Candy Topped Cookies

Here is another cookie recipe for you, and this one is a classic. These candy-topped cookies are soft, chewy, sweet but not cloying. Kids love helping with making them, and everyone loves eating them. The best part of this recipe is how versatile it is—you can add stuff to the dough, put stuff on top of the cookies, or any combination of the two. So without further ado, I present to you the candy-topped cookie recipe.

Zucchini Bread for CSID-ers

DISCLAIMER: This recipe is intended to be a starch-free/sucrose-free recipe.
This syrup is NOT low calorie or sugar-free.
Please use caution when adding a new food to a special or restricted diet—
—What works for my family may not work for yours.

There's not really much to say about this recipe. I wanted to make a version of zucchini bread that my CSIDers could have because there was a lot of zucchini and I really like zucchini bread. I started with my recipe for "normal" zucchini bread and proceeded to modify it as I saw fit in order to come up with this recipe.

Once comment on the nature of quick breads like zucchini bread and banana bread and the like—these are not really what I would consider bread. I have often fallen prey to the though process that banana bread is bread and that makes it good for breakfast, but it's time to start being honest with ourselves. Zucchini bread is really just cake. There is a much lower ratio of sugar & fat to flour than regular birthday cake, but quick breads often fall closer to cake than bread in the baked goods family tree.

This is not to say that I think you shouldn't eat banana bread or zucchini bread or those deliciously huge muffins you bought from the club store for breakfast. I am just saying that we need to be a little more honest in realizing that they really aren't that good for you. But hey, at least with zucchini bread you are getting some vegetables, right?

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the recipe. My oldest would probably eat it all day long, and his little brother really really wants to like it, and always asks for it, but never seems to be able to get that into it. Oh well. Have fun baking!

—Sam

Peanut Buttery Chocolate Buns

I really don't know what to say about this recipe because I can only say delicious so many times. These buns are truly, completely, and amazingly delicious.

The idea from this recipe came from wanting to create, of all things, peanut butter and jelly bread. I found lots of recipes online for peanut butter quick breads, and for buns made from rolling out regular dough and spreading it with peanut butter and jelly before rolling it up again. They looked good, but seemed really messy, and I have never considered quick breads to be a true bread, but rather a kind of cake. I wanted sliceable sandwich bread with peanut butter in the dough. Once again, I had to make up my own recipe. Oh darn. (^_^)

I made a loaf, and found it to be tasty, and I immediately starting thinking of the possibilities. Then I saw an episode of Cook's Country where they made cinnamon buns, and the idea for this recipe just came together.

Basically, this is a basic sweet roll dough with peanut butter replacing the fat in the dough. I had to take out some of the flour as well to make up for the solids in the peanut butter, but more on that later. The filling is your typical cinnamon roll filling except you replace the cinnamon with cocoa powder. Instead of cream cheese filling I decided to go with a chocolate donut glaze to complete the recipe.

The flavor is intensely peanut buttery, with chocolate permeating the entire bun. If you are fan of peanut butter filled chocolate cups, you will absolutely love this recipe. Just make sure you invite some friends over or you will end up eating the entire batch by yourself.

Chocolate lovers cupcakes and frosting

Here is another CSID-friendly recipe for all of you, and this is probably one of my favorites. Dark Chocolate Coconut Flour Cupcakes!! My quest for a CSID-friendly cupcake began with my sister-in-law's family, actually, because they have a lot of birthdays all clustered in one part of the year. Because we live so close to their family, we were always invited to the family birthday parties, but I must admit I had some underlying hesitancy because I knew that Jayson wouldn't be able to eat the birthday cake, and I didn't want him to feel left out.

So I started searching for chocolate cupcake recipes that would be CSID friendly, and I was rather lucky in my search because I could tap into the really big paleo-diet movement, which eschews grains and refined sugars for the most part. I decided to go with a chocolate cupcake because I knew that the cocoa would keep the coconut flour content lower, and would just be really delicious.

Anyhow, I found a recipe and tried it out, and the results were decent, but to be honest, I wasn't a big fan. Jayson ate it, especially since I made a sugar-free ganache to go on top, but I wouldn't eat it. They weren't very sweet and the cocoa made them kind of bitter. I wanted something better, something that with a texture more similar to that of real cupcakes.

