Eunji bakes Chocolate Crinkles

The baking rivalry heated up at school when my baking rival, Eunji, threatened to bring baked goods in for student council to finally prove that she is the better baker. She had me try one early on in the day before the meeting and then e-mailed me three pictures of the cookies. What can I say? They were delicious! A kind of perfect amount of sweetness, a little crunch on the outside, nice and soft on the inside! Plus they look oh so cute.

Chocolate Crinkles, from Betty Crocker
Printable Recipe

Makes 72 cookies (they are very little and bite-sized)

Ingredients


1/2 cup vegetable oil
4 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, melted, cooled
2 cups granulated sugar
2 tsps vanilla
4 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Preparation


In a large bowl, mix oil, chocolate, sugar and vanilla. Stir in eggs, one at a time. Stir in flour, baking powder and salt. Cover and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

Pre-heat oven to 350 F. Grease cookie sheet with shortening or cooking spray. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls into powdered sugar; roll around to coat and shape into balls. Place about 2 inches apart on cookie sheets. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until almost no imprint when touched lightly in centre. Immediately remove from cookie sheets onto cooling racks.

So my question now, since I have already acceded to the fact that she is the better baker, do I even try to compete at this point?! Probably not. Great job, Eunji!

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February 14th Baking: Cherry Chocolate Hugs

Valentine's has never been a big deal for my wife and I. There has never been any pressure to do, or more importantly buy, anything. However, during my daily skim of my Facebook newsfeed, I saw an intriguing post from one of my friends. Before we confirm the obvious fact that this post is indeed the recipe for today, I must tell you about my friend! She's a fantastic cook and baker (not to mention super mom and teacher) but as far as I know, does not have a blog of any sort. Instead, she links the recipes she has made with a small comment about them, unlike us verbose bloggers. Her comment for this recipe?


What's Baking? A V-day treat for my sweetie.

Aww!! So thanks to Facebook friend inspiration, this year for February 14th day, I was in the kitchen battling it out with my mixer. As usual, with baking, I didn't stray from the recipe.

In other news, one of my students made one of the recipes I wrote about! She said they turned out not so good though maybe I'm not such a good teacher after all. I brought these in for the teachers because it is Teacher Appreciation week, which so far means sweets at recess. Naturally I thought it would be a good idea to add on to the amount of sugar we were all ingesting. I ended up having enough extras to bring to my student council meeting which did not please my baking nemesis. Long story short: for a bake sale, we both made red velvet cupcakes and there was a debate as to who made the better cupcake. Being the teacher, I will admit here on my blog that Eun Ji Cho is the better baker! Maybe the best ever?

I'll bet that a master baker would be able to look at the ingredients and realize that this cookie has more of a shortbread/sugar texture. For some reason, I imagined some kind of cross between a fluffy macaron and a something else amazing so I think I was a bit disappointed. However, if you know what you're getting into then it should be an excellent treat.

Cherry Chocolate Hugs, adapted from The Curvy Carrot's Cherry Chocolate Kisses

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted butter, softened, but still cool (Being the terrible baker I am, I did not know what this meant)

1 cup powdered sugar

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons maraschino cherry “juice”

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

2 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup maraschino cherries, chopped

Granulated sugar, for sprinkling the cookies

36 milk chocolate kisses, unwrapped (I substituted Hershey's Hugs instead, because I thought we would look prettier. I'm not sure if they do.)

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.

2. In the bowl of your standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter at medium speed until creamy, about 1 minute. I must admit that I did not, and still do not, know what a paddle attachment is. My KitchenAid Mixer was not being cooperative with the mixing but I think it was because my butter was not soft enough. There was too much stickage and I was constantly scraping the mixer. Make sure you soften that butter.

3. Reduce the speed to the lowest setting and slowly add the powdered sugar and salt.

4. Add the cherry juice and the almond extract until combined.

5. With the mixer still on low, slowly add the flour, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. I think around this part I ditched the mixer and just hand mixed the rest of the dough. 

6. Increase the mixer speed to medium and add the cherries.

7. Shape the dough into 1-inch balls, and place the balls on a baking sheet, approximately 2 inches apart.

8.  Using your thumb, gently press each cookie in its center until the cookie is about 1/2-inch thick.

9.  Sprinkle each cookie with a little granulated sugar.

10.  Bake the cookies until the bottoms are lightly browned, about 12 minutes.

11. Once removed from the oven, immediately press a chocolate kiss into each cookie’s center. They are going to melt, so try not to move them very quickly otherwise they will topple over! Or worse:

A cookie's escape attempt ended poorly.

