Maa Maa Mack Meep

Have you any Maamoul?

These cookies are pretty fun to make, especially if you have pastry tweezers. I don't have pastry tweezers.



The recipe hails from the book what's cooking Jewish by Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen, and is a simple one. It's a Sephardic recipe, and the most refined version of these cookies is found in Morocco. Fillings can be date (seen here) or walnuts and pistachios.

You'll need:
6 oz/175g flour
2 tbsp sugar
3 oz/85 g unsalted butter
1 tbsp rosewater (or orange flowerwater)
2-3 tbsp milk
powdered sugar

2/3 c pitted dried dates, chopped
102 tsp more of rosewater (or orange flowerwater)

Preheat your oven to 325F, and grease a baking sheet.

With a food processor, combine rosewater and dates til smooth, adding a tbsp or two of boiling water if necessary. Set aside to cool. I let my filling stay a little too lumpy.

Now, sift flour into a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Cut in the butter, til *~FINE CRUMBS~*. Sprinkle over rosewater and 2 tbsp milk. Mix gently==> soft dough. Add more milk if necessary. Make a large ball, and pinch off pieces to shape 1 inch balls.



Press into the center of a ball, and rotate your finger to create a well. Add some filling, and pinch the edges of the dough together to seal it up.

Arrange all the cookies on the sheet 1 inch apart, seam-side down. Press balls into long leafy shapes, and use tweezers to pinch the tops 3 times (or craftily use two knives to do the same). Bake 20-25 minutes (until just set. Must remain pale!)

Let cool 10 min ==> sprinkle with powdered sugar ==>let cool completely ==>sprinkle once more.

I skipped the powdered sugar alltogether and still enjoyed my cookie experience.



-Anna

Brown Sugar Cardamom Friends

Nothing makes you feel a rumble in your tummy quite like the sight of a forest creature.



The recipe was quite simple. All you need is butter, flour, brown sugar, and cardamom. What could be simpler?

I would definitely add more cardamom.

I also topped the cookies with turbinado instead of more brown sugar. Shiny!


Farewell, Mr. Moose!

Recipe: here
Forest creatures: Hiding in the forest, and in ikea cookie cutters.

-Anna

Edit: I forgot my favorite photo!


Me and the cookie, drinkin that earl grey.

When someone offers you wheat cookies at a party, you say yes

Here's the recipe, folks. So, I used less sugar (as usual), and no almond extract. The only one I have, I bought at some thai store on santa monica blvd, and it does not taste great. I imagine they'd be great with some though--Amanda, get on that!

They were pretty light, definitely not the typical chocolate chip cookie. People gobbled them up, but I don't think I liked them enough to make them again. Depends what you're after!

-Anna

L@te

There are always those nights. You try to fall asleep at 11. You end up leaving the wide-eyed world with the scent of cookies/cakes wafting through the house, at 4am.

My mom had an appointment with the hospital at 8am, so I decided she deserved a cake to wake up to.

Using this easy recipe, I whipped up a cake that actually rose a bit! I left a netting of flour on the sides of a cake pan, so that the batter can actually climb as it tries to escape my pan, rather than seeping through the (impenetrable) cracks which allow the bottom to fall out. Good thinking. ..

A nice sun in the middle for radiance!

I don't like cake with buttermilk as much. Yogurt is my favorite way. Soon to come: bomb blueberry lemon bread. so bomb. bomb bomb. i like it so much i'm saying the word bomb. over and over.



This recipe was not as fun for me. I was really excited, because I'd been craving pistachios like who knows what (after seeing this pavlova), and I had a nice thick amount of pomegranate molasses sitting around. These cookies were a hit, but not to my ears. I also didn't think they were attractive. So this is their mention. I'm sticking to using pomegranate molasses in savory dishes.

-Anna

Sweetening the Studies

Inspiration is like hunger. Have a nibble, suddenly you're ravenous. The trick is, it's harder to motivate myself to take a bite of a book than a cookie. Studying also doesn't have quite the same level of stress-relieving ability as baking does. So during finals I found a sugar cookie recipe to love and adore, and my cookies were a lot less unappetizing than my prior salty, rock-hard, or completely melted attempts.



