Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Finally some chocolate!!! Yum yum!!!

This recipe from Chef Michael Smith's television show called Chef at Home. As the name says, they are CHEWY chocolate chip cookies, and boy are they ever!

Previous times I've made chocolate chip cookies, they turned out hard and crispy, and my husband has always said that he prefers them soft and chewy. So recently, when I decided to make chocolate chip cookies again, I told myself I would try to find a recipe for a chewy cookie. So when I stumbled upon this Michael Smith recipe, I got very excited because every other recipe I've made by Michael Smith has turned out really well and this was no exception.

On the site where I got the recipe, there's a small video explaining how to make it with some interesting tips. One of the tips was that instead of melting butter and mixing it in, you put in cold butter and cream it with the brown sugar. According to Michael, this creates air bubbles which make the cookie light and fluffy. Also, using white sugar makes the cookie hard he says, so that is why he uses brown sugar.

The mixture of creaming the brown sugar and butter looks like this:



Separately, I mixed all the dry ingredients together:



Once the brown sugar and butter were creamed together, I added the egg, vanilla and honey (instead of corn syrup). Then once the wet and dry ingredients were combined together, it resulted as follows:



I then added the chocolate chips, however, I used MINT chocolate chips, which is my husband's favorite chocolate combination.



At this stage, the batter looked so homogeneous and soft that I was thinking mmmmm these are gonna turn out great!

Then, I spooned the batter onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven:



The result, freshly baked cookies!!!



And Michael Smith didn't lie, they were indeed very soft and chewy!

P.S. My husband is the one who did all the work in this recipe, I just guided him. So essentially, he is the one who made these wonderful cookies. Congratulations to him!!!

If interested, here is a link to the recipe.

Hamantaschen with Melissa

Melissa and I made our own variation of Claudia Roden's hamantaschen recipe.

We replaced regular flour with spelt flour and we used sucanat instead of sugar. In addition, instead of the traditional poppy seed filling, we made our own chocolate chip, almond and coconut filling.

First off, we mixed the dough in the food processor which took no time at all! I sooooooo love my new food processor!

Next, we wrapped the dough in saran wrap and put it in the fridge for 20 mins or so. This was in order to make the dough a little firmer so that it's easier to make the shape of the hamantaschen.

Once we took the dough out of the fridge, we cut circles out of it, put the filling inside and shaped the hamantaschen.


It takes about 15 mins in the oven and they're done.



In the end, they turned out quite well. However, we found that the portions of sugar (sucanat) and vanilla extract were not enough to flavor the dough. The filling was excellent but the dough tasted very plain.
The portions allocated were 2 tbsp sugar and drops of vanilla extract. In my opinion, the recipe should call for at least 1/2 cup sugar and 1 tsp vanilla extract. In that case, the dough will have a bit more flavor and there are other hamantaschen recipes I've seen with those portions allocated, but not this one.

Lottie's Biscotti

Today was my attempt at making Lottie's Biscotti.

As per the link above, this was a recipe from the Kosher Foodies. It is chocolate chip and almond biscotti, yum yum!

First off, I roasted the almonds for a few mins. I roasted them in a pan for about 5-10 mins until they browned a bit.


Secondly, I mixed all the dry ingredients together.


The next step was to mix in a food processor 1 cup of almonds and 1 cup of dry mixture until a fine powder results. This was my first use of my new Cuisinart food processor, which I purchased about a week ago. To process the mixture took 5 seconds! Whoa!


Once the processing was complete, I combined the wet ingredients into the dry mixture and mixed in the powder as well. The dough is formed as follows:



Once the dough is formed, I shaped it into 2 logs and baked it for about 40 mins.

(The first picture is before the baking and the second picture is after)

Once they finished baking, the recipe instructed to let it cool and then cut it into pieces, then bake the pieces for an additional 25-30 mins. In this part, we let it cool a little too long which made it hard to cut. This is because we decided to go out for lunch and then cut it up and do the second baking after we got back.
That was not the smartest decision: as a result of it cooling completely, the biscotti became really hard and crumbly, and made it more difficult to cut. If we would have cut it before it became too cool, it would have been softer and easier to cut. At least now we know for next time.

After cutting it up and the second baking for a half hour, this was the end result:


Even though we made the mistake of letting it cool too much before cutting it, they taste amazing! I could not have expected them to come out any better taste-wise. However, in the next attempt, the shape will definitely be better as I know now not to leave it in the middle and let it cool completely.

Note: even though this post has more "I"s than "we"s, I just wanted to mention that my husband helped me throughout the process. He is a great help whenever I need it!!!