Coconut Biscuits (Pg 249)

These were supposed to be crunchy. They came out more chewy. It could've been because I added a tiny bit too much water.

It was a really weird recipe. There's no butter or eggs; just flour, sugar, and shredded coconut and then you add water to turn it into a formable dough. Apparently it's a traditional Jamaican recipe, which made it sound really good to me. But I really think they didn't come out exactly right.

They were alright, cos you've got all those sweet coconut flakes. It can't really be bad. But it wasn't that impressive. Maybe if they came out crunchy that would've been nice, but like I said, they were chewy, and a bit sticky.

Yield:

Recipe predicts: About 3 dozen.
Actual: 1 dozen. Eh.

54 recipes down, 121 to go.

Iced Hermits (Pg 102)

I'd been wanting to make these for a long time but I never had candied ginger on hand. One time I bought candied ginger but it all got eaten before I got to making these bars. So this time I got extra, some for eating and some for baking.

The actual bars here were so delicious. Tons of great gingerbread-like spices: ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, cloves. And dark brown sugar instead of white sugar, and molasses. Seriously, this combination is just so delicious. So these were really similar to the Gingerbread-Whote Chocolate Blondies but the difference was the little extras.

Instead of white chocolate chunks this has raisins and candied ginger in it. Obviously the candied ginger is for the topping also, but there are also bits of it in the actual bar. I'm not crazy about candied ginger, and the kind I got this time was a little extra spicy, so I wasn't crazy about it from that perspective. If it were just raisins I would've loved it, and if it was chocolate I would really really loved it, but then it'd be just like the other ones.

Apparently the reason these are called hermits is because they're better after they've been stored away for a couple days, like hermits. It gives the flavors more time to mingle and deepen. I've actually found that most cookies are better after a day or two for that very reason.

Yield:
Recipe predicts: About 3 dozen.
Actual: 2 dozen.

53 recipes down, 122 to go.

Cocoa Shortbread Diamonds (Pg 155)

I love shortbread and I love chocolate. Nothing should be better than these. But alas, they weren't that great.

They weren't bad, they just weren't great.

Shortbread is supposed to be thick. These were thin. I'm not sure why. I think if I made the same dough and just put it in an 8inch square pan and made it thicker and just cut it into rectangles it would've been better. But this dough was rolled out to 1/4 inch thickness. I probably rolled it too thin, but 1/4 inch is still pretty thin.

The recipe says to cut these into diamond shapes, but guess what? I don't have a diamond shaped cookie cutter. I know, my kitchen is so poorly stocked. So I just cut these into, as you can see, rectangles. There was also supposed to be a white chocolate drizzle. I just thought it wasn't necessary so I didn't bother. I know, I'm so lazy. So this is what these are supposed to look like, and you can see how mine looked.

So they really came out more like wafers than shortbread. Not bad. They could've been a little more chocolately. But overall I was not impressed.

Yield:
Recipe predicts: 1 dozen.

Actual: Almost 3 dozen, but I made mine a lot smaller.

52 recipes down, 123 to go.

Carrot Cake Cookies (Pg 202)

Oh the sandwich cookies. There are so many in this book. It's kind of out of control. All the ones I've made so far have something in common: they really don't need to be sandwiches.

Don't get me a wrong, a sandwich cookie is nice and everything, but it's just so much. And they're hard to eat because the frosting middle always oozes out all over the place. I prefer to take them apart.

Anyway, the idea here is to have a little carrot cake sandwich. The cookies themselves are very cakey, which I love. They are chock full of shredded carrots, raisins, and oats, making them chunky and satisfying. They really do taste like carrot cakes, they're just in cookie shape. And then, of course, it's a classic cream cheese frosting for the middle.

I really liked the cookie on its own, and I would've just eaten them as carrot cake cookies without any frosting. Once you get to the part of making the frosting and whatnot, you might as well just make carrot cake cupcakes, or just go all the way and make a carrot cake.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: About 3 dozen.
Actual: 2 dozen.

51 recipes down, 124 to go.

Gingerbread-White Chocolate Blondies (Pg 191)

I didn't even eat any of these because I don't eat white chocolate, but I'm in love with these. Look how pretty they are.

I will definitely make them again, and I will make them either with no chocolate or with dark chocolate chips.

