Double Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

Another item I made for the Relay for Life bake sale and forgot to take pictures of, oops! Hehe, oh well! I used to love getting the Eating Well magazine because it had pretty good recipes (they looked good anyway) and it had a lot of interesting facts and tips in it. Of course, part of the allure was that I got it for free at work...oh well. Some of the comments said they omitted the extra canola oil altogether and it turned out great, but I think that would make a more cakey cookie. If you're all for that, hey great, more power to you, but I wanted something with the consistency not synonymous with "low-fat." I think this cookie meets that because it's really not quite low fat. It has a cup of peanut butter in it, but it's all natural peanut butter so you can feel a little bit better about eating these. I followed the instructions and used the chunky peanut butter, but honestly, I didn't really like the taste of the peanuts in it, I liked the crunchiness it afforded, but not the taste of the peanuts. I think it's because I like my peanuts salted and roasted--which, well, that would defeat the healthy part of that, wouldn't it? These turned out pretty decently, but they're definitely not super sweet but they do taste rich. I like the use of the turbinado sugar. Btw, just so you know, the measurement for the turbinado sugar at the end seemed too much to me. I really don't think you need that much. 4 out of 5 stars/Easy to make and I would make them again.
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Below from here



Makes: 3 dozen cookies

Total Time: 1 1/2 hours

Ingredients

• 1 cup chunky natural peanut butter
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 3 tablespoons low-fat plain yogurt
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/4 cup rolled oats
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup trans-fat-free peanut butter chips, such as Sunspire
• 1/4 cup turbinado sugar (see Note)

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Beat peanut butter, oil, brown sugar and granulated sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed until the sugars are blended. Beat in eggs, yogurt and vanilla until combined.
3. Whisk flour, cocoa, oats, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl. With the mixer on low speed, gradually add the dry ingredients to the peanut butter mixture until blended. (It will be sticky.) Stir in chocolate and peanut butter chips.
4. Using a small cookie scoop or slightly rounded tablespoons of dough, place cookies 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
5. Dip the bottom of a glass in water and then in turbinado sugar. Use the sugared glass to flatten the cookies slightly, leaving a thin layer of sugar on top, rewetting the glass as needed.
6. Bake the cookies in batches until they are just set and the tops appear cracked, 8 to 10 minutes. (Do not overbake or they will be dry.) Cool on the baking sheet for 2 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool.

Tips & Notes

• Make Ahead Tip: Store in an airtight container for up to 3 days or freeze for up to 3 months.

• Ingredient Note: Turbinado sugar is steam-cleaned raw cane sugar. It’s coarse-grained and light brown in color, with a slight molasses flavor. Find it in the natural-foods section of large supermarkets or at natural-foods stores.

Nutrition

Per cookie: 115 calories; 6 g fat (1 g sat, 1 g mono); 12 mg cholesterol; 13 g carbohydrates; 3 g protein; 1 g fiber; 102 mg sodium; 33 mg potassium.

Easy Cream Cheese Brownies

What's better than cream cheese and chocolate? Not much. Except meat.
But no, there's no meat in this. These yummy delicious, wonderful things are absolutely delicious! So easy to make since the recipe calls for a boxed brownie mix of your choice (I always go with Ghiradelli mixes because they are always quite YUMMY.) The bake time below really depends on your brownie mix. I had to bake mine closer to an hour because the Ghiradelli mix calls for 50 or 55 minutes, I forget right now. It's difficult to tell when it's done, I used the toothpick test. Either way, this was so good warm with a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Happy baking!

4.5 stars out of 5.

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Adapted from recipe from here.

SERVES 16

Ingredients

1 package fudge brownie mix
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
1/3 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 F degrees.
2. Prepare the brownie mix according to package directions.
3. Pour into a greased 13x9-inch baking pan.
4. Beat cream cheese with electric mixer on medium speed until smooth.
5. Add sugar and mix. Add vanilla and egg; mix until well-blended.
6. Place cheese mixture in dolups over the whole pan, leaving some brownie showing inbetween.
7. Cut or swirl through batter several times with a knife or fork for a marbled effect. It can be tricky to get a good marble effect so be careful not to over work it.
8. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool; cut into squares. (These will also freeze well).

