Salted Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

The photographer was a slacker and took this photo with her Blackberry, which accounts for its terrible condition.

Our new range is installed and I have been able to start cooking and baking again! Marshal Mike's first request was salted oatmeal cookies. While I was making the batter, a bag of peanut butter chips serendipitous fell out of the cupboard and I thought, adding peanut butter chips to salted oatmeal cookies sounds delicious! Luckily, I was right.

The first thing I learned about baking with our new range is that there is going to be a learning curve. The ovens get to temperature quickly and hold the temperature. I practically burned the first sheet of these cookies because the recipe says 15 minutes, and my old oven used to take 16, 17, 18 minutes depending on its attitude that day, and these were easily done in 13 or 14 minutes. A-maz-ing.

Photos of our new kitchen will be coming soon!

Lofthouse Cookies

Marshal Mike loves the supermarket sugar cookies with frosting that changes color depending on the holiday or season and I randomly came across a recipe for those very cookies, which I learned are Lofthouse cookies.

I found the recipe on the blog Two Peas and Their Pod, but a quick search will bring up a bunch of different sites with the same recipe. I found the cookies to be really dry, but MM and all of my reliable tasters at work loved them. The buttercream frosting, however, is one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. The frosting does not get very hard though, which makes packaging and transporting the cookies a little messy. And a warning: when I made this recipe, I ended up with 95 cookies. It probably would have been closer to 100, but I didn't roll some of the dough as thinly as I should have. Also, do not attempt this recipe without a heavy duty stand mixer. I have a 5 quart Professional Kitchen Aid mixer and the dough was creeping up the blade and trying to jump out of the bowl. I would also recommend separating the dough into 3 sections (instead of 2) before refrigerating it - it is just easier to deal with later on.

Nicole's Baby Shower

Over the weekend I was one of three co-hosts for my good friend Nicole's baby shower (longtime readers should know this is the same Nicole of birthday cake fame and a regular taster of BlB food).

We held the shower at a restaurant in the Ballston area of Arlington, called Rustico, but of course I couldn't help making some baked goods for all our guests.

For favors, I made a gingerbread mama and baby:

Gingerbread Mama and Baby

I used King Arthur Flour's gingerbread cookie recipe, and I don't think I will ever look for another gingerbread recipe in my life. These have just the right amount of spice, the center stays chewy and the edges are crisp. I used KAF's royal icing recipe as well. Meringue powder is really easy to find. I bought mine off of Amazon, but you can find it at AC Moore, or other craft stores that carry Wilton products.

I found the adorable gingerbread cookie cutters at CopperGifts.com. The mama is 4 1/2 inches and the baby is their mini size.

For our dessert I made red velvet cupcakes.

Red Velvet Cupcake

I used the same red velvet cupcake and cream cheese frosting recipe that I used for my friend Amy's bridal shower last year. (If you don't want to click through, the recipe can be found on Simply Recipes.) They were delicious!

Brunch menu and favor

Tower 'o' Cupcakes

Our crafty friend, Michelle, made this adorable diaper cake snowman. Nicole said she doesn't think she can stand to take it apart!

Diaper Snowman

Michelle also made these great, simple centerpieces.

She spraypainted branches silver and hung a couple small ornaments from them. They were pretty and festive!

Salted Peanut Butter Cookies

Longtime readers of BlB know that Marshal Mike loves peanut butter anything and salted oatmeal cookies. I recently found this great recipe for Salted Peanut Butter cookies on Molly Wizenberg's blog Orangette and thought, well, that sounds right up MM's alley!

I followed the recipe as written, except I couldn't find pastry flour. I have whole wheat pastry flour, but decided that might be a little weird. So I used half cake flour and half all purpose flour. These cookies are extremely crumbly. Like fall apart on command crumbly. But they are delicious! I brought the extras into work (I sent most of them to MM in Afcrapistan) and my co-workers may like these better than the whole wheat chocolate chip cookies!