I found another recipe which looked promising, but the mixing protocol was more similar to muffins than cupcakes. "Wait a second," I told myself, "Why not take these ingredients and adapt them to a cupcake recipe methodology you know works." Brilliant! The result was a light, fluffy cupcake with a deep chocolate flavor, and just enough sweetness to be a cake without getting overpowering with a frosting.

Root Beer Cookies

I love ice cream sandwiches. They are just so deliciously tasty and fun to eat, not to mention being a great tie back to when I was younger and only had them on very rare occasions. I remember making ice cream sandwich cookies at work one day and I had the idea that a root beer float ice cream sandwich would be delicious, if I could only find a recipe for root beer cookies.

So, I looked around the internet and found a couple recipes, but none of them had everything I wanted. One thing they all had in common was root beer concentrate, so that was a definite must, but the rest of the recipe seemed to be up for debate. So I figured, I make cookies for a living, what's one more cookie?

The butter was an obvious choice, and I thought brown sugar would complement the earthiness of the root beer concentrate. To round out the flavor I added vanilla extract. Also on my list of ingredients was cream of tartar to get some of the acidity of root beer. I made a batch and found they still lacked the bite of root beer, so I upped the acidity with a little bit of citric acid. Finally I got some cookies that I felt were worthy of being given the name of root beer.

These cookies are perfect for making ice cream sandwiches. They have a deep root beer flavor that is not overpowering, and pairs perfectly with vanilla ice cream. For tips on making ice cream sandwiches read this post.

3 Secrets of Perfect Ice Cream Sandwiches

I love cookies and ice cream. The combination of sweet, sugary cookie and the rich, mellow ice cream is one that is hard to beat. Maybe I am weird, but I think the ideal sandwich is similar to a FatBoy—soft and tender cookie and firm ice cream. I could eat these ice cream sandwiches by the dozen. Actually, I need to make sure I don't eat one because I have that hard of a time stopping.

But all too often when I am offered a homemade ice cream sandwich I end up being disappointed because the cookies are so hard I can't bite through them without inevitably squeezing all the ice cream out from between the cookies and onto my shirt or—even worse—the floor. My own experiments were not any more successful though, and I had to settle for eating my cookies and ice cream in the form of crushed cookies mixed into ice cream. Not that this is bad, but crushed cookies do not a sandwich make.

There has to be a solution, I would say to myself. After all, ice cream and cookie combinations are found everywhere in the frozen dessert section of the grocery store, in the form of cookies & creme ice cream and, of course, ice cream sandwiches. But it wasn't until I got a project at work to make cookies intended for ice cream sandwiches that I learned the secret to perfect ice cream sandwiches.

And before you run away screaming and waving your arms shouting about chemicals and artificiality, let me tell you the secret isn't as complex or scary as you think, and it's something you can do in your own kitchen and freezer. And now let me share with you the secrets I learned as a professional baker about how to make perfect ice cream sandwiches.

Coconut Flour Muffins

As I have written about a couple times on this blog, my two sons have a condition called CSID—they lack the enzymes to digest sucrose and starch. It has been a trial to find recipes for them to eat, especially recipes for baked goods. So far, my only successes have been adapting some paleo recipes and some low-carb recipes. Believe it or not, the common solution to baking for people with digestive troubles—a gluten-free diet—is a pretty bad place to look for recipes for people with CSID. The reason for this is that most gluten-free recipes have a ton of starch in them to replace flour. But for people with CSID, the starch is the enemy, not the gluten.

Anyway, so low carb and a few paleo recipes are the way to go. Low carb recipes are generally the most easily adaptable to CSID because reducing carbs automatically means you have reduced sugar and starch. In screening recipes the only things to watch out for are nuts and fruits. Paleo diets require a little more scrutiny because a paleo diet, while eschewing refined grains and refined sugars, has no qualms about using fruits high in sugar—bananas and apples—or other ingredients which aren't CSID friendly.

