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Tie-dye cookies

~ 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.

Hulk-like

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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Monster-sized Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookies

~ Hilary ~ 6 Comments

These cookies were so large they should have had their own gravitational pull.

When I first saw these cookies on Tastespotting I knew I had to make them.  The question was: for whom?  My roommates have been experiencing a sugar overload in the past few weeks thanks to all the leftover cupcakes I’ve been bringing home.  Our house cupcake count is ranging somewhere between 30-40 cupcakes, which I think is an exceptionally impressive number.  Anyways, I wanted to expand the sugar appreciation beyond the walls of my house and find some new recipients for my baking.

And so, I made these for my multimedia journalism class.  A few people in the class have been bugging me since the beginning of the term to bring in some sort of dessert, so I thought I should finally oblige.  As the end of term creeps closer (only a week left now!) I get lured deeper into an obsessive baking fixation.  Baking is my means of procrastination and, whether my schedule likes it or not, I intend to spend at least 12 hours baking within the next week.

But back to the cookies.  They are HUGE!  In accordance with the recipe, I took an Oreo cookie (the double stuff variety, of course) and plopped a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough on the top and bottom of the Oreo.  Then I smushed the dough around the Oreo, completely hiding it and creating a dough ball that was approximately the size of a small softball.  The finished result was a cookie so large you had to eat it like a hamburger.

Make these for kids birthday parties if you dare.

Wicked co-ordination between cookie and oven mitts

Source: Picky Palate via The Kitchenarian