Miscellany

1. am New York and I are totally on the same page about the World Cup:I may not know who the favorites are. I'm pretty sure I don't understand all the rules. But I'll certainly be watching.

2. In order to make some extra money I've been working for the US Census--which, if it were a permanent job would drive me to alcoholism in no time flat--and that means that I now how to deal with the management office of the apartment complex where I live. Which is staffed by some of the most unpleasant people I have ever encountered in a professional capacity. So in preparation for having to get information from them tomorrow I am baking them some of the most fabulous cookies in the world. Not thanks to my baking skills--the recipe is just that good. I dislike the people in management so much that I'm having a tough time coming to grips with giving them cookies though, so this had better inspire them to be nice to me.

3. I'm moving in a couple months and while I'm only going to another area of the city, I'm trying to use it as an opportunity to get rid of things I don't want. It turns out that I'm quite good at getting rid of clothing and very bad at getting rid of books. Even books that I bought for 50 cents because I liked the covers and am never, ever going to read. I think that I'm going to need my sometime roommate to go through them with me and remind me that it really is a good idea to pass on books that I didn't even remember I owned in the first place.

Cookies

I started this entry almost a week ago and I'm only now finishing it. I did mean to be blogging this past week but instead I decided that, now that the series is almost over, it was high time I started watching Battlestar Galactica. So that's how I've been spending all my spare time. A girl has got to have priorities. (Just not necessarily good ones. [Not that watching Battlestar Galactica is a bad thing to do. But it would be a good thing to take breaks.]) Anyway...

My mother baked with my sister and me all the time when we were little but our repertoire was pretty limited. We mostly made tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, apple pie, rugelach, and gingersnaps. Which are all excellent things to make, really. But I think of two of those types of cookies as seasonal to begin with and I've never really enjoyed making cookies, and I'd rather have pie or ice cream, so I haven't really baked a lot of them.

Still, the little section of the office where my cubicle is located was having a cookie day Monday. Which is how I ended up searching the fantastic Smitten Kitchen for cookie recipes. I wound up making Dorie Greenspan's World Peace Cookies and Green Tea Shortbread cookies (minus the white chocolate ganache because I don't care what it's supposed to be complimenting, I don't like white chocolate). The World Peace Cookies were fabulous. The Green Tea cookies were...fine.

Normally February would seem like a great time for baking. The only problem is my apartment management and I have very different ideas on what constitutes a livable temperature. Combine that with the run of warm weather we had and I'd like it to be a good 15 degrees cooler than it is. When the oven was on for awhile it got up around 87 in the kitchen. So that made things a little less fun than they otherwise would have been. Oh well.

The dough for the World Peace Cookies was a cinch to make. And it only requires ingredients I generally have around the apartment anyway. I love it when I can bake without going shopping. Also I'm trying to save money these days so the fact that the recipe doesn't call for anything fancy or expensive is a definite bonus. I mean I'm sure you can use expensive, fancy chocolate and the cookies turn out glorious but I used fairly middle-of-the-road stuff and the cookies still tasted awfully good.

Making slice-and-bake cookies from scratch is a new thing for me and while forming the logs was easy, it turns out that I have no idea how big an inch-and-a-half is. I made these cookies again today and used a measuring tape this time around and as a result I can say with some confidence that the first time I made these the logs were easily over two inches wide. Oops. To compensate and make sure I had enough cookies to bring to work, I cut them a bit thinner than the half-inch wide they were supposed to be. So the cookies ended up being broader and flatter than they were meant to be. But as long as things still taste good I just figure that mistakes aren't that big a deal. I do have to admit though, that I like them best at their prescribed size and washed down with milk. Like that, they're about as satisfying a cookie experience as I can imagine.

The Green Tea cookie dough was also easy to make but did require me to go out and buy matcha. And since I couldn't find the unsweetened kind the recipe called for I ended up cutting back on the powdered sugar in the recipe just a tiny bit to compensate. It's not an overly sweet cookie, which is good since I don't have all that much of a sweet tooth.

