Just Can't Get Enough

Cookies are made of butter and love. ~Norwegian Proverb

We eat these faster than I can make them. True story. I think the recipe I use makes about 4 dozen cookies, only about 3 dozen make it into the tin, and then the tin is empty in 3 days or less. After all the days and nights playing with every recipe under the sun, thanks to hubby's cousin, we finally have a winner. Scootch begs me to make them on a daily basis, and I really can't blame him. They are, in every way, just like the floury, doughy, chocolate chip cookies of my youth. But allergy friendly for my little boy.

Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 1/4 C flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 C unsalted butter
3/4 C packed brown sugar
1/4 C granulated sugar
1 package instant vanilla pudding mix
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp Ener-G egg replacer
1/4 C milk
1/2 C chocolate chips (or more if you desire)

-Preheat oven to 350F
-Whisk together flour, baking soda, & salt, and set aside
-In a separate bowl, beat butter until creamy (about 2 minutes)
-Add sugars to butter gradually, beating until fluffy (about 2-5 minutes). Scrape sides
-Beat in pudding mix until blended
-Whisk together Ener-G and milk in separate bowl and add to bowl, beat well.
-Add vanilla and beat until smooth. Scrape well.
-Stir in flour mixture until just incorporated.
-Stir in chocolate chips
-Drop by heaping tablespoons into baking stone (or a cookie sheet if you use that) leaving about 2 inches between cookies.
-Bake at 350F for 12-15 minutes or until bottoms are browned.
-Cool for 2 minutes on pan before transferring to cooling rack



The cooking time might vary. I use a baking stone, which takes a few minutes longer to heat up and brown your baked goods. If you use a cookie sheet, its thinner, so you might need to reduce the cooking time a few minutes.

Also, the part about letting them cool is important. Don't skimp on that step like I tried to do or your cookies will be ravaged and you'll be forced to eat them as a failure offering. (Or maybe I do it intentionally?? I'll never tell!)

Enjoy!

Hell's Kitchen

"Recipe: A series of step-by-step instructions for preparing ingredients you forgot to buy, with utensils you don't own, to make a dish the dog wouldn't eat." ~Author Unknown

You think I'd learn something after 5 years. Every year I think I've found something easier to do for the kids birthday parties, and every year it usually becomes this ridiculous fiasco that ends in incessant cursing or tears of disappointment. I guess it would be such a shame to stop the tradition this year!

Enter the world of cake pops by Bakerella. I thought this looked way easier than cupcakes. Yes, it involved cake, but the recipe calls for you to mix the cake with icing and shape into balls. Which means even if I have rising issues with the cake nobody has to know. So I showed the Monkey my discovery. She enthusiastically agreed to ladybug cake pops, but added that she wanted pink cake inside. "Strawberry cake!" (Sounds gross to me, but hey, its her birthday!) The week before I made sure I had everything I needed so I could do this over a couple days and not a last minute mad rush like usual. Unfortunately, what I wasn't aware of, is that there is next to nobody who makes white chocolate that isn't contaminated with nuts. I did find a small bag from a local chocolate supply shop, so I thought I was in business. Just add a little red candy dye and we were on our way to ladybugs!

Of course it all started going downhill the day before. Especially when this is how far I got trying to melt the white chocolate before it started burning.

I realized at 12:15am on the morning of Monkey's party that this wasn't going to go as planned. From my previous trips to the store I knew that I didn't have the option of any backup chocolate from the baking aisle of any supermarket, and the opening hours of the candy supply coincided with the very moment Monkey's party was scheduled to start. So I did what I always do. I improvised. Thank goodness for Magic Shell. I busted through the doors of my local supermarket 11 minutes after they opened at 6am and bought some White Chocolate Cupcake flavored Magic Shell ice cream topping. Stirred in a little red candy dye, and presto - red ladybug candy coating.

Little did I realize that it was the beginning of the end of my good luck streak. In my sleep-deprived haze, I forgot the temperamental properties of Magic Shell. Basically, it starts out as a liquid when warm, and hardens when it comes in contact with the cold ice cream. This wasn't a problem in the beginning, because I had frozen the cake balls so they would firm up and hold their shape. However, when you have the cake pops sitting out on the counter so you can decorate and bag them, all sorts of shenanigans start going on. Long story short, we went from cute little blue eyed ladybugs,

To carnage of canniballistic proportions.

