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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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After many emails and requests on how to do this I am going to do a quick post.  I have used coloured sug­ars on many cook­ies and cup­cakes and it’s really sim­ple to make your own.  I’ve even made it with a pearl­ized sheen.  It all depends on the food colour­ing you choose.  The main thing to keep in mind is that you must use a POWDERED form of food colour­ing.  Any liq­uids or gels will just melt the sugar and you’ll have a colour­ful but sticky mess.

I try to buy a coarsely ground sugar for my dec­o­rat­ing sug­ars just so it gives a lit­tle more impact, or you can always use reg­u­lar white sugar if that’s all you can buy or have on hand.

To be on the safe side you should prob­a­bly start off with just a lit­tle of the food col­or­ing and see what shade you get after you shake it (with the lid on tightly of course!).  You can then adjust it and make it darker by adding a lit­tle more col­or­ing until you get the desired shade you are after.

Store your sug­ars in a dry space so they don’t clump up from moisture.