TWD: Peanut Butter Crisscrosses

I was really excited that Jasmine of Jasmine Cuisine picked Peanut Butter Crisscrosses for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe! These are some of my favorite cookies, this is the recipe I usually use when I make them but I thought Dorie's recipe was just as good! Dorie calls for chopped peanuts which I think is a fabulous addition, but unfortunately since my girls are both under the age of four they can't eat big pieces of nuts yet so I decided to leave them out this time. I also found that the cookies reached a perfect soft, chewy consistency at about 10 minutes instead of the recommended 12 minutes. I loved these! Perfect classic cookie!

On another note, Helen has recently become obsessed with taking pictures with my camera. Since she's only 2 and 1/2 I've been a little hesitant to let her use the camera without extremely close supervision. Here's her best shot so far:
Yep, a picture of Eloise's chubby legs hanging out of her highchair. This is her best shot because there is actually recognizable subject matter unlike the majority of her other pictures which ended more like this:I can't really say much about this though because let's face it, these days my pictures don't look much better! I'm usually so impressed with myself for baking and posting on time that I haven't really been able to take much time to make things look as appealing as they actually taste!

TWD: Chocolate Oatmeal Almost Candy Bars

Ok, so here's the deal: the New Orleans Saints won their playoff game on Saturday which means there is one more playoff game separating them from the Superbowl. I can't say that I'm really a football fan because I only understand the basics of the game and I probably couldn't tell you which cities over half of the NFL teams even come from. But...the Saints represent more than football for New Orleans- I think it would be difficult to find a more loyal fan base than New Orleanians. In short, the city has been going crazy for the entire season. You see, the Saints have never made it to the Superbowl. Ever. And they are not a young team, they were founded in 1967- but the fans have never given up! It's the same kind of attitude that made so many people rebuild their homes and businesses after Hurricane Katrina. Anyway, my mom is a larger than life Saints fan. She talks about the players like they are old friends or, in the case of Drew Brees, her son. She reads, listens, and watches everything she can to find out more about her Boys. As you can imagine, every game also turns into a little party so I brought these Chocolate Oatmeal Almost Candy Bars to my parents' house for Saturday's game.

The bars are made up of a sort of oatmeal cookie bottom layer topped with a fudgy chocolate layer dotted with more oatmeal cookie. The recipe calls for raisins in the chocolate layer and peanuts in the oatmeal one and I omitted both (although I really do want to try it out with both). These were delicious and very simple to make. They pop right out of the pan after cooling for 2 hours and they cut easily after a short stay in the fridge. They are a perfect treat for your Superbowl party.

I made a half batch because I'm trying to stay on top of my Ten in 10 goals but these were such a hit with Derrick (who has been going through sweets withdrawal since I started Ten in 10) that I made another half batch on Monday. In the second batch I substituted peanut butter for half of the butter and they turned out delicious! There are tons of ways you could change these out to suite your tastes! This week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was chosen by Lillian of Confectiona's Realm (you can find the recipe on her blog and in Dorie Greenspan's book, Baking From My Home to Yours). WHO DAT?!

Happy 2 year (and 1 week) Birthday TWD!

Surprise, surprise, I'm late with my Tuesdays with Dorie post! This should have appeared last Tuesday, when the Tuesdays with Dorie baking group was celebrating it's 2nd birthday...but things kept turning up and while I was able to bake on schedule I couldn't figure out how to get the pictures off my new camera and onto my computer.

Because this was TWD's 2nd birthday, our fearless leader, Laurie, of Slush decided to let us bake two treats this week! The first selection is Cocoa Buttermilk Cake, which as you can see I turned into cupcakes. These were truly delicious, they were incredibly moist and the cocoa flavor was really delicate and wonderful. I actually made my own buttermilk by adding a tablespoon of lemon juice to one cup of regular milk and it worked perfectly (although I imagine real buttermilk would have yielded even better results). The recipe calls for a chocolate frosting with malt powder and I would actually love to try it out sometime but I was unable to get my hands on it this week so I stole Tracey of Tracey's Culinary Adventure's idea of topping the cupcakes with peanut butter frosting. Wow! it that is a recipe that I will use all of the time now- so easy and such perfect flavor and consistency. I brought these to my dear friend Sadiha for her 25th birthday and they were a big hit! I'm thinking about making this as an actual cake for Helen's upcoming 2nd birthday.


The second selection was a traditional French Tarte Tatin or upside down apple tart. You melt a stick of butter and 3/4 cup sugar in a cast iron skillet on the stove and then place peeled, quartered pieces of apple in the pan and let it caramelize before laying the pie dough over the top of the apples and baking it in the oven. My apples took a good 20 minutes to caramelize but I really wanted to make sure that I achieved a nice deep amber color. Dorie says that you can use puff pastry, sweet tart dough, or good for anything pie dough and I decided on the good for anything pie dough. The last time I made Dorie's good for anything pie dough I was a little disapointed with the results, but this time I used a pastry cutter instead of the food processor and the crust was amazing. It puffed up with all kinds of buttery layers almost like puff pastry! The hardest part, of course, was flipping the tart out of the skillet but I did it quickly and only lost a tiny corner! This was by far one of my favorite recipes to date! I shared the tart with my parents, brother, sister, Derrick, and Helen and it disappeared very quickly! If I had left it at home I think I would have eaten the entire thing instead of the one slice I allowed myself (in keeping with Ten in 10!)


So thank you Laurie, and thank you Dorie, and of course thanks to all of the other TWD bakers who make baking through Baking From My Home to Yours so much fun!

Peanut Butter Criss-Cross Cookies

These are such a perfect lunchbox cookie- or a good cookie for an after school snack- something about them just begs to be served to children. The funny thing is that I don't remember my mom ever really making peanut butter cookies when I was little. Don't get me wrong, my mom is a fantastic baker and she always taught us that baking from scratch was the way to go- I never encountered slice and bake cookies until I had them at a friend's house in high school! She just didn't really make peanut butter cookies. I don't know why. She likes them. I like them.


Anyway, I digress. I ate peanut butter pretty much every single solitary day of my pregnancy. Fo' real. I ate it on bagels, on crackers, on apples, straight out of the jar sprinkled with a few chocolate chips (yeah it got that bad). This may have had something to do with a ten-pound-in-one-month-weight-gain that I had in my second trimester. I'm not kidding- ten pounds- one month- not even the last part of the pregnancy: I cried as I waited with Derrick for my OB to arrive after the nurse scolded me. I convinced myself that it was going to be straight up health food and prenatal workout dvds for the next 19 or so weeks- and I really stuck to it- except for the peanut butter. But I convinced myself that peanut butter was just a fattening health food, after all it's packed with protien right? A pregnant woman can convince herself that any craving is related to something the baby needs.


So, after Helen Mae was "from my womb untimely ripped", I decided it was buh-bye to peanut butter for some time- at least until I could squeeze back into my non-elastic maternity waistband jeans. Well, I'm sad to report that that day has not yet come exactly- I mean they fit, errr... button, but they sure look different now. And guess what?! I bought peanut butter anyway! And I made these phenomenal peanut butter criss-cross cookies from Cookie Madness! They were great- and I feel newly liberated about my muffin top! Ok, the last part is not true- but whatever- the cookies were perfect- and who wants to look like a thin young beauty once she reaches the ripe old age of twenty-three anyway?!


In closing, this makes me laugh out loud everytime I hear the phrase muffin top.