Christmas Re-cap

I'll admit, I'm a little burned out from all the baking I did for Christmas—mostly cookies.

I didn't fulfill my ambitious Christmas baking plans. I am happy with what I got done.

The above cake is a Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt cake from a Cooks Illustrated recipe. The pan is Nordic Ware Gingerbread House Bundt Pan, and I'm super impressed with the quality and the detail. My son and I decorated the cake later, but I didn't get a picture :-(

This is my favorite of the Christmas cakes I made. It's the Paula Deen recipe for Red Velvet Cake and my American Buttercream. I do not recommend making the cake as written, but it's close enough that I plan to work on the recipe. For the decorations I used palettes (thank you Shannon Weber for letting me know the name of the circle sprinkles), star sprinkles, and silver glittery coarse sugar. I feel quite emphatically that Christmas decorations should be unrestrained rather than tasteful.

My favorite of the cookies I made was the Compost Cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar. A good online adaptation of the recipe is a Amateur Gourmet, though I recommend the much more specific original. My mix-ins were potato chips, mini-pretzels, chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, toffee bits (yum!), and oatmeal. My husband suggested I rename them Candy Bar Cookies, because they taste like a candy bar. I'll do a full blog post on them someday. :-)

My Dad's birthday is December 25th, and for his cake I made the Chocolate Sour Cream Cake that won my Chocolate Cake Taste Test and a brand-new original Fudge Frosting that I will post soon. It was so good that I'm making the cake and frosting again for my birthday later this month.

How did your Christmas go? Did you try to do too much as well?

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Cornflake Chocolate Chip Marshmallow Cookies

Not many pictures, as time was tight. These are from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. I did not adapt these enough that I feel comfortable posting a recipe.

They are very, very good—slightly salty, and crunchy and gooey at the same time. I normally don't even like marshmallows, but the minis are perfect here. Christina Tosi lists a version with Fruity Pebbles instead of Corn Flakes and without chocolate chips. I didn't grow up eating "sugar cereal," and that still sounds amazing.

Yes, I have a crush on Milk Bar, but it's not blind. I have tested three cookie recipes in the past two weeks, several from Milk Bar, and I have thrown away three batches of cookie dough. It was painful. They were not nice enough to give, and I had to ask myself my standard "do I want this [food I am looking at] in the garbage or on my butt?" Crude, but it works.

The winners completely redeem the book though.

This was my second take on the recipe, and I felt confident enough to double it.

Really strange-looking cookie dough

This was not a good idea, as it didn't come close to fitting in my 5 quart KitchenAid.

I also made the cookies a lot smaller, using a flat scoop from a #40 or tablespoon disher. This is equivalent to a cookie scooped by a dinner-tablespoon. I baked them for only 8 minutes at 375 degrees.

Why did I throw away the first batch? Warning, dorkinesss ahead!

First, I used the Christmas variation that mixed in crushed candy canes, and did not like it. I didn't think I would, but I thought it was worth trying.

Second, I used the wrong flour. My miserly tendances led me to use bleached all-purpose flour. Christina Tosi calls for King Arthur unbleached bread flour, and I was unwise to ignore this.

As I read in BakeWise, cookies are controlled by their very low moisture level. The moisture level is, in turn, influenced by the protein level of the flour. King Arthur Flour has very high protein levels in their flours in general. For example, the protein level in their AP flour is 11.7%, higher than almost every other brand (Cook's Illustrated and TheArtisan.net). KAF bread flour is 12.7% protein.

Cookies from my first batch resembled terrible fried eggs, bulging in the middle with a huge spread and very thin, tough margin. I didn't have any bread flour (sigh—I usually have six types of flour on hand), so I used the very strong (high in protein) King Arthur AP flour instead of the softer bleached flour. The new cookies were still pretty flat, but good enough to share.

Bleached all-purpose flour is almost always softer (lower in protein) than unbleached all-purpose flour. According to Bakewise, this is only because of convention and not because of the bleaching.

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Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am, generally speaking, a fan of whole grains. Not for reasons of health though, though I can use whatever help I can get in that area. I just prefer whole wheat bread and brown rice on most occasions.

I do, however, strive to eat healthier, just on my terms. Thus, the whole wheat chocolate chip cookie.

I know how to make chocolate chip cookies. I've made the ones from Cooks Illustrated (behind a pay wall), and they are very, very good. But they are too much, if you know what I mean. I admire the rigor with which the ATK team tests its recipes. However, I sometimes find their recipes overly elaborate for my aims, and the preferences of the cooks and tasters idiosyncratic.

Back to the cookies. I like the taste of whole wheat, but I like the taste of chocolate chip cookies better. I am not aiming for a compromise here.

I made the King Arthur Flour recipe here, exactly as written (except for the espresso powder--I don't drink or cook with coffee).

The recipe starts with creaming the butter and sugars. The recipe uses a blend of sugars: white, brown, and honey. Whole wheat recipes often include honey, and it works unobtrusively here.

The recipe also includes cider vinegar. The vinegar obviously makes the batter more acidic, but I don't understand why the batter should be more acidic, functionally speaking. This, to me, underscores why I use recipes specifically developed for whole wheat, rather than substituting whole wheat in conventional recipes. Flour is already a complex mixture of starches and proteins--adding fat, fiber, and vitamins in the form of wheat germ and wheat bran increases the complexity to a great degree.

The batter was very, very fluffy.

I dished the dough with my tablespoon scoop onto a silicone baking liner. It's a very yummy dough for eating straight :-)

I watched the cookies very carefully in the oven. Chocolate chip cookies specifically need to be soft, and the whole wheat flour makes it more complicated to determine doneness.

These are perfectly done. The cookies are completely soft and seem raw, but the edge of one of the cookies is browning. Leaving the cookies on the baking sheet for 5 minutes after they are removed from the oven cooks the cookies just a little more and solidifies them enough to remove from the sheet.

After five minutes, the inside is cooked through and not wet. You can also see how the cookie dough has collapsed around the chips, an important part of a good cookie IMO.

The under-sides are not over-browned. You can't see it here, but there was a thin, smooth glass-like bottom, which I think is related to the honey.

I really liked the cookies. However, I am blessed to have two of the most sensitive tasters in the world right here in my own family. My husband though the cookies were "good" and my 7 year old son didn't eat them. The quest for a cookie that pleases the whole family continues!

How do you like your chocolate chip cookies? Are you interested in a cookie that uses whole wheat flour? Please let me know in your comments.

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