#operationcovertcookie (and some other December baking)

December 21, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 10 Comments

I have a serious, serious problem.

I’m addicted to baking for people. Be it my classmates, roommates, family or co-workers, I cannot stop. It has gotten to the level that it is unhealthy and I am in the kitchen for five hours straight. I am surprised my oven hasn’t exploded yet. The worst part? I ENJOY IT. At least I’m not in denial anymore. That’s the first step towards recovery, right?

It all started like this…

As some of you know, I’m interning at the Ottawa Citizen this month. This means that I haven’t been at home with my family for the traditional holiday build-up. Logically, I decided to recreate Christmas home time for myself here in Ottawa. That means lots and lots of baking. Even more than usual. Anyways, my co-worker Matthew and I were in cahoots one day over email and decided to start #operationcovertcookie.

I told him that I was planning on bringing cookies into the newsroom one day, and he said he would join me. Then a flash of what I can only describe as pure genius struck him: a top secret cookie FLASH MOB. People love cookies. People love flash mobs. This plan was brilliant.

Matthew and I got a few of our other co-workers on board, and we decided on the time for our operation to get underway. 13hr30 Wednesday afternoon. Close enough to Christmas that it’s appropriate, but on a random enough day that people are still surprised.

Since I have this perpetual need to impress people through baking, I decided to bake three different kinds of cookies.

1. Peanut butter candy cookies from Bakerella
2. Vegan ginger cookies
3. Peppermint double chocolate cookies

The latter recipe was a real doozy and made – wait for it – five dozen cookies. Le sigh. What a first world problem, having too many cookies. Luckily Twitter is a wonderful cookie-getting-rid-of tool, and I quickly disposed of (if that’s the correct word) a dozen of them. What are friends for, right?

Anyways, #operationcovertcookie was a HUGE success. We didn’t wear black unitards nor did we don fake cheetah print (both were suggested undercover outfit choices), but it was fantastic nonetheless.

A few lessons/fun adventures from this cookie baking session:

– If you’re prone to eating several cookies worth of raw dough (guilty, guilty, guilty), you will eat EVEN MORE when said dough is vegan and doesn’t contain raw eggs and other things that are normally supposed to be bad for you. The ginger cookie dough was unreal. Plan to eat at least 1/8 of it pre-baking.

– You may have to explain to the clerk at your small, local corner store what Smarties are. You will motion frantically at the M&M’s and say they’re similar and then draw out a spherical shape with your hands. You will ask if they have Christmas-themed Smarties, which will confuse him even more. You will then proceed to buy the normal M&M’s and pick out the green and red ones.

– When trying to be sleuth bringing cookies into an open-concept newsroom, don’t bring a Tupperware that is the size of half of Texas. See, if I didn’t have a baking problem this wouldn’t be an issue. Related: people on buses don’t like people with Tupperware.

– Pampered Chef parchment paper is wonderful. I’m so glad the no name stuff was sold out and this was on sale. It lasts FOREVER.

– Colourful sprinkles improve cookies by a tenfold.

I’m also addicted to photographing cookies. Here’s what you’re stuck with.

Oh yeah, and here are some of the other cookies I’ve made for classmates over the past month…Instagram-ified Not pictured: peanut butter stuffed chocolate cookies. They were good.

Photo 2011-11-23 10 53 00 PM — Light and fluffy ricotta cookies

Photo 2011-11-27 5 56 42 PM — Christmas swirl icebox cookies

Photo 2011-12-17 5 43 34 PM — Peppermint vanilla cupcakes for a friend's Christmas party

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Tie-dye cookies

July 9, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

Please forgive me for what I’m about to do:

These cookies were absolutely tie-dye for.

See? I told you it was going to be bad. Now, if you can move on from this disastrous display of attempted wit, please continue to read about these colourful cookies.

I figured such colourful cookies warranted the use of my homemade placemats as an appropriate backdrop.

The rekindling of my creative cooking self was partly inspired by my passionate love of colour.

These cookies saw me, once again, utilizing the ever-strong powers of my gel food colouring (well technically, it’s Brittany’s food colouring, but she was kind enough to let me use it for the summer). The recipe for these cookies was inspired by two different blog postings, one by The Cooking Photographer, and the other by my new favourite baking blog, Diamonds for Dessert. I’ve only made “icebox cookies” once before. To make icebox cookies, all you do is refrigerate the dough and slice it to make the cookies. For me, this refrigeration time lasted for two days, since I had absolutely no time to make them earlier in the week. I finally got around to baking them while I waited for my portobello pesto pizza to rise.

Due to poor planning on my part, I decided to knead the gel food colouring into the cookie dough, rather than mix it in pre-flour when it would have actually been easy. As a result, the dough wasn’t completely dyed, creating this sort of cool tie-dye effect. It also meant that my hands were dyed with pink, green, yellow and purple dye for three straight days.

Gel food colouring – it’s powerful stuff. (PS: in my recipe below I’ve changed around the instructions so you can get solid cookie colours…unless you want to make them look tie-dye, that is, in which case add in the food colouring last).

