Chocolate Chip Cookies - Cooks in Training #7
Yeah, I know… as you scroll down this page, the posts look a little heavy to kid stuff. It wasn’t planned, it kinda just happened, but how fitting… because that’s pretty much my life. And I say that in a good way, I love my 2 little girls and I know they’ll grow up way too fast. But until then, they’ll be a part of my cooking blog.
Lexi is 6. She already loves doing stuff in the kitchen, especially if it involves using her mini cooking stuff. She has declared it her job to make the iced tea around here, if I just do the part of dumping the hot tea into the pitcher. And, on non-school days, she often makes lunch around here (nothing on the stove). I’d have her pack her own school lunch, except that it makes more sense for me to do it while she’s eating breakfast or getting ready. She does have opinions though… the other day, she said, “Mom, next time you pack my lunch, do you think you could think of something healthy to put in it like an apple or something? I don’t wanna get all weak and stuff.” Thing is, it wasn’t exactly unhealthy, it was a sandwich, chips, and grapes.
Tiffany is 3. She loves doing stuff in the kitchen too. But WHY can’t she dump a 2 1/2″ in diameter measuring cup full of flour into an 8″ in diameter mixing bowl without spilling it out over the side?!!!!! 
We’ve got a chocolate chip cookie recipe to feature today, from the Kid’s Cook cookbook. Cute little chocolate chip cookies. I told them to make the dough into balls and (because of their little hands?) the balls ranged from the size of a marble to the size of a super ball. Instead of the usual 12 cookies that I bake on one sheet, we got almost twice that many on, no problem. I realized I kinda like little cookies… they’re bite-sized and easy to pop in your mouth. This is not my usual chocolate chip cookie recipe, but it’s actually pretty close. This recipe is a small recipe, which is nice because there’s less chance of the mom having to finish the cookies when they get tired of making them and run off to play. I usually copy the directions word for word, but I’m just gonna paraphrase these because it’s written kinda kid-like and detailed.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
1 egg
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup chocolate chips
Heat oven to 375. Stir egg, sugars, and butter with wooden spoon until mixed.
Add flour, soda, salt and stir with wooden spoon till mixed.
Stir in chocolate chips. Form into balls and put on cookie sheets.
Could I please have the cookie in the front on the left up there?
Bake for 10-12 minutes.
Pumpkin Cream Cheese Squares
Pumpkin. Cream cheese. Chocolate. They make a fine trio.
This recipe comes from the Simply Wonderful cookbook compiled by the Honeybrook Community Church. I’ve only had this cookbook for several months and it’s already a favorite! It’s got lots of cheesecake recipes in it, a grilling section, and the salad department is outstanding! If I were to describe this cookbook in one phrase, it would be “good ol’ Mennonite cooking with a bit of flair”. My cookbook is dog-eared on pages with recipes I’ve gotta try.
Pumpkin Cream Cheese Squares
1 c. canned pumpkin
1 c. sugar
1 egg
1/3 c. oil
1 c. flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/2 c. chocolate chips
4 oz. cream cheese
1/4 c. sugar
1 egg
Mix together pumpkin, sugar, egg, and oil. Sift together flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, and ginger. Stir into pumpkin mixture. Pour into a greased 9×13 pan.
Beat together cream cheese, sugar, and egg. Drizzle mixture over batter.
Cut thro’ batter with knife for marbled effect. I know, the whole marbling thing didn’t get as pretty and marbled as I thought it should, either… too much white, not enough pumpkin showing on top.
Sprinkle with chocolate chips. Shannon (H.), don’t even THINK of leaving out the choc chips!
Bake at 375 for 25-30 minutes.
Mmmmmm! Make these at your own risk… they’re dangerous to the waistline. And they loudly call your name every time you wander thro’ the kitchen, even if you’ve hidden them out of sight.
‘Tis the Season… bake some festive Meringue Candy Canes!
Mostly when we talk about food, we think of taste. Well, not this time… the strong point of these candy canes is the looks, not the taste. Aren’t they pretty? I think they’d technically be called a candy… they have no substances like a cookie does. Speaking of substance, they might even be calorie-free because when you take a bite of one, within seconds, that bite dissolves into nothing inside your mouth, so the calories must dissolve into nothing too, right? Lexi says they taste like dried out frosting.
They were fun to make… you get to make swirls with a decorating bag. I actually did something I’ve never done before in featuring cooking and took a video. It’s a very poor video, but my standards have gone from no videos to poor videos, so gradually, I’ll up my standards to good videos. Part of the problem may be that my lighting was bad or that I saved it in low resolution or that I was piping the meringue with one hand while holding the camera and videoing with the other hand. Not a good idea. Live and learn.
By the way, if someone would just out of the blue ask you, “How do you spell meringue?”, could you spell it? It has gotta be one of the weirdest-spelled words in the English language!
Meringue Candy Canes …from the Taste of Home Christmas Cookies and Candies cookbook
3 egg whites
1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp. peppermint extract
Red paste food coloring
In a mixing bowl, beat egg whites until foamy. Add cream of tartar; beat on medium speed until soft peaks form. Gradually add sugar, 1 Tablespoon at a time, beating on High until stiff peaks form and sugar is dissolved, about 6 minutes. Beat in peppermint extract.
Cut a small hole in the corner of a pastry bag; insert star tip #21. On the inside of the bag, brush 3 evenly spaced 1/4″ strips of red food coloring from the tip to 3/4 of the way to the top of the bag. Carefully fill bag with meringue. Pipe 3″ candy canes onto parchment-lined baking sheets. I didn’t have parchment paper, so I used tin foil. Worked great and they didn’t stick to it.
And now for the video:
See the difference in redness here in these 2 panfuls? The top ones on the left were made first. I guess the food coloring got less concentrated as the meringue slid past.