It was supposed to be made with white chocolate chunks but I didn't have a white chocolate bar, so instead I used white chocolate chips. There's really no difference, honestly.

The batter was so heavy I could hardly spread it in the pan. It's made in a bigger pan than the usual 8inch square brownie/blondie pan. The recipe actually calls for a 12x17 inch baking pan. That's very large, apparently. I don't remember ever seeing one. I used a 9x13 inch, which is still pretty big. So the blondies themselves are supposed to be a little bit thinner because the batter would've been spread out more, but I don't see how that's possible because the batter was really heavy and didn't like being spread around. I just left it in a pretty big lump in the middle and it spread out during baking.

I tasted the batter itself before I added the white chocolate chips and it was delicious. It has molasses and ginger and cinnamon and lots of other gingerbread-y stuff, and I love gingerbread. So yum.

Someone who ate one of these said they were like heaven. I can't verify that, but I'll just say these are pretty darn good. Gingerbread is always a winner and these were very moist and gooey. Definitely a keeper and definitely will be on the menu for holiday baking.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: 4 dozen which would be 48.
Actual: 20 but that's really because the pan wasn't the right size.

50 recipes down, 125 to go.

Chocolate Waffles (Pg 214)

This was so much fun. I love trying new things and I love it when something is different and unexpected. Like a cookie that's impersonating a waffle. How cool is that?

The dough is pretty similar to any chocolate cookie, except it does have more eggs (4, to be exact) which I guess helps it say together when it's in the waffle iron.

The only waffle iron we had in the house happened to be a belgian waffle iron, which obviously makes a thicker, bigger waffle. This is what Martha's looked like. I think the shapes I was getting were a bit different than what you'd get from normal waffle iron, but you still get the waffle effect. I think they're pretty cool.

The cookie was good but I think it was a bit on the dry side. The chocolate glaze was good but I didn't really have enough to cover all the cookies I made, so I used it sparingly. And the confectioners' sugar is really just to add to the illusion of it being a waffle. So they were fun to make and a cute idea but as a cookie there are other tastier choices.

Yield:

Recipe predicts: About 4 dozen.

Actual: About 3 dozen, but they were bigger than they should've been, so that's probably why.

49 recipes down, 126 to go.

Other Baking

As I said before I sometimes get distracted from my project and start doing lots of other random baking. I'm in the kitchen so much now that I've actually come to really love it. Also, I've been getting a really great response to the things I've been baking for friends and family and I've been getting people requesting specific things and I've been experimenting with gluten free baking and lots of other fun things. So I wanted to share some of what I've been up to.

Quite obviously, this is a birthday cake. It was for my nephew's 4th birthday, and there he is enjoying his birthday moment. So what's with the inside of the cake? It's a checkerboard cake. We've had this checkerboard cake pan in the the house pretty much forever, and I've been wanting to make one pretty much forever. 

It was pretty tricky to make. It takes a lot of patience. There's a divider that you put in the round cake pan and you have to alternate chocolate and vanilla cake batter and make sure they don't get mixed in together. And you have to do that three times. But look how cool it is! It was definitely worth the effort. I'm not sure my nephew fully appreciated the checkerboard design, but he definitely enjoyed eating it.

Is it a cookie, a brownie, a pie, a cake? What is it? It's a Brookie! I had so much fun with this. I actually had taken a little break from baking, about a week without baking anything, and I mentioned that I was anxious to bake and try something new. A friend of mine recommended I try this because she had just seen it on the Martha Stewart show. A cookie meets a brownie. Genius.

The recipe calls for making them in mini pie pans, but I didn't have enough of them so I just made one that way. Also it seemed way too large for such an indulgent treat. So besides the one round one, I put the rest of the batter and dough in a brownie pan and cut it into squares. I liked the squares better.

These were really delicious. The cookie was great and the brownie was amazing. Really rich and delicious. And you can see in the second picture how the chocolate was all melty and gooey. Yum yum yum.

I have quite a few friends with allergies, and one of my joys is providing them with tasty allergen-free baked goods. Sometimes it's gluten-free, sometimes gluten-free and egg-free, sometimes gluten-free and sugar-free, nut free, dairy free, etc etc. As crazy as it sounds, these kinds of challenges are really exciting for me. A lot of the stuff I've made hasn't really worked, and a lot of it comes out really delicious. I find it very satisfying and fulfilling when the recipes work.

