Peanut Butter- Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

There are two types of people in this world. Those who love Martha Stewart and those who don't. I happily fall into the first category. I love Martha Stewart. I love that she highlights that women can still be independent and successful (and single!) but also be very domestic as well. It's not one way or the other. You can be a career-minded woman while also having a completely straight and beautifully folded linen closet and also throw together a dinner party at the last minute. It is possible. And that's the woman I strive to be. Independent, successful, and also a whiz at home.

That being said, I peruse Martha's website quite often and came across this recipe. Now, what's not to love about cookies that have peanut butter, chocolate chips, and Oatmeal in the title?!?!

These cookies were absolutely delicious! They are definitely in my favorites category. They are sweet and chewy and so satisfying. Although, they really aren't that peanut buttery. But, it doesn't matter. They are delicious!

Notes on the recipe: I didnt use natural peanut butter and instead of adding peanuts, I added reese pieces. Yum.

Now... if only I could figure out a menu for my family st. patricks day dinner this weekend. Hmmm.... Maybe I should consult Martha...

TWD: Russian Grandmother's Apple Pie Cake

Apparently, grandma's and apple pie go together like peanut butter and chocolate. It seems like everyone's grandma had some sort of apple dessert that they made. Mine certainly did. My maternal grandma had a dried apple cake that she used to make. It was layers and layers of cake and a dried apple mixture spread between the layers. It seems like she always had some in her refrigerator. And I only liked it every once in awhile. The cake part was rather dry (It was supposed to be that way) and I'm not much of a cold cake type of person. But, I did love the part of the cake that sat right next to the dried apple filling. Yum.

I love apples and apple flavored things, but honestly, I'm not a huge apple pie fan. I just don't like the texture of mushy, cooked apples. But, I was really excited to make this apple pie cake, especially after reading the story in Dorie's cookbook of how she finally found a recipe similiar to the pie/cake that her grandma always made.

The recipe came together very easily for me. I ended up not needing the extra 1/4 cup of flour in the dough and after refrigerating overnight, the dough rolled out like a charm. I used fuji apples in the filling and also added a touch of vanilla (I have to have vanilla in everything). Also, I made the version in the deep dish pie dish.

It was delicious. It was almost like a apple cobbler. The top got pretty crispy, but the sides and the bottom of the cake were so cakey and moist. When I ate a piece last night, after it had cooled for about an hour, it tasted like I was eating apples and biscuits (which was good), but this morning, it was definitely softer and more cakey. Very delicious. And the apples stayed crunchy, which I loved.

I would definitely make this cake again for apple lovers. It's so homey tasting and different. The only problem is, it doesn't really keep its pie slice shape when you try to get it out of the pan. Oh well, who cares what it looks like on the plate, right (well, except for food bloggers)?

Maybe one day, I'll run across a recipe that is similiar to my grandmas dried apple cake...

Be sure to check out everyone elses Russian Grandmothers Apple Pie Cake, too!

UPDATE: This cake is unbelievable a couple of days later! The crust gets soft and moist and wow. This is an incredible pie/cake. I had to force myself to throw the rest of it out last night, because I couldn't stop eating it. Even as I was scraping it out of the pie plate and into the sink, I was sneaking bites in. Yum. This is a definite favorite of mine, now.

Russian Grandmothers Apple Pie Cake
Chosen by Natalie of Burned Bits

For The Dough
2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Juice of 1 lemon
3 1/4 - 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

For The Apples
10 medium apples, all one kind or a mix (I like to use Fuji, Golden Delicious and Ida Reds; my grandmother probably used dry baking apples like Cordland and Rome)
Squirt of fresh lemon juice
1 cup moist, plump raisins (dark or golden)
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Sugar, preferably decorating (coarse) sugar, for dusting

To Make The Dough: Working with a stand mixer, preferably fitted with a paddle attachment, or with a hand mixer in a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar together on medium speed until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add the eggs and continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 3 minutes more. Reduce the mixer speed to low, add the baking powder and salt and mix just to combine. Add the lemon juice - the dough will probably curdle, but don't worry about it. Still working on low speed, slowly but steadily add 3 1/4 cups of the flour, mixing to incorporate it and scraping down the bowl as needed. The dough is meant to be soft, but if you think it looks more like a batter than a dough at this point, add the extra 1/4 cup flour. (The dough usually needs the extra flour.) When properly combined, the dough should almost clean the sides of the bowl.

Turn the dough out onto a work surface, gather it into a ball and divide it in half. Shape each half into a rectangle. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, or for up to 3 days. (The dough can be wrapped airtight and frozen for up to 2 months; defrost overnight in the refrigerator.)

