Pumpkin Oat Scones

Starbucks has amazing scones, but they're huge and usually have tons of calories. Which is fine, if you're eating a scone for a meal, or if you split it or save some for later. But let's face it: you're going to Starbucks for a fancy drink and you're planning on eating the whole thing. That's why you're there!

If you look up a recipe for scones with the intention of making them at home, and, theoretically, lower calorie, I think you'll still be disappointed. Most recipes I found were still pretty hefty in calories.

So, I adapted a recipe to make it a little lighter. They came out fantastic! Around 100 calories, and not the size of a piece of birthday cake.

Pumpkin Oat Scones
(recipe and nutritional information)


Ingredients:

1.5 cups wheat flour
1.5 cups oats
1 tbs baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup pumpkin
1/2 - 3/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla

Directions:

1. Combine dry ingredients, then add in wet ingredients. Mix until just combined.
2. Split dough into two balls. Roll each ball into a disk about 1/2" thick, and cut into 8 slices.
3. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.
   

I also made some apple butter in the slow cooker. The two were an amazing match. (The apple butter was also an amazing addition to a boring oatmeal packet, but I digress.) But, I'd recommend freezing half until you want them; I ended up throwing out quite a few because they got moldy. Sad times, but I'll be making these again!

Newlywed Chocolate Cookies

Lately I've seen a lot of articles on the internet about how your spouse makes you fat. Let's talk about this for a minute. You just got married, theoretically happy and in love, and everything is right with the world. Except those pounds that have crept on. And it's totally not your fault! It's that horrible person that just promised to love you forever!

Good grief, people.

Then again, maybe they got a cookbook as a wedding gift, and made these cookies. They will not last the day.



The secret is the melted chocolate in the batter. Oh dear. Just trust me on this one: go out to the store now, buy some chocolate, and get to work.

Have a good weekend!

Monster Mac

One of my friends came by to learn how to make those fad-tastic little French cookies.

Not one to waste batter, we used the last in a piping bag to make ...


The MONSTER MAC!!!

That, my chickadees, is a single macaron with a regular-sized one for comparison.



Monster mac was about the size of a slice of bread, which we filled, folded in half, and ATE.

Seriously, am I the only person that's Americanized such a refined treat?

Chocolate Chip Cookies

OK, time to start knocking posts out and catching up on the kitchen escapades.

I've mentioned before and I'll do it again: I'm really not good at the traditional, wonderful, chocolate chip cookie. Nope. I've tried different recipes, different tricks, different places ... nothing. I halfheartedly saved this recipe to try, figuring I'd get the craving at some point and that would be the one I'd try.

It ended up that a game night at our house, a glass of wine, and yelling "who wants cookies??" is a completely appropriate time to try a new recipe.

Check these babies out!


Forget the Tollhouse recipe. This is the one to use. It doesn't make too many cookies - and I'm not a fan of making especially large ones. They were gone almost immediately!

Valentine's Day

Ah, Valentine's Day. I'm a little behind, aren't I? Things have been going on. Lots of ... things.

I was planning on making something to send to my very dear friend who sent me rugelach right when the water heater decided it wasn't longed for this world after all. So, I was a little (lot) behind. What I wanted to make was something like this. Aren't they amazing? Guess what. You can't make macaroons with regular flour when you're out of almond meal. We ended up eating them, but they weren't decent enough to leave the house.


I still wanted to send something. But now I obviously was attracted to the more foolproof. So, back to my most-amazing-sugar-cookies ever.

I had a bunch of white icing left over from some other project, and made up some red royal icing to decorate the cookies. But, even these weren't failsafe.

Don't worry, they came out just fine. But it's like I was cursed:

• I forgot to set the timer for one batch, and they were very overcooked. Edible, but not that pretty sugar cookie color.
  
• Do you know what conversation hearts say? Neither do I. And it was hard to come up with ideas!
  
• Piping took for-ever. And after piping a whole rack? Dropped them, face down, on the kitchen floor. (Don't worry, those didn't get mailed either!)

The ones that did turn out, did so beautifully. And they're sturdy enough to travel well. So I made more to send to my parents!