Ice Cream Brownie Cake

Happy VERY belated birthday, Elyse! Haha, oh man. So I wish I had the opportunity to take a picture of the inside of the cake, however I was the cake cutter at the party and felt it was a little too--weird-- if I stopped everything to do that. So this is what you get. :)

Yes, I know, it's SUPERBLY uneven, the frosting is terrible, the writing is crooked, but man oh man, was it good. I bought a Ghiradelli's Dark Chocolate brownie mix from the store as well as some frosting and went at it.

I say this is a budget dessert because this in comparison to buying an actual ice cream cake---well, those can run you $30-40 depending on where you get it and it wouldn't be this large. I was lucky enough to get my ice cream (Breyer's Vanilla) on sale for $2.88 per container. Can I just take a moment to say how things keep shrinking in size?? It used to be a half gallon container, now its a slim 1.2 L container selling for an original price of almost $5! Are they joking? Too bad the brownie mix wasn't on sale, but $3 for a bit of heaven without making my own brownies from scratch on the same day that I was making lemon bars--well, I'm willing to deal. Since I'm seriously unemployed, cheaper (for the most part because I can't say the same thing for cheap napkins from Target) is better. This was my birthday present to Elyse--a homemade ice cream brownie cake.

Recipe:

1 prepackaged cake or brownie mix
3 quarts of ice cream
1 13 x 9 x 2in baking dish
1 can of frosting
1/4c sprinkles
Foil or parchment paper

1. Line your baking dish with foil or parchment paper for ice cream. Scoop softened ice cream onto lined baking dish and try to smooth or even out as best as you can. Making it even is always the hard part. After you've made a layer a little under 1" high freeze baking dish with ice cream covered with foil until hardened.

2. After a few hours, remove ice cream from baking dish. This should be easy because of your foil underneath. Replace ice cream in freezer. I used a larger baking dish and put the ice cream in it with the foil on it still.

3. Prepare brownie mix and bake as directed in the same baking dish you originally used for the ice cream. It will be a thinner layer of brownie than the directions call for, so keep an eye on it to cook faster and not burn. Luckily because you'll be freezing it later, if your brownie comes out a little more done or underdone than normal, it will be fine because it firms up.

4. After your brownie is done baking, cool it down to still a little warm and place layer of ice cream on top. This way, hopefully your ice cream will melt just a little into the brownie to help the brownie and ice cream stick together when you cut it. (I had a little bit of a problem with this.)

5. Top ice cream layer with frosting, filling in any cracks. Of course if you had ice cream cracks, you can always add in more ice cream.

6. Sprinkles, flowers, etc. As you can see, I had some leftover beautiful baby blue sprinkles from my sister's baby shower and proceeded to carefully draw out Elyse on the top, cuz I wasn't crazy enough to write out Happy Birthday.

There are other ways to do this too. You could always take a page from Baskin Robbins and use a wire or string and after removing the carton from the ice cream, proceed to cut the ice cream in horizontal slices and place them on top. This didn't work well with the size of my dish so I ditched this option.

Obviously all of these things can be tweaked to your own specifications. I used the Dark chocolate brownie mix, but feel free to use a vanilla cake, a funfetti cake, a lemon cake, etc. The possibilities are endless. Same goes for the ice cream, maybe try a sorbetto instead which could be light and fun. You could also use a cream cheese frosting or a funfetti frosting. (Can you tell I like the funfetti? It's so pretty.) You could also get crazy and use a sheet cake and cut that in half horizontally and then have a layer of cake followed by a layer of ice cream followed by a layer of cake again and then frosting. That looks so much prettier than my ugly second cousin cake. :)

Needless to say, it was an absolute hit. The dark chocolate brownie complimented so well with just plain ol' vanilla ice cream by balancing out the sweetness. It was very well received and most of it was gone. Just have fun and enjoy!

5 of 5 stars! YUMMY.

The Momofuku Milk Bar Compost Cookie

*UPDATED 3/29/10*


The crazy, messy batter. I hate trying to cream butter and sugar without a paddle attachment! BOOO.

