The second baking recipe I made over the weekend comes from the early days of Ina. Her second cookbook, Barefoot Contessa Parties! takes on a menu-based theme. Recipes are organized not by type, but by party theme.
The recipe I chose to make from this book is one of three variations on the same base recipe. Combined, all three would make wonderful treats for friends or family. But the star recipe of the bake on Sunday was the Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk cookies.
There were surprisingly so simple to make. At first I was hesitant because there isn’t a lot of peanut butter in the recipe and it makes a lot of cookies…like over three dozen! At least that’s how many I got out of it. However, upon biting into one, they tasted like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup! I was in heaven!
In the recipe, Ina states that these cookies should bake for 17 minutes. I did that for the first tray of 8 cookies. But when I removed them from the oven, I found them to be too browned and overdone. When tasted, they were much drier and didn’t really have a lot of flavor. They were overdone.
So, I adjusted for the remainder of the batch. I baked them for only 16 minutes and they were perfect! What a difference 60 seconds could make, huh? Who would have thought so much could happen in such a short amount of time?
These cookies are super simple but packed with flavor. Everyone loved them. I think they belong on the Favorites list!
This recipe can be found in Back to Basics, page 214.
This past weekend was filled with baking and cooking! After a long hiatus, I finally got the BC bug and dived head first back into the project. Over the course of three days I made a total of five Barefoot Contessa recipes. You can see the full list here, but the different review posts will be dropping over the next couple of weeks.
After a much longer than anticipated hiatus from baking and cooking for the blog, I am excited that this weekend I am planning to make no less than 5 (yes, 5!!) recipes. All of which are Barefoot Contessa recipes.
Today I am going to make one of the two cookie recipes that I’ve been eyeing for sometime. I plan to use the duck eggs that I talked about in an earlier post. I’m really excited to work with them!
In addition to the Herb-Marinated Pork that I made last week, I was in the mood to bake. But I wanted a simple recipe that wouldn’t have me spending hours in the kitchen measuring, mixing, baking, and cleaning. After a few minutes of flipping through the Barefoot Contessa Index, I stumbled upon the Chocolate Dipped Brown Sugar Shortbread recipe from Comfort Food.
This seemed to be a somewhat straight-forward shortbread recipe. But it was the first time I made short bread before. In the head notes to this recipe, Ina said that these cookies taste just like Milanos. I mean, anything that tastes or resembles a Milano cookie has to be good, right?
While this recipe is easy and doesn’t cause an over abundance of dishes (which seems to be common with many baking recipes), this recipe does require you to get a little messy. But as Gesine Prado says, “…you have to get messy to get delicious.” After combining the dough, you need to shape pieces of the dough into logs.
I got about halfway through the shaping process when I realized that my logs probably had too much dough and would puff up a bit more than they should have during baking. It also meant I would get less cookies, but I think that was actually better for my family since it would help with controlling the amount we eat.
After baking, my prediction came true. The cookies ended up being a bit fatter than the ones in the photo. But since it wouldn’t impact the taste, I didn’t mind so much. I used a cookie scoop to ensure even sized cookies. I just used the wrong one. I should have used the smaller one, not the medium one. Oh, well. Now I know for next time!
The cookies looked and smelled so good after removing them from the oven that I had to try one even before I was able to dip them in chocolate! But as you can see in the picture above, some of the cookies lost their shape as well. Again, I think this has to do with the amount of dough used or how tightly I shaped them. Some may have been shaped a little more loosely than others, causing them to spread out more.
Once the cookies were cooled, I melted the chocolate and mixed in the melted butter. The addition of melted butter seemed odd to be at first but I did it anyway! It caused the chocolate to become a little thicker and helped it not to spread out too much.
After dipping them all in the chocolate, as directed in the recipe: only the top of the front of the cookies, I let them sit for about 45 minutes before eating one. I opted not to add the chopped nuts as called for in the original BC recipe.
Far from perfect, but still fancy-looking and definitely yummy!
These cookies actually taste better cool! At least for me. Allowing the cookie to cool gives all the flavors time to marry together and taste better. There is a LOT of sugar in these cookies, so if you eat one while still warm you won’t get the right effect since the sugar is still hot from baking.
While the cookies I made came out looking far from perfect, everyone liked them. In fact, some people recommended that they be made around the holiday season. And I think with them dipped in white chocolate and then decorated with chopped up peppermint pieces, they would look festive and taste great!
This recipe can be found in Modern Comfort Food, page 58.
Wow! What a week it’s been.
As things are beginning to open up in my home state and more people are getting vaccinated, my free time is slowly beginning to return to a pre-pandemic state. While this is great overall, it means that before I know it, it’s Friday. Then I realize I didn’t post all week long. Oops.
Anyway, last week we had a few colder days combined with some rainy weather. Even though it’s April, the weather had me thinking, “Soup for dinner, soup for dinner…” late in the week. So, that’s exactly what I did. I made a soup and it was the perfect choice!
