Chocolate + Caramel = Amazing

Janet here:

Yes, the cookie obsession continues. Here's the inception of this particular combo. The setting: Casa de Roomie, where I live part-time as I travel between New York and Connecticut. Scene: I'm ripping out recipes from magazines (click here for my little, um, issue with this habit). Roomie is ripping out magazines for a vision board. Her daughter is finishing adding the finishing touches on a Modge Podge project.

Roomie: Oooh these cookies look good (coconut with gooey circles of caramel in the middle from a magazine).

Daughter of roomie: Oooh make those for my birthday please. I love coconut!

Me (not a fan of coconut): Oooh these would be good with chocolate instead of coconut, don't you think?

A few days later I'm in the kitchen, whipping up my variation of these little numbers and I'm just going to say that my hunch was correct. I have no idea how they'd be with coconut (and never will since I don't like it) but I can say with a degree of certainty, they are awesome with chocolate. Enjoy!

Chocolate Caramel Cookies
makes about two dozen

ingredients
2 1/4 cups flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, room temperature
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
about 20 Kraft caramel pieces
6 tablespoons heavy cream
fleur de sel (sea salt crystals)


method
Heat oven to 350 degrees.
Line baking sheets with parchment paper (which really is one of the great inventions and I can't believe I didn't ever use it until last year!). Combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt in a bowl.

In another bowl mix the butter using an electric mixer or by hand (my method). Beat until light and creamy, however, you choose. Add the sugars, beating until light. Add the eggs and vanilla. Beat in the dry ingredients until just mixed.

Place spoonsful of the cookie dough on baking pans and bake for 15 minutes.

While the cookies are baking, melt the Kraft pieces in a pot with the heavy cream on low heat.

When the cookies come out of the oven, take a spoon and smoosh a little hole in the warm cookies. Pour about a teaspoonful of the melted caramel into the hole and then sprinkle a little fleur de sel over the cookies. How much salt you add is up to your own salt senses.

Ridiculously Simple Cookies

Janet here: I had planned to kick off the week with a Meatless Monday casserole as part of my fixation with Faith Durand's new cookbook, Not Your Mother's Casseroles. But then I saw a recipe for cookies without flour or butter, and I thought...Really? Is this possible? Will they be even remotely edible?

Yes. And yes.

I guess it makes sense on some level since flourless tortes have been around for a while. But cookies?

Yes. And yes.

These take about 2 minutes to whip up and 10 minutes to bake and then you can be stuffing your face with deliciousness. I'm not kidding.

I also think they just might be less caloric sans the flour and butter. I haven't studied that in depth of course, but that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Flourless/Butterless Chocolate Chunk Peanut Butter Cookies
makes about 16

ingredients
1 cup peanut butter (I used creamy but I suspect chunky would work too)
1 cup brown sugar, lightly packed
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 egg
1/2 cup or so chocolate chunks

THAT IS IT.

method
Heat oven to 400 degrees. Whip the first four ingredients together. Add the chocolate chunks. Place dollops on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake 10 minutes. Let cool on the sheet. Try not to eat more than one.

The Best Cookie Cookbook EVER!

Janet here:

Rachel and I are going to take a week off while we actually visit each in person — and the Divine Miss M!!! — instead of virtually through this blog. We'll come back July 18 with new recipes, new ideas for the blog (lots of good things coming folks), and plenty of M squeezes and hugs for me.

But before we sign off, I leave you with this note. I have got my cookie baking mojo back and I can entirely thank Tina Casaceli from Milk + Cookies Bakery and her fabulous new cookie cookbook called Milk + Cookies, published by Chronicle Books.

I originally reviewed it here and included a recipe for chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies.

Since then I've made four different recipes from the book (including the fabulous scotchies pictured here) and they have all taken my cookie baking to a meteoric level. If you only buy one cookbook for cookies, this should be the one. And in the meantime, Rachel, consider yourself warned: I'm back in the cookie baking business and I'm taking no prisoners. Your day in the sun is over.

