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First time testing out the squeeze cookies. They were a bit softer than I anticipated, I think it’s due to over beating (as I always over beat, ergh) Luckily the recipe was for a small family batch, so I can give it another go shortly.

This is what it looked like after baking. it just flattened out, and the shape didn’t hold. Despite the cookies not holding shape, it still tasted pretty good and crispy. I really need to stop sampling these though, it’s no good for my waist line.

I got these new cookie cutters, and couldn’t wait to try them out, so I broke out the remaining chocolate dough and tested it out. The dog bone shaped cookie cutter does not cut as well…i might have to use a knife to clean up the edges a bit more. The rest worked great, and I still have to get used to using the alphabets, but i love the new cookie cutter.

Looking forward to making more cookies with them!!

Nothing I love more than spontaneous friend gatherings. Yesterday, Lynn msgged me early afternoon seeing what I was doing, I said prob making cookies, then I asked if she wanted to come over. With nothing else planned for the day, Lynn, Cris & Wei-Chih came over to my house.

Agreeing on making chocolate cookies, we set to work. Everyone had a different idea of what type of cookie they wanted, we settled on cashew/banana flavor & og chocolate. So we made a double batch.

Lynn wanted to help out in mixing so I gave the reign to her, letting her mix the butter, mixing the flour & etc… letting everyone that wanted to help help out, half the fun is in the actual doing after all.

After all the mixing was done, I split the batch into two and added banana & cashew into one mix, and putting the other half in the fridge for later.

We might have had added one too many banana, so the cookie dough ended up being really moist, in that i was unable to form the mixture into a ball form, I just free formed it in scoop form.

The other half, we played with the cookie cutter…everyone had a good time using the cutters to make shapes that they wanted.

While waiting for the cookies to bake, we played some Wii fitness.

What a fun relaxing sunday with friends.

Every week on Tuesday I always get the hankering to make cookies. I don’t know what it is.

I was torn between making the shortbread cookie shaped like a teabag dipped in chocolate (although I would not make the cookies exactly like teabags, but I’d like to try the dipping the shortbread in chocolate) and trying the matcha cookies again. (I’ve failed many times in making matcha cookies)

I let the friend that I’m sending these cookies to voice an opinion about what cookies she wanted to receive, in the end, she voted for the matcha. I was more than happy to oblige. So I typed Matcha Cookies in Chinese into google research, and got this website in the search.

I have recently realised that cookies have to be made or ARE made differently here. Most cookies are made from low gluten flour instead of ap flour…so that the taste i think is different and one has to compensate for the humidity. So I thought I’d try a chinese recipe.

I doubled the recipe to use ONE whole egg instead of 1/2 an egg.  how do you measure half an egg? and what would you do with the other half of the egg? why not just say, egg yolk or egg white, but 1/2 an egg, really??!?!?!?  My measurements are a bit weird when it came down to the 1/3 t of baking powder. I just sorta eyeballed it, since I had only 1/2 t & 1/4 t.

Having an electronic mixer (borrowed from friend) helps in mixing…i love it.

I have a small oven, so I used my scale and divided the dough into 10~11g balls. I got about 36 balls in total. After i rolled them into balls, I then flatted them into a disc, and used a small cookie cutter to indent into the disc. The shape you indent into the disc will hold during baking…I rather like this way of making a design onto the cookie, so i’ve been doing it this way.

Without further ado

Matcha Cookies (original here)

Unsalted Butter 100g
Sugar 80g
1 egg
Gluten Free Flour 180g
Matcha Powder 2 Tbspn
Baking powder 2/3tspn

1. Bring egg & butter to room temp. Whisk together flour, baking powder & Matcha Powder & sift. (dry ingredients)
2. Cream the butter & add sugar in 3 separate times, until the butter turns pale (whiter)
3. Add in the egg slowly to the butter mixture, mix well.
4. Mix in the dry ingredients, be sure to scrape the sides. After your cookie dough is incorporated, refrigerate for at least 30 mins to firm up the dough. (i didn’t do this, i worked the dough directly into 10-11g balls)
5. Pre-heat your oven now to 160C (i always pre-heat my oven when i’m ready to bake), and roll out your cookie dough and cut to desired shape. Bake at 160C for 15 mins. or until slightly brown on edges.

Notes: if you do not want to cut the cookies to shape, you can roll them into balls like i did and just squish them flat to bake, it gives them a bit of an organic/homemade look that i like. I also am using grams instead of cups because that’s what the original recipe went with.

(Pre-baked)

These are yummy, pure butter, and nothing else. These are flakey & melts in your mouth. Who knew that eggs, butter & flours mashed together can make such yummy things. So simple, and so yummy. Sigh, the best kind of baking that makes one look like a wizard in the kitchen.

I first saw the recipe from a link that my friend sent me about chocolate almond cookies, I browsed around the site because let’s face it, it’s easier for me to buy ingredients when the ingredients are already in Mandarin.

As it turns out, this website is a blog for the food show, and they’ve uploaded their segments on youtube (bonus!!) I watched the video for this cookie, and it looked easy enough to make that I tackled it last night.

I had all the ingredients. This is how stocked my pantry is now. Although the original recipe does not ask fro vanilla extract, I put some in anyways, i like vanilla.

I was going to break out the large mixer my mother has, this fancy German thingy, but I decided against it due to it being a pain to clean up with the butter, so I just mixed it all by hand & a spatula.

The indentations in the cookie are best made when they’ve come out of the oven, and not pre-indented. I did them half way thru baking, but they were still not indented enough to my liking, perhaps I made them too big. I think the next time I try them, I will not indent them at all until they come out of the oven, and just press them fresh out of the oven. It will be more obvious that way.

