Chocolate & Walnut Cookies

It's been so long since I baked, I was literally dreaming about it. So, I set out to rectify it this weekend. After taking stock of my sparse pantry, I decided to make these simple cookies.

This is a mildly sweet cookie with bites of walnut and just enough chocolate to satisfy your craving. 

Strawberry Chocolate-Chip Cookies

Little girls' birthday parties are hardly without pinks and purples these days. Every little girl is enamored by the pretty pinks of princesses and can't seem to get enough! A cute daughter of a friend of ours loves pink in all forms... she has to have at least one shade of pink or purple in anything she wears or touches. So I was wracking my brain on what treat to give her on her birthday and I thought - why not make strawberry cookies? Except, I had no idea how to make them! Thankfully, Sally at Sally's Baking Addiction had a lovely recipe (and an easy one too), and I followed it to make a batch of delightfully pink and flavorful cookies that the birthday girl loved! Thanks, Sally!

Here is her recipe. I highly recommend the recipe. The cookies were soft and chewy and very flavorful! Who would have thought of using strawberry cake mix?! Mix strawberry cake mix with baking powder, eggs, vegetable oil, vanilla extract and chocolate chips and voila! In 10 minutes, you get the pinkest cookies you can ever bake!

Eggless Oregano Cookies

My friend J sent me a wonderful recipe for Jeera (cumin) cookies a year back. It was, as expected, everyone's favorite. I adapted the recipe by adding Oregano seeds (omam), removing eggs, and adjusting a couple of other measurements. Omam cookies are popular in India as a tea-time snack. So, here is the easy and fail-proof recipe. Thanks to my friend for the initial recipe!

Ingredients (about 20-25 cookies):

1. 1/4 cup sugar
2. 1/4 cup thick yogurt (greek or whole)
3. 3/4 cup vegetable oil
4. 1.5 teaspoons salt
5. 2 cups all purpose flour
6. 1 tablespoon or 2 teaspoons oregano seeds / dried oregano (omam/ajwain)
7. 1 teaspoon baking soda

Preparation:

1. Beat the sugar, yogurt, and vegetable oil for a couple of minutes until everything is incorporated. 
2. Separately sift/mix the flour, salt, soda, and oregano seeds. 
3. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix gently with a spatula. When the dough begins to come together, knead gently to mix everything. Do not over-mix or knead too much. 
4. Preheat the oven to 350 F. On a parchment lined baking sheet, form small (1/2 - 1 inch radius) balls and gently press down. Place them 1/2 inch apart and bake for 15-20 minutes until slightly brown around the edges and underneath the cookies. It took me 18 minutes (precisely) for the underside of the cookies to turn golden. 
5. Remove and let the cookies cool for 10-15 minutes. Store in an air-tight container

Potato-Chip Cookies

When I read the title of this cookie-recipe, I experienced a mix of feelings - amazement, fascination, excitement, curiosity, and several others while a voice was trying to force some discipline to not indulge in potato chips baked in buttery, sugary cookie-dough. But today, I really had to try it out. Baking can be a serious addiction. I was immensely curious of how the cookies would taste.

I'll cut to the chase and state that the cookies were wonderful! They tasted just as I'd imagined they would and even better. This is surely one of the most unique cookies I have come across - a beautiful mix of sweet and savory. It's surely a stroke of genius.

The only tweak I made to the recipe was to add peanuts instead of pecans.  And frankly, I think peanuts and potatoes are a better combination. One simple batch yields almost 32 cookies! It's great that I can bake to satisfy my curiosity, and distribute most of the calories to a lab-full of eager and stressed grad-students ;).

Spiced Maple Butter Cookies

This year's Christmas cookies come from this lovely recipe. It has lots of butter (a sure sign that things can't go wrong), sugar, flour, egg, maple syrup, nutmeg, and cardamom powder. I went heavy handed and added a generous teaspoon of nutmeg and cardamom powder each. Prepare the dough, chill it, roll it, cut out shapes, bake for 9-10 minutes at 350 F. Allow cookies to cool and decorate them with a very light icing. This cookie is best on its own; for that is when the maple and nutmeg flavors (not to mention the buttery aroma) are best tasted and enjoyed. So, don't crowd the cookies with icing, like I did with some.

The icing that I used consisted of whipping the below ingredients to a smooth consistency:

3/4 cup confectioners sugar

2 teaspoons of milk

1.5 teaspoons of maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract

some food coloring

Merry Christmas!

Gingerbread cookies

My earliest memory of reading a book (or even looking at pictures of a book) is that of a gingerbread man cookie that comes to life and runs away to escape his mean pursuers. I have the image of that particular illustration of a gingerbread man imprinted - he had cute buttons down his front, two bead-like eyes, and an expressive mouth. I had always wanted to bake gingerbread men cookies, and I used Christmas as an excuse to bake a batch of them last year. 

