Coconut Macaroons

Going to a gym with a television screen on every cardio machine made working out a little easier in high school. The channels, however, were limited and I'd usually end up watching the Food Network while running on the treadmill. My friends joked with me about watching Ina Garten, Sandra Lee, and Giada De Laurentiis make food while I tried to burn it off, but I loved picking up new cooking tips. Once I started classes at IU and had to adjust to new gym lacking in television screens I got through workouts listening to music and/or reading instead.

Now I obsessively read magazines while on a bike, but I didn't ditch food as a topic and one of my favorites is Food & Wine. I was never the only one in the gym watching the Food Network, but I think I'm the only one reading recipes.

Most of Food & Wine is filled with recipes I don't have the skill or resources to attempt, but every issue has a couple recipes I have to try. I came across this recipe for macaroons last week while cycling and bought the ingredients just a couple short hours later.

These Coconut Macaroons call for just a handful of ingredients and are far easier to make than I imagined. If you like coconut, these cookies have a perfect sweetness and a decadently chewy texture. These will definitely be a future Christmas go-to recipe for me and I encourage you to give them a try!

Coconut Macaroons, via Danny Cohen and Food & Wine Magazine

Ingredients:
One 14-ounce bag sweetened shredded coconut
One 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large egg whites
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted*

1. Preheat the oven to 350° and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. In a medium bowl, combine the coconut with the sweetened condensed milk and vanilla.
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. In another bowl, using an electric mixer, beat the egg whites with the salt until firm peaks form**. Fold the beaten whites into the coconut mixture.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Scoop tablespoon-size mounds of the mixture onto the baking sheets, about 1 inch apart***. Bake in the upper and middle thirds of the oven for about 25 minutes, until golden; shift the sheets from top to bottom and front to back halfway through baking. Transfer the baking sheets to racks and let the cookies cool completely.
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Dip the bottoms of the macaroons into the melted chocolate, letting any excess drip back into the bowl. Return the cookies to the lined baking sheets. Drizzle any remaining chocolate on top and refrigerate for about 5 minutes, until set****.
   
   
   
5. Eat them!
   

My notes:
*I used semisweet chips and I loved this choice. Bittersweet is pretty comparable though, so I would use whatever you have laying around.
**Egg whites have formed stiffed peaks when you lift the beaters out and the egg whites stick up in peaks without falling back into the bowl. You can over beat egg whites so be careful!
***I actually scooped "batter" with a tablespoon to help my macaroons look somewhat uniform. The batter is pretty sticky so it's tough to make them really round, but the chocolate helps cover up rough edges!
****Instead of fighting for space in the fridge I just let the dipped cookies sit on the counter until the chocolate set and that worked fine.

You can also find the recipe here:
http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/coconut-macaroons

Whoopie!

So... if you've ever read my blog (probably not) you'll notice my last post is dated back to last summer and doesn't even include anything I made myself. I ran into a friend earlier this weekend who brought to my attention that letting my blog die, whether anyone actually reads it or not, is a disappointment to myself. Even though I haven't been writing, I have baked and cooked my way through a number of good recipes over the past year. Maybe I'll have time to revisit some of those recipes this summer and share them with you, but today I'm going reincarnate my blog with a recent recipe.

Whoopie pies have been on my list of things to bake for a while now, and after my plans for this Friday fell through I decided to pull out my KitchenAid, crank up some music and make my own fun. According to the recipe I found, an Amish woman is credited for inventing the whoopie pie when she thought to sandwich two pieces of cake together with frosting. They were given their name because children would supposedly shout "whoopie!" when they found their mom had tucked the dessert in with their lunch. Hence the terribly dorky title to my blog post, find it in your heart to forgive me.

Seeing a book called Whoopie Pies (by Sarah Billingsley, Amy Treadwell, and Antonis Achilleos) while walked through a Sur la Table introduced me to whoopie pies, two cake-like "cookies" with a sweet buttercream filling. The book includes a recipe for classic chocolate whoopie pies with marshmallow filling as well as creative flavor combinations, such as red velvet, green tea, pumpkin with cream cheese filling, and oatmeal with maple-bacon filling :) Having somehow restrained myself from purchasing yet another baking-related book, I found a recipe for vanilla whoopies with Nutella filling on the internet. So after a quick run to Meijer and with recipe in hand, I set out to make a batch of Nutella filled whoopie pies.

The first step in making whoopie pies is whipping up batter for the cookie part. Most cookie batters are thick enough to hold a ball shape, but whoopie batter was alarmingly thin. Whoopie pie batter is really more of a cake batter than a typical cookie, and comes out with the same fluffy texture. Dropping the batter onto parchment paper (a must!) felt more like making pancakes... which made me nervous.

But they came out of the oven fluffy and delicious! Turns out my only error was my tendency to make everything bigger than it should be. The thin consistency of whoopie batter means it will inevitably spread, so palm-sized whoopie pies only require 2 or 3 tablespoons of batter. Had I not made cookies with a 5" diameter, I'm thinking they would have also come out a little thicker which would have been nice.