My favourite part of photographing these cookies, was that a little girl strolling along the street with her mom stopped and stared for a bit. Something about rainbow-coloured cookies make kids coming running. I gave her a her mom a cookie and snapped their picture just because the kid was so damn cute. I also happened to be a fan of her pink colour scheme.

I already have a few tricks up my sleeves for the next time I make cookies like this. I’m thinking of making two layers mint green and adding in peppermint extract instead of vanilla. The other two layers will then somehow have oreo crumbs mixed in, making them either (a) like a girl guide cookie or (b) like the best Dairy Queen blizzard in existence. Stay tuned.

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Chocolate CJTV Cookies

April 2, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

On Thursday I had my last journalism class of third-year. HOW CAN THIS BE? It seems like just yesterday I was blissfully unaware of the magic of broadcast journalism and was not attributing things and was writing run-on sentences (see what I did there?). I now consider myself a seasoned half-expert and a complete broadcast convert. God I love my program.

To celebrate this love and the end of the year, I wanted to make something for our last television class. I imagine many of you are unfamiliar with the end-of-semester routine with Carleton journalism, so let me explain. We have these three newsroom days where we basically get thrown into the world of same-day production. With tv, this means that you are reporting, shooting and editing something within a few hours, just like the big guns down at CBC and CTV do. You learn so much, but the days are a tad stressful. Food, particularly baked goods, always helps reduce this stress. So here we are.

CJTV cookies1 — The first and last time I will ever try to pipe a four letter acronym onto a tiny cookie.

When I got home Wednesday, all I wanted to do was bake. I had handed in two major assignments earlier that day and thought I deserved a little treat. I was devastated that I had already had to scrap my plans to make a Twitter-inspired fondant cake for my multimedia class, so I thought both me and my classmates deserved this late night baking extravaganza.

I knew I wanted to make some sort of corny television inspired cookie. I originally thought of doing these with a shortbread or sugar cookie base, but quickly decided in favour of something a little more chocolatey. The decorations were completely impromptu. I bought a bag of shoelace licorice with the full intention of cutting them up to make little antennas but, after I (a) ate 3/4 of the bag, and (b) couldn’t figure out a way to stick them on the cookie, gave up and ate the rest. The white and red outlining you see on the cookie is piped chocolate. At 11:30 p.m. that Wednesday night I was hunched over the counter decorating them, so I hope they look good!

PS: I love slightly undercooking chocolate cookies so they taste like brownies.
PPS: CJTV stands for Carleton Journalism Television.

And so, signing off from my kitchen, this is Hilary Duff, CJTV News, Ottawa.

Source (chocolate cookies): Cake Batter and Bowl

Pink Chocolate Surprise Cookies (also known as the cookies that can’t be “beet”)

February 14, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 9 Comments

Sorry if the title of this post made you groan, I can never resist the opportunity to insert a bad food pun.

Since Valentine’s Day is officially in…3 minutes, I figured I’d better keep blogging about all my holiday-themed treats in what appears to be a V-Day baking post marathon.

These cookies. Wow. Earlier this week I was perusing the pages of Tastespotting trying to get inspired for my Valentine’s Day baking. I stumbled on a picture of these cookies, and was immediately drawn to the vibrant hue of the dessert. Now you must understand that in my baking this week I challenged myself to one task: using beets as a natural dye in a dessert. You see, I’d been considering making red velvet something-or-anothers for a few weeks, but had always been turned off by my memories of awful tasting red artificial colouring. When I read that beets were a great replacement for all that fake stuff, I was a little hesitant. Sure, beets are great in borscht and in other main meal things, but could they really be used in a dessert?

The answer was an overwhelming “yes.”

When I found this recipe I decided I was going to go all out with the beet colouring. Remember, I’m trying to be brave with this food exploration thing, and this was another big step for me. Since I was going to make my own beet puree to use in the cookies, I decided the easiest thing for me to do would be to buy canned (but NOT pickled, this is very important!!) beets at the grocery store. This way I could smartly avoid any time wasted chopping, peeling, and dying my hands a bright shade of magenta. In the end, it was kind of fun to make my own puree in our food processor. It turned out looking like some sort of blood-red applesauce, and added the best natural colouring to these cookies.

So how did they turn out?

Well they were AWESOME! Okay, I know cookies are never healthy, but think about it. These have vegetables in them and no butter (normally a bad thing, but it worked out in this case). I guess I’m in a “put vegetables in my desserts” phase after my chocolate zucchini cake, but the trend seems to be working out for me. My cookies actually turned out to have more of a cake-like whoopie pie consistency, which gave them a perfect chewable quality. Even my roommate Amanda who is the pickiest eater EVER liked them, although she did initially wrinkle her nose when I told her about the “surprise ingredient.” I found the beets added almost a sweet after taste to the cookie, enough to keep the eater guessing as to where the great flavour came from. And of course, they were pink, which is all I really wanted in the first place.

PS: I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before, but isn’t using coloured paper as the backdrop for my food pictures a wonderful idea?! I have so, so, so much coloured paper, so this gives me an additional place to use it. To take my pictures I simply line our world atlas with paper, prop it up against the window sill with my hip, and photograph my heart out.