Peanut Butter + Snickers Bars = Heavenly

Regular readers may see a pattern evolving here. Rachel posts some incredibly healthy concoction like the hummus she made recently, and I counter it with some decidedly not-healthy but oh-so-tasty and good-for-the-soul sugarfest.

Hence today's post on peanut butter Snickers bar cookies. I remain inspired by the stuffing cookie concept first started by Picky Palate (at least for me) and then continued by every creative, candy crunching chocoholic in the culinary world. If Oreos work, why not Heath bars? Why not Butterfingers?

And why not peanut butter cookies with some chopped up Snickers bars thrown in?

So I took it upon myself to give these a whirl. Peter proclaimed them a little on the dry side. I took them to a baking event thrown by the orchestra I play in and while they did not win, a number of people voted for them and proclaimed them tasty. I, meanwhile, have eaten most of what's left over so there it is. I will say this as a further inducement: the caramel in the Snickers melts into this divine gooey mess while hot and into a more toffee delight after the cookie cools.

Let us know what you think.



Peanut Butter Snickers Bar Cookies

ingredients
1 1/4 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup softened butter, unsalted
pinch of salt
1 cup cream peanut butter
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
about 1 1/2 cups chopped up Snickers bars
3/4 cup milk chocolate chips

method
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream together the butter and sugars. Add the peanut butter and beat until smooth. Add the eggs. Beat again. Add the dry ingredients and beat until creamy. Add in the milk and stir. Then add the Snickers pieces and milk chocolate chips. Stir until blended.

Drop in large spoonfuls on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10-11 minutes. Don't overcook. Cool on the sheet for a minute before adding to a cookie rack to cool further.

Cookies for All

Janet here: Yes, it's true, we're kicking off this holiday week with a posting about cookies. Regular readers realize that we believe strongly that a day without cookies is a questionable day indeed. I always feel better after baking cookies, and I feel pretty darn good after eating one warm from the oven. It's the proverbial win-win.

You can feel particularly good about making and eating these cookies. They're oatmeal after all. It's fiber for God's sake! Yes, there are milk chocolate chips too, but fiber!

Anyway, I put in chocolate chips and pecans this time, but one of the things I like about these cookies if you really can add anything you want. Hope you enjoy them.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies

Ingredients
2 sticks of butter, softened
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugard
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups old-fashioned oats
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup pecan pieces

Method
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Beat together butter and sugars until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda and salt. Mix well. Stir in chips and pecans or whatever else you're adding.

Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls onto cookie sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes or until golden brown.

Cool one minute on cookie sheet; then remove to wire rack.

Feeling lazy? Put the whole shebang into a 13X9-inch baking pan and bake 30-35 minutes to make bars instead.


Rachel here: Oh, cookies. This weekend I made glazed molasses-spice cookies (from "The Best Recipe" by Cook's Illustrated...of course), mostly because I'd never made them before. I sort of figured I'd have to send John off to work with a bunch of them because I didn't think we'd be all that into them. Don't get me wrong--I thought we'd like them--just not in that eat-a-dozen-each kind of way. I was seriously, seriously wrong. The flavor and texture to these cookies was perfect.

You know when you really love someone and you unwittingly make them really happy? It is one of the great little surprises in life, I think, and such a good feeling. Anyway, while I have definitely enjoyed my fair share of these cookies, John unexpectedly went gaga for them. I think even he was surprised by how much he liked these cookies. It was a simple and happy little development in our weekend and I made a little note in my cookbook for some future rainy day when my man could use a little pick-me-up or when I just want to make something to show him I'm thinking about him and I love him.


