culinary experiments and explorations

Back sometime last year I got inspired by a cup of hot chai tea. Soooo tasty... were there any recipes that could duplicate that particular taste in a cookie? I did a little searching and turned up no existing recipes out on the web.

So what goes in chai tea? A little more creative Googling and I'd turned up the various ingredients that most commonly go into chai tea mixes. From there I started experimenting on cookie doughs, and after half-a-dozen drafts I finally arrived at a final result I was satisfied with. Now, at last, I feel comfortable sharing it with the world. Try these out, and let me know how you like ( Chai Cookies. )

I always have a fun time handing these to people and asking them to tell me what they think it tastes like. Many of them can identify some of the ingredients, but rarely all of them... and when I tell them they're chai cookies, this look of dawning comprehension always comes over their faces and they immediately agree. Try it and see for yourself!

For Christmas, my ever-lovable sister got me an unusual cookbook -- "Homemade Winter", by Yvette Van Boxen. I was immediately intrigued by it -- it's laid out in a very nonstandard, flowing, I-just-wrote-this-recipe-down-by-hand manner. It's got scads of apparently hand-drawn illustrations to go along with the directions, so visually it definitely catches the eye.

This morning, I decided while making breakfast that I was going to give one of the recipes a shot -- ( Gingerbread, or Pan D'Epice. )

Mixing the dough is probably best accomplished with a standing mixer. I initially tried mixing it both with a wooden spoon and by hand, and the dough was so sticky as to coat my hands with scads of gingery flour that had to be scrubbed off under the faucet.

That said, I'm quite happy with the final, modified, result. The adapted recipe produced a lovely loaf of bread -- light, moist, subtly spiced, and quite delicious. I'll no doubt make it again in the future, keeping my modifications in mind.

Enjoy!

Not much going on the past week -- between work and hobbies I haven't made the time to cook all that much that's new and interesting. Weekends, however, are when I have time to actually experiment a bit more. I'd snagged a bunch of cookie recipes and printed them out Friday at work, and decided to start experimenting with at least a few yesterday morning.

The first one I made was ( Skibo Castle Ginger Crunch. )

I adapted this recipe from the Good Morning America Food & Recipes page. Sad to say, overall I wasn't particularly impressed by it. The shortbread base seemed rather bland, and far too dry and crumbly for my tastes -- but maybe that's just the nature of shortbread. It wasn't in any way crunchy, really, and I expected it to be given the name of the recipe.

The ginger-maple taste of the topping is pleasantly sweet and elevates the recipe from mediocre to OK.

Overall rating, 3/5 -- I probably won't make it all too often, given that I can make tastier cookies for about the same amount of effort with similar ingredients, but at least this is a simple and straightforward snack recipe.