I will definitely make these again.

first attempt at making red velvet chocolate cookies. Got the recipe here. now, I don’t know what makes these red velvet, except perhaps the color, so I’ve just been making a variety of these cookies.
After these, I made green ones.

After making these green, my brilliant brother said, wouldn’t it be great to make these with different flavors. So today we went in search of flavor extracts. I already had orange…was going to buy raspberry, but it was $8 bucks a tiny vail…so decided against it.
Then while I was in that aisle roaming around, my eyes settled on JELLO. They had a box for raspberry JELLO, and I thought, ok why not. Let’s add that in, it’s flavoring.
So I got these tonight.

the cracks were from the sugars (i think…as this is the conclusion I came up with) After I baked these I realised that perhaps I should have omitted all the sugars and just used the JELLO packet’s sugar. I used the whole pack of JELLO.

I like the cracks better, which I think was because there was more flour, it was denser, like the original recipe said it should be, whenever i’ve halved the recipe, it always seemed a bit moist, and not too hard to beat like the original recipe claims… but this one with the JELLO mixing, was harder to mix, so it leads me to think that this is the type of dough it’s suppose to be like.

*the original red velvet cookies were received well.

*The green ones… my sister refused to eat them. She thinks green is a weird color for cookies.

*the raspberry one… really sweet… the conclusion is that perhaps you can only eat these in smaller chunks, Nephew A liked it, and ate a second piece, but Newphe I, could only eat half of it.

It’s been fun making cookies.

I signed up for martha stewart’s cookie a day email, and today’s email was a Flourless peanut-chocolate cookie. It seemed easy enough, plus I had all the ingredients, and i was itching to make more cookies.

I halved the recipe because I just made matcha sugar cookies last night.

It’s easy enough, you just dump all the ingredients in a bowl, and mix. I didn’t have to take out any butter ahead of time and set it for room temp.  I didn’t have any roasted and salted peanuts, but I did have some cashews that are roasted and salted, so I dumped those in. I used white chocolate, yum.

Since i couldn’t half an egg, i just used one full egg, and put in the whole 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda (in my weird mind, one full egg = 1/4tsp baking soda). I didn’t use the mixer for this, I just spatula mixed.

I don’t have parchment paper, so I used muffin liners, and my new “ice cream” scooper to put out uniform sizes. (I had thought the liners would flatten out a bit more, but I guess I didn’t flatten them, so it wouldn’t do that on it’s own.)

In the directions it says to set top & bottom shelves, and rotate back to front in the middle of baking, while I set out to do so, I completely mis-read the time. (Oops)  What I did was, I placed mine on the top shelf, then I set my timer at 12mins, when the timer went off, I did rotate it front to back and move the cookies to the bottom. BUT when I re-read the directions, i realised that I should have done this at 5-6 mins instead, so by the time I realised this 5 more mins into bottom shelf baking, I just pulled the cookies out from the oven.

Upon removing the cookies, it formed a shallow muffin cookie chunk, but still pretty chewy. It’s got a little bit of a crunch, and I love the chocolate & cashew chunks in the cookie.

If I had a coffee shop or a daily cookies selection for my imaginary shop, this cookie would definitely go on the list.

Ingredients

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2+1/8 cup sugar (this is how i calculate half of 3/4 cup)
1 large egg (lightly beaten)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2+1/8 cup semisweet white chocolate chips
1/4 cup roasted salted cashews

Do this:

1. In a large bowl, stir together peanut butter, sugar, egg, baking soda, and salt until well combined. Stir in white chocolate chips and cashews.

2. Preheat the oven for top & bottom shelf @ 350 F. Use a ice cream scooper, or a tbsp and scoop the mixture into a ball & place it 2 inches apart on the cookie sheet.

3.Bake until cookies are golden and puffed, 12 to 14 minutes, rotating sheets from top to bottom and front to back halfway through. Cool 5 minutes on sheets; transfer cookies to racks to cool completely

4. eat

hellooooooo….  anyone there?

maybe cookies will lure you out of the darkness that has descended on this blog.

these cookies were made on the whim. The recipe originally was for “chunky peanut butter cookie“, but I didn’t have chunky peanut butter…I didn’t even have creamy peanut butter, so I went with what I had on hand. Toblerone bars. (The T-bars were for the “Chunky Toblerone Shortbread“)

I put them in the oven for twice the time of the original recipe called for because at 7mins, it looked like the picture above and no way looked brown like how cookies should look.  Even at twice that baking time, the cookies were a bit undercooked.

How did they taste? Blah.  The cookies had no flavor.  It tasted like baked flour.  I had my sister taste it because i thought perhaps I was just having taste bud issues because i’m a bit recovering in sickness, but she also confirmed that there was no flavor to the cookies.

When she questioned it, I said that it was suppose to be peanut butter flavor, so maybe that’s why, since I omitted the peanut butter part of the cookie.

It was only when I re-read the recipe that I realised that, the missing flavor is also due to the fact that I forgot to add the 1/2 cup of brown sugar.  (roll eyes at self)  This is just what happens when I try to make the recipe from memory…I didn’t print out the recipe as usual, I just read it, and tried to commit it to memory, and then tried to refer to it back on the computer screen, which was not close to my kitchen. Ugh!!! lesson learned.  ALWAYS have the recipe printed, or readily available for referral.

In order to savage what is already a disastrous cookie… I smooshed the rest of the dough into the mini cupcake tins.  They amazingly formed themselves in a mini cupcake form, which is totally adorable.  I love it. i just really wanted to try the mini cupcake tins since i’ve gotten it, and hadn’t had an opportunity to make mini cupcakes yet.

I think I will add frosting to these cookies to sweeten them, or dust them with powdered sugar… or just hand people some sugar with the cookie to eat it with.

Failed cookie attempt, but try try again.