This particular recipe was passed on to me from my older sister (the same one who gave me the recipe for my Caramel Chex Mix). Her brother-in-law is on the paleo diet, and she occasionally makes things for him. To give you an idea of how much my son loved these muffins, let me tell you a story about the first time I made these. Once the first batch was cool enough to eat (barely out of the oven in my opinion) I gave Jayson half a muffin, which was promptly engulfed. He then proceeded to pester me with his calls of "more, more, more," until I gave him the other half. I was hesitant to give him more, partially because he had never had some of these ingredients before, and partially because he doesn't need to have two or three muffins. So he took matters into his own hands and decided to eat the crumbs...and the muffin liner. Yeah, they are that good.

Chocolate "Pudding"

What type of snack do you give a child who cannot have sugar or starch? My son, who was diagnosed with Congenital Sucrase Isomaltase Deficiency—CSID for short—lacks the enzymes to digest sucrose (table sugar) and maltose (a starch derivative). As those of you with children may imagine, this makes snack time rather difficult.

So far my wife and I have been able to come up with a few ideas like raisins, cheese sticks, cottage cheese, and olives, but what do you do for those sweet snacks? A couple days ago I was desperate for a snack idea that he hadn't already had that day when my eye lighted on the container of plain yogurt sitting in the fridge. Jayson really likes yogurt, but plain yogurt tastes nasty (to me, at least), so I had to think of some way to make it more palatable.

Did you know that to make flavored yogurt you only really need to add some type of jam? Well, this option wouldn't work for Jayson because all jam contains tons of sugar. I knew I could sweeten the yogurt with honey, which is an approved sweetener for people on CSID, but I couldn't think of any other flavorings to use, until I saw the cocoa.

Cocoa is not sweetened, so I could use that to make chocolate yogurt, and Jayson could eat it. To boost the flavor, I added a little bit of dry vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. Stir to combine, and then feed to a hungry toddler, who cries when it's all gone because he wants more.

The flavor of this yogurt is definitely different—not really bad—just different. The tang of the yogurt is an interesting counterpoint to the bitterness of unsweetened cocoa, one that I am not used to tasting. And maybe I'm just not used to eating honey with either yogurt or chocolate, and I'm still not sure if it is the best sweetener to use, but Jayson likes it, and I have it on hand, so I am sticking with it.

I am going to do this next section a little differently. There aren't really any instructions, but I would like to discuss these ingredients very lightly.

Plain Yogurt

Yogurt is made by fermenting milk with an innoculum (typically some already completed yogurt) under very controlled conditions. To flavor yogurt manufacturers typically add a type of jam and simply blend it in, sometimes standardizing the appearance and flavor with colors and flavors. Check the ingredient statement of the yogurt to make sure that it doesn't contain any sugar or stabilizing starches like modified food starch, which is just cornstarch (if you are making this for someone with CSID). Ironically, the private label was my favorite option because it fit all the dietary restrictions, and it was a lot cheaper than the name brands.

Honey

Honey is the only food manufactured by the natural world. Bees make it by evaporating nectar which had been treated with the enzyme invertase—the reaction occurs in their stomachs, so honey could actually be renamed "bee vomit"—which converts the sucrose in the nectar into glucose and fructose. Because of this honey does contain some sucrose (typically less than 2%), but this small amount shouldn't cause too many problems.

Vanilla Extract

Vanilla is one of those flavors that just seems to pair perfectly with chocolate. Real vanilla comes from the bean pod of an orchid, and isn't that easy to get in large quantities, which is why vanilla beans are so expensive. Luckily for us the chemical compound which is responsible for the vanilla flavor, vanillin, is easily soluble in alcohol, making vanilla extract a much more attractive option than using whole vanilla beans. What's more, vanillin is present in large quantities in some wood varieties, which is why some alcohols which have been aged in wooden casks can sometimes have vanilla notes. Vanilla extract obtained by extracting vanillin from wood must be labeled artificial vanilla extract, but using it is fine in most applications, especially when the finer nuances of real vanilla extract would be overpowered.

Cocoa Powder

Chocolate is pretty fun stuff. In fact, it is one of the more chemically complex foods out there. This being the case, I will not attempt to completely explain chocolate, mainly because I can't. But what I can say is that cocoa powder is essentially partially defatted cocoa liquor. Cocoa powder does not contain any sugar, unlike chocolate, which is why it is a great option for sugar-free diets. Dutch style—Dutch processed, Dutched, or cocoa processed with alkalai—has been treated with an alkalizing agent to neutralize some of the acids naturally present in cocoa. As a result, Dutch cocoa has a much darker color, deeper, richer flavor, and disperses well in liquids. It is my cocoa of choice in practically all applications.