So in the end, Kira's friends went home with ladybugs nested in cupcake wrappers.

At least I didn't hear anyone complain that the eyes that had slid off tasted any less delicious.

A Hairy Situation

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature's way. ~Aristotle

Ever notice how the littlest things seem to send you down the most altering paths? I got fed up with my hair around my birthday. I've always fought with it, so the feeling was nothing new. It's curly, and temperamental, and likes to give me greif. I had a pretty good system for taming my hair that worked for awhile, but ever since having kids I've felt like it could look better. I dyed it on a whim, and that became a disaster. I ended up re-dying it, then using Color Oops to get the leftover green tint out of it. Soon after that I just decided to lop it all off, so I had hubby cut it for me as a long chin bob. This look really required straigtening for it to look its best, but lets be real. Its summertime in the Northern East Coast, where the humidity level frequently exceeds the temperature. My hair grows like a ChiaPet in concurrence with the rise in moisture in the air. So I decided I should try to go back to curly. Except everything I normally did to style it wasn't working out with the same results. And to top it off, it felt like all the products I were using were leaving a greasy coating on my hair. So I decided to check in with the Google gods for some advice or direction. Enter the world of Curly Girl by Lorraine Massey.

Basically the philosophy is this; curly hair is more prone to over-drying than normal straight hair, and therefore, most of the harsh chemicals used in many commercial brands of hair products strip the hair and make it misbehave. So Lorraine suggests a different approach of using more natural products to cleanse, condition, and style the hair. I figured what the heck. It's worth a shot. And I'm not going to go into the specifics since the majority of you don't have my hair problems, but I find myself laughing at, well, myself on an almost daily basis now. People always arch their eyebrows when they learn we cloth diaper(ed) our kids. The forays into organic, vegan, and natural substitutions for Scootch's allergies have led me to become acquainted with many health food stores, co-ops, and on mailing lists for many forward thinking newsletters. I love to craft and sew which ultimately translates into making the occasional clothes, or quilt, or draperies. My husband and I were recently discussing how great it would be to install solar panels to offset the cost of the electricity we're using to cool the house. And now I'm in the kitchen making my own hair gel from flax seeds and boiling water using a recipe adopted from a hair care handbook.

I feel like my house is thisclose to becoming a hippie commune.

Foodie Post

So I've had a few successes to bolster my baking self esteem. I made the Blueberry Boy Bait coffee cake courtesy of Cybele Pascal's The Allergen-Free Bakers Handbook, and then I dabbled with a recipe my MIL found on Oprah (of all places) by Alicia Silverstone for Oatmeal, Walnut, and Dried Plum Cookies, (of which we, of course, omitted a few nut ingredients).
The blueberry coffee cake was met with rave reviews, and I only had the slight problem of the cinnamon/sugar dusting not carmelizing on the top. (And no, I don't own a creme brulee torch to recitfy the problem easily). Needless to say, the fact that the topping wasn't as pictured in the book did little to dissuade anyone from eating it. It was gone in 4 days!

Yum!

Now onto the cookies. I just want to apologize in advance to my mother, since her oatmeal cookies have been my favorite since I was old enough to eat one. (Sorry Mom. You just got booted by Alicia Silverstone.) And of course, the fact that Scootch can enjoy them because they are a vegan recipe adds triple bonus points. Although, to be truthful to any vegans reading my blog, I did cheat and put butter in this since I don't own the prescribed safflower oil and would have no idea where to procure any if I wanted to. And that was only one of the tweaks this recipe underwent. (So if anyone wants the recipe as modified, feel free to email me!)


