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Ok, this recipe needed a “do over.”  A huge part of the online bak­ing com­mu­nity is about shar­ing, that’s a large part of why we do this: a shared love of food and cook­ing it.  We all see recipes and foods online or in cook­books that we like and it’s per­fectly fine to go ahead and make them and then to write about your expe­ri­ences.  But, and here’s the point… I saw this recipe for yummy cook­ies on Caroline’s Choco­late & Car­rots blog and thought I’d see how they turned out since I have more than one friend these days who has a reac­tion to flour prod­ucts but still likes a sweet, baked treat.

In my haste yes­ter­day to:

1. Gather up two dogs to take them to the vet for shots
2. Wash my car and vac­uum the inside in 105 degrees
3. Go to the post office, video store, bank, City build­ing, library
4. Get Star­bucks
5. See what Hobby Lobby had on sale
6. Buy lunch
7. Gro­cery shop for our healthy eat­ing lifestyle change
8. Go to the gym
9. Do some work for a client or two (need money from time to time…LOL)
10. Remove the cov­ers from both air con­di­tioner con­densers to clean them and help Hubby(and about destroy both in the process),

I hit the “pub­lish” but­ton on my Word­Press post instead of “save draft” which inad­ver­tently posted a half baked arti­cle which didn’t give any credit to Car­o­line and her recipe at all.  Luck­ily for me, she was very under­stand­ing and polite about it… Sorry Caroline..

Any­way, here is the recipe and they are really great cook­ies so you must bake them!

One of the first things I do before I bake is set all my ingre­di­ents out and all of the equip­ment I’m going to be using… This is called mise en place or putting every­thing in it’s place. You can read more about that term here…

Mise en place — putting it all in order ready to bake!

Method

• First off, pre­heat your oven to 350°F (180°C) (F to C temp con­verter here)
• Pre­pare your bak­ing sheets with sil­i­con mats or sprayed parchment
• Com­bine all dry ingre­di­ents into a bowl (flour, cocoa pow­der and salt)
• Fold in 3 egg whites and then vanilla
• Only beat until mix­ture is moist and fudge brownie like.  If it’s too dry then add an addi­tional egg white.
• Fold in choco­late chips
• Using a table­spoon, place cookie mix onto pre­pared bak­ing sheets, leav­ing room as they will spread. (I got 12 on a half pan sized bak­ing sheet)

On the tray

Bake for approx 14 mins or until the tops begin to crack. They will have a shiny gloss fin­ish to them.

Fin­ished Cookies

Haha… my first embed­ded video..

Points to consider:

If you are using a con­vec­tion oven adjust the tem­per­a­ture down by about 25 degrees and you can usu­ally reduce your bake time by a minute or two.  Keep an eye on your cook­ies as all ovens vary a little.

Many vari­ables can affect your bak­ing… humid­ity, alti­tude and the age of your prod­ucts.  For exam­ple, the older the flour  is the drier it can be, there­fore often requir­ing the addi­tion of more liq­uid than nor­mally called for just to get it to the right con­sis­tency… don’t panic, there is NO FLOUR in this par­tic­u­lar recipe, this was just an exam­ple of a variable.

Enjoy and happy baking!

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Red vel­vet, while syn­ony­mous with Valen­tines Day and now pop­u­lar for wed­dings, is just plain gor­geous to look at.  To be totally hon­est, red is my absolute favourite colour and any chance I get to wear it, look at it or eat it I do.  Not that many red foods around when you think about it… and I don’t really eat very much red meat.

Sooo let’s get busy and make some deli­cious red vel­vet cook­ies to be enjoyed and shared all year around.  But wait, just think how cute they would be for Christ­mas or Valentine’s Day as well!

This recipe calls for Dutch Processed Choco­late.   So what’s the dif­fer­ence between that and reg­u­lar unsweet­ened cocoa pow­der you ask?   First off, Both types of cocoa pow­der are unsweet­ened and there­fore bit­ter when tasted alone.

Ok, on to our recipe:

Ingre­di­ents:

3 1/4 cups (355 grams) all pur­pose flour
1/4 cup (75 grams) unsweet­ened Dutch processed cocoa pow­der
1/2 tea­spoon salt
1 tea­spoon (4 grams) bak­ing pow­der
1 cup (227 grams) unsalted but­ter, room tem­per­a­ture
1 3/4 cups (350 grams) gran­u­lated white sugar
2 large eggs
2 tea­spoons pure vanilla extract
3 Table­spoons of Red Food Col­or­ing.. I used the gel type

For Red Vel­vet Cookies:

1. In a large bowl whisk together the flour, cocoa pow­der, salt, and bak­ing powder.

2. In the bowl of your elec­tric mixer (or with a hand mixer), beat the but­ter and sugar until light and fluffy (about 3 to 4 min­utes). Add the eggs, one at a time, beat­ing well after each addi­tion. Add the vanilla extract and the food col­or­ing then beat until combined.

Add the flour mix­ture and beat until you have a smooth dough.

3. Divide the dough in half and wrap each half in plas­tic wrap. Refrig­er­ate for about one hour or until firm enough toroll.

4. Pre­heat oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C) and place rack in the cen­ter of the oven. Line two bak­ing sheets with parch­ment paper.

