Churro Bites

I made these as a quick-and-easy dessert to take to dinner with friends, since I was also busy making olive bread as a surprise for them.

Churro Bites
inspired by this post

Ingredients
box of angel food cake mix (or if you have a good recipe, make one from scratch)
several Tbsp cinnamon (throw in some Vietnamese cinnamon if you want it strong!)
several Tbsp sugar

Equipment
oven and cake pan (if you need to make your cake), cutting board, knife, bowl

Instructions
Make your angel food cake according to package instructions. Allow it to cool completely. Mix sugar and cinnamon in a bowl. Cut the cake into bite-sized cubes. Roll each cube thoroughly in the sugar and cinnamon (tap them to shake off the excess).

Yields
a whole cake's worth

Total time
about an hour; check the instructions on your cake box; mine took 30 minutes, and I let it cool for about 30 minutes outside of the pan

Cleanup rating 3/5
You'll get cinnamon and sugar everywhere, but that's relatively easy to clean up. Other than that, you only have a few things to clean (bowl, pan, knife, cutting board). My hands always get a thin stickiness on them from working with angel food cake, though. Wash everything thoroughly! (Like you should anyway.)

Difficulty rating 3/10
Any idiot can bake an angel food cake. (You literally preheat the oven, mix the box of powder with the prescribed amount of water, pour it into a pan, and put it in the oven.) Letting it cool is a matter of not doing things, and cutting it up is less difficult than I expected (I had a fantastically sharp knife, though). Just don't try to rub your eyes while your fingers are coated in cinnamon. Not a good idea.

Flavor rating 7/10
Angel food is my favorite cake (it's like a giant, fluffy, marshmallow... but cake!) and I love cinnamon sugar, so this is pretty awesome. The original recipe called for frying the cake cubes in oil, which would have given them that awesome crispy churro texture, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to fry them. Some of the feedback I got (all positive) was that they're strong, and you so often get cinnamon-flavored desserts that barely taste like cinnamon at all. (I shared the secret: Vietnamese cinnamon.)

Adjustability: low
I don't know what else to do to these things. You could fry them like in the original post, or make an icing to drizzle on top or dip in, but that's about all I can think of. If you use a different type of cake, it would probably get too crumbly.

Make it with...
Everything. I originally decided to make them when we were going to have fish tacos for dinner, but it worked equally well with sausage-tomato-cream sauce and rigatoni. It would work with just about anything, I think. Or as a stand-alone dessert.

Rocky Road Cookies

These were so good. So sweet, but so good. Kind of like the GoT finale I made them for.

Rocky Road Cookies

Ingredients
3 cups powdered sugar
2/3 cup cocoa powder (unsweetened)
1/4 tsp salt
3 large egg whites
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
2.5 oz sliced almonds (I used slivered because that's what I had)
1 cup mini marshmallows

Equipment
large bowl, baking sheet, parchment paper, oven, MUSCLES, freezer

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350F. In a large bowl, mix up your powdered sugar and cocoa. Whisk in the salt. Add the egg whites and vanilla; stir until combined. Stir in chocolate chips and almonds. (This is where the muscle comes in... it's a thick batter.) Spoon small mounds onto parchment paper and top with a few marshmallows (press them in a little to make sure they don't tumble off). Stick them in the freezer for a few minutes to prevent too much spreading when they bake. Put on a baking sheet (I didn't think it was a good idea to freeze the baking sheet itself) and bake about 12 minutes (until marshmallows are toasted like in the photo). Let them cool a few minutes on the pan before transferring to wire rack.

Yields
2 dozen cookies

Total time
about 30 minutes (I baked two batches, so about 10 minutes prep, and about 10 minutes for each batch to bake)

Cleanup rating 3/5
Chocolate everywhere. Powdered sugar more everywhere.

Difficulty rating 6/10
I'm not kidding about stirring that batter... it's thick. Don't be lazy about it, though; you want evenly distributed bits. And someone save you if you think whisking your wet ingredients in is a good idea. Your whisk will pick up all of the batter and be rendered useless.

Flavor rating 8/10
Really sweet but really yummy. Kind of sticky.

