From the monthly archives: July 2010
this week, one of my good friends, a former roommate, had surgery and i couldnt be there to help her out with things since she is in denver and i am in jersey…so i made my best attempt at making her feel better from a distance– with cookies, of course! courtney and i used to be peanut butter, chocolate, and cookies fiends, so there was no choice but to make peanut butter chocolate chip cookies for her, but i wanted to try out a new recipe, mostly for your sake. i mean, if i used one of my previous recipes i couldn’t post it, and you would be missing out on these amazing cookies!
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as you may have gathered, i like a lot of the folks i work with…good peoples, i tell’ya. there are, however, some that really stand out– one of the absolute sweetest people i have ever met celebrated her birthday last week, but since we were at conference, we shall celebrate on monday. so, happy birthday, sherrin! you truly are an amazing, strong, caring, hard-working gal who deserves amazing things! since this is a cake, and i can’t very well slice into it in advance without ruining it, i am really hoping that this cake is amazing…
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as a former (and temporarily current) vegan and trying to eat gluten-free for a while, a lot of the foods i eat have quotation marks around the recipe title…one of the things i want to make soon is “apple pie” with “ice cream”; i can’t help but laugh, but hey, if they make me healthier and taste okay, nothing wrong with some punctuation in my food.
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last week i brought in espresso chocolate chip cookies and by the time one of my friends got there i was all out…she looked like she could really use a cookie so i felt pretty bad. that night i texted her to see if she was okay and she let me know that her grandfather, who she was very close with, had passed away. despite being 9pm, i knew what i had to do. i wasn’t sure what kind of cookies to make, but she is pretty healthy and likes trail mixy type things, so i took my base oatmeal cookie recipe, threw in raisins, chocolate, cinnamon, walnuts, and just about everything but the kitchen sink. i considered throwing the kitchen sink in there, but i needed it for the dirty dishes!
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one of the great things about vegan baking is that when things are undercooked, they are still safe to eat. i know some people are not afraid to eat raw eggs; i am not one of these people– unless they are pasteurized, i won’t serve raw eggs. since i was baking for justin’s birthday and his lovely lady, sheryl, is vegan, eggs were substituted out in this recipe. it is a good thing, since they came out extra ooey gooey. so much so that i texted on my way over to see if they had vanilla (nondairy, of course) ice cream to balance out the richness. they didn’t have any and the store i went to was all out, so they ate them as-is and loved them anyway!
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i imagine that by now you have all heard the bogus story about the woman who asked for the cookie recipe at neiman marcus, thought it was $2.50, and when she got the bill for $250, decided to get revenge by spreading the recipe all over the place. incase you haven’t, here’s the whole thing on snopes. in any case, it is still a darn good cookie recipe! my friend liz was making a whole ton of them as favors for a bridal shower she is going to, and i offered to help with this daunting task. she came over saturday morning and we got to work…man, it was nice that there were two of us because making over a hundred cookies can take a little while.
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is the coco for the coconut or the cocoa? who cares when it tastes this good! these ultra-rich, decadent treats were a fan favorite in the office! the only less than amazing feedback i got was that since they were so rich, i perhaps should have cut them a little smaller. oops. but hey, i didnt force them to devour it in under a minute, they just couldn’t help themselves!
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when i first read the “tandy takes” name on the recipe sent to me by my friend suvarna, i thought it was avoiding a copyright issue and frankly i thought it sounded like a little kid was trying to say kandy kakes (the tastykake treat). Well, it turns out in the 30s kandykakes were actually called tandytakes, and rumor has it that it was named that way because that is how a small child would say it. interesting. in any case, i couldnt pass up the opportunity to make a somewhat healthier version of this packaged treat. fresher is better, right? right.
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i don’t generally think of myself as shallow, and i know not to judge a book by its cover, but when these cookies came out of the oven i was disappointed. in fact, i considered throwing them out. see, i found this recipe for mississippi tea cakes on allrecipes and they looked great in the picture, so i was expected mine to look like them. as i was reminded a week or so though, (when my mom was upset that her reese’s cookies didn’t look like mine, but happy that they tasted great) sometimes things taste better than they look.