For the above cookie, I followed the recipe for lavender lemon cookies, and made a little lavender flower trail for appeal.

http://52kitchenadventures.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/week-19-lavender/

For the cookie down below, I used chai tea spices on the same sugar cookie recipe to make cookies that were basically snickerdoodles.

Because I like my cookies salty.

So Anna and I really like cardamom and cookies, and together--they're all pretty incredible. And I then I was inspired by Anna's brittle and I had to make snacks for my class last Thursday and snacks for a inspire-people-to-live-in-the-house-that-I-live-in-now-but-next-year fair, so chocolate chip cookies in bar form seemed ideal. And then cardamom is also really fun, these could also be really great with ginger. I want to make gingered pear challah soon, mmmm. My version is adapted from this recipe, but a bit spiced up. (note bad pun) Anyway have fun with them, and they would go well with this song, nice and rich. Yeah I did just do that.

Cardamom-y Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars with Salt!
2 3/4 c. flour
1 tsp (and then some) kosher sea salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp. ground cardamom
1 1/2 c. white sugar
1 TBS molasses (alternatively you could just use 3/4 c. white sugar and 3/4 c. brown sugar, but our kitchen's giant open bag of brown sugar could have broken bones)
3 medium eggs (or 2 large eggs)
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 sticks softened Earth Balance (margarine/butter etc.)
20 oz. chocolate chips/chunks whatever (these are veryvery chocolately!)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure butter/margarine is softened!
2. Whisk flour, salt, baking soda, and cardamom together in a bowl.
3. With a mixer, cream the sugars, molasses if using, and butter together. This might take a while, 3 or 4 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time, then the vanilla.
4. Carefully stir in dry ingredients (not too much!) and mix in chocolate chips.
5. Spray a 9 by 13 inch glass baking pan with cooking spray and pour the batter in and distribute evenly.
6. Bake for 20 to 30 minutes.
And these keep well if you put them in tupperware at least!

-Amanda

Brittle Little Chocolate Chip Cookie Bones

Based on this recipe

So my friend had a Liberace/apartment-warming/dessert potluck party. I made chocolate chip cookie brittle! Warning: it is veryy rich so you are going to be satisfied with a very small piece. I had lots left over, brought some to work the next morning.

You will need:
3/4 c room temp unsalted butter
1c sugar
1/2 tsp salt (but remember, less is less)
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 c flour
1 c semi-sweet chocolate chips, plus some more for drizzling


Preheat the oven to 350, and line your cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Beat together the butter and sugar, then add salt and vanilla. Finally (slowly) add the flour. This dough will look very crumbly. Check it out:


Now, add in chocolate chips. Much better!


Press this dough very firmly onto your cookie sheet, trying to make it level and pretty thin. I've seen some recipes involve another sheet of parchment paper, placing it on top of the goods and using a rolling pin to flatten. Try it?


Bake for approximately 20 minutes. My edges got a bit golden when it was just right. Cut the tip off of a corner of a plastic bag, and fill it with some chocolate you've just melted in a double boiler. Squeeze and drizzle all over the bark. Let it cool so that the brittle is firm enough to break apart, and so the chocolate drizzle is not all over the place. Then hurl it to the ground, causing it to break into a million little pieces. Does this remind any of you of the Russian snow queen story? With the shard of mirror that landed in the little boy's? I think I'd rather have a piece of this brittle lodged in my heart.


Enjoy =)
-Anna

A Glass o' Lassi on a Rainy Day

There will also be cookies in this post. Stay tuned.

As a little girl, I thought my sister (13 years older than me) was the coolest thing ever. She always took my family to the most exotic restaurants. Well, at least I thought they were, because I'm pretty sure I hadn't heard of Indian food yet. So we order some grub, finding ourselves questioning just how much we desired to taste some of the foods we'd ordered. Sometimes a long, bright pink sausage isn't the most tempting meal. But we went ahead and ate everything, unaccustomed to there being spice in food. And by spice I mean the hot kind. My sister was the only smart one, ordering a big glass of chilled mango lassi to calm her fiery taste buds. At the time, I blegh'd. I'm not sure why, because I liked yogurt, and i liked mango. Fortunately for you all, tastes change. So here you have it: mango lassi.