Adjustability: medium
Don't like almonds? Use pecans, or walnuts, or no nuts at all. Try mixing some marshmallows into the batter. Try cinnamon chips or butterscotch chips or caramel bits or toffee chips. I know rocky road has a specific definition but I've always thought of it as the "everything bagel" of desserts.

Make it with...
Nothing; it's a cookie. Our dinner was burgers and hot dogs on the grill with veggies. This seemed like an appropriately casual dessert for the occasion.

Maple Cookies

Happy Fathers' Day, everyone!

You know what I love about making cookies as gifts for people? I get to taste test them.

My dad loves a good maple bar, so when I ran across a maple cookie recipe on Pinterest, I thought they might make a good gift for him.

Maple Cookies

Ingredients
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups flour
2 Tbsp sugar

Equipment
oven, mixer, baking sheet, cooling rack

Instructions
In a large bowl, cream butter and brown sugar. Add the egg, syrup, and vanilla; mix until combined. Add soda, salt, and flour; mix until combined. Refrigerate for about an hour. Preheat oven to 350 F. Put sugar in a small bowl. Shape dough into 1" balls and flatten slightly; dip one side in sugar and set on greased baking sheets (sugar-side up). Bake 8-10 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

Yields
2 dozen cookies

Total time
90 minutes (a few minutes to mix everything, 1 hour to refrigerate, a few minutes to roll into balls, 10 minutes each for two batches to bake)

Cleanup rating 2/5
As long as you can manage to not get syrup everywhere while you're measuring, this is only as messy as a basic sugar cookie (simple enough to get the batter off the bowl and beaters, throw your measuring implements in the dishwasher, you're done).

Difficulty rating 3/10
The hardest part is creaming the butter and sugar, which is so easy.

Flavor rating 6/10
They're pretty good. They don't have a strong flavor (which I prefer, personally) but they're nice. I used light brown sugar, so that probably makes a difference.

Adjustability: low
I don't know what I could do to change this recipe. Maybe some kind of frosting to make it sweeter, or throw some walnuts in there?

Make it with...
Nothing, they're cookies. If I were a coffee drinker, I might think they go well with coffee... I'm not sure.

Lime Cake

Let's talk lime cake. I made this for Game of Thrones night! Everyone said it was good (and I agree). (Apologies for the photo... I forgot to take a picture when it was still whole... so this is the piece I took to work the day after.)

Lime Cake

Ingredients
1 cup sugar
2 1/2 Tbsp butter (room temperature)
2 eggs, well beaten
juice of 1 lime
1 1/2 cups flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
powdered sugar

Equipment
mixer, oven, 8"x8" square cake pan

Instructions
Preheat oven to 350F. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the eggs and lime juice and mix thoroughly. Add the flour and baking powder and mix thoroughly. Pour (my experience was more like "drop") into your greased and floured cake pan (I had to spread it evenly with a spoon, so do that if you need to). Bake 25 minutes (inserted toothpick should come out clean). Let it cool for a few minutes in the pan, then turn out onto a cooling rack to finish cooling. Sprinkle with powdered sugar before it's completely cooled (it will stick better if it's a little warm).

Yields
I don't know, an 8"x8" cake.

Total time
About 45 minutes (maybe a little longer if you forgot to get your butter up to room temp before you get started). It takes a little while to get the butter and sugar creamed (unless I'm doing it wrong).

Cleanup rating 2/5
Remember my rule about rating cleanup of things that involve powdered sugar? That applies here. Also, I didn't cool my cake on the cooling rack so it kind of stuck to the plate but still, not a biggie.

Difficulty rating 4/10
The most difficult thing about this recipe is creaming the sugar and butter (not my favorite thing in the world to do). Remember: I use a hand mixer. So that contributes. But you have to get the batter spread evenly in the pan or it's probably not going to turn out well for you.

Flavor rating 8/10
YUM. Everyone seemed pretty happy about this one. It almost totally disappeared, which is a good thing for cake.

