Kitchen Sink Cookies

This post I decided to make some Kitchen Sink Cookies.  It is my own recipe based loosely on the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Tollhouse.  It was inspired by the flavor of the month cookie for June from Cougar Mountain Baking Company: Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal. 

Here’s the recipe:

1/2 Cup Unsalted Butter

1/2 Cup Peanut Butter

3/4 Cup Brown Sugar

3/4 Cup Granulated Sugar

2 Eggs

1 Teaspoon vanilla

1/2 Teaspoon Fresh Nutmeg

1 Teaspoon Cinnamon

1/4 Cup Unsweetened Cocoa Powder

1 Teaspoon Salt

1 Teaspoon Baking Soda

1 3/4 Cup All-Purpose Flour

2 Cup Oats

1 Cup Chocolate Chips

 

Here’s the mise en place for the cookies.  Well, without the eggs since I forgot to include them for the picture.

Here I’ve grated the nutmeg using a Microplane grater.

Measuring out the peanut butter.

The butter and peanut butter get mixed together and then creamed with the sugar.

Here’s the creamed sugar, peanut butter, and butter.

Then the remaining wet ingredients and spices get mixed in.

Here’s the recipe slowly taking shape as I decide how much of each ingredient I’m going to use.

Then the dry ingredients, except the chocolate chips, get mixed in.

Then the chocolate chips get folded into the cookie dough, so that they don’t break up.

The dough gets rolled into flattened balls and put on a cookie sheet.  I always use a silpat on top of an airbake cookie sheet when baking cookies.

They bake for about 14 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

The recipe makes about 2-3 dozen cookies, depending on how large you make each cookie.

Let Them Eat Cake - Brioche

“Let them eat cake”, the phrase that was so famously said by Marie Antoinette.  Except, she didn’t.  The phrase was mistranslated and should have read “let them eat brioche.”  Of course, contemporary thinking suggests that she didn’t even utter this either.

Brioche is a rich buttery and egg laden bread.  The crust of the bread is very flaky, while the crumb of the bread is extremely tender.

Again, for this recipe I’ve turned to my favorite bread book: The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  In the book he presents three different recipes with varying amounts of butter.  I’ve always chosen to make the Rich Man’s Brioche, because as I see it, if you are going to make Brioche, you should make it the richest possible.  To that end, I’ve made some substitutions to the recipe presented in the book.  I’ve replaced the normal butter with my favorite butter: Plugra.  Also, I’ve replaced the whole milk with buttermilk.  The recipe provided in the book is excellent, but I think these two substitutions provide a better richer taste.

Once again, here is my mise en place. 

Getting ready to make the sponge, flour and yeast get mixed.

I heated the buttermilk in the microwave, but turns out I got it too hot, so here it is in a water bath, cooling down.  It needs to be between 90 & 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The sponge gets mixed and then set aside for 20 minutes, as the other ingredients get prepared.

Here’s the remaining dry ingredients: flour, sugar, and some salt.

Five eggs get cracked and then lightly whisked.

Here’s the pound of Plugra cut into manageable slices.

After 20 minute, the sponge is bubbly and ready for mixing.

The eggs get mixed into the sponge.

Then the remaining dry ingredients are mixed in.  This gets mixed for a few minutes to help the gluten develop before the butter gets mixed in.

Here’s the first round of butter getting mixed in.  The butter needs to be mixed in bit by bit.

Here’s the dough after all the butter has been mixed in.

The dough gets placed on a oiled parchment paper, then covered with plastic wrap and placed in the refrigerator overnight.

Here’s a close up view of what the dough should look like before going into the fridge.

And here we’ve skipped a few steps.  The dough came out of the fridge, was shaped into a ball, then into a brioche à tête.  The recipe makes two loaves, but since I only have one brioche pan, the other loaf got shaped into a normal bread loaf.

Here’s the brioche after baking.  The crust should be shinier and flakier but I forgot to give the loaf an egg wash prior to baking.

Here’s a close up of the crust of the finished brioche.

Chocolate Cake

This time around I decided to make some chocolate cake.  No special recipe here, just used the standard cake recipe out of a Betty Croker cookbook.

My mise en place for the cake.  I’ve got two different cocoas here for the cake, not because it’s better that way or I intended to do so, but rather I was running out of the Sharffen Berger cocoa, so has to fall back on the Hershey’s.

Here’s the cocoa for the cake.

Mixing the dry ingredients together first.

Then everything goes into the bowl and gets mixed.

Scraping down the sides of the bowl and ready to put into the pans.

Cake batter gets distributed between the pans.  I should have weighed them to make sure they were even, but I forgot to weigh by mixing bowl before hand to be able to figure out how much batter I had in the end.  They ended up a little uneven, but it still turned out pretty well.

Close up of the batter in a pan.

The smaller of the two pans after baking.

Close up of the vampire bite in the cake.  It’s where I was testing for doneness with a toothpick.

The larger of the two cakes came out of the oven.

Close up of the larger cake.

De-panning of the cakes.  They are still warm at this point, so they go back onto the wire racks.

The cake got a interesting diamond pattern on the top of it since I had it upside down twice on it’s top.

Side view of the cake.  (aside, I’m not sure why but I love this picture).

While the cakes are cooling, time to make the frosting.  I decided to make a chocolate buttercream.  It starts with soften butter and powdered sugar.

Some chocolate gets melted in a double boiler for the frosting.  I’m using some good quality ~60% cocoa Callebaut chocolate here.

Some strong coffee for the frosting.  I was going for a mocha buttercream, but it needed some work as you couldn’t taste the coffee at all by the end of it.

The chocolate is finally melted.

Everything gets mixed together and whipped up.  Some cream is slowly added until the consistency is correct.

Preparing the cake board to receive the cake.  I’ve got a few pieces of parchment paper laid down to keep the cake board clean while frosting the cake.

The larger of the two cakes goes down, and the top is removed with a sharp bread knife.  The top is removed to flatten it out since it gets a slightly mounded top while baking.  Also, it gives the baker something to snack on and without having to take a piece of the final cake.

A close up of the topped cake.

Some frosting goes on top of the first cake.  Followed by the other cake, which also gets its top removed.  Finally it all gets frosted.  I should have taken a few pictures of that process, but got too involved and forgot about the camera.

A close up shot of the finished frosting.