Posts Tagged ‘chocolate’
crack bark
Pretzels and chocolate and brown sugar caramel and sea salt and are you drooling yet? Here’s an awesome treat you can whip up in minutes and is just as addictive as the name dictates. Perfect for a snow day treat or something wonderful to crumble on top of vanilla ice cream.
chocolate-dipped macadamia nut cookies
The Test Kitchen is swamped with cookies right now. Every few hours it feels like a new batch appears. Millionaire’s shortbread. Madelines. Pear bars. A new cookie book is in the works and you’d think it would make my desire for cookies wane, but oh no, the exact opposite has been happening. I just want cookies more now.
I whipped these together after reading the recipe in Everyday Food. I love macadamia nuts and the idea reminded me of one of my favorite guilty pleasures, the Sausalito cookie from Pepperidge Farms. Toasted macadamia nuts, bittersweet chocolate, and just the right texture of a moist inside with a delicately crisp bottom.
The chocolate is pretty thick so I didn’t dip so much as paint on the portion that is chocolate. I was tempted to break out the pastry bag and tips and do pretty designs but yeah, delusions of grandeur and laziness got the better of me. Lack of frills aside, these are still delicious and soul satisfying.
cowboy cookies
Sometimes you just have to bake cookies at 11pm on a Saturday night. And sometimes they just have to be chocolate-oat-pretzel cookies.
I got the Baked Explorations book for Christmas and this is the first thing I made out of it. I love the writing style of the Baked duo and their absolutely meticulous borderline OCD/Rose Levy Beranbaum way of explaining how to bake something as simple as cookies. Use cool (but not cold) butter, use a scoop this exact size, press down on the cookies but don’t smush them, etc. As much as I love to cook on the fly, sometimes it’s more relaxing to just follow instructions to the T. And this T stands for Totally awesome cookies.
Everyone knows I’m a sucker for salty sweets and so the pretzels are of course a fabulous element I love in these. Still, I wish they were even more salty. So in the ingredients listed below I’ve added a bit more salt and say you should use bittersweet chocolate. I think the cookies would just really benefit from it. They would go from totally awesome to super totally awesome. If there is such a thing.
milanos
Time to take a stroll down memory lane.
It’s always fun to try and remember your earliest food memories. My third birthday cake is probably the earliest I have, but it’s more the candles and party than the eating of the actual cake. Eating Pepperidge Farm Milanos at around age 4 on the other hand – now that’s something I can picture with perfect clarity. The bag appearing in the pantry, the fancy fluted wrappers, the first taste of chocolate that wasn’t sweetened milk. I could easily eat the whole bag but knew they were expensive and special and had to make them last. My nostalgia still makes me feel that way anytime I buy them.
They are special cookies. Delicate and delicious with that perfect crunchy cookie and semi-sweet chocolate filling. I rarely buy Milanos these days since I usually have my own baked goods around 24/7, but I came across this recipe while hunting for new cookie ideas and stopped dead. Why hadn’t I ever made my own Milanos before? Upon seeing just how easy the recipe was, I knew I’d rectify that situation tout de suite.
I strayed from Gale Gand’s recipe to make the flavor more akin to how I think of milanos: vanilla cookie + semi-sweet filling. No citrus, no mint, nothing else. Just perfectly combined chocolate and vanilla. And that’s what these are. Perfect. Just how I remember them.
whole wheat white chocolate chip cookies
Ohhhh, white chocolate. You are one of my few culinary enemies I have yet to defeat. I will admit, you’re delicious in peppermint dark chocolate bark, and occasionally drizzled on chocolate cake. Otherwise, your flavor is sickly sweet and takes over anything it touches. Yet I try to make my relationship with you work. Tirelessly.
These cookies were an attempt to try and use up some white chocolate morsels I had lying around and I figured whole wheat flour, some pecans, and an equal ratio of semi-sweet morsels to white would balance out. It pretty much didn’t. If you like white chocolate, you’ll adore these cookies. They’re super moist and chewy, have fantastic texture, and the white chocolate flavor is right there in your face. For me, these are cookies to be handed out to others. If I ever make them again I’ll change the ratio of semi-sweet chocolate to white to at least 2 to 1 (maybe 3 to 1) but hey, my loss can be your gain.