(based on this recipe)



What you need:

some means of blending (I used a cuisinart hand blender)
1 large ripe mango (yielding a cup of diced mango pulp)
1 c nonfat yogurt
1/4 tsp cardamom
4 or 5 ice cubes



Blend all of these things. Strain. Transfer to a glass. Drink.

I did not strain, and this was not a problem. I don't think it would have made much of a difference at all. Not a single mango hair found in my teeth!

You can add a few tablespoons of sugar before blending, but this was sweet enough for me.

I would also add a little less cardamom, because the flavor was a bit overwhelming. My roommate thought it tasted carroty. At some point I'll be adding some cinnamon to this.

I only read the wikipedia page on lassi after making this, but now I know to sprinkle some pistachio pieces on top of my lassi. And to get some Bhang Lassi next time I'm in India.



||
V



Cardamom Cookies

Making these cookies was a disaster. I'm no good at making cookies. But I found some nice ducks in the rubble.

What you need:

1/2c unsalted butter
1c sugar
1tsp ground cardamom
2 eggs
1 c all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt


Preheat an oven to 325F.

Beat the butter, sugar, and cardamom together. Add eggs to this, one at a time. When well-combined, add the flour and salt and lightly mix with a spoon. Next, you can try dropping the dough onto a greased cookie sheet with a spoon, 1/2in apart. If you are like me, your cookies will form one unified cookie sheet. You will then watch this sheet til it is firm, remove it, and use a duck-shaped cookie cutter to shape the cookies, put them back in the oven til crispy and golden brown, and save the non-duck cookie bits for your mom.

I tried adding some more flour to remaining dough, but I needed to have flattened out the ploomped dough on the sheet. Edges too crispy. Tasted great though ! People really liked my ducks. I really liked my ducks


(based on this recipe, halved)

OH I almost forgot to mention something. Amanda and I made cardamom cookies at the exact same time. Without having planned this, or even bringing up cardamom cookies. That is how important these cookies are to the world.

Halvah is a Homonym

My dad really enjoys halvah--the kind with sesame and honey and such. He got these little halvah confections flavored with vanilla that I are delicious, so much so that the company decided to call themselves Delicious Halva, but of course. So I got it in my head that making halvah from scratch would be quite the project and started looking up recipes.
So as the title suggests, there are two types of halva, the more common sesame kind, and the other type made from semolina flour (the same flour used to make pasta). I buy a fairly expensive bag of semolina thinking "semolina, sesame, they must be related." And I bring the bag of pricey flour home, and I take it out, and glance over the ingredients...nope, no sesame listed. Semolina is actually made of from the hard grains left over after milling flour.
But I was actually able to find a rather enticing cookie recipe here, that used a hefty amount of the semolina. The recipe called for putting an almond on top, which I did, but in my opinion was a rather silly addition. If you were to replace the vanilla extract with almond it might work, but otherwise I would leave the cookies naked except for the quick egg gloss on top to shine them up.
I thought the flavor would be a bit flat with just the vanilla and semolina, so i decided to add a sprinkling of cardamom. I didn't put very much, so initially I was worried that the flavor wouldn't come out at all. Luckily it turned out to be the perfect amount, the cardamom flavor was there, but very subtle, so you had to wonder for a minute what the note actually was. These also might be nice with a teaspoon of ginger to replace the cardamom.

Cardamom Vanilla Cookies

2 sticks unsalted butter
1 c. flour
1 c. sugar
2 c. semolina flour
1 tsp. ground cardamom
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
A bit of egg for glossing them

1. Melt the butter slowly, i.e. don't let it get any brown speckles in it. After you've melted it use a spoon to remove as much as you can of the white froth that gathers at the top.
2. Combine the flours, sugar, and cardamom in a bowl.
3. Once the butter is cool, stir in the eggs and vanilla, make sure to break the yolks up. Add the flour mixture and stir well. With your hands rub and knead or whatever measure you want to use--just make sure that the dry flour parts and the yolky liquid parts meld together to form a cohesive dough. Let this sit for an hour or so covered with a towel or plastic wrap.
4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Play with the dough again to make sure it's the same consistency all over. Take out baking pans and put parchment paper on them. Make littles ball with of the dough. Midway between a tablespoon and a teaspoon in size. Put them about an inch apart on the baking sheets. Brush with the egg wash and stick in the oven for about 20 minutes.