Ballin'

I love sugar. I mean, I love sugar.  I have a capacity to consume sweets that is fairly remarkable.  I have eaten icing for dinner.  I have consumed an entire can of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk in a day.  Once, on a cottage weekend, I put so much brown sugar on my Shreddies at breakfast that a diabetic guy couldn't stand to eat at the table with me. There's hardly anything I couldn't improve with a bit of maple syrup.  But, eventually, things need to change.

Sugar isn't making me feel all that great anymore.  Not that it ever did, it's just that I feel the effects more now.  Because of that, I have been looking for some alternatives that will still give me the taste and sensation of sugar, but without the crash after.  And I am off to a great start!

These Rice Krispie Almond Balls are amazing!  I take absolutely no credit whatsoever for them, other than finding the web site Oh She Glows, and all the great recipes on it.

My stellar food photography continues...

Five ingredients, no cooking, gluten free, and totally delicious.  In place of sugar, they use brown rice syrup, which is sweet, but apparently causes less of a blood sugar spike than most other sweeteners.  The recipe is here.  Trust me, if I love these, any sugar fanatic will.  

More Christmas Cookies

Well, my holiday baking idea was sort of a bust.  I was not much of a self-promoter, so I didn't get too many orders.  Here is a box of 3 dozen assorted decorated sugar cookies made for a good friend and customer.  Damn, I forgot how much work it is to pipe a load of these!  I did some fairly easy sprinkles decorating as well.  Much easier, and just as delicious.

Since I need to take a break from desserts to prepare for a trip to the Bahamas, I think I will give up baking until Valentine's Day.  Unless someone really wants some :)

Some snowflakes

Sugary sugar cookies :)

The Cookie, BCC (Before Chocolate Chips!)

I have a small collection of old cookbooks, some about 100 years old, but my favourite is probably Ruth Wakefield's Toll House Tried and True Recipes, published in 1936.  The name may give away what makes it special- it contains the original Toll House Cookie recipe, which is the very first chocolate chip cookie!

The tale of the cookie may be slightly disputed, but it's origin is definitely at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts.  The original recipe, called Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookies, asks bakers to add to the dough 2 bars of Nestle chocolate "which have been cut in pieces the size of a pea".  

I made them tonight, using Mrs. Wakefield's original recipe.  Unfortunately I didn't have any bars of Nestle Yellow Label chocolate lying around the house, so I used some Callebeaut bittersweet chocolate chips.

They turned out perfectly.  Crispy on the outside and melty on the inside.  Just what a chocolate chip cookie should be.  I'm saving some dough, since as Jacques Torres proved, dough gets better with time, so I'll see if cookies baked in a few days are even better.

As great and classic as these cookies are, this is not my go-to recipe.  My standard chocolate chip cookie recipe (for now) is the Hershey's Milk Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe found here.  It produces really chewy cookies, which is my preferred texture.  Enjoy!

"-free " is Just Another Word...

Well, Hallowe'en's been over for hours, so that makes it Christmas Season, or, more accurately for me, Baking Season.  Yesterday I was wondering if there was a way for me to consume mass quantities this year without compromising my health or eating my way out of my clothes.  When I think about impractical health and nutrition, naturally I think of Gwyneth Paltrow, so I checked out a recent GOOP newsletter and found some recipes from Babycakes Bakery in NYC.  Everything's sugar-free!  Gluten-free!  Dairy-free!  Jackpot!  I was on my way to Whole Foods to drop a wad on expensive, Gwyneth-approved ingredients, when I thought, am I crazy?

I visited the Interwebs and made a useful discovery. One of the ingredients I was looking to buy was agave nectar, since I want to reduce my sugar consumption.  Turns out this stuff is mostly fructose, you know, like in the work-of-the-devil High Fructose Corn Syrup.  It has the same caloric count as sugar, and is simply lower in glucose.  Too bad fructose'll kill ya too.  I was almost taken in by clever marketing and buzzwords like Organic, Natural, blah blah.  

It seems the only way to reduce sugar intake is not to eat sugar.  Any kind of sugar.  That is such a massive bummer that I am not even going to think about it again until next year.

I will say, some of the other ingredients that Babycakes uses are interesting- coconut oil, garbanzo flour- I may try these some day, but for now, I'm just going to enjoy the holidays and take yet another stab at moderation.

