Wood Burned Cookies

My mother has a wood burning clay oven in our back yard. It is in this oven that she bakes her amazing sourdough bread and, whenever she fires it up, cooks a roast or some chicken for dinner. Also, her daughters have taken to baking chocolate chip cookies in the oven.

Generally, it's my sister Rebecca who bakes the cookies. They always turn out perfectly, taste better than any other chocolate chip cookie under the sun, and only take a couple of minutes to cook due to the extreme heat of the oven. 

This time, I made the cookies. I wasn't so lucky as to have perfect cookies. Exploded cookies is closer to the truth.

But hey, they still taste good. I think the picture enhances their appearance as well. 

Next time, I will succeed. Or rather, next time I'll let Rebecca take control of The Bakery. 

The Bakery

Last week or so, at dinner, two of my three sisters suggested a remodeling of our 'Garden Room.' The Garden Room, I suppose, used to be a place of gardening and plants. But for as long as I can remember, it's been the place where my mom bakes bread.

This is how the more redone side of the room looks now. I unfortunately neglected to take a picture of how the room looked before. Imagine an off-white wall with none of the shelving. 

The first day, we painted the walls. We painted one wall red, and the other three and a half (I'm allowing room for doorways and stuff) the same creamy white they were before. 

Before we got to work on the red wall, we gave it a little decoration. 

Just to show our fandom. By the way, we redid this room before DKR came out. 

After the first layer of paint, you could still see traces of Batman

It's a good thing we still had another can and a half of paint. 

I took the initiative to bake a snack. What other than our favorite, chocolate chip cookies? 

I somehow managed to make one of the cookies without any chocolate chips, so our dog Homer got that one. He loved it. His very first whole cookie. He did have some trouble getting it off the ground...

On day 2, my two sisters installed the shelves. I think. I might be getting my dates a little mixed up. But I think it was day two. I didn't help with this at all. 

On day 3: Ikea. We obviously had to buy new jars and containers for all of our baking supplies. 

I loved Ikea. Best place in the world. My new life goal is to get a 24 hour job there. The dozens of bedrooms and kitchens put of display on the second floor made me feel like I was in heaven. Who would have though pulling out every drawer in a model kitchen could be so much fun? I also took advantage of the beds in the mock bedrooms. Very comfortable. I really could live there. They even have a restaurant! 

That evening, we put everything in the room, and voila, we have the newly renamed Bakery! 

Oh, the beauty of it! 

A Home Carnival

Cotton candy flavored icing. Who'd have thought it? And yet...

'

Niha (my brother Nate's girlfriend) and I were busy last Sunday night making cupcakes, for the sole purpose of cotton candy frosting. Niha went out to the store and got: 

Vanilla cake mix

Cupcake wrapper things

Gummy bears 

White icing

And... Cotton Candy Frosting Flavoring! 

It's like a sort of powder. 

So, we made up the batter... I love cake mixes. they're so incredibly easy. Put in your water, put in your oil, don't forget the eggs like I almost did, bam you're done. 

And then you are supposed to bake it. I personally wouldn't be against eating an entire bowl of raw cake batter. No need to tell me that's disgusting. 

We split the batter into eighteen cupcakes. And baked them, and...

Yowzers! (Do we tend to say yowzers?) Do those look gorgeous? We unfortunately had to wait for them to cool. But we didn't wait very long before...

Two sugar-loving girls, in a kitchen, with cupcakes, gummy bears, and cotton candy frosting. Guess the result. mmmm! 

I hope the pictures inspired you to read all of the post, and the cupcakes' beauty inspired you to get the cookbook (or rather, grocery list, water, oil, and eggs) out and try to match Niha's and my brilliance. I bet you'll fail.

P.S. I'm sorry for posting twice in the same day. I know it's not aesthetically pleasing. 

All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; Easter, 2012

Icing sugar cookies is one of the funnest activities in the Universe. I remember when we decorated cookies at Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Easter. Now it's more like Christmas and Easter, if we get around to it.

We had a bunch of gingerbread men to ice at Christmas, but we didn't actually ice them. We just ate them. I'd wanted to do a Doctor then, but the occasion never came up. But come Easter, I was like, heck, I don't care if we don't have any gingerbread men! I'll decorate a Doctor anyway!

So I did...

The Doctor and the Tardis. I know, the Doctor isn't supposed to be a rabbit. I used what I had. Would you rather he be a basket? 

Happy Easter!

Molasses Ginger Cookies

Everybody who knows me also knows that I very rarely have anything to do with the kitchen. In fact, apart from lunch and breakfast, I try to avoid cooking altogether.

But Wednesday night, I went on the computer and found a completely vegan recipe for molasses ginger cookies and set out to make them for my brother David's birthday, which was actually in late December, but we've always celebrated it around St Patrick's Day.

These cookies have no artificial things in them like egg substitutes or soy milk, although it does call for vegan buttery spread. I used sunflower oil.

2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 Tbsp ginger powder
1 Tbsp fresh grated ginger
1/4 cup water 
1/4 - 1/3 cup molasses
1/3 cup melted vegan buttery spread (or sunflower or canola oil) 
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder


As it always is in recipes, the first thing you have to do is preheat the oven to 375 degrees. I didn't actually do this, because my mom was making bread and had the oven on at 350 degrees already. But unless your mom is making bread and has the oven on at 350 degrees already, you should preheat the oven to 375 degrees. 


Now you're supposed to soften your vegan buttery spread. I didn't do this, either, because as I said, I used sunflower oil, which had no need of being melted. 


Then, you get a big mixing bowl. Not too big, but big enough to hold all the dry ingredients (plus the wet ingredients, because you eventually add them all together. spoilers!) : flour, sugar, ginger powder, cinnamon, salt, and baking powder/soda. Put all of the dry ingredients (if you're too stupid to go back and read the list, you're too stupid to make these cookies) in the big, but not too big, mixing bowl. Stir them up until you can't see any individual ingredients; just a load of powdery stuff. 


In another bowl that's lots smaller, mix together the rest of the ingredients. These are the wet ingredients. Grating a tablespoon of ginger is not difficult. It just takes a fair amount of ginger. A tablespoon, roughly. The molasses and oil will not mix, nor will the water and oil mix. DO NOT DESPAIR! Just pour the whole lot of it into the bowl that's big enough to hold the wet and the dry ingredients. 


Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. You may have to add a couple of teaspoons of water in order for the dough to mix up well enough.


It will look like chocolate once it's all stirred up. It does not, as you will find out when you inevitably taste the stuff that looks like chocolate, taste like chocolate. It tastes as the ingredients would suggest. There is no chocolate in the list of ingredients. Don't be fooled by the beautiful chocolate-brown dough. 


The recipe says that you can freeze the dough for half an hour. i didn't do that, because it also said you didn't have to freeze the dough for half an hour. I just rolled it into twenty-four beautiful little balls, each of which was rolled in a bowl of sugar and placed on a single greased cookie sheet. The recipe says it makes twenty. Maybe i made mine too small. But that doesn't matter. However big or small you make them, you will get the equivalent of 20 cookies. 


Without turning the oven down, leave the cookies in the oven for eight to ten minutes. Or nine minutes. Whichever of the two. I had to bake them for an extra two or three minutes before they were finished. You may have to do the same. 


I slid my perfect cookies onto one of those things that's all those lines of metal. Cooling racks, I think. I waited fifteen minutes, give or take, before eating four. 


Well, I didn't eat four. Four people ate one each. They were delicious. 


I gave the rest to David the next morning. He thought they were delicious, too. 


I'm such a good cook. 


Recipe courtesy of Healthy. Happy. Life.