend thinking about it, the better off you’ll be.

All that’s left now is to decorate and enjoy. The whipped ganache can be piped, but you’ll need to work fast or it will turn to mush. Refrigerate the cake. Remove from fridge and let stand for 20 minutes before serving.

Did you read that last sentence? I just want to be sure. Trying to slice into a cake of this sort that hasn't been allowed to warm up can ruin the look of your lovely cake. It will still taste wonderful, however.

Use a spatula to recover the ganache in the sheet pan. This is the stuff that slid off the cake during the coating process.

Store the extra ganache in the refrigerator in an airtight container. Rewarm it a tablespoon or twelve at a time for a heavenly ice cream topping.