Ugh, my burned cookies before I used the cookie cutters to cut out the unburned centers. Good grief.

*END*
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Recipe Song: None. I listened to the latest installment of the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries on CD :) Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris. Pretty good idea, except when I washed dishes or blended things and couldn't hear it anymore. But that's what the rewind button is for, right?

So I was crazy enough to try this recipe. I say crazy because I don't have a stand mixer so I had no paddle attachment to make this. However, I didn't realize that til after I started mixing with my hand mixer and was trying to figure out why it wouldn't mix well and kept spattering all over.

Huh. No wonder they always tell you to recipe through your recipe thoroughly before you attempt it.

Anyways, that combined with an error with the baking temperature, and distractions in the form of a telephone call resulted in not so great cookies. I once again cooked using the convection oven which kinda screwed things up because I entered 400 degrees, and my oven usually converts it to the proper temp for convection oven baking. But for some reason, this time, it stayed at the temp entered and I ended up burning my cookies. I also forgot to check on them part way through because I got caught on the phone and I totally forgot about my cookies. Totally my bad. Needless to say, these didn't turn out at all like the ones pictured. Even after refrigerating the dough for almost 3 hours, they spread so thinly that it turned into one big cookie sheet with dented lines where the spaces between used to be. One sheet was so browned around the edges due to uneven cooking at too high a temperature, that I resorted to using two different sized cookie cutters to cut out the non-burnt centers and tossed the outer edges.

I must say, even tho one entire sheet was burned (even the bottoms), they were miraculously still pretty decent tasting. I was adventurous and used tortilla chip pieces and butterscotch morsels. Interesting combination? I think so! It gave a nice sweet-savory contrasting taste.

I don't know if I'll be making this again because it made a fair mess with only satisfactory results. Maybe I'll try it again when I have a paddle attachment. But until then...no thanks. :) I took pictures of my mishap, but now I'm a tad embarrassed to post them. Maybe one day. But until then, the nice poster of the website I took this from posted more than enough detailed pics of all his steps and that'll help you should you decide to make them as well. Happy baking!

3.5 out of 5 stars (but I would say that's due to my many errors...kitchen adventures indeed.)

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Below from here.

The Momofuku Milk Bar Compost Cookie
recipe by Christina Tosi
(Courtesy of Regis & Kelly's website)

Ingredients:

1 cup butter (that's two sticks, unsalted)
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 Tbsp corn syrup [Note: I left this out; not because I'm against corn syrup, I just didn't have it. The cookies came out fine, though may have had a nicer sheen with the syrup.]
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tsps baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 tsps Kosher salt
1 1/2 cups your favorite baking ingredients (options: chocolate chips, Raisenettes, Rollos, Cocoa Krispies)
1 1/2 cups your favorite snack foods (chips, pretzels, etc.)

Note: as said above, I used chopped up bittersweet chocolate and crushed pretzels. Next time I'd definitely add potato chips.

1. In a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, cream butter, sugars and corn syrup on medium high for two to three minutes until fluffy and pale yellow in color. Scrape down the sides with a spatula.

2. On a lower speed, add eggs and vanilla to incorporate.

Increase mixing speed to medium-high and start a timer for 10 minutes. During this time the sugar granules will fully dissolve, the mixture will become an almost pale white color and your creamed mixture will double in size.

3. When time is up, on a lower speed, add the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

Mix 45 - 60 seconds just until your dough comes together and all remnants of dry ingredients have incorporated. Do not walk away from your mixer during this time or you will risk over mixing the dough. Scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl with a spatula.

4. On the same low speed, add in the hodgepodge of your favorite baking ingredients and mix for 30 - 45 seconds until they evenly mix into the dough. Add in your favorite snack foods last, paddling again on low speed until they are just incorporated.

5. Using a 6 oz. ice cream scoop (I'm not sure how many ounces mine is, but it worked well), portion cookie dough onto a parchment lined sheetpan.

6. Wrap scooped cookie dough tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for a minimum of one hour or up to 1 week.

DO NOT BAKE your cookies from room temperature or they will not hold their shape.