As for our Valentine's day plans? We had a fabulous day in Irvine. Someone told me about the Great Park Balloon almost a year ago, and I was dying to go. We didn't get on the morning rides, so we had to wait until the evening. I had the California Roll appetizer at the Yardhouse - a lot of food, but really fancy! When we finally got boarding passes for the balloon around 7:30 that night, it started to occur to me ... the balloon would go 500 feet up in the air ... tethered only by a cable ... with a bunch of people ... all standing on a donut-shaped platform a yard wide. Whose idea was that??

FYI: I survived.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

One day I was extolling the virtues of peanut butter and chocolate with a very good friend of mine. You can imagine how deep this conversation might have been.

Doesn't a peanut butter cookie sound good? You see why this is an important conversation.

And then I was lamenting the fact that we had all this chocolate left over from Christmas. Don't get me wrong, I love chocolate. But melted down chocolate chips aren't exactly the finest way to enjoy it. So what if ...

What if you mixed melted chocolate in to peanut butter cookies?

There are obviously a few different ways this could work out. The chocolate could make the batter runny in the oven, and they might not ever come together. Or the chocolate could harden more like candy than cookie. And I was leaning toward it being an incredible runny mess. I like to stick to established, tested recipes. This is a pretty big deviation.

I started by making regular peanut butter cookies. The particular recipe I was looking at even suggested adding chocolate chips at the end, so once the cookie batter was together I added the great experiment: melted chocolate. I'd estimate I had about a cup to use.

It looked a lot like ice cream. The consistency in the mixer was a lot like ice cream. But it was obviously warm. I stopped mixing when there were still discernible swirls in the batter; any more and I think it would have blended together all the way. For future reference.

No special cooking here. Just the same as what the recipe called for (although you can see my bff parchment paper underneath the cookies).

These couldn't have come out better. The chocolate didn't harden into big chunks when the cookies cooled, and didn't ooze all over the oven. It was sort of like eating a peanut butter cup with a little cookie layer. Sure, sometimes there was more of one flavor than the other, but who is really going to complain about that?

They're especially neat because they didn't really require anything unusual. A little less mixing would make bigger swirls, and that might look cool. Or a little more, and no one would suspect they were peanut butter!

Christmas Cookie Roundup III

Does it seem like I made way more cookies than I did last year? That's because I've turned it in to three posts.

Bringing out the newest member of the family, the wintermint wafer.
I saw pictures of these in my holiday Real Simple issue, and wanted to make them. They're chocolate. They're mint. They're beautiful.

If they weren't coated in chocolate (or leftover royal icing, as the case may be), these would have been terribly crumbly too. I rolled them and sliced them in squares and circles. It's also kind of a bummer that peppermint extract is really expensive.

But, I got to use my fancy decorating stuff. Pearls from Target, and dirt cheap, and red & white peppermint flavored sugar from ... somewhere. Also cheap. I'm stocked.

Sadly, I never got a picture of the full glory of all the cookies I made. But, here's the final list:

• Gingerbread army and barracks
• Sugar cookies
• Poinsettia (holly) cookies
• Wintermint wafers
• Haystacks
• Red velvet cream cheese cookies
• Buckeyes
• Peppermint Bark
  

That's way more than I made last year. Here's to outdoing it in 2010!

Christmas Cookie Roundup II

This year I was going all out. This year I was going to make all of my cookies with real butter, rather than my old faithful Imperial sticks.

Things started off alright. I made sugar cookies (I'd heard my mother in law likes them) and I wanted to try my royal icing skills again. So I made a batch of Christmas trees ...


But if you look closely, the cookie doesn't quite look the like the same texture. Remember these? They were better, even if the decoration wasn't. Thank goodness the royal icing hardened, otherwise these might have just fallen apart.

Sort of like these.

My beloved poinsettia cookies just weren't the same, and I'm blaming the butter. I mean, sure the family recipe says "butter." What that means is Country Crock, or whatever was on sale or on hand at the moment. Whoops, I think I just cracked the code and spilled the family secrets. These were still good, but couldn't possibly make it to St. Louis in any form. I could hardly move them.

The verdict? Butter is not better. I love you, Imperial.

Next: the final countdown.

Christmas Cookie Roundup I

Get ready for cookie overload!