Snickerdoodles

When I told my friend Nicole that I made snickerdoodles this weekend, she said, "Oh, that is a cookie I have never tried to make!" After she said that, I realized that her statement held true for me, too.

I have always wanted to make snickerdoodles, mainly because the name is so fun to say. But also, they aren't complicated and taste of butter, cinnamon and sugar. What could be wrong with that? I used Michael Ruhlman's recipe from his blog and was extremely pleased with the results. These cookies are crunchy on the edges and soft and chewy in the middle. (After looking at the pictures on Ruhlman's blog again, I think I may have overcooked my cookies, which is why they are crunchy; Ruhlman's look a lot softer. Oh well!)

The other thing I liked about the recipe is that the measurements are in both volume and weight. Everything I read says that baking with weight measurements is easier and more precise than using volume and I have been wanting to try out that theory. I got a great kitchen scale for Christmas last year (thanks, Mom!) and have only used it for a couple random things here and there. Let me tell you, recipe writers need to start writing recipes with weight measurements instead of volume. It is so much easier! Put the bowl on the scale, zero the scale, add the first ingredient until its desired weight, zero the scale, add the next, etc. So much easier! And way less clean up!

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Can you see Patton's out of focus face at the top of the picture? He was willing the cookies to fall off the plate and into his mouth. I keep telling him he can't have chocolate, but he doesn't believe me.

Oh my goodness. No baked good I have ever made has solicited the kind of response that these have. My co-workers are asking for seconds and asking when I will be making more. They really are that good.

I am a little late to the Kim Boyce, Good to the Grain bandwagon. Her whole-grain cookbook came out in early 2010 and has accumulated accolades ever since. I had three adaptations for her whole wheat chocolate chips cookies clipped in my recipe book: the Washington Post's version, a skillet version, and Molly Wizenberg's version. I decided to go with Wizenberg's version because she can do no wrong and there were helpful instructions included.

Remarkably, the hardest part about this recipe was finding 8oz of bittersweet chocolate! I had a 4oz bar of 75% chocolate in the pantry and headed to the grocery assuming it would be easy to find the other 4oz. Silly me. Scharffen Berger's 70% bar is only 3oz. Both Lindt's 70% bar and Ghirardelli's 70% bar were 3.5oz. (Hmm, Ghirardelli's 70% bar online is 4oz. Sneaky!) So I decided on the Lindt bar and I threw in some Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chunks to make up the difference (the bag was almost gone, so it needed a purpose anyway).

It was a little annoying to chop up the chocolate, but I liked the results in the cookies. There were some large areas of chocolate, similar to how it would have turned out with chips, but the chocolate also got incorporated throughout the whole cookie because of the smaller chards from chopping.

One more thing to mention: as Wizenberg mentions in her post, the dough benefits from chilling. In the picture below, the cookie on the left was on the first pan that went in the oven. As you can see, it totally spread out. The cookie on the right was on the last pan that went in the oven and had been chilled for 20-30 minutes. Same amount of dough (I always use my 1 1/2 tablespoon cookie scoop, no matter what the recipe says), but different results. There is certainly nothing wrong with a flatter cookie (and if you like crisper cookies, you would probably prefer flat), but you have to place them further apart on the sheet so they don't all run together, which means you have to put fewer on a sheet and as a result, it takes longer to cook all of the batter. And for impatient people like me, that just doesn't fly.

So, long story short, if you like chocolate chip cookies, but are looking for a slight variation that truly elevates the taste of the cookie, give these a try. But be warned, make sure you have enough supplies on hand to make a second batch!

Marshal Mike's Party

Marshal Mike is home on his two week break from Army duty in Afghanistan, so we decided to get our friends together for a little party.

Herewith the food I made for the party:

Crostini with fresh ricotta, honey and lemon zest

If you try nothing else new this year, try making fresh ricotta. As I mentioned the first time I made ricotta, it is so simple, but the results are so amazing.