Chocolate Yogurt:  Yields approximately 1 cup
3/4 cup plain yogurt
1-1/2 Tbsp honey
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
1-2 Tbsp Dutch-style cocoa powder
1 pinch salt

Combine all ingredients in a small bowl. Use a fork or whisk to homogenize. Serve right away or store in the refrigerator, tightly covered, or freeze in molds and make frozen yogurt.

A return triumphant: Spritz and Piping Chocolate

Sorry to have taken so long to get another post out here. It's been far too long. But to make a long story short, I moved and was without internet for a long time. Plus, with everything going on, I haven't done much baking. There is one thing that I would like to share with you though, and it was inspired by a really fancy and expensive cookie I came across at work a couple months ago.

Do you see those cookies in the bottom right corner, the ones that look like a spritz cookie with a weird dollop of icing? Well, they are really expensive, and I'm not that big a fan of the icing. So, I made my own version.

I took my favorite spritz cookie recipe, baked it into a swirl-ish pattern, and after it cooled I topped it with the really cool stuff called piping chocolate. I found a reference to it in a book on French chocolate techniques. Here is what you do.

McCleary Family Cake

Today I am going to write about the McCleary cake, which is my mom's family's special birthday cake. And, as with all family recipes, this one has a story behind it. What makes this one even better is that there is a little inter-family argument over it.

As far as I can tell, my Grandma Jane is the originator of this tradition. She told me that she had the cake for a church activity once, and liked it so much that she went home and made it. It was an instant success, and became the most requested (or maybe just the only) birthday cake for my mom's family. According to Grandma Jane, that was about 50 years ago. That's a lot of birthdays. To this day, it is one of my family's favorite cakes.

The McCleary cake is basically a 4-layer chocolate cake, with the layers separated by layers of "cream" and the entire cake covered in chocolate frosting. You would think that this would not be something over which there could be any confusion or disagreement, but there is a good reason why I put the word cream in quotation marks. It would seem that practically none of my mother's siblings can agree on what the true McCleary cake is made of.

My grandma says that her original recipe was Betty Crocker's devil's food cake mix separated by layers of Dream Whip and covered in chocolate frosting, with toothpicks to keep the layers from slipping off of each other. Later, when Cool Whip became available, she changed to using that instead of Dream Whip.

To see what my aunt's and uncles remember about the cake and how it should be made, click here. On the other hand, my mother swears that my grandma mixed the Dream Whip with chocolate pudding because she can remember snitching some of the mixture. Her version is souped up chocolate cake, chocolate frosting, and a mousse made up of chocolate pudding and whipped cream. Personally, I prefer it this way, so that is the recipe I will write here.

Chocolate Chips Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies are, I would say, a truly American creation. They are also one of my most favorite recipes. I can remember eating chocolate chip cookies almost my entire life. Every family has their recipe, and rarely do they stray from it. My family was no different: making chocolate chip cookies meant making my mom's chocolate chip cookies.

Chocolate chip cookies are also, I would imagine, one of the first baking experiences many children have. If they aren't helping to crack the eggs (so many eggshells), or pour in the flour (I'm dreaming of a white kitchen), they are helping to scoop out the cookies or...um...remove the evidence. I know, I know, there is some risk involved, but come on. Eating cookie dough is one of those things that every child needs to experience.

Anyway, chocolate chip cookies are one of the few recipes that all of my siblings know how to make. A couple of my sisters have branched out and now have their own recipes, but we all started with my mom's. By the way, before I tell you more about my family's recipe, I need to point out that the following recipe isn't my mom's: this is. I love my Mom's cookies, and they will always have a special place in my heart. The only problem is that when I was younger, I could eat probably a dozen of my Mom's cookies, but now I can only manage one or two before I get sick. I think they are just too sweet for my current tastes. But hey, I've grown up. And my cookies have grown up with me.

