Valentines day treats...

For Valentine's day, I have considered making various different kinds of snacks for different groups like teachers, Sude's gymnastics team, coaches, teachers, kid's classmates. At the end, I made "Buckeye bites"which were enough for everyone. I used two bags of pretzels and a jar of peanut butter. They were a huge hit...

The recipe is from Sprinkles on top...

http://www.withsprinklesontop.net/?p=1583

I made two versions; one with dark chocolate and one with white chocolate.

I filled little bags with peanut butter bites, raspberry chocolate, chocolate covered almonds, and candy for the coaches, teachers, and my special one...
And the rest went to the friends of our kids at school and the gym.

It was an easy and delicious treat for a special day...

Linzer cookies...

I made these cookies for a gathering at a friend's house. They were easy to make and really tasty. The recipe is from my Cordon Bleu baking class. I had to make some changes to the measurements and convert them to cups, etc from weights.

Ingredients:
9 oz butter
1 cup sugar
3/4 cups roasted hazelnuts
6 graham crackers
1 egg
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking powder
Dash of vanilla extract

Process the hazelnuts in a food processor until it has a fine texture; see left bowl in the picture.
Also process the graham crackers until they are fine; again see the bowl on the right.
Bring butter and egg to room temperature.
Cream butter and sugar until light anf fluffy. Then add the egg and follow with all the dry ingredients including the vanilla.

Flatten the dough in between two wax papers and let it still in the refrigerator until cold.

Cut the cookies with cookie cutters and bake them at 350 for 8-10 minutes (until golden brown)

When the cookies are out of the oven sift powder sugar on them and vola.... You are done.

Next time I am planning to make sandwich cookies with this recipe with raspberry jam in between. That is what the recipe calls for... I will let you know how it turns out...

Cooking class 2...

Second class that I went to covered cookies and confectioneries. It was right up my alley. They separated us into groups and gave us the choice of choosing one of the cookies. I opted for coconut macaroons.

It was a lot of fun. Biggest thing I learned was the importance of consistency of the size of the things that you are baking. That being the cookie size or the how much you fill in the muffin papers. Again, having the right equipment is crucial.

We did not know any better and experimented with a lot with different sizes and shapes of macaroon.

There was a lot of instructions at each table which allowed us to see the chef's perspective and touch.

The best macaroons were the small ones that shaped like a mountain (the ones on the far side of the baking sheet). They were baked evenly and was so much easier to handle with chocolate decorating later on.

This was my presentation...

We also dipped them in chocolate so that the bottom's of them were all chocolate...

We got to bring lots of cookies home. We had some friends over that night and got to taste them all. It was lots of fun but not great for my waist line...
I have gained few pounds since I started the cooking classes. If I want to eat like this, I have to increase my exercise hours for sure... ;-)
I will certainly make all of the cookies in the next couple of months... Stay tuned for recipies...

Cookie pops...

Last week I made sugar cookie pops for Sude's birthday celebration at her school. They were relatively easy to bake but not much easy to decorate.

I have realized that I do not have the right type of icing and the tools. I used store bought icing and used a spoon to fill in the cookies. Neither idea turned out really good.

I have many lessons learned;
- Will start to make my own royal icing which seems to be less runny
- Will buy disposable baking bags for piping the edges
- Will use squeezable plastic bottles to fill in the icing.

I used the cookie recipe from Bake at 350:
http://bakeat350.blogspot.com/2008/04/taste-of-yellow-yellow-rose-sugar.html

I replaced regular sugar with powdered one...

I used lollipop sticks and cut an inch off of them. Refrigerating the dough before cutting them with cookie cutters help in pushing the lollipop sticks into them.

I did the edging and the filling with white icing and let them dry for few hours.

Then I decorated them with size 2 tip icing bag and some sparkly store bought gel. At the end they turned out cute and tasty and kids just loved them. More importantly Sude was very happy with the end result...

Sugar Cookies

Recently I have been to a Turkish cooking class where they made these cookies. They dipped them in walnuts and I decided to dip them in pistachios. It is a simple recipe but it is very tasty...

Ingredients:
3 sticks of butter (room temperature)
3 eggs
10 tablespoons of sugar
4 cups of flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla
Crushed walnuts, pecans, or pistachios

You need to start with separating yolks of the eggs. Then mix; egg yolks, butter, sugar, flour, baking powder, and vanilla to make the cookie dough. You can use your hands or the mixer.

Then you make golf ball size balls, dip them in egg white first then to your crushed nuts. Line them up in a greased cookie sheet.
If you make them smaller they will be crunchier and if the make them bigger, they will be softer. I like them soft, so I made them big...

Then you bake them at 350 for 35 minutes (I ran out of pistachios in the middle) They are better with walnuts if you ask me...

Then you can enjoy it with a cup off coffee or tea... I took the ones that I made to Sude's gymnastics competition for the coaches and parents who endure 5 hours of stress...
Let me know if you try it...

Christmas Cookies...

The day before Christmas we made our traditional cookies for Santa. This year, we decided to do both sugar cookies and gingerbread. They both turned out great. Decorating them was so much fun with grandma. We all had wonderful time.
Sude and I are working on the shortbread cookies...

They turned out great. I bought a bucket of cookie cutters last year from Crate and Barrel. They were very handy...

Daddy is help with the gingerbread cookies. I made the gingerbread cookies from a store bought bag. I made both types of cookies the night before and rolled them in wax paper. Then I kept them in the refrigerator over night...

Grandma loves these gloves that we got from Costco.She uses them for cooking all the time...

Time to decorate... My favorite part of the whole process...

You have got to taste the icing while working of course...

Cem's scary snow man...

Grandma's intricate work...

My Christmas tree in works...

Santa was very happy this year with the cookies that we put out...

Scrabble cookies...

A week ago, two of Sude's friends from her gymnastics team made it to the state championships. We thought it was a great idea to celebrate this accomplishment with some snacks and good luck cards. I had the snack duty. After looking around in the web, I found this great idea in Bake at 350; scrabble cookies.

The link is here along with the recipe... http://bakeat350.blogspot.com/2010/01/game-of-love.html

Her cookies look so much more professional than mine. I did not have a special tip, I just used the store bought black colored icing.

I baked sugar cookies based on her recipe. The only change I would make is to change the sugar with granulated sugar. I like sugar cookies that way for some reason, less crunchy.

I cut the dough with a ruler and a pizza cutter since I did not have a cookie cutter that was a square. It is best if you let the dough sit in the refrigerator before you try to cut it in that way.

I used the store bought cream cheese icing to line them up. Then, I added just a little bit of water to the same icing to make it a little more watery to fill up the middle of the cookies.

Then I started to put the letters on. I actually used excel to make them in my computer first, based on the number of cookies I had and what I wanted the letters to say. Then it was much easier to manage...

My mom had the brilliant idea of putting them out on a gift wrapping paper on one of the tables at the gym. Of course she did not consider my clumsiness.

While I was setting them up, I messed up a little bit... AKA Letter D and Y. But all and all, all the girls were happy, the cookies tasted great, and they were all gone in 3 minutes which seems to be a good sign.

I am glad I got to take pictures...