12.  Transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

Wondering what my wife thought about her surprise baked treats? Well, considering her love for cherry cake and her love for chocolate, I'd say it was a success! Happy February 14th, everyone!

so i'll watch your life in pictures
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Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies (In theory) and Chocolate chip cookies with no butter!

Back in November, the student council (of which I am one of the faculty advisors) at our school had a PJ & pancake day. They cooked up a couple hundred pancakes and had toppings of all kinds for students to pile on their pancakes. In the end, they sold a lot of pancakes and the cafeteria was a sticky mess. However, they raised a lot of money maybe for a charity, I can't remember but they are usually trying to raise money for lots of things. Actually, at our meeting today, it was announced that we raised $1000 to help a 1 year old get a much needed heart transplant. Oh, how proud I was...or am, of these little ones.

Oh, but back to the end of pancake day. There was an unopened bag of chocolate chips left over which I took and left in my teacher mail box until about last week... Needless to say, today at the student council meeting, there were also chocolate chip cookies! Unfortunately, I didn't even think to take any pictures because I wasn't planning on writing about them until one of the students asked for the recipe and so here we are.  Here's a picture of the empty container as proof .

So last night, rather than preparing for my classes, I spent the evening baking two different batches of cookies. Upon checking the fridge, I found out we had no eggs and no butter. The first batch I made came from Erica's Sweet Tooth which looked worrisome while I was reading about the crumbliness of the cookies. In any case, I really liked this recipe because it was just really quick and easy.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies, adapted from Erica's Sweet Tooth

1 1/2 cups flour

3/4 cup sugar 

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips 

2/3 cup vegetable oil

1/4 soy/almond milk

1 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp dark molasses (I used 'Fancy' Molasses, whatever that is)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and chocolate chips. In another bowl, combine the vegetable oil, milk, vanilla and molasses (tip: measure the oil first, then pour the molasses into the same measuring device so that it doesn't stick!). Add the wet mixture to the dry and mix well with a wooden spoon until everything is JUST incorporated. Don't overwork that flour. Roll dough into bowl, place on a greased pan or parchment paper-lined pan and squish them down to form saucers. Bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes. Let cool on pan for 5 minutes before transferring to wire rack.

While re-writing this recipe from memory, I'm realizing that I must be one of the luckiest bakers in the world. The only reason I altered the original recipe was because I started on a different recipe before I realized I didn't have an egg. So I had 1 1/2 cups of flour in a bowl, with 1/2 tsp baking soda and 1/4 tsp of salt. My brilliant thought was to make random estimations to roughly reduce the recipe by a 1/4 (It's clearly not a 1/4 reduction but hey, that's my math teacher skills kicking in). This brilliant thought somehow disappeared halfway through following Erica's cookie recipe and I now realize that I kept the rest of the recipe the same. I also used regular skim milk from a cow, and greased the pan with butter. Two very un-vegan things, but I highly doubt those would have changed the way these cookies turned out. Oh, I also baked them for an extra 3-4 minutes at 400 degrees while I had a pizza going in the oven. Maybe that's the secret...

Well, my wife and I both thought that these cookies turned out pretty amazing and I really hope I can make them again... A lot of the kids were saying the cookies were good, but I didn't know which kids were eating which batch.

Butterless Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Cookie Madness

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1 large egg

1 cup chocolate chips

1/3 cup toasted walnuts (I didn't use these, but they probably would've helped)

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl, stir together flour, baking soda and salt. Set aside. Whisk together both types of sugar, oil, egg and vanilla. Add flour mixture to oil mixture and stir until just blended. Stir in chocolate chips and walnuts. Make mini golf ball size cookie balls. Put them onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Cool on sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack.

To be honest, I wasn't as impressed with these cookies, probably because I followed the recipe though it is more likely that I didn't have walnuts. I initially used the suggested 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chips, but I just ended up with a big bowl of chocolate chips at the bottom...

Well, I was happy to supply my students with a rush of sugar at around 4pm today though I hope their parents don't catch wind of this! In an effort to boost the lack of pictures in this post, I was considering posting a picture of them looking incredibly goofy at the start of the year in a 'silly' student council group photo but now that some of them might start reading this, I shan't. Instead, here is a picture of a slice of my birthday rum cake which my wife made for me. Maybe I can convince her to write up the recipe for everyone...

See how that rum glaze glistens in that fluffy cake.

no one sayin' do this

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