Chocolate Chip Cookie Fail

I tried Dorie Greenspan's chocolate chip cookie recipe last night with less then stellar results. They were so ugly I couldn't even bring myself to take a picture of them to post here. They ended up completely flattening out, and the only thing giving them some height was the chocolate chips in them.


I'm not really sure what went wrong with them. My first thought is always to blame my oven and its complete lack of consistency, but that could be a cop-out. My go-to chocolate chip recipe uses more flour, I think about 3-4 cups, versus Dorie's 2 cups. Past that, I'm out of good guesses. I'll have to try Dorie's recipe at least once more before I deem it not worthy.


As ugly and sad as my cookie fail was, there was a silver lining. I didn't get in trouble for mistakes and loss of efficiency. No one cared that the couple of hours I spent making them could have been spent making cookies that I knew would turn out right. I had fun making them and reduced my stress level. The resident taste tester came home and said the place smell wonderful and the cookies tasted great, regardless of how they looked. And, best of all, I ended up with a big plate of chocolate chip cookies that the guys will enjoy tonight. Ugly cookie fail? Maybe. But tasty cookie win!!

Happy National Pancake Day!!

In keeping with tradition, my office celebrated National Pancake Day with two incredible rounds of pancakes!! Yes, I know, last year we celebrated National Pancake Week, which was a fabulous week of pancake eating competition between me and Lea, my quantity control expert. (By the way, I won that contest.) But this year it was just too much work to do pancakes every day, so it was shortened down to one day of pancake heaven.

My pancake-making area, also known as my desk

I kicked off the morning with Round 1 of pancakes: cinnamon griddle cakes. From my ongoing and dedicated research of allrecipes.com, I found the following recipe for cinnamon pancakes: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Cinnamon-Griddle-Cakes/Detail.aspx

My cinnamon roll pancakes cooking

These were amazing!! It was like a cinnamon roll in pancake form, complete with the frosting on top. The pancakes followed a basic pancake recipe, but had a ton of cinnamon added to them. I read the reviews on allrecipes and decided against the corn syrup so they wouldn't be super sweet. We noted that they could probably pass as whole wheat pancakes since they were so dark, so we felt slightly healthier as we added more frosting to them...

My quantity control expert, diligently working on a cinnamon pancake

After digesting the first round, the quantity control expert took over and served up some outstanding pumpkin pancakes. I don't have her recipe (maybe she'll posted it for me...), but you could smell the pumpkin and all the spices in the pancakes. With the pumpkin, it was slightly harder to tell if they were done, but they were incredibly moist!

Making her tasty pumpkin pancakes

"These things are unruly!!" ~The Quantity Control Expert

Both recipes turned out to be keepers that will be made again. While we both ate a lot of pancakes, there was no competition this year and it was nowhere near the insane amount of pancakes we ate last year. Overall, National Pancake Day was a win!!

Wine Sunday: Boeuf Bourguignon

Yesterday was another much-needed Wine Sunday, this week featuring Julia Child's Boeuf Bourguignon. I say featuring because this meal was a work of art and a labor of love that I spent literally all day working on. The resident taste tester and I were joined for dinner by James' roommates: three guys who can definitely eat a lot of meat!

After spending an hour and a half working to get the dish ready to go into the oven for 3-4 hours, I was hungry and more than a little cranky. Luckily, the resident taste tester came to my rescue with a fabulous BLT that restored my good mood. Plus, I was able to sneak a little nap in while the beef simmered happily in the oven.

When I got back to my kitchen, I started browning my pearl onions and mushrooms to go into the beef. Unfortunately, I didn't read the browning of the pearl onions as carefully as I should have, since it called for simmering the onions for 40-50 minutes. Since my beef was about ready to come out of the oven, the onions got about 25 minutes of simmering before I added them to the beef. Personally, I don't think anyone noticed.

Up to this point, all the many little steps had gone pretty smoothly, until I got to the sauce. I strained the beef and veggies out of the liquid and started boiling it down rapidly for several minutes, per Julia's instructions. After roughly 15 minutes of boiling, many words of encouragement, and a couple of curse words, it finally started to thicken up and a thick brown sauce was created! It may not seem like it, but it was a huge victory for me. Not only had I made sauce, but dinner, my masterpiece, was ready!

