Perfecto Cookies

I had some cookie dough left over from when I made last-day-of-school goodbye cookies for my students. I froze the dough (wrapped in wax paper in a log, then in a plastic bag) and then decided today that I had enough cookie appropriate events coming up that it was a good time to bust out the rest of these guys. Plus I thought it would be really great to heat up the house with a 350 degree oven on a 90 degree day.

The recipe comes from the New York Times perfect cookie search. The first time I used this recipe, I basically used it as an outline and the cookies were just alright. This time around, the only thing I changed was to use "buttons" instead of "discs" for the chocolate. Sticking to the recipe produced some of the best cookies I have ever made or eaten! Resting the batter, high quality chocolate, and a flour blend I think are key here. I guess sprinkling on some salt does something too.

When I made them for my students, I used probably half-sized dollops of batter to make little quarter-sized cookies, which I thought were a nice little treat and spread them out better amongst 30-ish teenagers. The ones from today are about 5 inches in diameter.

Lets make some BREAD PUDDING

 

I'm not much of a recipe writer-downer. i like to take little notes about whatever i'm currently going to cook or bake and write them down on scraps of paper. if the food turns out good, it means i put the scrap of paper somewhere in the kitchen, usually on the fridge - YAY! it also means that i have about 45 scraps of paper which all have some sort of variation on X cups of sugar, X tbsp butter, X cups of milk, splash vanilla, bake at 350 for 35 min. So I rarely know if my recipe is for cookies or cupcakes or whatever. Which is why, in order to keep this recipe special and out of the "scrap o paper pile" - i wrote it on a netflix return envelope. I love this recipe. It was handed down from my great grandmother and has been a favorite of mine for my whoooole life! But apparently my great grandmother was like me, and didnt put any sort of descriptions on her recipes because here is the entirety of her notes:

4 cups milk

2 cups old bread

1/4 tsp salt

3 eggs

3 tbsp melted butter

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 sq unsweetened chocolate

1/2 cup sugar

Make custard. Pour over bread.

I mean, did everyone in the 30's just KNOW how to make custard? cause i have no idea. all the joy of cooking says is "it is imperative to not overcook the custard or you will obtain an undesirable texture". good grief, way to be super unspecific. so i did some research on the intertubes and sort of wung it (past tense of wing it, winged it? i like wung it) and the rest is history. i tend to make this about once a month, or whenever matt and i have enough leftover crusts of french bread to make this delightful and delicious dessert.

 

so you make the custard. this involves pouring milk (although i like to use light or heavy cream. it's more tasty. and keeps the fat on that keeps me warm during these cold NJ-stormed nights!) into a sauce pan on med-low or low heat, add the butter and the sugar and the eggs. whisk so that the eggs are incorporated into the milk, and keep whisking as the butter melts, about once a minute or so. in the mean time, chop up the chocolate.

I like to use Bakers chocolate because it's the perfect size squares and is pretty cheap and pretty good quality. also, because it harkens back to my g-gramma's time so you know that it's time-tested YUM

So while your chopping in between your whisking, the butter will melt all up into that deliciousness and then you're ready to throw in the chocolate. the point is to keep whisking as the chocolate melts and as the milk and eggs slightly cook so that it gets thick. so you can either start with warm milk and eggs and butter, or all of them cold and heat them up at the same time (the lazy way). once you've chopped the chocolate, its time to start chopping bread!

chop chop chop

fill up a casserole dish with chop chop. throw in all the crumbs!

 

the custard should look like this and be kind of thick. if it's not thickened, dont worry, keep going. just make sure that all of the chocolate is incorporated into the mixture (not stuck to the bottom of the pan or unmelted or whatever) 

pour pour pour

 

see how it didnt get on all the breads? get to smushing the bread into the custard. smush smush smush

 

bake bake bake. about 350 for something like 45 minutes or so. put on a lower rack or else the top breadies will get a bit toasted and you'll have to pick them off later (unless someone in the house likes burned chocolatey bread! it's pretty tasty, acutally. leave em on. dont pick em off)

 

All done. Pay no attention to the dirty oven.

 

Eat with a ton of whipped cream. fucking YUM.

yum yum yum

cupcakes - a really old endever.

First things first: i made these the week before thanksgiving. i shoulda posted then but i was embarassed that i hadnt figured out anything clever to do for ben's MSB challenge so i sat on this post until, oh, about now. sorry ben.

