Tales from the Crypt

Or Kitchen, rather. I think I've mentioned before that the flour here is...odd. At first I thought it was the humidity, but that just can't be the problem. Everything, and I mean everything, requires a whole heck of a lot more flour than in the recipe. Sometimes nearly double. So now, I've just been liberal in my use of flour. A little bit too liberal, if these last cookies are any indication:


I wanted chocolate chip cookie dough. So, I made some, had a little, then went to bake them into, well, cookies. Due to time, lack of desire, and lack of clean utensils, it took a couple of days before I went back to try to bake the cookies. The dough felt a little strange, but tasted fine. Now, however, the dough is a solid mass of very dry...stuff. Since there's no water or milk in this recipe, I did not want to add either of those. The internet said egg whites are a good moisturizing component to add if necessary, so I added a whole egg. It did the trick! I baked the dough, and, well, it looked more like muffin tops than chocolate chip cookies. And they tasted more like flour than like sweet cookies. This was a problem. This was a problem I could attempt to solve.


I made delicious frosting to cover the cookies. A bit decadent, frosted chocolate chip cookies, but they needed some sweet to make them more palatable, and who doesn't like frosting? I made a variation on my grandmother's frosting recipe, which is pretty much the Decorator's Frosting from Joy of Cooking. 1/2 cup of shortening to 2 cups of powdered sugar, 2 - 4 Tb of milk and 1/2 tsp of flavor. The powdered sugar here comes in packets of just over 2 cups, so I used an entire package, put in 1/4 cup of butter and 1/4 cup of shortening, to make it a bit richer, creamier, and more flavorful than straight shortening, and 1/4 tsp of vanilla with 1/4 tsp of almond. Or is it 1 tsp of flavor, so 1/2 tsp of each? Either way, I used the recommended total amount in Joy of Cooking, half of each flavor. Hmm...I use half of the recommended powdered sugar and shortening/butter, but all of the flavor...it tastes great! I used 2 Tb of milk, just enough to make it spreadable, then left the cookies out for the frosting to harden so it didn't get everywhere when I packed them. The cookies themselves are based on the Joy of Cooking recipe, with some extra flour and another egg.

Everyone at the office loved them, and I almost wish I had kept them for myself, or made more! They were very, very good with the frosting. The cookie was not sweet but was very...dense and airy, if you know what I mean, so made an excellent base for the frosting, and the frosting was just heavenly. Lee doesn't eat such things, so it is much better that I can bring them in to work because if I didn't, I would eat it all, and that would not be a good thing!