Oreos

Oreo (noun) Two crisp chocolate wafer cookies sandwiched together by vanilla cream.

Back in January, I visited Flour bakery in Boston where they offered homemade oreo cookies. Intrigued, I had to try one. Their cookies were similar to oreos, but the chocolate wafers tasted extremely buttery and much thicker, more like a shortbread. They were good, but not exact replicas of my favorite cookie. Taking matters into my own hands, I googled Oreo recipes as soon as I got home and decided I must try to make them myself. I've had this recipe sitting around for a few months now and I finally tried it today.

I usually tend to stay away from making complicated cookies, especially the ones calling for multiple steps (aka. make dough, bake cookies, make filling, build cookie, clean up giant mess)...ack. But working the night shift at the paper today left me with plenty of time to kill this morning.

These cookies proved they were worth the effort. The chocolate wafers were thin, but not brittle thin, and the buttercream filling was the perfect consistency. I am happy with the way these turned out! Who needs Nabisco??

Homemade Oreos

Cookies
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened Dutch process cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) room- temperature, unsalted butter
1 large egg

Vanilla-Cream Filling
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) room-temperature, unsalted butter
1/4 cup vegetable shortening
2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preparation
Set two racks in the middle of the oven. Preheat to 375 degrees.

In a food processor, or bowl of an electric mixer, thoroughly mix the flour, cocoa, baking soda and powder, salt, and sugar. While pulsing, or on low speed, add the butter, and then the egg. Continue processing or mixing until dough comes together in a mass.

Take rounded teaspoons of batter and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet approximately 2 inches apart. With moistened hands, slightly flatten the dough. Bake for 9 minutes, rotating once for even baking. Set baking sheets on a rack to cool.

To make the cream, place butter and shortening in a mixing bowl, and at low speed, gradually beat in the sugar and vanilla. Turn the mixer on high and beat for 2-3 minutes until filling is light and fluffy.

To assemble the cookies, in a pastry bag with a 1/2 inch, round tip, pipe teaspoon-size blobs of cream into the center of one cookie. Place another cookie, equal in size to the first, on top of the cream. Lightly press, to work the filling evenly to the outsides of the cookie. Continue process until all the cookies have been sandwiched with cream.

Makes 30 sandwich cookies.

Bridal shower cookies

With MLF in the UK, I was left on my own to bake and frost a batch of custom bridal shower sugar cookies. After 4+ hours in the kitchen, I emerged with these wedding cake and wedding dress cookies.... and a GIANT mess of a kitchen. With MLF's help, I probably could have finished decorating these cookies in a jiffy AND had a cleaned-up kitchen in no time. I miss him.

Superstars!!!!

Lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream frosting. It's a yellow lemon theme, fyi. :)

Red velvetly goodness

Red velvet cake is one of my favorites. I can't say why. Maybe it's the shocking color. Or maybe it's the hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it flavor. The cake has cocoa powder in it which makes it taste slightly like a chocolate cake, though it don't really taste that chocolatey. It tastes smooth, sweet, and rich. Red velvet cake recipes differ widely in proportions of ingredients and secret ingredients, but they will always call for buttermilk, vinegar and of course, red food coloring!

The bright red batter is quite a fun change from the usual white or chocolate battered cakes.

This pic makes them look browner than they really were. In real life, they were actually pretty red!

Get Low, low, low, low, low, low, low

It's mid-July and here I am catching up on early month posts. Oops. Anyway...For the Fourth of July, MLF and I, along with a few friends, made trips to Charleston and Asheville. The cuisine of Charleston can be summerized in two words: low country or new South. Menus abounded with oversize biscuits, fancy egg benedicts with crab cake, stuffed french toast, fresh seafood, coconut cake, and the butteriest mac and cheese, all served with a large helping of Southern hospitality. When it comes to eating in the former British colony, it's hard to go wrong. The number of exceptional restaurants to pick from is amazing. The few we ate at were The Peninsula Grill, Poogan's Porch, Cru Cafe and Sermet's. We didn't have one complaint- and that's a big deal for us!