Adjustability low
At least, as far as I know, it's low. The original recipe recommended garnishing with chopped peanuts, which I planned on doing, but I had no peanuts. I want to look into some kind of honey sauce I could put on top... but still, options are limited.

Make it with...
My coworker Missi was the lucky recipient of my other leftover piece that came to work with me, and she said it was screaming for coffee (not in the way that it's dry but in the way that it would pair extremely well with coffee). I don't drink coffee, so I wouldn't know, but I'll take her word for it. I think it would go really well with some fresh strawberries too.

Accidental Cookies

So, remember how I was making a ton of Mothers' Day cookies? Well, I screwed up the dough for the raspberry cookies (I forgot to add the sugar... thank goodness I tasted the dough before folding in the raspberries!). I tried to go back and add the sugar and re-mix it, but it turned into a firm dough ball that would not take raspberries well. So I saved it until later, and made these "accidental" cookies! Then I decided that they needed a little something... so I made a lime icing.

Accidental Cookies with Lime Icing

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

8 Tbsp (1 stick) butter, not softened, cubed

2/3 cup heavy whipping cream

lime juice (about 2 Tbsp? I didn't measure)

powdered sugar (about 1/2 cup? I didn't measure)

Equipment

baking sheet, parchment paper, mixer, oven

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix flour and baking powder together. Add butter and knead together by hand. You should get a crumbly mixture. Add the heavy cream and mix thoroughly (with a spoon should be fine). Add the sugar (if you want to be exactly like me, swear loudly about forgetting to add the sugar in the first place). Knead really thoroughly until all the sugar is incorporated. Pinch off small balls of dough and place on parchment-paper-lined baking sheet. Bake about 15 minutes. Let them cool thoroughly on a cooling rack. Mix lime juice and powdered sugar, adjusting amounts until you have the consistency of icing you want. Drizzle over cookies.

Yields

I got about 2 dozen cookies

Total time

Hard to tell, since I made these around making the raspberry cookies, but probably about 30 minutes including 15 minutes baking time.

Cleanup rating 2/5

Any time I'm working with powdered sugar will be no lower than a 2/5. But the dough is really clean, because it's a firm ball of dough instead of a crumbly mess.

Difficulty rating 5/10

Kneading by hand is a pain in the butt. Especially since I did it twice in a row (this batch, then doing it correctly for the raspberry cookies). And getting the icing consistency right is tricky.

Flavor rating 6/10

Birk says the cookies have a biscuit-y feel/flavor, and I don't disagree. But I like them, and it means they aren't too sweet. The lime icing is pretty tart, and I like that too. I feel like this recipe has some tweaking in its future.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Cookies

These are the cookies I made for my stepmom! She's gluten-free, and she loves chocolate, so I jumped on this recipe when I found it.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter (softened)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup cocoa powder

1/2 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup butterscotch chips

Equipment

oven, baking sheets, parchment paper, cooling racks, mixer

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix together butter, brown sugar, and white sugar. Add egg and vanilla; mix thoroughly. Combine baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder, and mix into wet batter (be careful not to make chocolate clouds that choke you). Stir in the chocolate and butterscotch chips. They will expand while baking, so give them some room on the parchment-lined baking sheet (about 1-1.5" should do). Bake for 10-12 minutes.

Yields

I got about 15 cookies out of it, but they were pretty big cookies.

Total time

A little under 30 minutes.

Cleanup rating 3/5

Chocolate everywhere. Delicious batter that I know I shouldn't lick off the spoon and beaters and bowl because it has raw egg, but yummy anyway. Definitely an instance of "clean immediately or regret it."

Difficulty rating 5/10

Not hard, but there is skill and patience required when baking cookies. Mixing, measuring carefully, fully incorporating ingredients... it might help to know that I use a hand mixer, so it's a tiny bit trickier than using a stand mixer.

Flavor rating 3/10

Disappointment. I hope my stepmom liked them more than I did. They are INCREDIBLY sweet. And I have an insane sweet tooth... but this is ridiculous. I washed down a bite with some Coke and it made the Coke taste bland like water. Still, though... chocolate. So it's not like a 1 or 2.