There is no whoopie pie without a filling and the Nutella buttercream recommended by this particular recipe was killer. I tweaked this recipe a little because I like my buttercream good and fluffy, but the flavor paired with the vanilla cookie wonderfully.

I ended up with about a dozen delicious whoopie pies, but would've had about twice as many had I made them a reasonable size. No doubt whoopie pies are sugary and delicious, but I don't think I'll be adding them to my list of "go-to" recipes. The cookies were easy to make and easier to eat, but I like a cookie with a little more chew to it. For the texture of a whoopie pie I'd rather have a slice of cake, but for the convenience of a cookie I'd rather have an actual cookie. That being said though, put Nutella buttercream on just about anything and I'll find a way to eat it ;)

Recipe for Vanilla Bean Whoopie Pies at http://traceysculinaryadventures.blogspot.com/2011/02/vanilla-bean-whoopie-pies-with-nutella.html.
*I doubled the amount of powered sugar in the nutella buttercream, but that really only changes the texture so you can use as little or as much as you like!

You Asked For It!

I had a few recommendations for things I should bake/cook and I have every single one of them! That's right, all three ;) Well, now, the remaining two. I tackled one yesterday and the general consensus seems to be that the experiment was a genius idea, and I'd be the last person to disagree.

When I mentioned to some friends of mine at IU that I was planning on picking up blogging again while I was home for winter break one of them got really excited, describing to me a cookie concoction he thought I should try. Oreos are, hands down, my favorite store bought cookie. Actually, they're really the only prepackaged I ever find myself jonesing for. So, when it was suggested that I attempt to encase entire Oreos in homemade cookie dough I was on board.



Peanut butter makes just about anything better and Oreos are no exception. I'm not going to lie, I've been caught in the kitchen far too many times digging into a Jiff jar with an Oreo in hand, but can you really blame me? Clearly if I was going to cover Oreos in cookie dough it needed to be peanut butter cookie dough.

I figured if this was going to work, big IF, I needed a really think cookie dough. Something that would hold it's shape and not melt away from an Oreo. I ended up picking a peanut butter cookie recipes off Smitten Kitchen, big surprise. My biggest concern, however, was that the Oreo would be chewy. A couple years ago, along with a few other friends, I tried a deep fried Oreo. I'm not much of a fan of fried food and Oreos didn't change my mind. The Oreo was chewy and Oreos should not be chewy, their crunch is half their identity! If my cookies ended with chewy Oreos I was not going to be a happy camper.



But Sally and I decided to give it a go and laid out a sheet full of cookie dough encased Oreos. Crossing our fingers and holding our breath, we popped them into the oven and anxiously waited to see what 12 minutes of baking time would do to them.

Turns out putting these in the oven is actually a brilliant idea. What isn't a brilliant idea is running into the refrigerator with the tray of cookies you just pulled from the oven. I killed a couple that went cascading to the floor... but the rest were laid out to cool, unharmed. Don't they look like ravioli? I think they look like giant raviolis. But they're not, they're actually delicious cookies. Check out the inside!

These were a hit. If you're as big of a sucker for a chocolate and peanut butter combo as I am, these are going to rock your socks. They're really easy, too :D If you follow the recipe for peanut butter cookies here: http://smittenkitchen.com/2007/12/peanut-butter-cookies/, then you've finished the hardest part. We left out the peanut butter chips and chocolate chips because they just didn't seem necessary, but I suppose if you want them, more power to you! Then we evenly covered each Oreo with the cookie dough and let them bake for 12 minutes. I highly recommend you let them cool before biting in. The ones that met the kitchen floor ended up being our taste testers and the Oreos were alarmingly soft when straight from the oven. If you let them cool though the combination of the crunchy Oreo and chewy peanut butter cookie is phenomenal :)

Like I said, I have plans to get to paella and fish stew, two other excellent recommendations, and hopefully I'll be able to before I have to ship back off to IU! In the meantime, if you have anything else to add to my to-make list let me know and I'll try to whip it up!

Milk's Favorite Cookie

I still can't believe I'm leaving for IU in 13 days. Oh god, 13 days. At the beginning of the summer 3 months felt like they would last a lifetime, but lo and behold the trips to London, Arkansas, and New York, along with all the other small happenings I had to look forward to this summer have come and gone and the days left in my vacation from school are waning fast. Now I feel like my last two weeks are a frantic attempt to cram in as many activities as I can. What people do I want to see before I move out? What restaurants do I want to visit for what seems like the last time? What foods do I want to knock of my mental list of 'Things to Bake' before I'm hopelessly kitchenless?

Finally, as time runs short, some friends and I have scheduled a day trip to Turkey Run that we talked about before school even let out but have thus far failed to actually follow through with. We were all recruited to bring different food items to refuel between bouts of canoeing, hiking, and swimming. Naturally, my brain immediately thought 'DESSERT!' :D Unfortunately I can't take my favorites, neither layer cakes, pies, or cheesecakes sound very camping-friendly. I was forced to consider more finger friendly options: cookies, bars, brownies, cupcakes.

