Taste Odyssey #7 - A to Z Everything-But-The-Kitchen-Sink Chocolate Chip Cookies

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/a-to-z-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-chocolate-chip-cookies/detail.aspx

After a vacation and a birthday weekend where the oft-demanded chocolate cavity maker cake (see #4 below) was pressed back into service, I finally got the chance to try something new for the baking arsenal.  I hadn't yet made any chocolate chip cookies from scratch, and when I stumbled across these, well, the name alone made them too interesting to pass up.

Despite such a promising name, however, the end result wasn't exactly to my liking.  Or was it?  Frankly, without a dead body falling out of the cookbook that's about as much drama and suspense as I can wring from a blog about baking, so let's just act like we're in the middle of sweeps week and press onward.

Actually, I'm going to make an initial admission here that I ended up making these cookies twice in the span of three days.  On a lark I decided to take a batch to work; I wanted to divest myself of some of the excess ingredients and it was an easy, but appreciated, gesture.  Things went... more interesting... the second time around.  That's body from the cookbook moment number two there.

First off, let's examine the mistakes I made with the initial batch.  I forgot to buy coconut, so even though it's a prescribed part of the package, it had no presence in either run of these cookies.  No great loss, I don't think.  You could consider it a substitution, or alteration, but in reality it was just because I was a bloody idiot and didn't make a shopping list.

My other sin was in not softening the butter enough.  As if I needed any help making things more difficult on myself, this really ended up giving me a lot of grief in getting a smooth distribution of the mixture.  I made sure to make it that much softer for the second batch.

Now we move to the substitutions, and let me tell you that this recipe ended up with enough of those to give a Chinese take-out nightmares.  First off, walnuts are not really my favorite and if I'm going to eat these then I'm not about to make them unpalatable to me.  It's part of the same solemn vow that will see a raisin in one of these recipes only after hell freezes over.  I had pecan pieces left over from the original carrot cake recipe that started this whole mess, so in they went.

After reading a bunch of the comments on the recipe, one person suggested that Frosted Flakes were a better cereal to use than Corn Flakes.  Well, William Kellogg gets his pound of flesh out of me either way and at least I'd get at least a couple of breakfasts from leftover Frosted Flakes.  Ergo, Tony the Tiger pinch hits here for Reginald Rooster.  Shocking revelation: they didn't add anywhere near as much to the recipe as I had hoped.  I was expecting something grrrrreat, but the change was hardly noticeable (not that I made a Corn Flakes batch, but I couldn't tell the Frosted Flakes were there which means they might as well have been anything).

Several people said that the mace was far too overpowering and suggested replacing it with an extra dash of nutmeg.  This is where the first recipe went a bit haywire; my extra dash got a bit out of control and with the kind of shrug that only the terribly foolhardly can properly manage I just went along with it.

Final result?  Some reasonably tasty oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with no real distinguishing features to them worth noting.  After all the comments and the ingredient list, I was really hoping for something special in these cookies.  Slightly bummed, I shared the batch to my usual suspects and that was that.

However, when I made the second batch, I properly adjusted the nutmeg and was very precise in my measuring.  I also had the butter more evenly mixed.   End result for round two? Much praise and a quickly emptied cookie container.  I have it on good authority that these were a huge improvement over the first round.  The problem was, neither my wife nor myself really wanted them again after the first batch was so underwhelming.  So my co-worker, who had tried the first batch and the second, is the lone person who tried both and she said the second batch was way better.  I can only assume the nutmeg was a big issue because otherwise the two batches were exactly alike.

On the health front, nothing at all was much of an issue.  Rolled oats are sometimes a question mark, but it seemed fine.  An unremarkable end for an unremarkable cookie.

Taste Odyssey #6 - Peanut Butter Bars

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Peanut-Butter-Bars-I/Detail.aspx?prop31=5

There's not a lot to be said for this recipe.  I learned a few important lessons from it, so from a beginner standpoint it was a fantastic recipe, but it's very basic at the same time as it's very, very good.   Conversely, despite being delicious it also gave my wife a migraine and gave me a slightly queasy feeling (which I had conveniently forgotten about from when my mother used to make them years ago), so I'm not planning to make this a recipe that I come back to any time soon.  Nobody else managed this problem, however, and even those of us who fell ill still agreed they tasted great, so if you're feeling that masochistic baking urge then your ship may have come in.

The bottom layer is very simplistic.  My first lesson from this recipe was learning that confectioner's sugar is just icing sugar.  If you're like me, and I know I am, this may have thrown you off at first glance.  From my professional novice perspective I spent quite some time trying to find confectioner's sugar in stores before I resorted to the internet, which of course immediately showed me the way.  Oops.  Next was melting butter, which was a simple matter of a saucepan and medium heat, quite the contrast to certain other melting attempts.  Only the peanut butter looks to pose any real issue but it went pretty quickly into the mixture and the whole thing spread very easily into the pan.

Next stop, the topping, which is just melted chocolate chips.  Of course, after the truffle debacle I was incredibly leery of going back to the melted chocolate well, but there's no point in not challenging myself.  This time around I re-used my stoneware bowl, set the microwave at the higher 70% power level, and let it go for two minutes.  Perfect.  Depressingly so, given my struggles when I was doing the truffles.  Minimal stirring required to just get rid of the last couple hard chips, then an easy pour over the pan.

Dramatic action shot here.  Once the chocolate is nicely spread, resist the urge to carve a dirty word into it before it sets and stuff it into the refrigerator for an hour.  Cut, serve, enjoy, regret, repeat ad nauseum (lots of nauseum in my case).

That's it from this end of the world for the week.  Like I say, this recipe does taste amazing but you should know you may get more than you bargain for from the deal.  Still, it's hard to argue with results that look this good.