Glazed Molasses-Spice Cookies
makes 15-20 large cookies

Ingredients
2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
2 tspn. baking soda
1/2 tspn. salt
1 1/2 tspn. cinnamon
1 tspn. ginger
3/4 tspn. cloves
1/4 tspn. allspice
12 T. unsalted butter, softened
1/2 c. dark brown sugar, packed
1/2 c. granulated sugar, plus 1/3 c. for rolling cookies
1 large egg
1 tspn. vanilla extract
1/3 c. unsulphured molasses
1 1/4 c. confectioners' sugar
2 T. milk


Method
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Whisk together flour, baking soda, salt and spices and set aside. Cream together the butter, brown sugar and white granulated sugar until fluffy. Add egg, vanilla and molasses, beating until combined. Add dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Place remaining 1/3 c. of granulated sugar in a shallow bowl. Roll dough into balls, using approximately 2 T. of dough per ball. Roll each ball in the bowl of sugar before placing on baking sheet. Bake, rotating halfway through, until the centers are soft and puffy and the edges are just beginning to set. These cookies will not look as done as you're probably used to and you don't want them to; this is key for establishing their super soft texture. If your cookies get hard as they cool or by the next day, then next time try cooking them less.
Cool cookies. Once completely cooled, sift confectioners sugar and stir in milk until smooth. Using a spoon, drizzle the glaze over your cookies (I suggest doing this over a piece of wax paper for easy clean up). Let set and enjoy.

The Cookie Competition

Rachel here: I have made these cookies a million times. They are my go-to "Oops! We're supposed to bring dessert tonight" recipe, both for their ease and their reliably awesome turn-out. This time, however, I made them for our birthing class. For some reason, bringing food for this bevy of pregnant ladies over the past three weekends has left me feeling a bit more pressure than I usually do when I cook. I think, perhaps, it's an underlying fear of somehow exposing myself as a bad mom or something by not bringing an appropriate food item. When I was assigned to bring dessert for our final class, I didn't think twice about what I would make. I knew I would make this foolproof recipe from "The Best Recipe" by Cook's Illustrated.


During our lunch break, I had one of the most satisfying cooking related experiences of my entire life. While John and I sat and ate, multiple people bit into their chocolate chip walnut cookies and announced that these cookies were amazing. The woman sitting next to me and her husband said that they think these are the best homemade chocolate chip cookies they've ever had. Now all I did was follow a darn good recipe, but it still felt super good. It felt so good, in fact, that I felt a little bit bad for the other woman who brought cookies. Don't worry, though, ever the altruistic eater, I dutifully ate her (quite yummy) ginger cookies.

Anyway, seriously: make these cookies. Though certain people that I blog with bake in whatever order they please, I can only assume that the success behind these cookies lies in following the various steps and combinations as they are detailed in the recipe. I have adapted the recipe ever so slightly and share my version below. I should warn you, though. If, as I did, you are going to bake these cookies for an event, leave a few at home. There won't be any leftover for you to enjoy late night if you don't and, trust me, this is tragic.



Thick and Chewy Chocolate Chip Walnut Cookies
makes 2-3 dozen

Ingredients
2 c. plus 2 T. all-purpose flour
1/2 tspn. baking soda
1/2 tspn. salt
12 T. unsalted butter, melted and cooled to just warm
1 c. brown sugar, packed (*TIP: Pour out 1 1/2 times the amount of brown sugar that you need--in this case that would be 1 1/2 c.--and this should get you very close to the right amount once it's packed*)
1/2 c. granulated sugar
1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
2 tspn. vanilla extract
1+ c. bittersweet chocolate chips
1 c. toasted walnuts, broken/chopped

Method
preheat your oven to 325 degrees. Whisk flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl and set aside. Mix the melted butter with the two sugars until thoroughly blended (make sure to break down all sugar lumps at this point). Add the egg, the extra yolk and the vanilla until combined. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Stir in chips and walnuts. Pull 1 to 2 T. chunks off and place on cookie sheet, leaving in rough ball form. Bake--rotating half way--for roughly 15 minutes, until cookies are a light golden brown. Cool and enjoy.