7. Heat the oven to 400 F. Take the plastic off your cookies and bake 9 to 11 minutes. While in the oven, the cookies will puff, crackle and spread.

At 9 minutes, the cookies should be browned on the edges and just beginning to brown towards the center. Leave the cookies in the oven for the additional minutes if these colors don't match up and your cookies still seem pale and doughy on the surface.

8. Cool the cookies completely on the sheet pan (good luck!) before transferring to a plate or an airtight container or tin for storage. At room temp, they'll keep five days.

Baking Tip #1 - Baking Chocolate Substitute

3 tbsp coca + 1 tbsp butter can be substituted for 1 ounce unsweetened baking chocolate.

thanks, alton brown!

Haven't tried these yet, but don't they look scrumptious? Who doesn't love Thin Mints, especially when you don't need to spend $4 on a box that seems to somehow shrink with each passing year...

Everything below taken from here.

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Faux Thin Mints

For about 2 dozen cookies (revised from Bon Appetit):

• 1 1/2 c. all purpose flour
• 3/4 c. unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 3/4 c. (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 tsp. peppermint extract
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 c. sugar
• 1 large egg
• 6 oz. milk chocolate

Whisk flour, cocoa powder, and salt in medium bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until smooth. Beat in peppermint extract and vanilla extract. Beat in sugar in 3 additions. Add egg and beat until blended. Add dry ingredients and beat just until blended (dough will be sticky). Divide dough between 2 sheets of plastic wrap. Using plastic wrap as aid, form dough on each into 2-inch-diameter log. Wrap with plastic and refrigerate dough until well chilled, at least 2 hours. Position 1 rack in center and 1 rack in top third of oven; preheat to 350°F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Unwrap cookie dough logs; roll it out with a rolling pin and form the round cookie with a cookie cutter.

Transfer the cookies to a parchment paper lined baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes or until the cookies are firm to touch but still soft. Lay all the cookies out when they are all done baking and splatter on the melted chocolate. Wait for the chocolate to firm and cool before serving or saving.

Awesome Chocolate Brownies

I just tried this recipe today and it was divine, but a huge quatity.
Note: Used 1/2c applesauce with 1 stick butter, 1c Lindt Truffle Dark Chocolate Shavings added directly into mix + 1+c of semi-sweet chips, 1 tsp of baking soda + 1 tsp cream of tartar instead of 1 tsp baking powder, used a smaller pan (BAD IDEA--> uneven cooking, thick brownies, and much longer baking time--really thick, and tall too), omitted nibs altogether.

Tip: I learned that 1 part baking soda + 2 parts cream of tartar = baking powder alternative. Why in the world would I have cream of tartar? To make snickerdoodles with, duh, silly!
(I wonder if it expires, cuz i've had it for a looooooooong time, tho never opened it...special!)

5 out of 5 stars

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The recipe and picture below taken from here.

Yummy-Nib Brownies
Adapted slightly from the recipe on the back of the King Arthur Flour bag

1 cup unsalted butter
2 1/2 cups sugar (460 g)
1 1/4 cup Valrhona cocoa
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs
1 1/2 cups (6 1/4 oz) AP flour
2 cups (12-oz bag) chocolate chips (the darker the better!)
1/2 cups cocoa nibs (I use Guittard)

(note on the measurements - I try to bake as much as possible using a scale, so I convert most of the recipes I use into grams - easier to double/triple/divide than using ounces)

Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a 9" x 13" pan with parchment paper so it comes up each of the shorter sides (butter the two other sides)

Melt the butter over low heat. Add the sugar and heat up both just until it's just about to boil. This will give the brownies a crispy top crust. Transfer to a mixing bowl.

With a wooden spoon, stir in the cocoa, salt, baking powder and vanilla. Add the eggs one by one, beating until smooth and shiny. Add the flour, mix gently until it's almost completely incorporated. Add the chips and the cocoa nibs until combined.

Pour into the prepared pan. Bake for 28-30 minutes. Brownies are done when the top is firm and slightly puffed and set on the edges.

Chill in the fridge (or outside if your fridge is like mine and it's already stuffed!) until cool.