Taste Odyssey #3 - Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-butter-cup-cookies/detail.aspx

After this particular recipe I am now updating on a weekly basis, as I will be caught up with my current attempts at baking.  I have one left for next week's entry, and then the week after that will hopefully bring something new and exciting into all our lives and more importantly our mouths and to a relatively lesser extent our stomachs, waistlines, and lower intestines.

Right, so I stumbled onto this cookie recipe while I was browsing for ideas that looked good but didn't require a Herculean effort or some sort of baking mojo I have yet to accrue.  I went looking into these solely based on the title, figuring that they would be woefully complicated, however, given the name.  Far from it, these little scamps have pretty much all you could want in a cookie - great dough with a bit of a kick thanks to the peanut butter cups, and once you know a couple of simple tricks they are bog easy to make.

Trick one - make sure you have some decent capacity mini-muffin pans to bake them in.  That sounds ridiculous, but mini-muffin pans come in some pretty small sizes and you'll be baking these things way longer than necessary if you keep having to bake and cool off a single pan due to inadequate size (look, it matters, just accept and move on).  With a single batch yielding 40 cookies, I recommend a couple of 12-muffiners (accepted unit of measurement from the Muffinological Institute of Oslo) so you can get the whole batch done in two bakes.

Trick two - handle the peanut butter cups (I used Reese's) with care and common sense.  Try buy them as close to home as possible and not in the middle of a blisteringly hot summer day like some idiot (nobody I know, I swear).  Once home, stuff them in the fridge for an hour or so before prepping them.  This next bit is not part of the recipe, but something I read from others who had tried it and it should be considered essential to the whole thing given how easy it makes it.  After unwrapping the peanut butter cups from the fridge, toss them in a container of some kind and then throw them in the freezer for a bit (pretty sure I did an hour or so here too).  You may consider this a basic concept on the level of fire = bad, but once the cookies are out of the oven they are very hot and if you try and stuff a room temperature peanut butter cup into the center it'll come apart faster than the American economy tossed into a centrifuge.  Even the frozen ones were quickly warmed and slightly melty on the underside, but the outer peanut butter cups retained the pleasant Madison-Avenue-designed shapes that helped sell the look of the whole thing.

On the food allergen and migraine front, pretty much smooth sailing straight on through with these.  Kraft Peanut Butter in its original form has nothing of any concern.  Shockingly enough, neither did the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which I had fully expected to contain some extraneous thickening agent.  Nope, they are just as rich and as bad for you as you had originally thought.  Oh, and these may contain traces of peanuts, so be warned.  Ahem cough.

That's pretty much it.  The cookies look a lot like a similar version I've seen around that has Hershey's Kisses stuffed in the middle, with the difference being that the recipe for the base used here tastes better and a peanut butter cup will kick the ass of a Hershey's Kiss every day of the week.

Taste Odyssey #2 - Skor Bar Squares w/Allegedly Vanilla Icing

Recipe: http://www.grouprecipes.com/6489/awesome-skor-squares.html
Recipe: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/creamy_vanilla_frosting.php

I look forward to going to once-a-week posting once I finally catch up to my current experiments in baked goods, but for now you can enjoy as I keep pushing through my check list of culinary conquests.

Important Cross-Border Cooking Clarification - Skor Bars are a chocolate-coated toffee confection that tastes like delicious.  The closest American equivalent for this recipe are Heath Bars.  If they do not sell chips of this product, please don't look too hard at how awesome this recipe is.

Compared to the diabolical complexity of the whole carrot cake experiment, this proved to be a very, very easy follow-up.  On the Superman Scale of Dessert Complexity, the carrot cake was easily a Lex Luthor master plan whereas this one was more like a guy named Doug trying to get out of paying his bar tab. 

This recipe was born from my desire to recreate a similar one that my mother had made some years prior, but I didn't really feel like asking for what she used.  My whole thing here is exploring and trying to learn something, so I went hunting for something that sounded about right and made it.  Undoubtedly the simplest recipe I have attempted so far; the hardest part was getting the icing made. In fact, I whipped up two pans of these in the same time it took to do the carrot cake, if not less.

First off, in terms of ingredients, the only thing that was slightly sketchy here were the Ritz crackers.  You'd be amazed what they hide in food packaging labels and I was still a bit worried after I vetted them that rogue MSG could be lying in wait.  Turns out that this is not the case, I am happy to report.  Icing was a different story; your laboratory bred can of pre-made frosting is a quick and easy fix but it has a list of chemicals that wouldn't sound out of place on a package labelled "Penzoil" let alone "Duncan Hines" and I do not trust them.

But, let's start at the beginning.  Undoubtedly the most enjoyable part of this recipe is the crumbing of the Ritz crackers.  Simple and fast way to do this?  Punch a small hole in the side of the bag, let the air out.  Next grab your rolling pin and just start beating the holy hell out of the crackers.  After you revel in the vicarious thrill of this for a bit, get down to actual business and start rolling the pin over the bag.  The crumbing really depends on your level of devotion to the definition of the term.  I almost want to say that the first bag that had bigger bits in it turned out slightly better but both of them were delicious so it's a matter of preference.