I wish I could say that this post's recipe is one of my own devising, but that wouldn't be 100% truthful. To be honest, it is one of my own conglomerating. When I was little I used to read cookbooks for fun, and the habit never really stopped. So I have seen a lot of cookie recipes in my life. This recipe kinda combines some of my favorite things about a lot of those recipes, along with a few tips that I have learned along the way.

Andes Mint Cheesecake

I have mentioned before that a few of the recipes on this blog were inspired by my Mom's baking. This recipe is one of those. We didn't have it that often, maybe only three or four times, but every time we did I remember loving it. It actually was one of my first experiences with cheesecake, and every cheesecake I have had since I compare to this one. After talking with my mom about it, I learned that the original recipe came from the (unfortunately) no-longer-in-print magazine McCall's, specifically from the December 2004 issue.

The texture is silky smooth, and the flavor divine. I love it because the mint flavor is just strong enough to be dominant, but subtle enough to not be dominating.

In fact, I love this cheesecake so much that I figured out how to make it in a smaller size just so I could justify making it for myself. If you are also so inclined, I will include the ingredient amounts for a 6-inch cheesecake at the end of the recipe.

As a note, the original recipe called for 1 1/3 cups coarsely chopped Andes mints. I don't know if you have ever bought Andes mints before, but to get enough for the recipe you need about 3 boxes, which will run you around six bucks. On the other hand, a 10 oz bag of Andes mint chips only costs around $2.50, and is more than enough for this recipe.

Trust me, if you make this recipe you will fall in love with it, and if you bring it anywhere don't expect to take home leftovers, because it will be completely gone.

Sugar Cookies

For some reason sugar cookies just seem to evoke the feelings of childhood in adults. Maybe it's because I only can remember eating sugar cookies when I was barely tall enough to see over the table, or because stamping out sugar cookies reminds me of small hands. But for whatever reason, sugar cookies just seem to mean childhood.

A while back I worked for a bakery and learned some fun things about baking cookies, which when combined with what I learned during my food science classes in school, hopefully let me make a good recipe for you.

Gourmet Boiled Cookies

I can remember making boiled cookies for a long time. They were always delicious: moist, chewy, peanut buttery, and just a little bit sticky. And to me, they were always "boiled cookies." It wasn't until I got to college that I found out that the rest of the world had a different name for one of my favorite cookies: no-bake cookies.
Then when I was in Switzerland serving my mission for the LDS church, I got a real craving for the cookies, but didn't have the recipe. So I borrowed one from a friend, and tried it out. The result was not anything like what I remembered. They were grainy, hard, and overloaded with chocolate.
After I got married, there arose the occasion to make my beloved boiled cookies for some friends, and just for fun I decided to spruce the recipe up a little. The following recipe is the result.

Red Velvet Drop Cookies

Last week I was asked by a co-worker to make some cookies, specifically red velvet cookies. I agreed, because who can say no to a change to bake some cookies? Anyway, after some consideration, I decided that I didn't want to go through the hassle of rolling out and cutting cookies at work because I would have to bring additional flour, a rolling pin, and my cutters, not to mention only having a half hour for lunch. So being the food scientist that I am, I was confident in my ability to convert a rolled cookie dough into a drop cookie dough, so this morning I weighed out all the ingredients, stuck them in my lunch box, and went to work.

While driving, I thought about the best way to make a drop cookie dough, and came to the conclusion that I would just increase the amount of buttermilk until the consistency was right for scooping. It turned out that I needed 4 times the amount of buttermilk, but the cookies was pretty tasty. Oh, I also baked them in a convection oven set at 350°F, but I think that it would also work the same in a regular oven set at the same temp.

The result was a moist, puffy, cake-like cookie that would be the perfect accompaniment to a tall glass of milk. For a picture tutorial, please see my red velvet cookie recipe.

Versatile Bread Dough

This post is to enlighten readers on the versatility of bread dough. I am not talking about the stuff that you buy in the freezer section of your favorite grocery store, but rather making minor changes to a master bread dough recipe to fit any of your needs. This isn't as complicated as it may sound, and knowing these tricks will change your bread baking experience forever.

