culinary experiments and explorations

Name totally pending! I printed out a sugar cookie recipe off of the Food Network site, and then improvised my way into a incredibly tasty citrus-flavored iced cookie. Overall, this recipe felt incredibly easy to put together, and the final product looked enough like a sunny-side up egg yolk that I decided to tentatively name it the ( Sunny Side Up Citrus Sugar Cookie )

One of the things I've wanted to do more this winter is try my hand at baking bread. I've got a handful of cookbooks with many recipes to try, but one of the first ones I wanted to try was a recipe card I picked up at Penzey's back around Yule.

It looked intriguing, and I'm definitely more of a fan of bread recipes that don't require yeast and substantial rising periods. I didn't know how it was going to turn out, as I'm usually not an enormous fan of drinking beer, but the result was astonishingly good.

( Beer Bread )

Alternatively, instead of placing all the dough in one 8x4 bread pan, you can split the dough into a six oversized cup muffin tin. If you do so, reduce baking time to 28 - 32 minutes -- the smaller volume of dough in each cup means it will bake notably faster.

I admit I had my doubts about this when I first set out to make it, largely because I'm not a huge fan of Newcastle Brown Ale. (I've used Brooklyn Ale for a particular spicy Cajun stew before to great effect, though.) To my delight the Newcastle turned out amazingly well with the Savory Beer Bread option, so I urge anyone else who tries this recipe to experiment with beers of their liking.

Towards that end, I'm intrigued to try out the Sweet Beer Bread option using Redd's Strawberry Ale. Its alcoholic content isn't particularly high (3.2%?) but without any yeast in the recipe I believe it's the carbonation that's important.

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!

I've been doing a lot of cooking and experimentation since around Thanksgiving, but with the holidays I haven't had as much chance to update this journal. Today, hopefully, that gets corrected.

I've been making a good number of different recipes gotten from Penzey's spices, and one that I tried out for the first time over the holidays was ( Holiday Cookie Balls. )

Reasonably easy to make, these confections are a little bit sweet and a little bit savory. I thought that the dough was maybe a little too crumbly, rather than chewy, but perhaps that's something I can work on if I tinker with it more in the future.

Yesterday was the Adam Ezra Group's Ramble (which was, by the by, awesome), and as last year there was a bake-off (with cookies for free to anyone, and you put money into the jars of the cookies you liked the best, all proceeds going to charities to help feed the hungry). Determined to impress, I made not one but four different batches of cookies: traditional oatmeal raisin, triple chocolate cranberry, my spicy ginger cookies, and an experiment...

( Peppermint Chocolate Chip Cookies )

Aside from uncertainty over the color of the cookies (which is why I say the addition of the food coloring is completely optional), these were generally well received. People said, and my experience with a test cookie matches, that they ended up tasting pleasantly like Thin Mints.

(And on a side note, although I didn't get recognized as having one of my batches raise the most contributions -- I came in a close third -- I'm quite happy that the combination of all four different batches just around tripled what anyone else's single batch did. All in all, I'm quite happy with that, particularly since the proceeds all go to charity. *wry smile* )

A while back I made me some chocolate mint brownies, which turned out reasonably well. However, after making them I still had quite a bit in the way of creme-du-menthe liqueur left over. Ever since, I've been looking for minty recipes to use it up on. I decided, what the heck, why not try cupcakes? And as it happens, they turned out pretty damn well!

( Vanilla Cupcaks with Minty-Green Cream Cheese Frosting )

Tasty cupcakes, with just enough mint flavoring to add some zing. Alternatively, substitute in 2 teaspoons Triple Sec (or other orange-flavored liqueur), 2 teaspoons grated orange zest, and 1/8 teaspoon each of red and yellow food coloring to swap it from minty-green to orange-flavored frosting.

After the fun of the Ramble Bake-Off, I decided to start experimenting more with cookie recipes. I spotted one recipe on a Livejournal site that included Heath Toffee chips, and immediately thought about adapting it for use in one of my own baking projects. The result was better than I expected, and the cookies themselves turned out both subtle and savory.

( Toffee Chip Cinnamon Molasses Cookies )

Adapted from another one of the discovered trove of Chinese recipes, I kind of threw this one together from a couple of different sources. I tinkered with some of the quantities on the ingredients, because parts of it seemed far out of proportion to what else was up there. Nonetheless, I ended up with a surprisingly tasty result -- pleasantly comparable, I must argue, to the kinds of Chinese dumplings (potstickers, specifically) I've eaten in restaurants or bought in frozen packs at the market.

( Juicy Fried Dumplings )

( Hoisin Dipping Sauce )

Overall, I was very pleased with the way these came out. For cooking the potstickers, I do recommend edging towards a 7-minute cook time rather than 6 minutes -- it makes them a bit crisper without being overcooked. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Following through on my resolution to try at least one new recipe every week, I stumbled over an old printed recipe for garlic naan. That inspired me to pull out my copy of Bay Books' The Essential Asian Cookbook, looking for Indian recipes. Thus, being not too immediately hungry, I decided to try out both the naan and a recipe for Madras curry.

( Madras Curry )

( Naan )

This is finishing up cooking as we speak, although the naan still has a while to go -- I haven't even divided up the dough yet. The curry smells great, though, and I'm anticipating it'll be very tasty given all the spices that went into it.

ETA: The curry turned out quite good, though nowhere near as spicy as I was expecting. I had it with rice, and with the naan on the side. The naan was surprisingly tasty, considering it was my first time trying to cook it. It's very straightforward to fry up. I actually realized only after I'd mixed up the dough that it indicates "Portions: 14" -- so I made three pieces of naan and kept the rest on the tray to refrigerate. I can quickly fry up more naan each morning or night, given a little melted butter.

Not at all put out by my failure to successfully make peanut brittle, but still filled with a hankering for something sweet and peanut-y, I decided to pull out an old recipe of my mom's. These rich, hearty snacks were always quick to disappear whenever they were made when I and my sister were growing up. I never could, and still can't, resist a serving of ( Mom's Peanut Butter Rice Krispy Treats. )

Easy to make, quick to prepare, and ridiculously tasty. This has been one of my favorite snacks since childhood.