the good lord's own cookies

Once upon a time, I went to a Methodist Sunday school in a very small town in Maryland. One of my teachers had a cookie recipe that she would bust out when we were leaning about a specific part of the Bible. The cookies are light, fluffy, whitish in color, kind of springy-textured, and sweet. These cookies, she told us, were manna cookies. That's right. The food God threw down for people to eat. God's own dessert food. For real.

So if these cookies have another name, I do not know it. I will say that they are very tasty. A friend of mine tested the first batch and said, "They're nice and sweet and then there's this aftertaste that makes me want to hug my grandmother. Your cookies make me want to hug my grandmother." To be honest, I'm not quite sure what that means. But I'm taking it as a compliment.

The only down side to these cookies, which I always forget until it's too late, is that they're going to stick to each other. If you're packing them, put something between them (wax paper would probably work just fine). Otherwise, they're easy to make and don't disappoint.

Maryland Methodist Manna Cookies
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons honey
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups flour

Preheat oven to 400. Cream butter, adding sugar gradually. Add eggs and beat thoroughly. Add honey, salt, and vanilla.

In a different bowl, combine baking powder and flour; add to butter mixture. Drop by half teaspoonfuls onto buttered cookie sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for 5-6 minutes. Watch very closely. They don't really brown, per se; you just have to wing it. Cool on wire rack. Makes 6 dozen.

seco de pollo (adventures with cilantro)

In response to my recent announcement that I did not like cilantro and was sick of getting mountains of it every week from my CSA, a friend suggested I try to find some Peruvian stew recipes dealing with it and see how I felt afterwards. So I found this one and decided to give it a try. My version:

Strawberry Cream Cheese Pie

Hey, remember last year when I promised you a second pie recipe? Neither do I.

This recipe is from my friend Meg, who in turn got it from her mother. It's a once-a-summer sort of thing for me, and it is absolutely delightful; the version here has a few minor tweaks built in but of course I encourage you to experiment if that's your thing. Regardless, this pie is supremely tasty.


Glaze:
1 cup sliced strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
dash of salt
2x 1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon lemon juice

Blend strawberries until smooth. If you go a little over a cup it's not a bad thing. Put strawberry goo in medium saucepan, add 1/2 cup sugar, salt, and 1/4 cup water. (Personally I put it and a dash more in the blender, swished it around, and got every drop of strawberry I could in to the pan, but I'm a bit obsessive.) Put the cornstarch in a small dish, prepare 1/4 cup water, set both aside. Also prepare two tablespoons lemon juice; set this aside as well.

Stirring constantly, bring contents of saucepan to a boil over medium heat. Cook (still stirring) three minutes. Remove from heat. Combine water and cornstarch, mix well, add to saucepan. Put back on heat, cook two minutes (still stirring). It will thicken as you cook and it will be pretty obvious when it's done. Stir in lemon juice, set aside to cool.

Filling:
3 cups strawberries
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon orange zest
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 8oz package of cream cheese
2 tablespoons cream/milk
1/2 teaspoon of almond extract
9 inch baked pie shell (Graham cracker crumb-style)
glaze (see above)

Put the pie shell in the fridge. Wash the berries, cut off the stem (I recommend a nice flat surface), set them on a towel to dry. Combine cream cheese, sugar, orange juice, orange zest, cream/milk, and almond extract. Beat until light and fluffy. Spread evenly into cooled pie shell. Arrange the strawberries, cut side down, over cream cheese mixture. Try to cram as many on there as possible. Pour the cooled glaze over the berries; you're shooting for an even coating here. Refrigerate until chilled, 3+ hours, and enjoy.

Notes:
At first I was iffy on the orange zest. The recipe calls for grated orange peel, which is what I thought zest was, but I don't have a grater and I keep forgetting to buy one, so I checked online and found this guide that told me to just chop it super fine. I did, and then thought it was a terrible idea, but I put it in anyway and I was very pleased with the result. Also, I squeeze the juice out of the same orange, which is probably your best bet for good juice. If you have a juicer, use it, because I made a mess, but no matter. You can, according to this recipe, just leave the orange out entirely, but I like what it adds to the pie. Plus, you have most of a nice tasty orange to eat after you make the pie! Win-win.

A note also on the strawberries: Using mostly-whole berries on the pie makes it a little awkward to eat. It tends to fall apart. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, if you want a more unified pie, you can slice them and pile them up; I did that the first time I made it. This lets you fit a lot more strawberries on the pie if you so desire, but it leads to a somewhat damper experience. Basically it comes to the quality of the berries. Last May they were so-so, so I liked each forkful to have berry and cheese and crust. The ones I used today are glorious, so they're excellent once they've fallen off the pie and they have just a hint of the glaze on them.

Lastly, as to crust: I used a shortbread crust that was sitting on the store shelf right next to the graham cracker crusts, and I found it to be the far superior choice for this pie.

zucchini bread

Thanks to a running gag that a friend of mine has been working for a while, I've been really craving some zucchini bread. (I'd explain, but you really had to be there. The point is it came up in conversation a lot.) I've started getting some zucchini from my CSA, so I decided that now was the time.

Sadly, once I actually set out to make the stuff, it became a comedy of under-preparation. The good news is that the final product is quite tasty, so I'm calling it a win.

my friend's mom's breadsticks

When I was very young indeed, my best friend's mother had this recipe for breadsticks that were like none I'd tasted before. Instead of being puffy and soft, these were flat and crunchy, tasting heavily of butter. My mother acquired the recipe, and eventually I acquired it from her, and now I am sharing it with you.

These breadsticks are kind of an acquired taste. If Olive Garden breadsticks are perfect in your mind, you probably won't enjoy these. But, you know. Crunchy. Buttery. If that suits, I recommend them. Plus they're super easy.