I wanted to try a new recipe this time, so I chose this one from Food 52.  I hate to say it, but I was underwhelmed. It just tasted like cream in curd form. Delicious and creamy, yes, but it was lacking the tang and the flavor of the recipe I made last time (Ina Garten's). So I went back to the store, bought more whole milk and heavy cream, and whipped up a batch of Ina's ricotta. Yum, yum, yum. I did find that if using Ina's recipe, let the mixture sit in the pan for about 10 minutes (instead of the recommended 1 minute) before transferring to a cheesecloth-lined sieve. The recipe will yield about 3 cups of ricotta this way instead of 2.

Now, the ricotta is fabulous on its own, but it really shines when you use it in this recipe for Bruschetta with Ricotta, Honey and Lemon Zest. The flavor combination of these items is perfection!

I thought about trying to make pigs in a blanket as I have never made them (from scratch, anyway), but then I stumbled upon this recipe for Chicks in Blankets on epicurious.

Chicks in a blanket

I love apple chicken sausage, so decided to give this recipe a try. As you can see in the picture, some of my blankets didn't stay closed (exhibitionist chicks?), but they still tasted great! I did include little bowls of mustard to dip them in because I found each piece to be a little pastry-heavy.

To round out the homemade appetizers, I made avocado hummus, which I have posted about here. It is a recipe from the Washington Post that I have made a couple times (and never photograph!) and it is a crowd pleaser every time. I made pita chips to go with it.

Salted Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

For dessert, I tried this recipe for salted double chocolate peanut butter cookies, which was created by a fellow Rhode Islander! These were also a crowd pleaser; if you like chocolate and peanut butter, give them a try!

Chocolate Nutella Cookies

Mmmmm...chocolate...Nutella...

This is my second attempt at Nutella cookies (see first one here), and I am pleased with the results. This recipe is from the well-known blog, Simply Recipes, and is actually a guest post by a gentleman named Garrett McCord of the blog Vanilla Garlic. (As I mentioned on this post, if you have an extra couple minutes in your day, visit Vanilla Garlic and search "Eat Beast" - you will cry from laughing so hard.)

Anyway, a couple things I liked about this recipe: it calls for a full cup of Nutella (yum!), less butter than the first recipe I tried (healthier!), brown sugar and white sugar (interesting!), cocoa (chocolaty!), and chopped hazelnuts (crunchy!). All of those things combined into delicious cookies!

The recipe says to bake them for 10-12 minutes, but at 13 minutes mine were still practically raw in the center. I would say that mine baked for 15-16 minutes and they are still tender and soft. The recipe also says that it will make 6 dozen 1 tablespoon-sized cookies. Well, my cookie scoop is 1 1/2 tablespoons, so that is what I used, and I ended up with 42 cookies.

Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies

There are plenty of recipes for variations of the chocolate chip cookie out there. There are even plenty of different recipes for Nutella chocolate chips cookies (do a Google search, I dare you). I found this particular one on a blog named Pink of Perfection.

I have printed lots of Nutella recipes over the year, but I always felt like it was a waste of Nutella to bake with it. I prefer to eat it with graham crackers, toast or just on a spoon when no one is looking. Nutella was one of my favorite discoveries when I studied in Florence in college and I have been mildly obsessed ever since.

This recipe is pretty good. The cookies taste a little like shortbread to me. I did over cook them, which is part of the problem (they are more crunchy than soft and chewy), but at 10 minutes they were still raw. I would suggest checking them at 10 minutes, but do not bake them longer than 15 minutes.

I made a couple alterations to Pink of Perfection's recipe. I used scant 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup Nutella and a mixture of regular and mini semi-sweet chocolate chips (I think I actually like the mini chips better). Next time I would use less butter; the cookies are a little greasy. Some chopped hazelnuts might be nice too, to reinforce the hazelnut flavor of the Nutella.

Crispy Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

This post is picture-less, but this recipe is so good that I just couldn't keep it to myself.

For anyone who likes oatmeal chocolate chip cookies - this recipe from food52 may be your new favorite. I know it's mine! The balance of spice, salt, chocolate and oats is just perfect.