Bake at 225 for 25 min; rotate baking sheets to a different oven rack. Bake 25 min longer or until firm to the touch. Turn oven off; leave canes in oven with door ajar for at least 1 hour or until cool. Yield: 4 dozen. I must’ve made them bigger because I got only about 2 1/2 dozen, but I did use the #21 tip.
Put these festive candy canes on an assorted cookie plate for your mailman this Christmas! Or take a plate to your local fire dept. Or to your neighbors. Or eat all your Christmas cookies yourself.
Christmas Cookie Exchange 2008
So, now I have several dozen cookies around here. Good-bye, diet… see ya in January.
Actually, I’m going to put them in the freezer till Christmas when a bunch of family is coming. *Ahem*But those monster cookies might not make it to the freezer. I made peppermint-flavored Candy Cane cookies, which are not pictured above. But here is a progress picture of them in the making:
And here is where they are featured when I made them another year: Candy Cane cookies. They turned out better this year, not quite so fat, and a bit more evenly twisted.
So, we are now in the Holiday season! There’s excitement in the air, and snow flurries outside, and Christmas music playing, and candles burning, and love all around. And gingerbread-cookie-making with Lexi and Tiffany… but ‘today’ never seems like the right time to do that. ‘Tomorrow’ always seems like a better day to do it. Actually, it’s fun, just quite a mess!
Pumpkin Cookies
I’ve made these twice now… both times they were inhaled in a short amount of time. They are great with applesauce. Have you ever tried cookies with applesauce? I hadn’t until my husband introduced me to that combo after we were married. The girls LOVE the frosting. When I saw that these cookies take caramel frosting, I thought ‘No way. It’s gotta be cream cheese frosting’, but I decided to try them with caramel frosting after all and it turned out to be a good decision.
By the way, it’s nearly Thanksgiving… are you cooking a Thanksgiving dinner at your house? I’m not. We’re going away for dinner. I’m just planning to bring something to go with the meal, like a salad. I just went to put a link to the post with the recipe of one of my favorite salads and realized I have not featured it yet! It’s the Robust Italian Salad pictured on this post. It’s SO good and you DO need to have the recipe, so be looking for it within the next week or so! It’s got homemade croutons, and just before serving, you toss it with Italian dressing. I’m also planning to make a pumpkin pie this week. I want to try a Custard Pumpkin Pie from a ‘blank’ cookbook that my grandma hand-wrote recipes in for me. This pumpkin pie recipe was given to her from my great grandma. Mixing my nostalgia with my cookbook collection, a couple of the cookbooks I own are PRICELESS. The pumpin pie recipe is in this cookbook next to the Brown Sugar Pie, which is also passed down from my great grandma. Mmmm, just seeing that brown sugar pie again makes me hungry for it!
Ok, back to the pumpkin cookies with caramel frosting…
I got this recipe from my friend Freida… This recipe is 1 cup of this and 1 tsp. of that for most of the ingredients… if you ever want to memorize recipes, this would be a good one! Is there any recipe that you make so much that you’ve got memorized (I don’t mean made-up stuff, like you dump-and-bake cooks do )? From age about 12-17, it was pancakes for me. Not sure if I was the chief pancake-maker or what, but I knew the recipe. Now, it’s Raspberry Cream Cheese Cinnamon Rolls and Red Lobster Biscuits and maybe a couple others, but that’s all I can think of right now.
Pumpkin Cookies
1 cup Crisco
1 cup sugar
1 cup pumpkin
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
Cream shortening and sugar. Add pumpkin, egg, and vanilla. Blend in dry ingredients.
Bake at 350 for 15 minutes. (Freida said, “I only baked them for about 12 minutes and they were perfect.” And now I add, “Me too.”) Spread caramel frosting on top. Also good with cream cheese frosting.
Caramel Frosting
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
Combine brown sugar, butter and milk and bring to a boil over medium heat. Cook and stir for 2 minutes.
Remove from the heat and stir in vanilla. Cool to lukewarm, then gradually beat in the powdered sugar until frosting reaches spreading consistency.
The more powdered sugar you add, the faster it will harden. I made the frosting while the first batch of cookies was in the oven. It took forever to cool to lukewarm… next time, I’ll either make the frosting ahead of time or make the cookies while the girls aren’t around! “Mom, is the frosting ready yet?… 20 seconds later… “Is it ready now?”… 
My mom gave us some little leaf sprinkles, so we used them on the cookies for a bit of garnishing. We (er, they) sprinkled them on right away before the frosting hardened.
Lexi was explaining this picture to someone and here’s what she said, “We were sprinkling sprinkles on pumpkin cookies with delicious frosting. At first, I sprinkled a little bit so I needed more and then Tiffany came and she wanted to sprinkle some on too. At first she was sprinkling on too many sprinkles, but then she got better at it. And then she patted it down and got her hands all messy.” Yup. That’s pretty much how it went.
About Me
Hi! Welcome to my kitchen! My name is Kay. I'm from central Ohio. I love cooking and baking. Especially baking. It's therapeutic for me. I'm not a professional or gourmet cook by any means. I'm a Christian homemaker who happens to take pictures of some of the food I make. I have 2 little 'helpers'... Lexi (9) and Tiffany (5), who are young cooks in training. And I should mention Megan (born in June 2010), altho' she's not in training yet. She's more in charge of inside-the-cupboards demolition when she's in the kitchen. I don't do anything on the grill... that's where my husband Shannon comes in! He grills quite a bit, especially in the summer. So, sit back and enjoy browsing thro' the recipes. If you try some of them, I'd love to hear feedback on how you liked them! If you want to contact me, my email address is kay@kitchenscrapbook.com