Category Archives: Cooking

We usually only eat chocolate chip cookies when we stop at Subway to eat when we’re out shopping in Aalst. And that happens once every two-three months. Oh, their local specialty? Veggie Pattie! Direct way to my heart, with loads of veggies, jalapeños and chipotle sauce. Then a coffee with a free chocolate chip cookie of your choice nom nom.

This week I found chocolate chips (meant to use for melting for a chocolate fondue, techincal detail) in the supermarket, and decided on baking chocolate chip cookies. LiveLoveKnit from the #knitty chat recommended me this recipe from Smitten Kitchen and I liked it. It has metric measurements ¹. So off I went to make these cookies and of course I had to modify the recipe, because you all know me! The result:

On to the modified recipe, shall we?

Chocolate Chip Cookies With Added Ooohmp

Grab the ingredients:

• 80 grams granulated sugar
• 10 grams vanilla sugar²
• 100 grams light brown sugar (in this case, I used light cassonade de candi)
• 110 grams unsalted butter, warmish but not melted, chopped in small pieces at random³
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence⁴
• 1 tablespoon runny honey
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon⁵
• 1 teaspoon baking soda⁶
• 175 grams flour
• pinch salt
• 200 grams chocolate chips

Make them:

1. With electric beaters and lots of patience, cream together butter and sugars, until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Yep, that long. Add honey, cinnamon, vanilla essence and egg, and beat again till mixed properly.
2. Shift together baking powder, salt and flour. Add to butter mixture and mix in very well, but do not overmix. Clean the beaters with a rubber spattula. You know how much dough they keep? Add chocolate chips and fold in with spattula.
3. Stick dough in fridge for at least a couple of hours until quite firm.
4. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 150ºC / 300F, and line two or three cookie sheets with baking paper. Make balls with the dough about 4cm in diameter. Place nine per cookie sheet. Flatten if you want the thin cookies that I got, otherwise let them be round.
5. Stick in oven for 15 to 18 minutes, until nicely golden. Remove from oven and let cool in the cookie sheet until firm, at least 10 minutes, then transfer to rack to finish cooling.
6. Eat with delight, slightly warm even better!

Yield: approx. 30 dosis of sin.

They’re so good, even our little kiss furball (freeby from certain very famous cola drink) wanted to eat them while I was taking pics of them:

 
 
da footnotes:

A couple of months ago I bought a jar of chunky peanut butter at the local Aldi. It was the “American Week” and I was curious about this ubiquitous ingredient in certain baking recipes and the also famous PB&J sandwich. Reports of friends and family trying peanut butter as is, or in a sandwich, had put a warning in my brain, but still I tried a bit, for the shake of experimentation. The result, I can say, is I do not like peanut butter as-is. It’s too sweet, with an underlying saltiness, and way too sticky. Both in consistency and in flavour. Not for me, I’ll stick with Nutella thankyouverymuch.

So off I went to decide what to do with this peanut butter, and thought cookies was the way to go. If we didn’t like them at home, Jan’s coworkers would get rid of them in no time. They don’t say no to free food! Seeing as I’m trying to bake my way through (selected recipes from) Vegan with a Vengeance, I chose their “Big Gigantoid Crunchy Peanut Butter-Oatmeal Cookies”.

Off to the kitchen with all my stuff I went. Because for once I had all the ingredients at hand, yes. And started mixing everything. May I say, thank you so much for (metric) weight and volume measures of the ingredients? Whoever came up with baking by cups should be tortured to the failing cake every single time muahahaha. Anyway, mix I go and so on and so forth, the goop called cookie dough was softer than I expected. The recipe says:

The dought will be very firm and moist.

This was slightly confusing, because a cookie dough that is at the same time firm and moist does not compute in my brain. Anyway, being sure as I was that I has weighed all the dry ingredients, and measured in ml all my liquids, I thought the dough I got should be good enough as is, even tho scoopable rather than shapeable. So, instead of packing 5 tablespoons in a cup to make a single cookie, I scooped a portion the size of a small icecream ball, and let it glop down to a flatish shape on its own accord.

My biggest surprise came after baking. This took longer than stated for my smaller cookies, too. I went up to 12 minutes in the oven for my “slightly less than 2 tablespoons of dough per cookie” cookies, instead of the 8-10 minutes the recipe recommends for “normal-size” cookies. So yes, they take longer. They don’t really turn nicely golden brown, at all. They do puff up, and then take over the cookie sheet and join the other cookies and sooner or later they’ll be bossing you around. And the worst part: they came out of the oven softer than they went in. This was a big (bad) surprise. Yes, recipe also says:

Allow to cool at least 10 minutes to firm up before moving off the baking sheet.

What it doesn’t tell you is the bottoms of said cookies will be completely sticky, and that even if you move them with great care, after a good 15 minutes resting, they will will try to make a Dalí clock but with cookie and a cake spatula. This also caused an accident by which I lost 3 cookies: When I took the tray out of the oven, a barking mut was driving me insane, and thus I moved too fast, the paper liner slid over the tray, and three too soft cookies colapsed into a useless pile of dough.