These chocolate chip muffins were gluten-free and egg-free. For the first time I used flax seeds as a substitute for eggs. I had heard about it and I was very curious about it because it sounds so strange. Surprise of surprises, it totally worked. You have to grind the flax seeds up in a coffee grinder and then let them sit in water for about 10 minutes, and then it becomes a gooey gelatinous substance, similar to eggs. I think with eggs they would've risen a little bit more, but these had a nice moist yet crumbly texture. They were tasty. 

OK, it's not a dessert item, but bread still counts as baking. It turns out I love baking bread. This was an Irish soda bread I made for a St. Patrick's Day party. It was delicious. Seriously. So sweet and rich and delicious. I ended up making like, 3 loaves of it cos it was so great.

This is a gluten free Focaccia bread. I would've liked it if it had risen a little bit more, but obviously the gluten-free is going to be a little different. It was delicious anyway. The topping is red sea salt and some mixed herbs. I felt it was maybe a tiny bit too salty, but still delicious. I enjoyed it very much and will be making it again.

Still 127 recipes to go.

Cranberry Shortbread Hearts (Pg 114)

We all know how much I love shortbread. Just the thought of shortbread makes my heart melt. It just makes me so happy.

My baking pantry is a little crazy right now due to this project. Every time I'm at the store I find a few random things and I think to myself  "I probably need this for a cookie recipe at some point" and then I buy it. So I have lots of random things and then when I need to decide what to bake I rummage through everything and go over recipes and compare what I have to what I need and figure something out.

This is why sometimes my entries are widely spaced out. Sometimes I just don't have what I need and I can't manage to figure anything out. I'm past most of the basic ones that don't have weird random ingredients.

So flipping through the book and finding this recipe and discovering I actually had dried cranberries got me very excited. It's shortbread, how could I not be excited? So it was pretty much just a basic shortbread recipe plus dried cranberries, which I had to chop up which was a very sticky task.

Other than that there's not much to say. I obviously didn't make them into hearts. It didn't really make sense to make them into hearts. They were baked in a square brownie pan and then I would've had to cut hearts and then I would've had all the in-between pieces of shortbread. It seemed wasteful. I don't like to waste cookies. So I just cut them into rectangles as I would with brownies in the same pan. Not as cute as hearts, but just as tasty.

I actually wasn't crazy about the cranberries in this. They didn't really add enough flavor, and they were just sticky. But hey, it's shortbread so it's delicious. I love it.

Yield:

Recipe predicts: 1 dozen hearts.

Actual: 20 rectangles.

48 recipes down, 127 to go.

Chocolate Charms (Pg 110)

My Mom re-named these Dirt Cookies. That's not as gross as it sounds, trust me. But let's be honest, they do kind of look like little clumps of dirt, don't they? They also have the texture of dirt. Like you know how you see cakes that are decorated for Halloween with crumbled up Oreos to look like dirt and then there are gummy worms coming out of the dirt? See, dirt is not always gross. If it's chocolate dirt, it's not gross.

There's a strong possibility that I messed these up, but I'm not entirely sure. It might just be a weird recipe.

After mixing the dough I noticed it was very dry. It wouldn't really hold together at all, it was just all crumbs. But the dough was meant to be refrigerated and that usually makes it hold together better. But it was only supposed to be refrigerated for 1 hour and I left it in there for almost 3 days. Hey, stuff happens. I don't always get right back to my baking when I expect I will.

3 days later the dough was still very crumbly and not holding together. But I have a feeling it was going to be like that no matter how long I left it in there, so if I made a mistake it was in the measuring for the dough.

The warmth of my hands as I was rolling it into balls helped it stay together, but it wasn't as neat as it was supposed to be. These were really supposed to be perfectly round little domes, and the cocoa powder was supposed to be completely coating them. The idea, as the book describes it, is that they look like a truffle, but then when you bite into them they're crumbly like shortbread.

Interesting idea, I have to say. I just didn't really want to dump all that cocoa powder all over the place. I treasure my cocoa powder. It all just sounded too wasteful, so I lightly sprinkled just a few for the picture.

These tasted good. Chocolate will always taste good. But they were pretty dry. You really had to have a nice glass of milk to wash them down, and in that case they were awesome. Without the milk...well, you know, they were dry. And had the texture of dirt.

Yield:

Recipe predicts: 3 dozen

Actual: 2.5 dozen.