Bar and brownies are just fine, especially for the less than enthusiastic baker in a time of need. Directions are generally as follows: mix, pour, bake, cut. So simple. (Unless you're me, then brownies and bars are a game of 'how many extra ingredients can I fit in this batter without it exploding in the oven?') Drop cookies can be ok, cut-outs are time consuming, and my obsession with detail and eagerness to go over the top on everything make cupcakes a nightmare. I've made countless variations of all of the above, but ended up finding one that I had never tried before.

Sandwich cookies. I think my favorite thing about these is you get two cookies in one package! I had been surfing smittenkitchen.com for inspiration and discovered a recipe for homemade oreos. I immediately decided I need not look any further! Who doesn't love oreos? So I went to town crafting thin chocolate cookies, doubling the recipe so that my family would have their own plateful to snack on while I tote the rest to Turkey Run this weekend. So... many... cookies. And the worst part was I couldn't just spoon them on the cookie sheet! No, I was forced to roll out and flatten teaspoon sized balls of my cookie dough. Turns out there were a whole lot of teaspoons in two batches of the chocolate stuff. Luckily, lots of batter means lots of cookies!!!

Everyone knows the best part of Oreos is the filling in the middle and my cookies would certainly not be complete without big dollops of vanilla creme. I whipped up a batch of what essentially was vanilla butter cream frosting to pipe onto half the cookies.

I topped the dolloped cookies off with another cookie (to complete the whole sandwich effect) and ended up with a plateful of wonderfully rustic 'Oreos.' Yum.

I only assembled half the cookies at first, waiting to add frosting to the other half until closer to the Turkey Run venture. On the first batch I used the recipe provided on the smitten kitchen site (which by the way is... http://smittenkitchen.com/2007/05/my-kingdom-for-a-glass-of-milk/) but refused to eat any myself because the creme contains one of my least favorite ingredients. Vegetable shortening. Ewwwwwwww. In my house, where Oreos come, peanut butter follows, so on the second batch I decided to experiment a little and replace the shortening laced vanilla creme with peanut butter butter cream frosting. I think they turned out the better of the two and would highly recommend trying any version of a peanut butter filling. Then again, I'll put peanut butter on anything...

I Like Throwing Shit in a Bowl!

Taylor named this post, and I let him do so because he was kind enough to assist me in this kitchen-based endeavor :D My Japanese teacher asked me to bake for a going away party we're having tomorrow for our student teacher and, of course, I was all too happy too oblige. Although I had settled on a delicious looking classic yellow layer cake with chocolate buttercream frosting (sounds good right?) I decided cookies would be easier and cleaner to pass out amongst classmates and opted for another intriguing recipe.

I once had a caramel apple from the Rocky Mountain Candy Co in Edinburgh called a "Kitchen Sink Caramel Apple." It was a huge granny smith dipped in caramel and then rolled in various toppings: m&ms, chocolate chips, graham cracker crumbs, and nuts, and then drizzled with three different types of chocolate. Orgasmic. The basic idea of things titled "Kitchen Sink" is that they include everything you have lying around or, everything but the kitchen sink. This was a concept I fell in love with because Taylor is all too right, I do love throwing a bunch of shit in a bowl! So I found a recipe called Kitchen Sink Cookies in that fabulous cookbook he gave me for Christmas and figured they'd be delicious. I haven't had one yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm right :).





Now Taylor's going to talk to you, since he was an integral part of this baking process! Hello! This is Taylor. I am a boy so Molly makes me do all the manly things involved in cooking like stirring, lifting heavy things, and providing moral support when things get too difficult and she starts to cry. Anyway! This recipe was particularly intriguing for a variety of reasons. The first reason being that it contained a LOT of oats. Last I checked, oats were the favorite food of horses, not people. Oh well, Molly has a tendency to eat lots of things popular amongst the lower echelons of the animal kingdom. Like flax seeds. I don't even know what those are! With that aside, I will continue my discussion of why this was a rather interesting recipe: Molly made way too many cookies. Remember that post from a while back when she made muffins and filled that bowl all the way up with batter? Yeah, that happened again, only this time there were oats and rice krispies everywhere. It was borderline horrifying, but we survived. Stirring that bowl was a super pain in the ass though. My arms hurt, but I don't care because I am MANLY! After my duties were completed I proceeded to sit around and do nothing while Molly scooped and baked the cookies nine at a time. Nearly seventeen hours later I estimate that she baked roughly fourteen thousand cookies. Good thing one of my other manly duties is eating more food than should normally be feasible. So the cookies are out of the oven and smelling delicious as most of the things Molly makes do. Except when she uses lentils. Or chick peas. Those smell like feet and burnt cats, respectively. So that's that! We made some kick-ass sink-shit cookies which smell pretty awesome and are composed primarily of chocolate and horse snacks. Until next time, au revoir blog readers.

Neighhhhh,
Taylor (And Molly!)



This picture doesn't even include the bag Taylor took home!