Additional note: The original recipe called for white chocolate chips instead of butterscotch ones, and mentioned that you can also add 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts (which I had, leftover from Mom's walnut butter balls, but I was fairly certain that my stepmom and I agree that nuts are great but they don't belong in our baked goods).

Walnut Butter Balls

Happy Mothers' Day! I made cookies for my mothers this year... a different kind for each mother, according to their tastes.

For my mom, I made Walnut Butter Balls. The criteria for Mom were (1) I had to be able to mail it across the country without too much damage; (2) she likes nuts in her cookies/brownies/whatnot; (3) preferably no chocolate (only because it would melt in the mail, not because she doesn't like it).

While I was making them, I thought they smelled kind of like Christmas... and they look kind of like snowballs! Maybe they just remind me of rum balls (without rum) but I think these will get a repeat around Christmas.

The original recipe is from here.

Walnut Butter Balls

Ingredients
1 stick of butter, softened
1/2 cup powdered sugar
another 1 cup powdered sugar
1 cup flour
1 cup chopped walnuts
pinch of salt
1 tsp vanilla extract

Equipment
oven, parchment paper, baking sheet, cooling rack, mixer

Instructions
Soften your butter in a large bowl (I let it sit out for about 30 minutes). Preheat oven to 350. Add 1/2 cup powdered sugar to butter and beat with mixer until creamy. (Beware of sugar clouds.) Add flour, walnuts, salt, and vanilla and beat until incorporated. It will be pretty crumbly. Take tiny handfuls of batter and squeeze it together to get the air out. Squeeze into balls and set on parchment-paper-lined baking sheet. You don't need to give them a lot of room; they won't expand much. Bake 15-20 minutes. They'll be pale but firm (not squishy). Let them cool on the pan for a few minutes. Put about 1 cup powdered sugar in a bowl. While the cookies are still warm, roll them around in the sugar to coat them and set them on the cooling rack. Once you've done all the cookies, start again from the beginning and roll each one a second time.

Yields
I probably got about 20 cookies.

Total time
Prep + baking + sugar coating = about 30 minutes. Plus 30 minutes for butter softening, so about an hour.

Cleanup rating 2/5
Powdered sugar everywhere. Other than that, you just have a mixing bowl to clean (put parchment paper under your cooling rack to catch all that powdered sugar).

Difficulty rating 5/10
Not the easiest cookies to make, but certainly not difficult, either. It takes some patience and attention to mix the butter and sugar properly (and without making it sugar-snow all over the kitchen). And making the balls takes a little talent and a little patience. Otherwise, not too difficult.

Flavor rating 7/10
Birk loved them. I'm typing this up before Mom gets them so I don't know yet what she thinks of them. I thought they were pretty good, but I'm not a nutty cookie person, so they aren't my favorite. But they're good.

Bonus photo: cookies pre-sugaring.

Sweet Palmiers

Palmiers have lots of names in French: palm trees (palmiers), French hearts (coeurs de France), elephant ears, shoe-soles... but they're usually just palmiers. And if you use frozen puff pastry, they're stupidly easy to make. We had a last-minute "oh no, one of our best employees is moving and his last day is tomorrow" situation at work, so we wrangled up some people to bring cookies and ice cream and chips and dip and drinks so we could give him a proper send-off. I made these.

Palmiers (cinnamon-sugar)

Ingredients

frozen puff pastry

sugar

cinnamon

1 egg white per 2 sheets of puff pastry

Equipment

oven, parchment paper, baking sheet, basting brush

Instructions

Thaw your puff pastry according to package directions. (Mine said 40 minutes.) Preheat oven to 400 F. Unfold the puff pastry and brush with egg white. Sprinkle liberally with cinnamon and sugar. Roll the right and left sides toward the center (to make the curly shape you see in the photo). Turn the log over, brush with egg white, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Turn it back over, brush with egg white, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Use a sharp knife and slice the log into ~1/4-inch slices, trying your best to keep the curly shape. Lay the slices on a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet (give them enough space to expand a little bit). Sprinkle each liberally with more sugar. (I never said these were good for you.) Bake for 12-15 minutes. Cool on a cooling rack.

