Working on Oatmeal Raisin Cookies - 1st Attempt

I received some excellent input from my friends about what an oatmeal raisin cookie should be like. The only universally loved quality seems to be a chewy center with crisp edges. Desired spice levels, sweetness, nut inclusion/exclusion, and overall healthiness vary.

Since my standard menu of cookies will probably look something like this - chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, ginger - I think I do need to include walnuts in the oatmeal raisin cookie. Some people really love nuts. Folks who hate them can either pick a different cookie (the chocolate chip cookies will be nut-free) or pre-order a special batch without walnuts. Also, I feel that if you're looking for a healthy cookie, maybe you shouldn't eat a cookie. I'll try it with applesauce for some of the fat, but only because I feel like that could lead to good flavor and texture for this particular cookie. If full fat tastes better, so be it. Since there will be a ginger cookie - and likely a highly spiced one - I will aim for mild cinammon in the oatmeal raisin cookie. As with all my cookies, it will not be too sweet, and it will be small.

For chewiness, I'll try melted butter (rather than creamed butter and sugar) and brown sugar. For crispiness (on the edges), I'll be sure to include some white sugar. The walnuts shall be toasted so they taste awesome. The raisins shall be soaked in some sort of hot liquid so they're plump. Maybe orange juice.

My first trial recipe

Ingredients

3/4 cup raisins
juice of one lemon (couple tbsp, at least)
hot water (enough to cover the raisins)
4 oz (1 stick) butter
3.5 oz (1/2 cup) brown sugar
3.5 oz (1/2 cup) granulated sugar
2 oz (1/2 cup) walnuts, chopped
3.75 oz (3/4 cup) all purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups rolled oats (not instant)

Steps

1. Boil the water, pour the lemon juice over the raisins, and then pour enough hot water over the raisins to cover (in a shallow bowl). Let stand while preparing the rest of the dough.
2. Melt the butter. Once melted, combine it with the sugars in a large bowl. Stir and let stand.
3. Toast the walnuts in a dry skillet over medium low heat until they smell really good. Don't burn them.
4. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon in a medium bowl.
5. Once the butter/sugar mixture is no longer hot to the touch (warm is OK), add the egg and vanilla and stir to combine.
6. Dump the flour mixture into the butter mixture and stir well to combine. Squeeze the liquid out of the raisins before adding them to the dough. Add the oatmeal and walnuts and stir everything well to combine.
7. Put the bowl in the freezer while you pre-heat the oven to 350° F. Good time for some cleaning, checking email, petting cats, or whatever you like.
8. Use a #40 portioner to drop dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Flatten gently with the palm of your hand. Bake for 10 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through. You want to see light browning on just the edges of the cookies. Remove from the oven and transfer to a wire rack as soon as the cookies are firm enough to move.

Results

I tried the first pan exactly as written. They came out very soft and flat and had to cool almost completely on the pan before they were strong enough to move. They still fell apart quite readily the next day.

For the second pan, I did not flatten the dough, and I baked for 12 minutes instead of 10. These held together a bit better - I was able to transfer them to a rack after maybe 3 minutes - but they were still too crumbly. There was more browning on these cookies from the longer bake time, but not flattening them out led to inconsistent shapes. I was worried that they would be hard when cool, but this wasn't the case.

Both versions had excellent flavor and the right level of sweetness, but they were soft all the way through and did not hold together. 

Tasters remarks were 80% enthusiastically positive. The only real feedback I got had to do with the crumbliness and lack of any crispiness. One person said she'd have liked more cinnamon.

This recipe was a good start, but I'm going to make the following changes to the next attempt:

• Increase ratio of white to brown sugar in an effort to get crisp edges.
• Increase amount of flour and stir longer to develop gluten and hopefully help the cookies stay together better.
• Increase cinnamon.

Carrot Cake

Ingredients

Cake
12 1/2 oz all-purpose flour (2 1/2 cups)
1 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves
3 eggs
7 oz granulated sugar (1 cup)
7 oz brown sugar (1 cup, packed)
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup oil
1 lb carrots, peeled and shredded (preferably by hand on a box grater)
1 cup raisins, soaked in hot water and squeezed

Frosting
8 oz. 1/3-fat cream cheese (Neufchâtel), softened
5 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
2 tbsp sour cream
pinch salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 cup powdered sugar (add more if you like it sweeter - I don't)

1 cup toasted pecans, chopped

Steps

Cake

1. Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease a 9 x 13" cake pan with butter.
2. Mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices, and salt in a medium bowl with a whisk or fork. Set aside.
3. Beat the eggs and sugars with an electic mixer on high until light and fluffy (about three minutes). Add the vanilla and beat to incorporate.
4. With the beaters on low, slowly drizzle the oil into the egg mixture to emulsify.
5. Add half the flour mixture to the egg mixture and fold in with a rubber scraper. Repeat with the rest of the flour. Be gentle with the batter.
6. Gently stir in the carrots and raisins.
7. Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake 45-50 minutes (until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with a few crumbs attached), turning half-way through.
8. Remove cake from oven and rest in the pan on a wire rack until completely cool.