I have to admit that I was a little concerned also, by the rather unappetizing color of the dough. And it was a fucking pain in the ass to roll out. First it cracked and then it stuck horribly. I ended up rolling it out between a couple sheets of plastic wrap. And once they were baked the cookies were a much more appealing green than the dough had been. They're light and crisp with just a delicate taste of green tea. Not so much as to be overwhelming but distinctly noticeable nevertheless. Now if only I liked shortbread better.

Chocolate Cake

I had a shabbat dinner to attend Friday and needed to bring a dessert so I whipped up a nearly flourless chocolate cake. The selling point was that Epicurious said it was easy and I didn't really have a lot of time. Basically I took a lot of chocolate:
Lots of eggs and sugar:
Not so much flour and baking soda:
Melt the chocolate down:
And combine. Voila!

I made ganache to ice it and basically ended up with a super-duper-chocolatey brownie. Not my favorite, but it seemed to be a hit.

More Miscellany

Just a few thoughts from your resident absentee blogger:

1. Finally replaced the old, falling apart whale stickies on the bottom of the tub.
Quite an improvement, I think. My roommate and I agree that they make it look a bit like we have a 5 year old living in the apartment but we love them anyway. Besides, look at the color of our tub (also the sink and toilet). Our bathroom needs all the cheering up it can get.


2. Dmitri Kalinin makes my heart hurt. I want so much for him not to struggle and he's just playing really bad hockey right now.


3. I'm so glad that Christian won Project Runway. I liked Jillian's work as well, but I thought Christian put together a wonderful show. And this dress was fucking amazing (although not the most amazing picture of it):
I loved this as well, particularly the hat:


4. Over the weekend I baked Italian olive bread. My sister gave me the recipe but told me she found it a bit bland and would probably substitute whole wheat flour for about half the recipe. I didn't really feel like doing that but in the end I agreed that it was slightly boring although it had a nice texture. I think next time I'll either try adding in some whole wheat flour or I'll use more olives to make a really olive-stuffed loaf. I'm also thinking that sourdough bread with black olives would be delicious.


5. I also made a maple-pecan cake, which has the advantage of looking quite pretty.
I like the cake a lot but hate the frosting. It's maple and vanilla flavored and has a kind of sticky, marshmallow-y texture which I don't enjoy. If anyone has any suggestions on a frosting that would go well with a maple-flavored cake feel free to leave them in the comments.

Challah

Sorry for the crappy quality of this picture--I've misplace my camera so it was taken on a cellphone. I just somehow feel like I'm being a bad blogger if I don't include images.

Anyway, last time my sister visited, I stole the recipe for this particular challah off her iPod. I'd never had it before but she said it was good and that her boyfriend's mother loved it when she made it for her. So now that I have a new oven, which makes baking bread much more feasible, I figured I'd try it out.

I went to a Jewish summer camp for a couple years when I was a teenager and on Fridays we'd always have to do these preparing-for-Shabbat chores. One of these was braiding the Challah for baking--which I didn't do all that well on the pictured loaf but was much more successful at on the mostly eaten loaf--but I'd never actually made the dough. I was very relieved then, to find that it wasn't at all difficult.

The thing that always throws me off when I make bread--which is admittedly rare--is getting the right liquid to flour ratio. But this recipe only uses 1/4 cup of water so it's fairly hard to mess up. I ran out of regular flour so I mixed in some whole wheat flour and it came out just fine. Today I picked up some chicken soup from Little Veselka to go with it.

And if nothing else, challah always looks delicious.

Rugelach

Well, if you've got a new oven you have to cook stuff in it, right? So of course I choose to make one of the few things that cooked up just fine in the old oven as well. Hey, it may be time consuming, but it's also easy to make.

The recipe was my great-great grandmother's and like most people of her generation, she didn't actually measure the ingredients when she made things. My grandmother, who used to bake with her, did take the time to figure out general measurements, but there's still a lot of "add about . . . " and "add cinnamon until light brown" type stuff, so if you get the amounts off, it's not the end of the world. I've yet to truly mess them up, and I can cook pretty much anything badly.

And below is the reason it's so time consuming . . . all that cutting and rolling.
Of course, the recipe also makes about 60 , but they always seem to go pretty fast.