5.    Remove one half of the chilled dough from the refrig­er­a­tor and, on a lightly floured sur­face, roll out the dough to a thick­ness of 1/4 inch (1 cm). (Keep turn­ing the dough as you roll, mak­ing sure the dough does not stick to the counter.) Cut out desired

shapes using a lightly floured cookie cut­ter and trans­fer cook­iesto the pre­pared bak­ing sheet. Place the bak­ing sheets with the unbaked cook­ies in the refrig­er­a­tor for 10 to 15 min­utes to chill the dough which pre­vents the cook­ies from spread­ing and los­ing their shape while baking.

Note: If you are not going to frost the baked cook­ies, you may want to sprin­kle the unbaked cook­ies with crys­tal or sparkling sugar.

Bake cook­ies for about 10 — 12 min­utes (depend­ing on size) or until they are firm around the edges. Remove from oven and let cook­ies cool on bak­ing sheet for a few min­utes before trans­fer­ring to a wire rack to fin­ish cool­ing. Frost with royal icing, if desired. Be sure that the frost­ing on the cook­ies dries com­pletely before stor­ing. (This may take sev­eral hours.) Frosted cook­ies will keep sev­eral days in an airtight

con­tainer. Store between lay­ers of parch­ment paper or wax paper.

Makes about 36 — 4 inch (10 cm) cookies.

BEST frosted with a cream cheese frost­ing.  I use the recipe on my site here and thin it with some milk to make it more like a glaze if I don’t want heavy frost­ing.  Also, I have rolled out fon­dant into the same shape as the cookie and placed it on top of a thin layer of the frost­ing which gives a nice finish!

For a final fin­ish on my fon­dant cov­ered cook­ies I used an impres­sion mat to make pretty pat­terns.. and then dusted with pearl dust.. there is no limit to what you can do with these or any other cook­ies!  Happy Baking!

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Hubby has a work Hol­i­day party tomor­row so I decided to make cook­ies instead of cup­cakes for a change.  Plus, who can resist some of the great cookie recipes syn­ony­mous with this time of year.  I went with a tried and true favourite — the peanut but­ter cookie with a choco­late kiss pushed into the top.  While at the store buy­ing kisses I saw the white and red striped pep­per­mint vari­ety and thought how fun they would look in a choco­late cookie, so I made those also.

Here are the two quickie recipes which will have you rolling in cook­ies in very short order:

Like I said, after see­ing how cute the pep­per­mint kisses were I just had to make a choco­late cookie to put them on.  I had some red dec­o­ra­tor sugar in the pantry and rolled just the tops of the cookie balls into that before bak­ing for some extra hol­i­day sparkle.

Choco­late Pep­per­mint Kiss Cook­ies

Ingre­di­ents: 2 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 cup unsweet­ened cocoa 1 tea­spoon bak­ing powder 1/4 tea­spoon salt 8 ounces unsalted but­ter (2 sticks), softened 1 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed 2/3 cup gran­u­lated sugar 2 large eggs 1 tea­spoon vanilla extract 1 choco­late kiss for each cookie

Method:

1.  Sift together the flour, cocoa, bak­ing pow­der, and salt and place aside.

2.  Cream together the but­ter and sug­ars until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, beat­ing after each addi­tion. Beat in vanilla.

3.  On low speed, beat in flour mix­ture a lit­tle at a time, until well blended and smooth.

4.  Drop choco­late cookie dough onto greased bak­ing sheets or sil­i­cone mat by rounded tea­spoons, about 2 inches apart.   I rolled mine in coloured dec­o­ra­tor sugar before plac­ing them on the tray.

5.  Bake at 350° for 12 to 15 min­utes, or until set.

Gen­tly push a kiss into each cookie as soon as they come out of the oven.

Makes about 3 dozen cookies.

***TIP***  If you don’t have the coloured dec­o­ra­tor sugar avail­able you can make your own but you will still need pow­dered food colour­ing to add to reg­u­lar white sugar.  Place 1 cup of white sugar into a con­tainer with a tight fit­ting lid and to that add about 1/4 tea­spoon of pow­dered food colour­ing.  Shake the con­tainer until the white sugar turns coloured.  Of course you can adjust the amount of food colour­ing to make stronger or paler colours.

Peanut But­ter Choco­late Kiss Cookie 

Ingre­di­ents:

• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup of white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup peanut but­ter (I like to use crunchy but we only had smooth on hand)
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 3/4 cup flour
• 1 tea­spoon bak­ing soda
• 1 tea­spoon salt
• Her­sheys Kisses — 1 for each cookie

Method:

1.   Pre­heat the oven to 375°F.
2.  Cream together but­ter, both sug­ars and peanut but­ter.
3.  Add the egg and vanilla.
4.  Add flour, bak­ing soda and salt.
5.  Form into small wal­nut sized balls.
6.  Roll in white sugar and place them on a cookie sheet.
7.  Bake for 8 to 10 min­utes.
8.  Press Her­shey Kiss into each cookie when fresh out of the oven.Makes about 2 1/2 dozen.

***TIP*** It really helps to have removed the foil wrap­pers from the kisses BEFORE the cook­ies come out of the oven.  I did it for the first batch but was scram­bling to get them unwrapped for the sec­ond batch before the  cook­ies cooled too much as they break up more when push­ing in the kisses if too cool.

Also, some recipes say to return the cook­ies to the oven for a minute once the kisses are on the cookie but I really don’t pre­fer this as the kisses lost their point and looked more like the teats off a baby bot­tle… um no.  You can see the dif­fer­ence in the two pho­tos since I didn’t do it on the choco­late pep­per­mint cookies.

Have a won­der­ful time mak­ing these cook­ies for your fam­ily and friends!  I know I did.  As always, your email ques­tions are most welcome.

~Colleen