bless the dishwasher
We had the oven on for almost 7 hours today. I can’t remember doing that, like ever.
Ben and Mandy came over this afternoon to bake cookies because they don’t have a mixer and it’s more fun to bake with people. We made two kinds, both recipes from the Food Network. The first dough we made was for Alton Brown’s “The Chewy” chocolate chip cookies. Now, when I think of chewy chocolate chip cookies, I think of slightly puffy and thick chewy cookies. This recipe required that the butter be melted, which should have been my first red flag but as I trust in Alton, I overlooked this peculiarity. Since we needed to chill the dough for an hour before baking, we went on to the second type of cookie, Raspberry Lemon Thumbprint Cookies from Emeril Lagasse.
I’ll tell you the truth. I really wanted these cookies to be horrible, because I’m not a fan of the Emeril, but these were fantastic jammy morsels. Ben and Mandy made this dough while I cleaned up a bit and sat on the couch for awhile. I helped a little at the end by filling the jammy hole with jam, but that’s the extent of my involvement with these ones. They did seem to be fairly easy and quick to throw together but require some ingredients you may not usually have around the house. Though the recipe calls for Chambourd or Kirsh, Ben and Mandy brought along a delightful framboise liqueur and a little of it went into the jammy mixture and lots more went in to us. I remembered that I had a bottle of framboise from our visit to Chamonix in October 2002 so I brought it up from the cellar and we had a little tasting. All in the name of science. Both were very good but different from each other.
Anyways, the thumbprint cookies baked up wonderfully and tasted even better once they’d cooled. The only thing to note is that the recipe says you’ll get 4 dozen cookies and we got about 20 cookies total. I think that we could’ve stretched the dough a bit farther but there’s no way we’d come close to getting 4 dozen.
Back to The Chewy. After hanging out in the fridge for an hour, the dough had firmed up nicely and we had high hopes of perfect chocolate chip cookies coming our way. This was not to be the case. The cookies spread a lot in the oven and came out quite flat and much more greasy than I usually care for. But here’s the thing – they do taste good and even though they’re quite possibly the thinnest chocolate chip cookies to come out of my oven, they are indeed chewy. In my opinion, they’re not pretty enough to serve to company and I wouldn’t make them again. They’re just not what I’m looking for in a choco chip but they are interesting. I think I’ll try Alton’s recipe for “The Puffy” and see how that comes out.
You thought I was done? Ha! Then we made homemade pizza. But now I’m too tired to tell you more about it. Perhaps tomorrow.
February 21st, 2005 at 2:19 pm
Your assumption was correct on the cookies. My wife and I have been experimenting with cookies recently as well, and the colder the butter, the better for our cookies. We prefer to just take sticks of butter right out of the fridge, and let the kitchenaid beat them into submission. I suggest you try making them again, without “melting” the butter, perhaps merely softening it, or just out of the fridge like we do.
Alton Brown is the best. Melting/softening the butter makes the flat spread out cookies. Perhaps his notes/recipes were “lost in translation” ?