Baking Therapy

I found a hidden gem during my excursion to Telluride - a fabulous little pizza shop/bakery called BIT - Baked In Telluride. It was delicious - on a 6 day trip, we were literally there 3 times. They had great cookies, but the best were clearly the oatmeal butterscotch and the oatmeal chocolate cookies with chocolate drizzle. The hermits, peanut butter chocolate cookies, the sugar cookies, and M&M cookies were all delicious (and of course, I sampled them all), but the oatmeal cookies were the real standouts!

I returned home on Saturday and realized my Mom had a day of baking planned on Sunday. How could I resist? Even though I brought over all of my baking supplies to her house to keep me from baking, I still had to take part in this day of baking therapy. Our agenda was ambitious to say the least. Her plan was frosted cinnamon chip cookies (my absolute favorite) and espresso chip meringue cookies. I was committed to baking ice cream kolaches and chocolate covered cherries (more on these later). In our shopping, we dropped into Michael's Craft Store and were lured into a baking aisle, where I also bought some tools for candy making. Oh the excitement.

Allow me to back-track. The flight from Dallas to Boston on Friday night yielded a copy of the most recent Taste of Home cooking magazine. Ironically, this was the Winter Baking Edition! Tremendous! There was a section dedicated to quick breads, one dedicated to pastry, and a section dedicated to chocolate. All the pictures were mouth-watering, and when I met up with Mom, we decided that we had to try our hand at making chocolate covered cherries and ice cream kolaches. Kolaches, as it turns out, are a Polish cookie filled with nuts, seeds, or jams. They are similar to rugelach, but different in shape and the lack of cinnamon, sugar, and egg wash. The variation in Taste of Home magazine required the cookie dough to be made with vanilla ice cream instead of the standard wet ingredients. I combined the butter and ice cream, along with flour, sugar, and a little bit of salt, and divided the dough into quarters. The dough sat to chill for the next several hours.

Meanwhile, Mom was beginning to make a mean batch of cinnamon chip cookies. These cookies are literally the first I have ever encountered that I actually liked the taste of the baked cookie better than the batter itself. I think it has something to do with the fluffy white frosting that adorns the top. Here are the steps to these yummy cookies. First and foremost, secretly acquire from a REAL bakery tried and true cinnamon chips (not the waxy stuff they sell to recreational bakers). See image at right!

Next, you need to cream together the butter and sugar. This, traditionally, is my favorite part, save for the time that I had to do it for an upside-down cake!

Mom made the rest of the batter for the cookies, adding flour and a bounty of her delicious cinnamon chips. Next, we were on to meringues. Now, Mom has made pavlovas before, but this was my first venture into seeing how meringues are done. Boy, it is tough to tell whether you have achieved stiff peaks or not. Is everything supposed to be in stiff peaks, or are some stiff peaks good enough? Who knows? And then I freaked out in this process too when you had to start adding in the espresso powder and the chocolate chips. I have always heard that egg whites are so delicate that you do not want to break down their proteins when combining them with other ingredients, but I was at a loss for what that meant. Here is Mom expertly separating the whites out from the yolks, an essential part to good meringues.

I decided to be creative and use our pastry tips to pipe out the meringues onto the parchment-lined cookie sheets. That was great until the phone rang, I got distracted, the pressure in the bag increased, and I blew the piping tip right off the psuedo-pastry bag. Having then been consumed by the phone call Mom and I BOTH forgot to remove the tip from the cookie. Good thing I decided to eat the ugliest cookie three days later because I hence found the missing metal pastry tip that we hadn't realized had gone missing. Oops! The meringues, all told, came out quite tasty, and are somewhat healthful, considering they lack fatty egg yolks.

Feeling quite excited about my foray into candy (much like my sister) I began to work on my chocolate covered cherries. These are not terribly homemade, as the ingredients are drained maraschino cherries, butter, confectioners sugar, sweetened condensed milk, and chocolate melting candy, but I still felt quite accomplished. The first step was to craft the white candy to surround the cherry. This is where the butter, sugar and milk came it. It made a fun candy dough with a texture similar to marzipan (but none of the inconvenient almond flavor). This was wrapped around the cherries, and the cherries were then dipped in chocolate. Easy enough! And after my visit to Michael's I had acquired the tools to decorate the little candies. What fun!

Now, I don't know anything about crystalization, tempering chocolate, or the blooming effect that Kerri talked about in her blog. I just goofed off and had some fun with decorating these cherries. I then started to play around with a kitty cat candy mold I purchased on a whim at Michaels. I made some mice, a food bowl, a fish, and a couple kitties. This was simple and nearly brainless. A perfect way to spend a snowy Sunday.