I really wish that i had a "before" picture of these cupcakes - it was pretty cool to see how easy it is to disguise a special treat for kids! if you can see, the icing is just plain white, the decorations are snow caps (white on dark chocolate) and the wrapper is silver. which meant that they looked like plain ole boring ole stupid ole cupcakes. TRICK!

this one kid took one bite and said "OMG OMG OMG OMGOMGOMG!!!!! RAINBOWS!!!"
and then he asked me what they were made of and i said "magic!" but matt told me i should have told him 'clown blood'. DARN. i totally missed that opportunity.





they're really easy to make, just make white cake (from a box is fine - the point of this recipe is to look good, kids dont care if it's boxed cake or a gourmet recipe) . divide the icing into 6 bowls and dye the crap out of each bowl with food dye. the colors will get less brilliant during baking, so really just go wild. then transfer the contents of each of the six bowls into one ziplock baggie for each color. line the cupcake tins and tilt the whole shebang by setting one end of the cupcake tray on a thick cookbook (this will make layering the colors easier) and start piping in a solid line of each color. try to not fill the cupcakes more than 1/2-way full, or you may get overflow and overflow toasts a brown color and then you've just used a bunch of food coloring for nothing because it turned brown in the end.

anyway, yum. go cupcakes!

breakfast for dinner!

did you know that breakfast for dinner is delicious? and that croissants make delicious french toast? and sangria is a great side? mmm.

french toast:
croissants, sliced into two or three slices. use a bread knife and work the sawing motion rather than a pushing motion to obtain your immaculate slices. dip in eggy dip. fry on both sides in butter. keep in warmed oven until eating.
eggy dip:
eggs (3 eggs frenched 3 whole croissants), add a splash of vanilla, some brown sugar, some cinnamon all mixed up with two splashes milk. add a pinch of salt to break up the egg whites. yum. leftovers are good for cooking like scrambled eggs!


sangria: 2 bottles white wine (dry and without oaky flavors. we got a really good cheap dry argentinian from trader joes), some fruit (for white wine sangria we used the fruit off of a luncheon plate matt snagged from work - oranges, pineapple, watermelon, honeydew, strawberries, grapes), some sugar (about 1/4 cup. frankly, it didnt need it), 2/3 cup apricot flavored brandy, 2/3 cup triple sec (maybe should have used contreau? triple sec was very sweet!), some lime juice, some mint.
combine all of the above. put the lime juice on the fruit before adding it to the liquids and they will keep their bright colors. tear the mint into teeny tiny bits before adding so that the oils really seep into the wine. after combining the above, put in fridge for a minimum of 1 hour. best if overnight (so sayeth the internet).
when serving, add a splash of sparkling water if you desire!

yum. watch out, because of the added sugars can lead to a monster hangover.

My pictures suck but my cakes are awesome.

I made a cake. A fantastic cake. One that I saw on the internet and wanted to make for myself and eat to my heart's content. it was fantastically easy, and something i would recommend for any birthday. or, any day, really.

1 box white cake. prepare according to directions (leave out egg yolks or the batter will be yellowey)

1 box gel food colorings.

Take prepared cake mix and divide into 5 bowls, add a TON of food coloring to each bowl: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. (drat, i should have put some purple in there too!)

take two cake tins, and here's what you're going to do: pour about half of each color into the first cake tin in ROYGBIV order. just pour right into the center of the tin, dont mix, dont smush. just pour. THEN, in the secon tin, pour in opposite order! that way you get a nice swoosh of color in your two-layered cake! woo!

ok, bake.
matt added two little marshmellows just to spice things up.

let em cool, invert, and ice.
fucking delish.

that's right. alf. you know him, you love him. and someone's gonna eat the hell out of him.

while this may not be as unique as an egg-cooked-in-a-tomato (or the tomegg as i called it when it totally tipped over and spilled all over everything, as in "GODDAMN THAT TOMEGG IT WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME"), i would definitely say that this cake is the single-most amazing cake i've ever made. and i was a pastry chef's assistant for years!

the cake was the easy part. cake in a box. (i'm usually really scrupulous about making my own cake from scratch, as evidenced by my year-long love affair with oddball cupcakes (that's a different post) but since this was about alf, i figured spend more time on icing and less on cakeing)

the idea behind icing a cake with multiple colors and getting a good gradation between them is using really soft icing - the best bet for this is to heat up the icing you've got, spread while it's warm, and when it cools it will harden again, rather than using an icing that will stay soft, which may slide around the cake during normal transport. To get the color gradation, we started with 6 teacups, put white icing in one, dark chocolate icing in another and mixed different gradations in the middle four. put them in the microwave for a few seconds each and BAM - ICED THAT MOTHER.

details were piped on using our ever-so-fancy icing in a ziplock baggie technique. put icing in a baggie, snip a tiny hole in one end and pipe to your heart's content.

My only advice to future alf-cake-makers is to not work in a kitchen where the average temperature is 50 degrees. The icing kept setting before we were done smooshing it into proper place, which caused some minor lifting of the icing which kept it from looking quite as perfect as i was hoping for.

go alf!