Janet here: Yeah, so apparently this week's decision to make cookies wasn't about merely making cookies; it was about "winning" the cookie bake-off. Guess I didn't get that memo.

Anyway, while I can't claim that my cookies are THE.BEST.COOKIES.EVER. the way some people are, I can tell you that these, which were adapted from Salty Sweets, are mighty fine and that people will enjoy them. Christie Matheson includes coconut, but I hate coconut so it's not in my version. So without further ado....the completely adequate "other" cookie recipe.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulatedsugar
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 cup old-fashioned oats
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
grinder sea salt

Method
Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
Combine the flour, coca powder, baking soda and fine sea salt in a bowl.

In a separate bowl, beat the butter, sugars, vanilla and eggs until creamy. Add the flour mixture a little at a time, mixing thoroughly each time. After this is all mixed up, add the oats and chips.

Spoon onto a baking pan. Add a few sprinkles of salt to each scoop on top. Bake at 350 degrees for 11 minutes. Let cool on a rack.

Food for Thought Thursdays: Cookie Comfort

Janet here: While therapists and studies regularly point out how emotional eating is bad for you, it seems pretty clear to me that eating and emotions are inextricably and impossibly intermixed. Starting with a mother breastfeeding her baby, whose only needs initially are to be fed and held and protected — all of which are satisfied with the food she is sucking down — food not only nourishes us physically but emotionally as well.

Of course, we all get off the path of that original purity pretty quickly. Our parents withhold dessert for "bad" behavior, we give ourselves a "treat" to make us feel better when something bad (or good) happens — the list is endless and makes our relationships with food almost universally complicated, and that's without adding social stuff like stick-thin models and movies extolling only young thin bodies, etc.

But it was interesting to me and Rachel that two weeks ago we both literally woke up and said, "Today I want to make cookies." I know that baking cookies is something I regularly turn to when I need a little comfort. The kitchen immediately becomes a cozy haven from life's nuttiness as I blend the batter, methodically line up the dough, and pull the pans in and out of the oven. I love the smell in the house as cookies bake. And of course, I love how happy everyone is when they discover cookies are in the works and/or that a batch has just come out of the oven. Oh, yes, and I also like to eat them. One of the few (and I mean few) things I don't like about summer is that it's usually too warm to bake cookies so I'm usually on hiatus until the fall. But come that first cool day, there's nothing better than baking up a new batch. Everything feels good.

Rachel here: I love that my mom and I both woke up with cookies on the brain on the same morning 3000 miles apart from each other. I wonder how much of my love of baking cookies is tied to the feelings I associated with baking with my mom when I was growing up. I remember feeling special when we baked together, like I had been invited into this cozy little kitchen bubble and been made privy to an arena that I otherwise viewed as hers (since she did all of the cooking). My brother G helped sometimes (S was too little or not even born during this era), but mostly I recall getting to spend time with my mom that felt like it was ours. Plus, there were the cookies and the sitting at the kitchen table together to nibble from the first batch just as soon as they were cool enough while the second batch baked. My mother seemed so competent to me, absent measuring accoutrements for the most part and with the strength to cream butter and sugar that far surpassed my childish arms'. I figured I would never know how much salt was called for, or vanilla, the way my mom just knew. I would dutifully read from the recipe while she dutifully ignored it, a feat which always felt a little dangerous to me and which left me feeling a little bit like I was scrambling to keep up. I loved everything about those weekend afternoons baking cookies with my mom, though. I loved the mess inevitably made with the pouring of flour and sugar; I loved the wooden mixing bowl the dough would come together in; I loved the nearly sick feeling in my stomach when we were done from having tasted the batter, the chocolate chips AND the cookies. When I bake cookies now, these feelings and sensations are conjured vividly for me and, without fail, I am left feeling a whole lot of love for my mom, even if its from 3000 miles away.