The resulting cookies are far from crispy, the only crispiness in them is the pieces of peanuts from the chunky peanut butter. They’re too sweet as well, even tho I used sugar that’s less sweet than normal sugar. And they’re kind of oily as well. After several days, they haven’t dried out, which is nice, but they’re still more chewy than I like my cookies. I don’t think I’ll repeat this exact recipe, maybe if I can find something that’s dryer and crunchy I’ll give peanut butter cookies another try. And now that you’ve come this far reading, mandatory food pic:

I had a bunch of over-ripe bananas in the fridge, and rather than throwing them away, I decided to bake with them. I’ve made Banana Bread Muffins before, that were a bit on the heavy side, so I didn’t want to repeat that recipe. I looked for a Banana Cupcake recipe, since cupcakes are usually lighter than muffins. I found one I liked, but it was too heavy in the eggs department. I didn’t fully veganize it, but I cutted eggs in half. The resulting recipe follows:

Ingredients:

• 3 very ripe bananas, mashed
• grated zest and juice of one lemon
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 cups self-raising flour

Make them:

1. Preaheat oven to 200C and line with paper cups two muffin trays (you will need 18 at least)
2. Melt the butter with the oil (microwave for 30 seconds). Let cool a bit. Meanwhile, in a big bowl, mix the bananas with the lemon juice and zest. Beat in eggs and milk. Add the butter-oil mixture.
3. Add nutmeg and sugar, incorporate well. Add flour and mix well, until incorporated, but not overbeating. Fill cupcake liners just a bit below the rim. Bake at 175C for 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes clean but moist and top is light golden and sproungy.
4. Let cool on rack. Scarf them

Yield: 18 cupcakes, but don’t expect them to last long.

That is how a friend named the truffles I made for her.

Truffle-Bonbon

Ingredients:

• 240 grams milk chocolate
• 150ml crème fraîche or sour cream
• 1/2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 4-6 cloves
• pinch salt
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/4-1/2 cup bitter cocoa powder

Make them:

1. In a small saucepan, melt the crème fraîche. When it’s warm, add the spices and let rest for half an hour (also known as infuse). Remove the cloves, add salt, and reheat.
2. Chop the chocolate in small pieces and add to the warm crème, removing with a wooden spoon until it’s completely molten and shiny. Do this over a very low heat, and removing the saucepan often from the heat source. Add the butter and incorporate it completely. You now have a tasty ganache.
3. Line a 15×20 dish with baking paper so that the paper overhangs on the shorter sides. Pour the ganache in and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Lick clean your wooden spoon and rubber spatula once you’re done. Stick the dish in the fridge overnight.
4. When the ganache is completely cool and solid, remove it from the dish and put it on a cutting board, using the baking paper to move the ganache and as a base for cutting. Put cocoa in a deep dish. With a knife, cut squares of ganache, transfer them to the cocoa, and roll them around so they are completely covered in cocoa. Trasnfer to small baking paper cups for a nice touch. Return to fridge, and enjoy them by twos!

Yield: not enough :)

I promised some food pr0n a while ago.

Summary: Spicy Indian Rice with Toasted Almonds and Marinated Italian Tofu with Assorted Veggies, both recipes adapted from Vegan with a Vengeance. I made a list of recipes from the book I want to try, and I’ll cook my way (more or less, you know, can’t follow a recipe to save my life) through it. And probably I’ll do the same with other cooking books.

Not joking, really. Even when I bake I have to change a little something at least, or I won’t be happy.

So well, I saw a couple of weeks ago a recipe that sounded interesting: Marmalade Tofu with Kale and Lemon Pearl Couscous, and thought to myself “Hey, this sounds interesting, gotta try it”. But of course, I failed in following the recipe, because I’m like that. My version is “Marinated Tofu with Bai Cai, Garlicy Shiitakes and Couscous”. In truth, they are four different dishes served together, with the Tofu as main, and the other three as sides. It’s a full meal, and delicious.

Recipes after the cut! Continue reading →

So today I had time to bake, and Zanne, our lovely Knitty Zanne (who is internet-less for the Spring and Summer), had asked quite a few times I made a recipe for cookies using real espresso. And today was the day.

As always, I guess you want to know how to make them yourself, so I’ll direct you to the lovely database for the Espresso Cookies recipe.

So, I wanted to bake Chocolate Stout Cupcakes from VCTOTW for about a month. But these past two weeks I wasn’t feeling very cupcakey. I was more in the mood for cookies. Good cookies that you can dip in your coffee, or your milk, or just eat as is. And really, Chocolate Stout Cookies sounded damn good. Doesn’t it? So I did what (nearly) anyone would do, turn to the internet and mighty Google and search for a recipe.

However, it seems, not many people appreciate the delicacy that a Chocolate Stout Cookie is. So there only one recipe out there that I could find: Double Chocolate Stout Cookies. It is a vegan recipe, it requires sourcing whole wheat pastry flour, and rice flour, and egg replacement. Too Much Work! I know I could just substitute and let go, but really, I just worked from this recipe and created these totally not vegan but absolutely delicious Chocolate Stout Cookies.

I assume people will want the recipe, so you can find it on the database here where you can also get it in a nice PDF format for printing. Since I know most are too lazy to go there, I’m gonna write it here as well.

Continue reading →