Frosting

1. Put the Neufchâtel, butter, sour cream, and salt in a food processor and whiz to combine.
2. Add the vanilla and powdered sugar and whiz to combine.
3. Refrigerate until cake is cool enough to frost.
4. Frost the cake and sprinkle the toasted pecans over the top.

Recipe: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies
by Jessica Louise

Makes 30 cookies.

Ingredients

6 oz. butter (or 3/4 cup or 1 1/2 sticks)
3.5 oz. granulated sugar (or 1/2 cup)
5.25 oz. brown sugar (or approx. 3/4 cup)
10 oz. all-purpose flour (or approx. 2 cups)
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt*
1 egg
1 egg yolk**
1 tbsp. vanilla
6 oz. chocolate chips (half a bag)***

*I use non-iodized, fine sea salt.
**Approximately 2.35 oz. of egg, total.
***Quality matters. A lot. I use Ghirardelli semi-sweet or 60%.

Steps

1. Put the butter in a pan to brown. For tips, try this or this. 
2. Keeping an eye on the butter, combine the sugars in a large mixing bowl. Once the butter is browned, pour it into the sugars and stir to combine.
3. In a separate, medium mixing bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
4. Once the sugar and butter mixture is no longer hot to the touch (warm is OK), add the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla. Stir well to combine.
5. Add the flour mixture to the sugar-butter-egg mixture and stir well to incorporate all the flour. 
6. Add the chocolate chips and knead with your hands in the bowl to evenly distribute the chips throughout the batter. It will seem like the chocolate chips don't want to stick in the batter, but that's OK.
7. Heat the oven to 350° F. Put the dough in the freezer while the oven heats up. Now is a good time to clean up. 
8. Once the oven is heated, portion the dough (using a #40 portioner, or a tablespoon, generously rounded) onto parchment-lined baking sheets. You should be able to fit 15 cookies on a standard half-sheet pan. 
9. Bake for 12 minutes, turning the baking sheet half-way through. Remove from the oven when the edges have just started to brown, let them rest on the sheet for a minute, and transfer to a wire rack to cool.
10. Once cool, store in an open plastic zip bag or in a glass or plastic container with the lid only resting lightly on top. You don't want to leave them completely exposed to the air, but having them in an air-tight container ruins the texture, too. 

Kouign amann

Kouign amann (pronounced something like "keen ahMAH") is a simple laminated dough. Basically, you enclose butter in dough, then fold it and roll it out and repeat a bunch of times so you have lots of fat-dough-fat-dough layers. This one has 27 layers, which sounds like a lot, but I only had to do three folds, or "turns." Croissants, puff pastry, and danishes are all laminated doughs. Kouign amann is similar to a croissant, but with the addition of sugar.

This turned out pretty well for being my first attempt at laminating. I ended up with a higher fat to dough ratio than intended because I messed up the enclosing-the-butter part, but I don't think that had a huge impact on the final product.

It smelled amazing while it was baking because the sugar sprinkled on top was caramelizing. I ate way too much of it. And I made two. My co-workers will thank/resent me for bringing the rest in tomorrow.

The recipe I used came from Joe Pastry, which may be my very favorite baking site. His kouign amann looks a lot better than mine, as it should.

Boston Cream Pie

This is my Boston cream pie. I thought it failed. But letting it sit longer makes a huge difference in the quality because the pastry cream gets a chance to soak into the sponge-y cake. It was delicious.

I used Greg Patent's recipe from Origins (found online here) because he dedicated a lot of time to tracking down the true cake.

While I sincerely appreciate and value authenticity, I think baking is a place where tinkering and change are totally acceptable. Next time, I'll skip the almonds (they got soggy from the pastry cream that glues them to the side of the cake). I'll also mess with the chocolate topping (a simple mixture of chocolate and cream) because it turned out chewy, almost rubbery. I'll up the ratio of rum to water (brushed onto the cake layers before assembling) because I couldn't taste it at all in the final product. But the cake and the pastry cream were just right.

Pastry cream might be my favorite substance. I was happy to find that this recipe left me with more than a cup extra.

Working on chocolate chip cookies

Crunchy on the outside, chewy in the middle. And this was not right out of the oven. Almost perfect.

I figured out snickerdoodles. Now it's time for chocolate chip cookies.

The photo above is of my second attempt. The first attempt turned out weird (see the problems listed below) but pretty. The second attempt is very nearly perfect. They'd be better with a better chocolate, but I couldn't find Ghirardelli 60% at the co-op.

I'll gather feedback tonight at a party. And make them again in the middle of the week when I have my co-workers over for a Wii party. But they're pretty close to perfect.