The guys came over for dinner bearing a lovely and always welcome gift, more wine, which was very much enjoyed. Not to toot my own horn, but I think that dinner was an absolute success. We went through roughly 3 pounds of beef, salad, potatoes, a baguette, and several bottles of wine, plus the resident taste tester made a delicious deconstructed apple crisp for dessert.

For all the work that went into it, I enjoyed making the boeuf bourguignon and I know I'll have to make it again in the future. But for next week, I'm thinking of going simple and enjoying a lazy Sunday!

PS: Don't forget, tomorrow is National Pancake Day!! My office will be continuing our tradition of celebrating pancakes, and I should hopefully have a blog up tomorrow with the results!!

Sugar Cookies - The Finished Products

Well, decorating all those cookies was quite the adventure on Sunday. While I still have a long ways to go before I'll be a master sugar cookie decorator, I had a lot of fun and thought the finished cookies ended up looking super cute!

My strategy this time was to bake Saturday night and decorate on Sunday. Next time, I think I'll bake in the morning, do the base frosting at night, and then decorate the next day. Even though I gave it a couple of hours before I decorated, I don't think the base fully dried.

Cookies after the base frosting

My sheet of cookies after the base frosting

I thought that the edible markers were lots of fun and I'm think I'll be using them more in the future. Since the base wasn't fully dry, the markers sometime went through the frosting. They also seemed to bleed a little more than I liked, but I was using the bold tip pens since Michaels didn't have the fine tip ones.

I used corn syrup diluted with a little bit of water to get the sprinkles to stick to the cookies. Those were pretty simple and looked really nice, if you can tell from the pictures. I had bright pink sprinkles that I bought, and then I used red food coloring to color raw sugar and use that as sprinkles.

It was hard coming up with all the phrases for the text ones

The white frosting that I used to decorate some of the cookies is tubed frosting that I had from another project. Once I got it going, it seemed to work pretty well, but it did clog up pretty easily. I was pretty darned pleased with my piping skills on those ones!

I was really happy with how they all turned out. The cookies were soft, moist, and very tasty, so I feel that my sugar cookies are improving. Most of them were packaged up and sent in a care package to James and Jeremy. They had a slight delay getting out because apparently yesterday was a holiday for all non-accountants and the post office was closed. But I got them to the post office today, so hopefully they'll get there in one piece and still be tasty!

The finished tray of cookies!

Sugar Cookie Hearts - Part I

This week's Wine Sunday is being trumped by Valentine's Day. Since I'm going out, I have no fabulous menu planned out for tomorrow. Instead, my kitchen escapade for this weekend is sugar cookies, specifically happy heart shaped ones that will be sent to Kuwait!



Before I go any further, I feel the need to apologize to Dorie Greenspan for not believing her recipe. As I was rolling out sugar cookies, I kept saying to my resident taste tester that there was no way I was going to get 50 2-inch cookies out of this batch. Granted, my cookies were a little smaller than 2-inches, but I got 72 out of them. So Dorie, I'm sorry I didn't believe you. Once again, you were right and I was wrong.

My problem with sugar cookies has always been that they spread way too much. I still don't know that I've figured out my problem, but after the first couple of sheets the cookies stopped spreading and seemed to be keeping their shapes!

My only guess is that I chilled the dough like crazy! I kept sticking the scraps back in the freezer, and if I started having trouble handling the shapes or dough, I just stuck the sheet in the fridge or freezer. I also used three cookie sheets this time to really let the sheets cool between uses. Maybe they really do mean it when they say to chill the dough. As a sidenote, history has taught me that they usually mean it when they say to line the pan with parchment paper.

The left one is from one of my first batches and the right is a later batch, which was probably colder when it went in the oven.

So for tonight, all my cookies are baked and cooling overnight so I can frost them tomorrow. I'm still undecided as using regular sugar cookie frosting, or trying the new meringue powder I just got. But I'm really excited for the decorating part tomorrow! I found these cool edible markers at Michael's today, so I'm looking forward to seeing how they write on the icing.

This was my test on an unfrosted cookie that I made for my resident taste tester.

She was strangely unimpressed by a cookie with her name on it.

More to come tomorrow after I get the cookies frosted and decorated!!