That being said, I present to you below a  wicked chocolate cake recipe, and it's vegan!  No eggs, no butter (just a bit of canola oil), but yes, there's sugar and flour.  It doesn't need icing, but if you add some buttercream, remember the cake will no longer make Stella McCartney happy :)

Vegan Chocolate Cake

In a glass 8 or 9 " square pan, mix together 

1 1/4 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1/3 cup good cocoa

1/2 tsp salt

3/4 tsp baking soda

Make 4 dents in the mixture- 2 big, and 2 small.

Pour into the dents

 1 cup water 

1/3 cup canola oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp white vinegar

Mix until it's all smooth and combined.

Lick batter off of spatula shaped like a finger (optional).

Bake 30 minutes, cool in pan, and sprinkle with icing sugar.  Mmmmm.

Cookies

Made some cookies for a wedding shower we had for a friend at work. I was inspired by Mango and I thank her for the pictures she posted on her blog. Got the same cookie cutter at St. Lawrence Market- wedding cake with a heart on top.



Used thick royal icing to outline the cake shape.



Flooded the cookies with thinner icing- used a squeeze bottle, which made it really easy.



Here's where the student could not equal the teacher- the icing I made for the decorative piping was too thin, but I did what I could. At this point, I'm not even sure they look like wedding cakes. The BF said they looked like the Capitol Building in Washington but with a heart on top. I called him an idiot, and got back to piping :)

The final cookies. Actually, I think this cookie cutter could be used to make some pretty nice Stanley Cup cookies!

This Can Only Help

Great Idea , thanks Little Bridge.

Petty Fores

Spent all day Saturday at McCall's learning how to make petit fours.  I didn't think to bring my own apron, and I cleverly wore a black sweater and brown cords, so I was covered in flour and sugar quite a bit of the time.

It was a hands-on class, but the sort where everyone does a bit of everything; you don't just make your own batch.  We made a lemon sponge roulade, tons of little tarts with a sweet almond paste, almond cream, and variations of buttercream, fondant icing, and vanilla custard. 

Also made the standard pound cake with marzipan and raspberry jam.  The fun part was the melted fondant.  We learned the proportions and temperature that guarantee a smooth, glossy finish.  

I will definitely do these again.  Just not for a long while.  There was some sampling, and I will be spending tomorrow on a treadmill because of it.

Stained Glass Cookies

OK, I had to make the stained glass cookies last week, because I had made the dough a few days earlier, and it probably wouldn't have kept much longer.  NBC provided me with an appropriate background of Christmas music and the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center. Miley Cyrus's version of Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree is an instant classic.  No, not really.  

Although bashing lolly-pops with a rolling pin on the balcony was great, I'm not sure I crushed them small enough.  I haven't made these cookies in 15 years, give me a break!  How the hell did I crush the candies last time?  Can't remember...

Here are the un-Christmassy cutout shapes (the only ones I had that had littler versions).  Filled with crushed red lolly-pops.  

Finished cookies.  The "stained glass" doesn't exactly remind me of Chartres, but I'll try to disguise the mistakes with icing.  There may be a second attempt, stay tuned!

Attack of the Giant Cookie Press

Finally used my massive "ergonomic" Williams-Sonoma Cookie Press.  My old, regular-sized one broke, and when I tried to exchange it, the WS at Yorkdale only had this model.  In the spirit of testing new cooks' tools, I decided to give it a try.

In some ways it's nice that you can fit an entire bowl of dough in at one time, but it makes it more difficult to change the die, and no one wants to make all their cookies the same! Problem is, it's a total bitch to squeeze it!  The whole design is just foreign to me; I was an expert marksman with my old cookie press.

The final batch- only 36 cookies, where I used to get about 80 smaller ones, which was better for packaging and giving away.  Took them all to work, and they were much appreciated.  Cookie press is going to be exchanged for the smaller model, however.

Another Picture of the Cupcakes

Sandy helped me with the little Obama logos.  Cupcakes are vanilla Barefoot Contessa flower cupcakes recipe, and the chocolate frosting is a recipe I haven't given to anyone, though it's out there in a very fine celebrity cookbook.  Of course it is made with real 70% cocoa solids chocolate, not cocoa powder.  Cocoa powder is for amateurs.