Yields

I used three sheets of puff pastry and got about 36 palmiers out of them, so I'll go with about a dozen palmiers per sheet of puff pastry.

Total time

I baked mine in rounds, so I did three separate bakings... took me about 90 minutes (40 minutes to thaw the pastry, a little prep time, plus 45 minutes baking time, with three rounds of 15 minutes each). If you did just one sheet, it would be about an hour (40 minutes thaw time, 5 minutes prep time, 15 minutes bake time).

Cleanup rating 1/5

So easy. If you can manage not to get sugar and cinnamon everywhere (which is easy-ish, because it's not powdered sugar, and I used Vietnamese cinnamon which is more expensive and therefore I'm more careful with it) you just have to clean the sticky sugary egg white mess off a cutting board (or, if you're smart, throw away a piece of parchment paper).

Difficulty rating 3/10

It's not very hard, but you do have to be careful with timing (I made too many without adjusting timing, so by the time I got to my third sheet of pastry, it was getting sticky because it had been thawing for too long) and without a great knife, it's hard to slice the log nicely. I managed to keep the shape okay, but good tools are necessary to be a good cook (or baker in this case).

Flavor rating 5/10

I was a little underwhelmed. I think Birk was too. But a lot of people at work praised them (and sought me out to do so) so that's probably a good sign.

After thawing the pastry, brushing with egg white,
and sprinkling with cinnamon & sugar.

After rolling it into a curly log.

After slicing. (This was the third batch. Notice the little tails on some
of the slices? That's because it had been thawing a little too long,
and it kept sticking to the knife. It's not a big deal, you can just
stick the tails to the side when you lay them on the baking sheet,
but still... that's not the goal.)

A palmier in my palm. Ha.

Raspberry Lime Cookies

I promised cookies for a party. I made brown sugar cookies last week, intending the same thing, but I missed the gathering, so I ate a lot of the cookies myself. And I'm making the brown sugar cookies again for a work thing next week. So I thought I should probably make something different for tonight! (And I made them early enough that if they turned out badly, I still had time to make... brown sugar cookies.)

Raspberry-Lime Cookies

Ingredients

2 cups fresh raspberries

juice of 1/2 a lime (or 1.5 Tbsp ReaLime)

1.5 Tbsp sugar

another 1/2 cup sugar

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

8 Tbsp (1 stick) butter, cubed (not softened)

2/3 cup heavy whipping cream

3/4 powdered sugar

1.5 Tbsp milk

Equipment

oven, cookie sheet, parchment paper, cooling racks, two bowls (one small, one large)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350F. In a small bowl, combine raspberries, lime juice, and 1.5 Tbsp sugar. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, 1/2 cup sugar, and baking powder. Add the butter and mix together with your hands (it should be a crumbly mixture when you're done). Add cream and mix together. Fold in raspberries (try your best not to smush them, but a little smushing is inevitable). Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and put spoonfuls of batter about 1" apart. Bake for 15 minutes (I left them for another 2 or 3 minutes, but I'd check on them at 15, anyway.) Let them cool on cooling racks. Mix powdered sugar and milk together and drizzle on cooled cookies.

Yields

I got nearly 2 dozen cookies, and a few of my spoonfuls were a little big.

Total time

I had to make two batches (only one rack in the oven right now) so it took an extra 15 minutes, but it takes about 30 minutes overall.

Cleanup rating 4/5

I made a mess... you might make less of a mess. But I got raspberry juice, lime juice, flour, and powdered sugar everywhere. It helped that I put parchment paper under the cooling racks before adding the icing, but there was still quite a mess to clean up.

Difficulty rating 4/10

You need to be able to mix the flour mixture with the butter properly (not too lumpy), not destroy the raspberries, not over- or under-bake them... etc. Plus, you should make sure each spoonful has an appropriate mixture of dough and berries and is cohesive enough to stay a cookie.

Flavor rating 6/10

They're a little tart (possibly because I changed the original recipe I found from lemon juice to lime juice, and I used ReaLime instead of a... real lime) but they're still pretty good. Maybe a little less lime juice, or a little more sugar in the first step?