Chocolate Chip Pretzel Bars

This bar cookie recipe came from the August 2009 issue of Food and Wine magazine. I actually ended up making two batches, one for friends and one to take with me to work on Monday. Despite needing almost twice the recommended baking time, they were easy and fast to put together. I used white chocolate chips instead of semisweet or bittersweet, and omitted the sprinkles (I didn't think they needed sprinkles), but followed the recipe otherwise.

The cookies are loaded with brown sugar and butter, and are studded with chips and salty pretzel bits... it's a great combination, with that salty-sweet pairing that's so popular. They went over great!

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Recipe: Chocolate Chip Pretzel Bars from Food and Wine, August 2009

Space needed: Minimal
I used two mixing bowls: one smaller bowl for the dry ingredients, and a larger one for the wet ingredients. No kneading, no rolling, no cookie cuttering... great for limited counter space!

Maple Leaf Cookies

For once, I had my annual cookie swap contribution picked out in advance. And I'm talking a couple of months in advance.



Martha got me good, with a recipe for Maple Leaf Cookies as the "cookie of the month" in the November Martha Stewart Living. It's a basic sugar cookie, but with brown sugar and maple syrup added to give it a slightly deeper flavor. I am a complete sucker for maple, so I copied this cookie recipe as soon as I saw it.

I got 6 dozen out of this recipe, despite rolling the dough thinner than the recipe calls for AND using smaller cookie cutters than the recommended 3.5" maple leaf. Martha says you'll get "about 8 dozen".

The cookies as they come out the oven are not very sweet at all, and you could easily stop there and have some nice tea-or-coffee biscuits. The final step of brushing with maple syrup and sprinkling sugar on top adds a nice amount of sweetness to them. The maple flavor is there, but pretty subtle.

I didn't bother with the repeated dough freezes called for in the recipe. I almost always roll out cookie dough between sheets of plastic wrap or parchment paper, which lets me get away with a stickier dough. Any time it felt like the dough was getting too warm, it went into the refrigerator for 10 minutes.

I used regular granulated sugar for the final step, instead of sanding sugar. They still came out sparkly and sugary:



Now I just have to keep myself from sampling any more. I've gone through the leftovers already, so all that's left are the packages for my coworkers. :)

Recipe: Maple Leaf Cookies from Martha Stewart Living, November 2008

Homemade Thin Mints

If you work with me, and you're doing the cookie swap, this is what you're getting from me: Heidi Swanson's All-Natural and Homemade Thin Mints.



I've been looking for an excuse to make these since she posted the recipe back in 2006. I don't bake sweet stuff for myself very often, and we have so many birthdays at work that I almost feel guilty bringing in sweets on other days. I forgot about the recipe when I was doing last year's swap, but I remembered this year!

The nice thing about online recipes is that they frequently have a place where people can leave comments. You can tell pretty quickly which comments can be ignored ("I changed most of the ingredients and it didn't turn out right, so this is a bad recipe" is always a favorite) and which ones should be taken to heart. On this recipe, there were several comments about the dough being crumbly and difficult to work with, as well as comments saying that dipping the cookies in the melted chocolate leaves a chocolate layer that's too thick.

Crumbly, persnickety dough. That means that using cookie cutters is going to be a HUGE pain, so I changed the baking method just a bit. The recipe says to roll out the dough to 1/8" thick, cut out shapes, and bake for 10 minutes. Instead, I rolled it out closer to 1/4" thick and used a knife to cut the dough into 1.5" squares. I put them in the oven for 10 minutes per baking sheet, and due to the high butter content, they spread out nicely into 2" slightly rounded squares. I made three batches of the dough so I'd have plenty, and had a nice assembly line going for the mixing. I made one batch, put it in the freezer to chill, used the same bowl for a second batch (no cleaning the bowl necessary, since it's all going to be the same dough anyway), put that batch in the freezer, made the third batch, put that in the freezer, and took out batch #1 to roll out.

Mixing, rolling, and baking took about 2 hours from start to finish: not bad for 9 dozen cookies.
The full batch of cookies cooled overnight, and this morning, I did stage 2: chocolate coating. Instead of dunking each cookie in melted chocolate (which, according to many comments, left far too much chocolate on the cookies), I spread a thin layer of the chocolate on the cookies. It worked well, and had the added benefit of being messy fun. Doing this also allowed me to coat all of my cookies with one 12 oz. bag of semisweet chocolate chips instead of 3 lbs of chocolate--a smidge healthier is always a good thing, and the extra chocolate won't be missed. I got about 4 dozen cookies per batch of dough, and since I only made 9 dozen, I have the leftover dough in the freezer awaiting a chocolate craving attack. :)

The mint flavor in the chocolate is very subtle, and I would definitely add more of the peppermint extract on any future batches. This isn't just because I used less chocolate, because even the chocolate by itself doesn't have that strong mint flavor that the GS Thin Mints have.



Playing around with chocolate wasn't a bad way to spend the first snowy morning of the winter!

Holiday cookies

Big cookie swap at work. I spent Sunday making eight dozen of these:



I'm calling them raspberry schmear cookies. Originally, I was planning to do a raspberry jam sandwich cookie for the swap. And then it dawned on me that I'd have to make SIXTEEN DOZEN cookies in order to have eight dozen finished sandwich cookies. I don't mind doing some work, but that was going to be ridiculous. So, I mixed up the dough from the original cookie recipe and tried to figure out how to incorporate the raspberry preserves. I could do a filled cookie, or spread the preserves over the rolled out dough to make a spiral cookie... and then I started thinking about one of my favorite desserts to make, which is Giada De Laurentiis's jam crostata. It's a basic butter pastry dough spread with jam or preserves. As it bakes, a lot of the water evaporates out of the preserves, leaving you with a thickened, almost caramelized filling. When I need a quick no-fuss dessert, that's what I make. I thought that maybe I could get a similar result on a cookie by spreading a thin layer of the preserves on the cookies before baking....

Worked like a charm. The consistency of the preserves changes completely after baking. You're left with a thin, slightly sticky fruit layer, very different from the messy preserves you start with. The cookies stick to each other a bit when piled on top of each other, but come apart easily. I think they look very festive (part of the reason I used red raspberry preserves... very Christmas-y).

And as it turned out, the original recipe makes half the number of cookies it claimed, so it was a VERY good thing that I had already decided to go another route. The recipe said it would make 2 dozen sandwich cookies... I rolled mine out THINNER than what they called for, and got 2 dozen cookies, which would have only made 1 dozen sandwiches.

Anyway... basic sugar cookie plus about 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of raspberry preserves spread thinly on top, baked at 325 degrees for 12-16 minutes.