2 1/4 cup flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk (soy works fine)
~1/3 cup butter, melted

Preheat oven to 400. Grease two cookie sheets.
Sift dry ingredients together. Add milk to mixture. If necessary add more in small amounts to soak up excess flour.
Turn out on well-floured surface (dough will be sticky). Knead 10-20 times. Roll out as flat as possible, slice into thin strips. Arrange on cookie tray; brush with melted butter.
Bake @ 400 for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown. If yours are too tall, they may only crisp on one side; after cooking I sometimes turn off the oven, flip the sticks over, and put them back in for a few minutes.

So, blam. The whole thing takes twenty minutes if you do it right. Serve with marinara, ranch, or whatever else you like your breadsticks in, and enjoy.

baked ice cream cake

So, I found my way to this entry on Omnomicon recently, discussing a method of making cake with a box of mix, three eggs, a cup of water, and two cups of ice cream. I found this very intriguing, and I decided to try it. It's goofily easy, as you would imagine--combine ingredients, 350 for 45 in a bundt pan, enjoy.

And oh. My. Yes.

The final product reminds me of a cakey pudding, or perhaps a puddingy sort of cake. It also kind of reminds me of jellied cranberry sauce, only chocolate and bready instead of ... cranberry and ... the metaphor breaks down, but seeing the partitioned ring of cake quiver when I slice in to it really sells it.

We did a chocolate fudge mix with "Forbidden Chocolate" flavor ice cream, and the result is a damn fine bit of chocolate. We also bought some nice light strawberry frosting, but frankly it doesn't need to be frosted. Next time I'm going to try a chocolate cake with a mint chocolate chip ice cream; Silver wants to try Butterfinger.

So. Healthy? No. Classy? Not really. Delicious? Oh yes. Oh my, yes.

Click through to the original for some excellently illustrative pictures as well as a very well-written food blog. You know. If you're in to that sort of thing.

checkerboard cookies

A few weeks ago I encountered a post on 17 and Baking about checkerboard cookies, and they looked like a fun and complex project, ideal for breaking in my new kitchen. On a side note, if you're not reading 17 and Baking, you should be--the author is a young writer who (as you might guess) loves to bake. Her posts are introspective and well-written, and the recipes are always quality.

You'll note from my picture that my own product isn't quite as well put together as the examples on the original post, but I'm not going to pretend to be particularly ashamed of that--these are some excellent cookies I have created, and while there is a lack of right angles, the presentation is still pretty cute (and not too shabby for a first attempt if I do say so myself).

Also, I learned something interesting in the course of making this recipe. Specifically, I learned about room temperature eggs. Seriously, I have been baking for [mumble] years, and I even took cooking classes in my youth, yet no one ever bothered to tell me about the room temperature egg thing. What's that about?

At any rate, the dough recipe is fairly basic, and will have healthy eaters cringing right away. It goes like this:

5 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 lb (2 cups or 4 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 cups granulated sugar
1 tbsp pure vanilla extract
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Recipe calls for sifting; people tell me you don't have to do that anymore but I do it anyway because it's fun. In another bowl, cream the butter and sugar thoroughly, add eggs one at a time, then vanilla. Add the flour all at once and mix lightly with the beater then continue by hand--you don't want to overmix this, but fortunately it will be really obvious when you're done if you're paying attention.

From here, it gets complicated. First, you want to split the dough in half. As per the recommendation, I weighed my dough. If I had been smart, I would have checked the weight of the bowl it was in so I could just remove the appropriate amount of the final product, but instead I had to do a complicated back and forth sort of thing. Once you're done, knead the cocoa into one half. Split each half into halves again, then shape them in a roughly rectangular fashion, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate for two hours.

At this point, you take one of each flavor out and let them warm up. It took a while for mine to be workable; I don't know if that's a feature of my fridge or if the original 15 minute estimate was just really optimistic. At any rate, you want to roll it out into a rectangle that's about 12 by 5 inches, then cut nine half-inch strips.

Now, I do want to take one moment here, because something about that math tripped me up. It should be pretty obvious: 9 x 1/2 = 4 1/2, not 5. This worked out for me because my dough was a little uneven, so the trimming from one side fleshed out the other side. But if you're neurotic and have a ruler (ok, I had a ruler, it was just a sloppy result), you'll wind up with a full extra half inch strip. This is even funnier if you look at my source's source, who went to the trouble of making a diagram showing nine half inch strips turning into a five inch sheet. So ... yeah.

Anyway. Once you have your strips, you make two checkerboard patterns, which you can probably figure out by looking at the cookies above. Carefully squish it together, do your best to define the corners, then wrap those up and put them back in the fridge for another two hours. Then you take the other, not-yet-molested chunks of dough, warm them, roll them out nice and thin, and wrap them around the checkerboard patterns, using the opposite color to the four corners of the one you're wrapping. This is where it starts to get really sloppy. If you're going for a professional presentation, you might consider some sort of weight setup to flatten the sides. Personally I didn't care this time out.

Refrigerate overnight, then slice with a sharp knife and cook at 350° for 12 minutes. I have a nice stove, which temps quite accurately, and 12 minutes is exactly what I needed for each batch, but of course your mileage will vary. Make sure you refrigerate the dough in between batches, because (1) it will get harder to cut when it's warm and (2) screw up your cooking time.

The end result is delightfully tasty, and fairly impressive to look at. Obviously the presentation is the whole point here, so I would recommend just slopping it together, but unless you're actively trying to impress a tough crowd, even lopsided ones look pretty nice for a randomly-thrown-together sort of cookie project.