I have been baking bread as long as I can remember (which is only about 8 or 10 years old). I started following recipes exactly, and needing a new recipe for every type of bread or roll I attempted to make. This is how most bakers start out: following recipes as written, making few (if any) changes. I baked like this until I read a Swiss bread cookbook, and my baking was changed forever.

What made such a difference, you may ask? Well, it was quite simple: the author used one bread recipe to make 8 different types of bread, another recipe for 6 types of bread, and a short "textbook" on bread-making in general. It wasn't until then that I realized that all bread recipes are basically the same, with a few minor modifications based on the target application.

The reason why this revelation changed my baking so dramatically was that it allowed me to focus on my bread-making technique instead of worrying about following the recipes. Now, I rarely look for a recipe when I want to bake. Instead I just take my master recipe and modify it a little to make what I want. What follows is my master recipe, followed by some of my modifications.

Red Velvet Cookies

I have a bone to pick with red velvet. One does not simply make red velvet by adding red food coloring to an otherwise vanilla batter and call it good. Red velvet is so much more than it's color. Of course, I can't really blame anyone for this mistake because there is so much misinformation out there on what red velvet actually is. So, to set the record straight, and for my own peace of mind, I am going to set in stone (or bits and bytes) what I firmly believe red velvet to be.

After searching the internet for many red velvet recipes in an attempt to come to some sort of consensus, I concluded that red velvet is a mildly chocolate cake with background notes of both vinegar and buttermilk, also containing some form of red food coloring to heighten the already-present red anthocyanin present in the cocoa powder. There, I've said it. Red velvet is first and foremost a chocolate product. True, it is not as chocolaty as an Oreo©, but it is chocolaty nonetheless.

Well, on to the point of this post. The internet is riddled with red velvet in the form of cakes, cupcakes (shudder), brownies, crepes, pancakes, waffles, cake-mix cookies, etc. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with these things (except for the cupcakes. I don't like cupcakes), but I don't have a great love for any of them. What I really wanted was a cookie that I could roll out and cut into shapes, like sugar cookies. And don't you dare tell me that I can just put red food coloring into a sugar cookie. Didn't we already go over the fact that red velvet is chocolate at heart? No, I discovered that if I wanted a rolled red velvet cookie I would need to make my own recipe from scratch. So I did.

One more comment before I begin; it took me many tries to come up with this recipe, mainly because I wanted to get a good amount of chocolate flavor without making the cookie too brown. The solution is to use black cocoa, which is highly dutched or alkalized cocoa, in conjunction with natural cocoa powder. If you don't want to buy black cocoa you could probably get away with just using normal dutched cocoa, but please do not just use natural coca by itself. The flavor just isn't the same.

—Sam

Sugar Cookie Frosting

I am not a frosting fan. Really. I prefer my desserts unadulterated because frankly, I can't stand the sweetness. However, I do realize that there are those who cannot eat a sugar cookie unless it is accompanied by a thick layer of rich, sugary buttercream-style frosting. For all of you people out there who fit into this category, don't despair: this recipe will fulfill your needs.

Before I get into how to make it though, a couple comments first. You may notice that while most recipes call for using only butter, I use a combination of butter and shortening. The reason for this is because of fat melting points. Butter melts at a relatively low temperature, which means that on a warm day your frosting will begin to melt and "curdle." Shortening melts at a higher temperature, much above body temperature, so it will allow the frosting to hold it's shape even on warm days. So if shortening is so much better, why use butter? FLAVOR!! Even the best shortening can never beat butter for taste.

Secondly, this recipe differs in that it doesn't require the sifting of the powdered sugar. The way I see it, you will whip the frosting until smooth, so any possible lumps in your sugar will get beaten out anyway. And sifting powdered sugar just makes a huge mess.

Third, this recipe does not include food coloring. I have a good reason for this, and it has nothing to do with any possible health effects of food coloring. I didn't include it because I don't know what type you will have, and the type of food coloring plays a huge role in the final texture of the frosting if you don't know what you are doing. I prefer using powdered food colors because they huge only a marginal effect of the final frosting, and it is easier to get a vibrant color from a powder. Gels and liquids mean that you will have to either add more sugar to the recipe or reduce the amount of liquid in the recipe. So, any will work, but you have to pay attention to what you are doing.