An oversized biscuit at Poogan's Porch.

MLF started off one day with a ridiculously large portion of peaches and cream-stuffed french toast with warm syrup at the Palmetto restaurant in the Charleston Place Hotel.

Beautifully prepared eggs benedict with Canadian ham.

THE best mac and cheese in the world. So rich it could have been dessert. Be sure to get this at the Cru Cafe, located on Motley St.

For father's day

For the biggest peanut/peanut brittle/peanut butter - loving person I know, my dad, I made some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies this morning. These cookies are a cross between chocolate chip cookies and classic peanut butter criscross cookies. The peanut butter adds a slightly sandy texture to these crunchy-crispy soft-in-the-middle cookies. A healthy dose of chocolate chips thrown into the batter gives these cookies some gooey goodness. I know they weren't made for me, but I ate some anyway. I love these!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

* 1/2 cup of butter (1 stick), softened
* 1/4 cup of brown sugar
* 1/4 cup of white sugar
* 1/2 cup of peanut butter (I used creamy)
* 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
* 1 egg
* 1 1/4 cup of flour
* 1/2 tsp baking soda
* 1/2 tsp baking powder
* 1/4 tsp salt
* 1 cup of semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees and spray a baking sheet with cooking spray. In a large mixer, cream butter, peanut putter, sugars and vanilla. Add the egg and mix until light & fluffy. In another bowl, combine flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt - mix thoroughly. Slowly add the dry ingredients into the butter mixture, stirring continuously. Add chocolate chips and combine. Drop spoonfuls of cookie dough on the baking sheet and press the center of the cookie with a fork. Bake for 10-11 minutes.

For a pic, see "For the Love of Cooking's" post of the same cookies at:
http://fortheloveofcooking-recipes.blogspot.com/2008/05/peanut-butter-chocolate-chip-cookies.html

Zucchini-Pineapple Quick Bread

In the newest edition of Cooking Light, the "make-over" recipe featured is for Zucchini-Pineapple Quick Bread. The new and improved recipe cut down the amount of fat and calories significantly. Just reading the short blurb about the bread made me want to try it. Reviewers said that they liked the low-fat version better than the original. Could that really be true? Were they lying??

Well, I've made the recipe, and it's really good! I never tried the orignal, but I'd say that if someone served this to me, I would have no idea it was low fat because it tastes just that good. I give it a big thumbs up.

It's an easy recipe. Here are the players.

Just add the zucchini in with the rest of the batter.

Pre-oven bread. I halved the recipe to only make one loaf- the full recipe makes two.

Soooooooo moist and tasty. I think I love it more than banana bread.

Zucchini-Pineapple Quick Bread

3 cups sifted all-purpose flour (about 13 1/2 ounces)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 large eggs
2 cups sugar
2 cups grated zucchini (about 1 1/2 medium zucchini)
2/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup egg substitute
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 (8-ounce) cans crushed pineapple in juice, drained
Baking spray with flour

1. Preheat oven to 325°.

2. Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups, and level with a knife. Combine flour, salt, and next 3 ingredients (through ground cinnamon) in a large bowl, stirring well with a whisk.

3. Beat eggs with a mixer at medium speed until foamy. Add sugar, zucchini, oil, egg substitute, and vanilla, beating until well blended. Add zucchini mixture to flour mixture, stirring just until moist. Fold in pineapple. Spoon batter into 2 (9 x 5-inch) loaf pans coated with baking spray. Bake at 325° for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pans on a wire rack; remove from pans. Cool completely on wire rack.

Yield: 2 loaves, 14 servings per loaf (serving size: 1 slice)

CALORIES 167 (32% from fat); FAT 5.9g (sat 0.5g,mono 3.3g,poly 1.7g); PROTEIN 2.4g; CHOLESTEROL 15mg; CALCIUM 16mg; SODIUM 151mg; FIBER 0.7g; IRON 0.9mg; CARBOHYDRATE 26.5g

Cooking Light, JUNE 2008