Oh, and this is going to sound utterly dim, but when the recipe calls for condensed milk, they mean sweetened condensed milk.  Which I'm sure for many people is a bit of a 'duh' moment, but I was looking around for quite some time, vainly seeking milk that was just condensed before realizing that such a beast does not exist.

As I say, that was the easy part.  Next came the icing.  You'll notice the term 'Allegedly' up there in the title because it tasted great but the vanilla was probably not as mixed in as it should have been.  Totally my fault, so your results may vary, though it could be that the small amount of vanilla used is overwhelmed by everything else.  I did like this recipe because the icing was amazing, natural, and it made an insane amount.  I can confirm that leftover icing (and there's plenty to frost two pans of this stuff plus a ton extra) will freeze just fine and can be easily thawed out and applied later with no harm to its sugary goodness.

Big food warning regarding the whipping cream though.  I highly recommend coughing up the extra couple bucks for the all-natural stuff (Farm Boy carries it up here, I have heard Trader Joe's has similar in the States).  Your average dairy has thickened its whipping cream with a product on the label called carageenan.  It is a natural food thickener that's found in just about everything that you can imagine needs thickener (and some things that don't need thickener where apparently they toss it in just for the hell of it) because it's cheap.  It is also known to cause stomach issues in sensitive people, particularly those with IBS, and it can cause MSG-related reactions.  So if you know somebody sensitive to MSG, the whipping cream will turn your icing into something just as potentially problematic as the store-bought kind.  Since I know people with both issues, big no-no.

All potential problems avoided, however, and you have an incredibly rich and easy dessert.  Very tasty for a very minimal amount of effort.  Pardon the blurry picture but I did get better with the camera as I went.  Oddly enough the inside of our fridge is not an optimal photo studio.  Until next time, insert witty cooking catchphrase here!

Taste Odyssey #1 - Carrot Cake w/Cream Cheese Icing

Recipe: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/canadas_best_carrot_cake_with_cream_cheese_icing.php

Some of my baking experiments are fueled through my wife's very delicate migraine sensibilities.  She's quite sensitive to certain foods and ingredients, so by making something that's all natural ingredients I am able to confidently provide the delicious without exacting a horrible price later on.

That was certainly the reasoning behind the carrot cake.  I'm not going to give great detail, yet, on what I have been doing, more illustrate the perils and any alterations that may have occurred along the way to the finish product.  Sadly I don't have a great picture of this carrot cake because it looked fantastic.

One thing I did not quite grasp from the outset was the concept of pan greasing and flouring, which is one of those baking terms that everybody expects you to know without actually telling you what it is.  Essentially, you grab a blob of butter, softened works really well obviously, and rub it all over the surface of the pan in question.  Then take a half cup of flour and shake it over the greased pan surface.  Next toss the flour all over the place like you're having a seizure, coat the whole thing, then dump the excess flour out.

My only thing about flouring is that I tend to leave a little too much in the pan, but I can safely say that a little extra here and there will not adversely affect anything coming out of the pan proper in my current experiences.

The recipe was pretty complicated for a first time baker, but going in with a cool head and some assistance from Cassie (my wife) it was very manageable.  She was a monster help because she shredded the carrots while I fiddled with the other stuff and helped me work the mixer.  Interestingly, this was the only recipe where I actually used our mixer, everything else has been stirred by hand.

This carrot cake recipe wins, hands down, versus most others I found because the others had raisins in them.  I don't mind a raisin but they do not belong in my baked goods.  They are like lazy man's sugar to me and if you are pro-raisin I do not mind telling you right now that this blog will disappoint, shock, dismay, and otherwise not acknowledge your stance.

As I recall, the cake was in for the whole 40 minutes, though I did check it 5 minutes ahead of schedule just to make sure it was good.  It definitely needed the full 40 to cook, which was fine since I made the icing in the meantime.  You could easily shave some time off by buying your own icing but prepared icing is chock full of chemicals and since I'm trying to stay natural here it was homemade or bust.  Besides that, the homemade was amazing and it was really, really simple to bake.

So that was the end of my first foray into baking.  Tune in next time when I start having actual pictures of the nonsense cookery I'm embarking on.

The fine art of doing precisely what is listed in a recipe.

I hope this could be the start of something good.

By good I mean delicious.

For anybody who stumbled onto this little project, my name is Mark, I'm a happily married 33-year-old geek, and I have learned, in the past month, that I love to bake.

There was no epiphany here, I didn't set a bush on fire and have it talk to me or anything like that.  One day I just got it in my head to try and make a carrot cake from scratch and icing equally from scratch.  It was a bit hectic but it turned out amazingly well.  Since then I've been playing around pretty much every week with a new dessert recipe or something like that.

I suppose I could cook, but my wife does a better job at it in my opinion, and my forte seems to be grilling and baking.  Baking seems to be a good fit for my ability and it gives me a rare feeling of satisfaction that I often don't get in my work of late.

I don't want to go off on any major tangents here, the whole purpose of this blog is one and one alone.  I intend to depict and describe my attempts to learn more about myself and the wonderful world I've managed to unlock here.  I want to make a little chronicle of what I am trying, what I am learning, what works and what does not, simply so I can learn.

That being said, time to get to the real business here...  the food!