Soup for Dinner…in April?
Ina’s Chicken Pot Pie Soup comes from her most recent cookbook, Modern Comfort Food. While I have only made a few recipes from this book so far, none of them have been short of amazing.
However, I will admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by this one. I liked the idea of taking puff pastry cut-outs to act as the “crust,” the soup itself didn’t taste much different to me than her regular chicken noodle soup recipes. I have found that when I make chicken pot pie, the mixture is a little thicker and has more body to it. For me, that makes pot pie heartier and more comforting. This soup, despite its name, still tasted and looked like soup. Perhaps it just wasn’t thick enough or maybe some of the flavors are off.
The world may never know!
This Week’s Cooking
Last weekend I had big dreams in the kitchen. My original post mentioned something like I would make three recipes all in one day. Well, that was a little optimistic. I only ended up making one (the soup).
But, the cookies I had planned to make are still calling my name, so they will be made today and I can’t wait to try them! According to the headnote, Ina says her Chocolate-Dipped Brown Sugar Shortbread cookies taste just like a Milano!
That’s reason enough for me to try them, right?
Dinner tonight will be of the pork variety. This will mark the first recipe I tackle under the Pork & Lamb heading in the recipe index. I am not a big fan of pork, but I’ve never had lamb. So I’m continuing to put those recipes off for as long as I can!
Friday I woke up and decided I felt like baking. I know, I know. What a surprise. I was planning to get lunch with a friend who I haven’t seen in a while, so I thought it would be nice to make cookies and give her some. I’ve learned that if I want to keep baking the way I have been, it’s best to give the treats away. That way, they’re not in the house very long and tempting me to eat them all!
Naturally, I decided on the most common and most popular cookie there is: chocolate chip. And naturally, I knew it would be the recipe from Bobbie Lord’s Magnolia Bakery Handbook. Thanks to my well-stocked pantry with baking supplies, I only needed to run to the store to get some chocolate chips.
Yesterday was Pi Day! It was March 14 and the mathematical number, Pi, begins with 3.14. Though I did decide to bake yesterday, I did not bake a pie. Instead, I made GIANT chocolate chip cookies!
The recipe I used came from Sally’s Baking Addiction and the recipe I used can be found here. I highly recommend checking out her baking blog. There are recipes for virtually anything you would ever want to bake. Plus, the stellar food photograph really makes her recipes shine. I often want to jump right into my computer’s screen to gobble everything up!
If you are looking for a giant cookie recipe, these will not disappoint. The recipe is easy and, unlike some of Sally’s cookie recipes, does not require any chilling time. One downside is the recipe only yields 6 cookies. Though, each one is equivalent to about 4 regular-sized cookies. But, by making a second batch, you can get twelve extra, extra large cookies in no time!
I’ll be honest, when making these cookies, I thought the massive amount of cookie dough used for each one would cause it to be dense. But that wasn’t the case at all. This recipe was definitely a success for me! The best part? No scooping the dough required. (One less tool to wash!) I just turned out the prepared cookie dough on a piece of parchment paper, formed it into a large hockey puck shape, and divided it into 6 sections. Each section became one cookie. It worked great!!
After baking, while the cookies cooled, I decide to “dress them up” a little bit and pressed in some additional chocolate chips into the tops. This gave the cookie a “bakery look” and really did make them look better.
Today, I am off from work so I decided to make a couple recipes. One of them is this amazingly yummy dessert. The other is a vegetable dish that will serve as a side for tonight’s dinner.
These Chocolate Chunk Blondies are basically a chocolate chip cookie in bar form. However, they are super dense and chocolately, so they hit that spot a little differently than a cookie would.
Ina recommends baking them in 8.5 inch by 12 inch by 2 inch pan, but I don’t have one of those, so I used one slightly smaller. However, I probably should have used the 13 by 9 inch pan we have. Regardless, they came out great!
I like that this recipe calls for chocolate chunks over chocolate chips since chunks tend to have more of chocolate flavor. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it’s because they are larger? The more surface area? Who knows!
These will make an excellent dessert tonight! I can’t wait to try one.
This recipe appears in Barefoot Contessa At Home, page 192.
Last week was a busy cooking week for me. I made a total of three different recipes! Earlier this week I posted about the first two which you can read about here and here.
But, I still haven’t written about the dessert that I made last week — until now. For dessert last week I made the Ultimate Ginger Cookie. This was definitely a new type of dessert for me since I am usually not a fan of gingerbread. But, I have to admit, these cookies were tasty!
This week I will be making at least two recipes. One of which will come from either the Dessert or Breakfast chapters in the books. But, I’m really feeling like I want some cookies. Now I just need to pick which ones!
For the regular weekly cooking, I will probably make some sort of soup but I’m also leaning towards something out of the Lunch chapters. I have yet to make something from that section.
I will be deciding on the recipes tonight and I’ll post them tomorrow. I will be making dinner on Saturday this week, but will probably do the shopping tomorrow.