Regarding the recipe, I searched and scoured the internet inside-out and went over every possible highly rated recipe to understand what makes a classic gingerbread cookie (without all the extra frills). I noted down a few recipes, mixed and matched and adjusted a few measurements "intuitively" and came up with this version. I unfortunately don't remember the sources of the original recipes to credit them here, but thanks to them for helping me figure out a version. 

Ingredients: (makes 30 gingerbread men cookies, depending on the size of the cutter)

1. 1 stick butter (at room temperature)
2. 1/2 cup sugar (brown sugar would be better)
3. 1/2 cup molasses
4. 2.5 cups all-purpose flour
5. 1 teaspoon baking soda
6. 1 teaspoon salt
7. 1 teaspoon ground ginger (ginger powder)
8. 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger (for extra zing!)
9. 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
10. 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
11. 1/2 teaspoon cardamom powder
12. 1/2 teaspoon ground pepper
13. 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
14. 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
15. 1/4 cup buttermilk

Preparation:

1. Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl - the flour, baking soda, salt, ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and cardamom. 
2. Cream the butter and sugar on medium speed (if using an electric mixer) until fluffy. 
3. Add molasses and vanilla extract, and stir (do not beat). Next, add the buttermilk and grated ginger, and stir until combined.
4. Add the flour mixture in parts, and gently stir till the dough comes together. Do not over mix. This dough will be extremely sticky, so divide the dough into 2-3 parts and gently wrap it up tightly in saran wrap/plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. 
5. When the dough is chilled, roll it out to 1/4-1/8 inch thickness on a generously floured board. Using a cookie cutter, cut out the cookies and bake for 9-12 minutes on a parchment-lined baking sheet at 375 F. 10-11 minutes was the ideal interval for me. 
6. Allow the cookies to cool completely before icing. I used store-bought icing tubes to make little eyes, mouth, buttons etc. 

I had other cookie cutters to make Christmas trees and stockings along with the adorable gingerbread men. I love these cookies for their crunchiness and spicy flavors.

Witch-Hat Cookies

Happy Halloween! We’re having a nice time handing out candies to incredibly cute kids in our neighborhood. The week before, we had a really fun Halloween party complete with traditional American-Halloween games such as Bobbing for Apples - which involves dunking your head in a tub full water to retrieve floating apples with your teeth! Anyway, I was looking around for spooky treats to prepare for the party, and decided to take a slightly easier route by trying out Giada’s yummy looking chocolate-hazelnut smooches that came out looking like adorable witch-hats - the good witch kinds ;).

Another reason why I really wanted to try this cookie was to somehow find an excuse to (buy) and use Nutella! If you haven’t tried Nutella yet, it’s a “sin”! ;). Really. How I wish my childhood had Nutella in it! That’s my only regret.

Anyway, so I followed the recipe as such. It’s a simple chocolate cookie, except the rich cream of Nutella goes into it, and the balls of cookie-dough are rolled in orange sprinkles and baked for 7-8 minutes at 375 F, following which Hershey’s chocolate kisses are placed at the center of the cookie and baked for another 3 minutes.  And you get delicious witch hats waiting to be devoured. Next time, I would probably bake smaller sized cookie balls so that the Hershey's kisses are proportional to the diameter of the cookie, making them look like realistic mini-hats.

I know, this was such a benign Halloween treat! Next year, I shall up the ante and venture into more gory-looking, spookier treats!

To make up for the lack of spookiness of the treat, here is Anand lurking as a werewolf!

Jeera Cheddar Cookies

As a child, I used to love the melt-in-your-mouth butter biscuits. Later, I grew up and butter-biscuits grew out of my reach, but its cousin, jeera biscuits, became my favorite. Good for me, Anand loves it too, and always asks for them. So I always look for an opportunity to make them, with slight variations here and there.

This time, I tried this alluring recipe to make shortbread jeera cookies. I’ve tried both the fruity and savory versions of the shortbread cookies twice, and they have come out really well both times - especially the orange cookies - yum! The only minor changes I made to the savory version were - I skipped the thyme, added shredded cheddar instead of Parmesan cheese, and went heavy on the jeera - I added about 3 teaspoons. The thyme does add a nice aroma to the cookies, though.

It seems like this blog is more about recording recipes from a ton of sources, than coming up with innovative recipes of my own! It’s turning into a tribute to all these wonderful sources! Oh well, I’ll need more time to experiment a little more. Since most of the dishes I make are usually to entertain or to whip up something within a constrained time period, I really don’t feel like experimenting anything in that frenzied state.

Anyway, the recipe is quite perfect. It results in cookies that are crumbly, cheesy and cumin-y! The best part is, it envelops the whole house with the lovely aroma of butter and toasted cumin!