47 recipes down, 128 to go.

Maple-Pecan Shortbread (Pg 124)

This was one of those times that I wondered what I have gotten myself into with this blog/experiment.

Not to say that I regret starting or I am not enjoying it. I am loving it. Seriously: love, love, love.

But of course I knew that there would be some recipes that would be a pain in the neck, and the blog really wouldn't be interesting if there weren't some of those. So this was one of them.

First annoyance is that it called for cake flour. I'll have you know I was on a search for cake flour for quite some time. It's in this recipe and a few others throughout the book, so it's been in the back of my mind whenever I'm at a grocery store that I need some, and I had never found any. Then I needed to make a birthday cake for my nephew, so I really needed cake flour, and still couldn't find it. So I did some research online and found out you can actually make cake flour! You just add 2 tablespoons of corn starch to 1 cup of flour.

That was when I got really nerdy and I got excited about my new-found baking knowledge. It seems now I'm constantly running into recipes that call for cake flour, and now I know that if I can't find it in the store I can make it. This is so exciting.

Of course, then I found cake flour at the one store that I hadn't looked at, the one store that I never thought to look at, and it happens to be the one closest to my house. Go figure. But at least I know what to do in a pinch.

Next annoyance: pecans. I'm allergic. Nuts are a very dangerous allergy. I get scared to work with nuts. I should probably wear gloves to protect myself if I have to chop nots or whatnot, but I don't. I just try to get it done really quickly and then I wash my hands. Well the thing is with these that there are pecans in the actual dough, and the dough had to be rolled out to cut the circles, and then the nuts had to be placed on top for decoration which means pawing your way through the bag of nuts to find the ones that are pretty enough to be decorations. So this is a lot of handling of nuts.

I think my reaction was maybe caused more by fear, because my allergies are not as severe as they used to be. But after I had been working on the rolling and cutting and decorating for more than an hour, my hands started to get itchy and red. I gave up. My Mom was kind enough to help by finished the last couple batches, and then I just sat staring at them.

They were quite the adorable little cookies, so I didn't mind staring at them. They're brushed with egg before placing the pecan half on top, so it gives it a little shiny finish. Isn't it pretty?? I like the way they look. Of course, I couldn't eat one but I can tell you that they smelled magnificent. That might've just been the maple syrup but it could've been the maple and pecan combo, which apparently is delicious. I've heard that these taste very good. The texture was not very shortbready, but maybe it was just because my DIY cake flour didn't work, but it worked in the cake I made so that doesn't make sense. So I think this just wasn't a very shortbready cookie, so the title is misleading, but other than that it seemed good.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: 2 dozen.
Actual: Over 6 dozen. What? I guess I used a smaller cookie cutter, but I think they were a decent size.

46 recipes down, 129 to go.

Coconut Macaroons (Pg 62)

This was exciting for me. I had always been really curious about macaroons. Why? I'm not sure. I guess just because I couldn't eat them, because since I was young I was allergic to eggs. But with age (your body changes every 7 years, right?) and changing my diet, I have overcome my egg allergy. It's a long and complicated story, but now I get to eat macaroons!

I don't think anything could be easier to make. Coconut flakes, sugar, and egg whites and there you go. They were a little difficult to mold because the coconut flakes were unsweetened and they were completely dry so a lot of little flakes escaped and ended up all alone and burnt on the cookie sheet. But I guess something like that is hard to avoid, what with coconut flakes being so hard to control.

Besides that little complication, these were easy and fun to make, and they tasted really awesome. The recipe has three variations - the plain coconut, the chocolate chunk, and the chocolate. I didn't make the chocolate because it required changing the amount of coconut flake, and since I was doubling the recipe it just seemed like too much math to separate 1/3 of it out and recalcuate coconut flakes and whatnot.

So I doubled the recipe and then put chocolate chips in half of it. Both were really delicious, but I'm partial to chocolate so that was the one I liked better. I think the chocolate ones honestly would've been a bit too chocolatey, it might've taken away from the lovely coconutey flavor. I love coconut, and it's nice with chocolate, but you don't want the chocolate overpowering the coconut.



Yield:
Recipe predicts: 1.5 dozen, but I doubled the recipe so it should've been 3 dozen.
Actual: 5 dozen (half plain and half chocolate chunk)

45 recipes down, 130 to go.