Tag Archives: cookies

Days 24 – 28 – Photo time!

Posted in 30 Days of Creativity, baked, blogs, Lola, mini trips, Mira, photos by

I was out of town this past weekend. We drove to St. Louis to visit some of Michael’s family. No time to update the blog. Had to get creative with being creative! Oh my goodness do I love Instagram. If you have an iPhone, download this app. Between discussing Dick’s (and what it’s like to be inside one) with Michael’s aunt, uncle, and cousins, eating ice cream, playing kickball, and meeting grandparents, I was happy to have an easy way to be creative with my phone.

Day 24


Ted Drewes in St. Louis – delicious and apparently highly sought considering the lines custard.

Day 25 

I was missing my girls on Saturday. I took this picture just with my regular phone camera last week. On Saturday I played around with the various lenses on Instagram.

Day 26

We may have gotten a little turned around trying to leave St. Louis on Sunday, but I’m glad we did, because our detour took us right by the Arch!

Day 27 I made a pair of sandals, but I’m not satisfied with them just yet so no picture to show.

Day 28 I did some creative writing type work for the magazine. Yay work creativity!

And now you must do something for me. Go to HomeFries and download the Joy the Baker podcast. Do you know who Joy the Baker is? She lives in California and has a website where she writes about food she makes, her cat, boys, flashing people, and all kinds of other hilarious and awesome topics. HomeFries a project she’s started with a friend. The site has four podcasts, one of which is Joy’s. She’s joined by Tracey of Shutterbean, whose blog I only started reading recently. Anyway, Joy and Tracey talk about blogging, baking, and other random stuff like Pinterest (did you know I’m obsessed with Pinterest these days?) and work pool parties (a terrible idea!). Check out their podcast. It’s LOL good.

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Day 12 – 36 Hour Chocolate Chip Cookies

Posted in 30 Days of Creativity, cookies, family, food by

Long week. Glad it’s over, but it’s not really over. Glad I can support my mom. Not glad the last time I saw my grandmother was two years ago. Distance sucks. I’m not quite sure what else to say right now. I think I’m going to miss my Oma though.

Chocolate chip cookies – a classic comfort food.

Chocolate chip cookies, you gotta have more
You can bake them in the oven or buy them at the store
But whatever you do have them ready at the door
And I’ll love you til I die, boom, boom, boom

In our quest for the perfect chocolate chip cookies, I came across a recipe published in the New York Times in 2008. The gist of the article that accompanied it was that in order to get a truly flavorful chocolate chip cookie, you must let the dough rest in the refrigerator for 36 hours. The resting time allows the eggs, the hydrating ingredient in cookies, to really penetrate the dry ingredients. You must pay attention to the size, because, well, it matters. Large cookies allow for three textures – a crisp outer edge, a soft center, and a small space where the two meld together in a ring. Please also use salt. Salt enhances sweet like no other. Trust this. And use disc-shaped chips. Ghirardelli 60% cacao bittersweet chips are a larger, disc shape.

So, was the 36 hour wait worth it? My brother claims they are more flavorful. I ate five yesterday.

The recipe suggests baking for 18-20 minutes. I had never heard of cookies baking for that long, so I punched 10 minutes into my timer for the first batch. When it beeped, the cookies were very ready to come out. In fact I shortened the baking time to 8 minutes for the rest, rotating the sheets at 4 minutes.

Also, don’t be scared by cake flour. Mix 1 cup all-purpose flour with 1 tablespoon of cornstartch and you have one cup of cake flour.

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Chai Snickerdoodles

Posted in baked, food, North Carolina by

This recipe comes to you a bit out of order on my recipe list. In fact, I just made them this past weekend. But they’re so good that I cannot wait.

When I lived in Raleigh, I worked at a coffee shop called The Morning Times. Still probably the best coffee shop I’ve ever been in. Best Americanos I’ve ever had. We also made our own chai tea. It was a mixture of tea and spices, the one which I remember the most being ginger. I spent lots of time peeling and grating ginger for that tea, but it gave the end result such a nice bite.

These cookies are basically sugar cookies filled with all the spices that make chai tea so warm and autumn-y and delicious. They’d probably be really awesome with a cup of tea. They’d also be perfect for a holiday party. Not hard to make at all. I promise. And so festive and flavorful.

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Ginger Chocolate Cookies

Posted in baked, cookies, money, the blues by

These past few weeks I’ve been too exhausted to cook or even really bake much. I’ve been eating out with my parents, eating over at my parents’ house, eating with my girlfriends, and sometimes throwing something together at home. I’m sure you know the feeling. Work is overwhelming, your personal life is a roller coaster, and standing in the kitchen becomes a chore rather than a joy. No one ever told me that being a beginning grown-up was so hard and tiring! Your college diploma should come with a big warning label: Hard times ahead. Forget staying up late to party or study. You won’t be able to make it past 10:30pm lots of nights. You think being independent will be cool and will involve having fancy drinks at fancy bars, buying awesome clothes, and decorating your first real apartment? Think again and this time include bills, rent, credit cards, food for your pets, gas money, food for yourself…and then swear that the only time you’ll look at your bank account is when you need a good cry. Oh and balancing your personal and work lives? They overlap. Work seeps into personal time, even if you don’t work long hours. It affects your personal relationships. Just…be prepared.

OK, so enough with the bitching about being a grown-up. The good part is that if you do come home from work one day and are craving cookies like woah, you can make a batch of cookies if you damn well please.

And these ginger chocolate cookies are the ones you should probably make. That’s what I did one Friday about a month ago. (shut up, I know I’m behind on posting!) They’re hella easy and you most likely have everything in your house.

Chocolate and brown sugar make cookies magical

(You may not have molasses, but you should probably buy some and keep your cabinet stocked with it always. It adds amazing depth and flavor to baked goods.) Kind of like chocolate chip cookies with a fantastic kick.

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simply irresistible chocolate chip cookies

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Adam is my best critic of my baking. He likes good baked goods (really good food in general, how lucky?!) and he’s not afraid to tell me exactly what he thinks about a pie, brownies, or cookies that I’ve made. He’s always able to pinpoint the not so great aspects, such as “this pie is too watery, and I can taste the chunks (that’d be the tapioca beads)” or “the caramel on top of these brownies is just too much. The layer is too thick. Besides, don’t change the brownies, they’re perfect the way they were.” I really do value his judgment and opinions. So when he proclaimed my most recent batch of cookies “simply irresistible” I was thrilled.

What makes these cookies so irresistible? Well, first, as a baker, I find the fact that they hold their shape irresistible. You know how most chocolate chip cookies spread as they bake? These don’t. I kind of want to attribute that to the oatmeal in them. Oatmeal cookies always seem to hold together much better than choco chip cookies. Also, and this wasn’t in the original recipe, I left out the vanilla. I read this in a recipe somewhere on the internet (damned if I remember where), and while you’d think taking the vanilla out would take away flavor, I think the exact opposite happens. The brown sugar, butter, and chocolate flavors really shine. Lastly, I love the texture of these cookies. They’re not chewy, but not crunchy and hard. They live in that in between, crumbly cookie land.

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