Anyways, just so you're fore-warned, these cookies should come with a warning label. I think the cookie dough was just as good (if not better) than the baked product. When I snuck some of the mixed wet ingredients off my finger I swear it was like eating liquid butterscotch, and the addition of the dry ingredients didn't diminish that particular deliciousness any. And what I love about them is that they don't suffer from preservative free-syndrome. You know where you bake all those cookies and they turn crispy and rock hard after a day no matter how you store them? Yeah, I hate that. Especially in oatmeal cookies. They shouldn't be something you'd give your kid to cut their baby teeth on. Although you could, because since they have oatmeal in them, they're healthy cookies, right? (I hope so since I ate them for breakfast) ;-)


So my next projects are cakes and cupcakes, since the Monkey's birthday is in a week. I need to make a cake for our home party that we have with family, and then cupcakes for her kiddie party at what my kids affectionately refer to as "Old McDonalds." I'll try to make sure to keep you posted with the successes of those! :-)

The key to success

My new confidence booster.

Thanks to this and a FANTASTIC eggless pancake recipe I want to stay in the kitchen all day and do nothing but bake, bake, bake. (Might have something to do with my other compulsion to do nothing but eat, eat, eat, but I digress.)

I have successfully made the vanilla cupcakes, and hopefully will be moving onto the Blueberry Boy Bait which I think would be right up Scootch's alley (considering he ate more blueberries than he kept in his bucket when I took them berry picking last month.)

I will try to be better and take pictures of my successes before letting the family at them in the future. ;-)

"My list of ingredients for success is divided into four basic groups: Inward, Outward, Upward and Onward." - David Thomas

The Science of Solace

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight.... Not people die but worlds die in them. ~Yevgeny Yevtushenko

It has not been a good past few days.

The mood swings from my lack of meds is frightening. The kids are wound up tighter, most likely due to the beautiful weather outside and their lack of playing in it. And on Tuesday it was my birthday. Not just any birthday, but the last birthday before I cross that prime meridian in my mind where I will be on this Earth for more years without my mother than I will have knowing her. My personal Y2K crisis.

But its things like this that really bring home how much I'm missing my mother.


Fallen cupcakes might not make much sense to you, but my mother was both a baker and a scientist. When the cookies came out flat she knew that I needed to add more flour. When my boxed cake didn't come out right, she could tell I was being impatient and didn't mix it for the whole 2 minutes the package directs. When she fell in love with a batch of orange muffins while we were on vacation, she went home and made up a recipe for them. She knew relationships that existed between baking powders and sodas and salts and flours, and I was content as a child to be honored when I was allowed to lick the beaters.

How I wish back for that lab time now. There isn't a recipe that I try to make for Scootch that has come out right yet. Pancakes, boxed cakes, scratch cakes. Modified, fortified, and verbatim. They all crumble, fall, or fail to rise at all. I used to love baking. My husband used to brag I was good at it. But lately it just feels like I'm failing a midterm anytime I lug out the Kitchen Aid. And as much as everyone is sympathetic, I just have this feeling that if my mom were here, she would fix it. She would HAVE a recipe that wouldn't fail me. Possibly multiple ones at this point. In all kinds of flavors so her grandson wouldn't be missing out on what red velvet or devil's food cake did to your tongue.

My only small solace is this;



At least she left me the means to still decorate my disasters.

Success

Yum.
Fifth time is the charm. :-)

On A Mission

Living by the rules of a food allergy are hard. Sometimes I wonder if its a little bit harder for me since it also impinges on a beloved hobby of mine, baking.
I love scratch baking. I have binders and books and all sorts of loose pages floating around with tempting recipes on them. I even Xeroxed all my mother's recipe index cards after she died, and I'm slowly adding every one to my own recipe book as I make them.
So to make a long posting short, I'm on a mission to make a decent chocolate chip cookie. Cakes I've duplicated without much fuss, icings are pretty easy, I have a slew of pie and cobbler recipes we can all enjoy, but the one sticking point is making chocolate chip cookies. The few tries I attempted at just converting the regular recipes to Scootch-friendly usually ended up in disaster. This last batch I attemped using my beloved recipe from Alton Brown yielded chocolate chip potato chips, because they were so thin and crunchy.


Not that Scootch minded ;-)


And the last recipe I used for Christmas was a tasty cookie, but not exactly what I would deem a good chocolate chip. The flavor and texture were more brown sugar blondie than nice flour batter based cookie. Although Monkey was incredibly helpful throughout the whole process.


So I recently acquired another vegan recipe from my cousin, and I'm ready to try again. Let's see if the fifth time is the charm!