Rhubarb Crumb Bars (Web)

As I mentioned before, I am going to be replacing some of the recipes in the book with other Martha Stewart recipes. If any of the recipes in the book have nuts that I'm too allergic to, I'm not making them, and in order to keep the amount of recipes at 175 I will just use some recipes from the web.

Which is actually pretty brilliant because I had subscribed to Martha's "Cookie of the Day" e-mail list. This makes it a lot easier to find replacement recipes.

I got this recipe from the e-mail list about a week before we got rhubarb from our farmer. Leave it to Martha to have all the seasonal recipes perfectly timed. I was excited because it was something different, and it's always exciting to use fresh, local, seasonal produce in cooking or baking. The recipe calls for 1/2 a pound of rhubarb, and we got 1 pound and didn't have any other plans for it, so I doubled the recipe.

I must've miscalculated something in the doubling process. The cake part wasn't quite right. There wasn't really enough of the cake batter to cover two 8inch square pans. But I went with it anyway. When these were immediately done, they were still too tart from the rhubarb. There isn't a lot of sugar mixed in with the actual rhubarb, it more gets its sweetness from the sugar crumb topping. The next day, some of the sweetness from the crumb had settled into the rhubarb and it was delicious.

I know for sure something was wrong with the measurements because I ended up making these again, and again doubling it, but the cake batter part came out completely differently. The second time, the one pictured here, came out perfectly. It was a perfect crumb cake bottom. Dense and rich and sweet. The crumble topping, of course, is delicious. It's melted butter and brown sugar, how can you go wrong? All together the bar is absolutely delicious. Sweet and tart, rich and satisfying, just perfect. I'm slight obsessed with it. It's a good thing we will be getting at least a pound of rhubarb every week until our farmer runs out. I will be making a lot more of this.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: 16.
Actual: 12, I cut them bigger.

59 recipes down, 116 to go.

Mocha Shortbread Wedges (Pg 133)

Some of these recipes are just starting to seem redundant. There's so much shortbread, and as much as I love shortbread, how many different kinds do you need? I just recently did the Cocoa Shortbread and that wasn't very exciting. This was a little bit better, it was thicker and made in a round pan like normal shortbread wedges. The texture was nice. But it was just kind of....uninteresting. It has espresso powder in it, hence "mocha" in the title. Coffee with chocolate is always nice. But I was honestly just bored. Seriously, just bored.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: 8
Actual: 8

58 recipes down, 117 to go.

Earl Grey Tea Cookies (Pg 231)

I'm not one to toot my own horn, but I have to say that I get tons of compliments on my baked goods. I'm good at baking. It's a gift.

However, what I do not have a gift for is making round cookies actually....round. This is yet another recipe that requires the dough to be rolled into a log and refrigerated. This one recommends using a paper towel tube to keep the round shape, but I didn't happen to have any of those on hand. And even when I have used the paper towel rolls, the cookies still don't come out perfectly round, so I've pretty much given up. They'll be whatever shape they want to be.

They came out rectangular, with somewhat rounded edges. Like most of these cookies turn out. Whatever; a cookie's a cookie, no matter what the shape.

Looking at these, everyone thinks they're poppy seed. Even after eating them, they usually think they're poppy seed, because there's citrus in them so people think it tastes like lemon poppy seed. This pretty much proves my theory that poppy seeds have no flavor. If it looks like a poppy seed, you'll assume it's a poppy seed because you can't really identify the flavor.

The little black flecks in these are definitely not poppy seeds. Rather, they are tea leaves. What you do is actually cut open an earl grey tea bag and put the tea in with the flour. I guess if you had tea leaves instead of tea bags, you could grind the tea leaves into a finer powder, using a coffee grinder or a food processor.

These also have orange zest in them, to give it a nice little bite. As I said, the flavor is not really identifiable. But they do taste very good. They have a shortbread consistency, which everyone loves. Even though they fool you into thinking they are poppy seed, I call these a success.


Yield:
Recipe predicts: About 8 dozen.
Actual: 4 dozen.

57 recipes down, 118 to go.

Oatmeal Bars with Dates and Walnuts (Pg 216)

I apologize for the ugly picture and that I didn't take the time to arrange them nicely for the photo shoot. Making these bars was a traumatic experience for me, one that left me so scarred that  I slowed down my baking a lot.

Although, to be honest, it was also the coming of beautiful warm weather that made me slow my baking a little. I mean, who wants to be in the kitchen all day with the oven on when it's 85 degrees out? As much as I love baking, in weather like that I'd much rather be sitting outside in the sun reading Twilight, but that's another story.

But I digress. We all know about my nut allergies. I have to be careful when I'm baking with nuts. I've baked with almonds with not much of a problem, and I've baked with pecans and just had some uncomfortable itchiness but nothing too bad. Well, as the title of this recipe suggests, it had walnuts in it. Apparently walnuts are pretty dangerous to me.

I was very careful not to touch them at all. I had to toast them so I poured them from the bag onto the baking sheet and spread them around with a spoon, no touching. Throughout the whole process I used a spoon to scoop them, spread them, etc. Well, all the caution was not enough, because apparently I can't even breathe when I'm in the same room with walnuts.

My reaction wasn't as bad as it could have been. I didn't go into anaphylactic shock or anything like that, but I did get a horrible case of hives on my arms. Hives don't sound that bad, but these were bad hives. I won't get into all the details because it would be disgusting and you would no longer have any interest in reading about food. Suffice it to say, it was very uncomfortable. My body fighting the toxin made me so tired I took a 2 hour nap, and when I woke up the hives were still bothering me. I even had to call out of work.

I had a hard time believing I could get such a bad reaction just from being near walnuts, but there was no other explanation for that reaction. So I didn't bother with arranging these all nice and pretty for a picture, because obviously I didn't want to touch them. 

I unfortunately now must alter this project a little bit. From now on I will be avoiding recipes with walnuts, and probably peanuts also. I am going to replace them with other recipes from Martha Stewart so that I still do 175 recipes, some of them just won't actually be from the Cookies cookbook, but I will note them at the time.

My mother tried one of these bars and said they tasted like a hippie made them. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's the only feedback I had on these so that's all I can tell you.

Yield:

Recipe predicts: About 2 dozen.

Actual: I don't know, I didn't count.

56 recipes down, 119 to go. 

Cranberry-Pistachio Cornmeal Biscotti (Pg 160)

This was nearly one of the most exciting moments of my life. Making biscotti. Seriously. I never thought I could do it. Even with all the baking I've been doing, there are some things that for whatever reason I have convinced myself are too complicated. This was one of them. It just seemed way out of my league and way too complicated.

I was so wrong. It was so easy. The dough was really basic and then I just shaped it into two "logs" which were more rectangular than round. The logs are baked once, then taken out and sliced into these beautiful biscotti shapes, and then baked again. Viola. Super easy.

Not to mention super delicious. I love pistachios, maybe because it's a nut that I'm not allergic to so I find it exciting. But I really do love pistachios and I love cranberries. The cranberries were a bit much. I'd make them with a little less cranberries or even without, because the dried cranberries always stick in your teeth. Or maybe that's just me. There's also cornmeal in the dough which gives it a nice crunchy texture. Very delicious and definitely worth making again.

Yield:

Recipes predict: About 2 dozen.

Actual: About 2 dozen.

55 recipes down, 120 recipes to go.

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.