This year, I thought I'd have lots of time for baking. I wasn't going to have to contend with final exams. We were only doing one leg of the midwestern whistlestop tour. I was going to be a lovely hostess for a week. So I surveyed last year, and started planning.

Of course, when you're in school and it's time for exams, you will find that your room/house/apartment is never cleaner. Procrastination wasn't on my side this year. Especially not when I had a guest bedroom and bathroom to finish up with all those nice touches like ... sheets. And curtains.

But, I wasn't going to let that stop me. And we'll start with the gingerbread.

Every year I make a batch of gingerbread using the edict of Oracle Betty. And every year the result is something to the effect of "@!#$% that's a lot of dough!!!" So, instead of building a complete gingerbread army, I split it up a little.

Of course, there were the gingerbread men. And women, this year. I made them in little couples, but didn't get very far in decorating before I ran out of time. These guys made it.



Some of the gingerbread ... people didn't get decorated per se. Some of them got chocolate-ified! My mother in law sent us this video on producing Christmas at Disney World (an online video, no less, since we're still to cheap for cable). Andy saw the chocolate-backed shingles of the gingerbread house there, and thought that might make gingerbread worth eating!

We didn't do the glaze, though, and to be honest I accidentally put double the ginger in than was called for. Don't worry, it was still good!

So that accounts for some of the dough. And the rest?

Now this is about the only kind of construction I can get in to. No kit involved! I did use a paper template to cut out the pieces before baking them, and I do wish I'd made the roof a little larger. I got the idea for the pecan shingles from a blog, but there were so many gingerbread houses that I forget where I saw it originally. And then I saw someone had made a gingerbread model of their house, and UGH! I wish I'd seen it before I'd baked the pieces.

Yes, that recipe really does make that much!

Next, the verdict on whether butter is better ...

Sugar Cookies

Have you seen those beautifully decorated sugar cookies? The ones with the beautifully smooth decorations in cute shapes? I won't tell you how many blogs I subscribe to that feature these at least weekly. Let's just say it's possible to read that much about a cookie.

I don't find myself particularly creative, but I really wanted to make pretty cookies like that. I don't have any friends with impending baby or wedding showers, where I could show up with adorable and insanely appropriate cookies. But I can make them anyway!!

I made the basic recipe for sugar cookies from Oracle Betty. They came out perfect! I don't think I've ever had a rolled cookie come out that perfectly. Actually ... I still haven't. The dough never really firmed up enough to roll out and cut, so I just rolled bits of dough into a ball and flattened them out. Maybe that's been my problem all along?


Who cares about the cookie, though. They're just frosting vehicles for this experiment.

I took some tips from this great tutorial on decorating cookies. In fact, I'd recommend you follow those instructions over the insert that comes with Wilton's meringue powder. The #1 lesson to learn is: don't be afraid of runny icing. It won't run that much, and is probably easier to work with.


Ah, displaying my lack of creativity. Or lack of artistic skill. Or both. I made these around Thanksgiving, so fall leaves seemed like the perfect pretty design. These look more like the Batman insignia than pretty leaves. Part of this is because I let the white icing dry, so the decoration would sit on top. The other part was that the meringue powder makes the icing stiffer.

With a little fiddling, this could make pretty and smoothly decorated cookies!

Pumpkin Bisquick Scones

Some time ago I ran across this recipe for scones on a new (to me) blog. I'm not even sure how I ran across it, but isn't that how all the best discoveries are made?

To be fair, these probably aren't exactly scones. But like any good country woman I love my Bisquick, and I do enjoy an excuse to make pumpkin flavored anything. I gave my mom a scone pan one year for Christmas, as she was interested in some Scottish recipes. Scones don't get any more Scottish.



You can see another project in the background.



I just plopped these out with my trusty cookie scoop. Skipped the Splenda (Bisquick is just a glorified mix of flour and sugar) and chocolate chips. I didn't have any mini chips on hand anyway, since I don't ever buy them, but I wouldn't contaminate the pumpkin and pumpkin spices flavors anyway.

These were stupid easy to make, and I bet if you put a little more effort in to them they'd make a nice addition to your afternoon teas. If you do that kind of thing. I just like cookies.