Chocolate Chunk & Vanilla Bean Cookies

Look closely and you can see the vanilla bean specks!

I have been excited to try this recipe for awhile - I just love the flavor from vanilla beans and there is certainly nothing wrong with semisweet chocolate chunks!!

This recipe is from the Coconut & Lime blog and the cookies are delicious. The recipe says it will make 2 dozen, but I only got maybe 18. It turns out that's a good thing, because they are only good on the 1st and 2nd days. By the 3rd day they taste a little stale. My only complaint is that the cookies don't have a strong vanilla flavor. I was really hoping for a stronger flavor from the bean.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Please excuse the classy plastic dish... 

My friends, Jaime and Jon, bought a townhome a couple months ago and had their housewarming party this past weekend. Jaime likes all things pumpkin, so I decided to try these cookies. Boy am I glad I did! They are like mini pumpkin cakes: soft, fluffy, with a hint of pumpkin flavor and warm spices.

I wasn't sure how the chocolate would pair with the pumpkin (it just didn't seem like a good match in my brain), but it complements the pumpkin well and adds an appropriate burst of sweetness.

If you are looking for something to fill your home with the aroma of fall and whet your appetite for Thanksgiving's pumpkin pie, try these cookies!

UPDATE: These cookies will last over a week in an airtight container or Ziplock bag!

Crispy Oatmeal Chocolate and Butterscotch Chip Cookies

Crispy, chocolaty, chewy and crazy-good!

Today's post is sponsored by the letter "c." Just kidding.

I got this recipe from the Food52 website, but as I started to get all my ingredients out on the counter, I realized that I was missing a couple, so I used what I had and ended up with a really delicious cookie! (Just ask Marshal Mike, he consumed six (6!) yesterday!) My version is below.

Crispy Oatmeal Chocolate and Butterscotch Chip Cookies
Makes about 40 cookies

1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups old fashioned oats
1 cup milk chocolate chips
3/4 cup butterscotch chips
1/4 cup semisweet chocolate chunks

1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking soda, and spices. Set aside.

2. In the bowl of a standing mixer, cream the butter and two sugars until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the egg and vanilla and beat until combined. Add the flour mixture in three additions, beating until just combined and scraping down the sides of the bowl. Do not overbeat!

3. Stir in the oats and the chocolate/butterscotch chips, distributing evenly. Drop by tablespoon (or ice cream scoop - I use a 1 1/2 tablespoon scoop) on parchment-lined baking sheets, keeping the cookies at least 2 inches apart. Flatten gently with the back of the spoon/scoop and bake for about 14 minutes, rotating the baking sheets halfway through. The cookies are done when the edges are golden. Cool on the baking sheets for a minute, then transfer cookies to wire racks to cool completely.

4. Devour!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Martha Stewart has done it again! These are some of the most delicious cookies I have ever tasted. Salty, crunchy, chewy, chocolaty, what more could you ask for? In some parts of the cookie, it is so light and crunchy it tastes like a meringue.

I made these for my sister and brother-in-law's Labor Day party (which is tomorrow), and I just hope MM and I don't eat them all before we make it to the Eastern Shore! You can find the recipe here, and I would recommend making them soon!

Salted Oatmeal Cookies

Salty!

I think these are Marshal Mike's favorite cookies. In fact, the only two desserts he requests are these and peanut butter brownies (and although I have tried making pb brownies from scratch, he prefers the box). I got the recipe from the Washington Post, who adapted a recipe from DCist, who had tried to replicate a Teaism cookie. I have never tried the Salty Oat cookie at Teaism, so I don't know how they compare. 

An ice cream scoop makes a perfect cookie dough mound!

I used French gray sea salt on my cookies, but I am sure you could use any coarse salt you had on hand. You do have to plan ahead when you make these, as the dough has to chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour before baking.

Marshal Mike happened to successfully arrest a bandit he has been looking for this morning, and I would like to think it is because of the salted oatmeal cookies! Another one of DC's finest citizens off the streets.