To Make The Apples: Peel and core the apples and cut into slices about 1/4 inch thick; cut the slices in half crosswise if you want. Toss the slices in a bowl with a little lemon juice - even with the juice, the apples may turn brown, but that's fine - and add the raisins. Mix the sugar and cinnamon together, sprinkle over the apples and stir to coat evenly. Taste an apple and add more sugar, cinnamon, and/or lemon juice if you like.

Getting Ready to Bake: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Generously butter a 9x12-inch baking pan (Pyrex is good) and place it on a baking shee tlined with parchment or a silicone mat.

Remove the dough from the fridge. If it is too hard to roll and it cracks, either let it sit at room temperature for about 15 minutes or give it a few bashes with your rolling pin to get it moving. Once it's a little more malleable, you've got a few choices. You can roll it on a well-floured work surface or roll it between sheets of plastic wrap or wax paper. You can even press or roll out pieces of the dough and patch them together in the pan - because of the baking powder in the dough, it will puff and self-heal under the oven's heat. Roll the dough out until it is just a little larger all around than your pan and about 1/4 inch thick - you don't want the dough to be too thin, because you really want to taste it. Transfer the dough to the pan. If the dough comes up the sides of the pan, that's fine; if it doesn't that's fine too.

Give the apples another toss in the bowl, then turn them into the pan and, using your hands, spread them evenely across the bottom.

Roll out the second piece of dough and position it over the apples. Cut the dough so you've got a 1/4 to 1/2 inch overhang and tuck the excess into the sides of the pan, as though you were making a bed. (If you don't have that much overhang, just press what you've got against the sides of the pan.)

Brush the top of the dough lightly with water and sprinkle sugar over the dough. Using a small sharp knife, cut 6 to 8 evenly spaced slits in the dough.

Bake for 65 to 80 minutes, or until the dough is a nice golden brown and the juices from the apples are bubbling up through the slits. Transfer the baking pan to a cooling rack and cool to just warm or to room temperature. You'll be tempted to taste it sooner, but I think the dough needs a little time to rest.

TWD: Snickery Squares

The Snickers Bar is my all-time favorite candy bar. I often flirt with other candy bars… Reese Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, etc… but I always go back to the Snickers. It’s just the perfect mix of chocolatey, crunchy, gooey, chewy, sweet and salty all in one bite.

So, initially I was excited about the Tuesdays with Dorie recipe for this week, picked by Erin of Dinner & Dessert. She choose Snickery Squares.

Yay! Snickers!

Then, I read through the recipe and looked at the picture. Hmph. These sure don’t look like Snickers bars, I decided. I love shortbread, but shortbread in my snickers??? I don’t know about all that business.

Upon reading the recipe I realized that I didn’t have 3 things mentioned in this recipe.

A food processor
A pastry brush
An 8x8 square pan

Jeez. So, I ended up making and baking the shortbread crust at my parent’s house on Saturday, using their food processor and also borrowing an 8x8 square pan. Then I left the shortbread hanging out in the fridge from Saturday till Monday, when I finally made the bars. I bought a fancy dancy pastry brush at Target. I really feel like 6.99 is too much to spend on such an item, but… I felt like the cheaper ones they had would just shed and I didn’t want to be gagging on bristles while I was enjoying my faux snickers

Fancy Dancy Pastry Brush. $6.99 Target.

The candying of the peanuts was interesting. At first, while I was letting the sugar “color” I was able to flit around the kitchen, making dinner, flipping through cookbooks, etc… occasionally brushing the sides of the pan with my fancy dancy pastry brush and saying to myself.. jeez. What’s the big deal about making candy??? This is a breeze.

And then as time went on, I started to wonder about the sugar. What does “just start to color” really mean? Color at all? Or color as in start to turn caramel colored? I let it color a little bit… meaning, I could tell that it was starting to color, but I let it color just a little bit more. Then I threw my peanuts in. And yes, they turned white just like Dorie mentioned. But, I wasn’t prepared for the constantly stirring for about 20 minutes that ensued. I totally thought I cooked the sugar too long, because for like 15 minutes the sugar was coloring, but it was all clumpy and not caramel-y with the peanuts. It was like forming its own little mini peanuts. I cranked the heat up and that seemed to help… eventually it all came together.

Here’s the thing though…. I thought that these peanuts were going to taste like the peanuts in snickers. But they don’t. They taste like the peanuts in cracker jack (which I really really dislike). So when I anxiously cut into it and tasted my first square. I took one bite and tossed the rest of the square in the trash. Yuck. The peanuts totally ruined it for me. I think I would have liked it better with just the peanuts layered in, instead of candied.

Oh well. Win some, lose some and at least I conquered the candy peanuts. Those rascally little attention-screaming bastards.

Soundtrack: John Legend's Get Lifted. I love to groove when I’m in the kitchen and this was the perfect accompaniment to standing over the stove stirring peanuts for so long.

Snickery Squares

For the Crust:
1 cup all-purpose flour¼ cup sugar2 TBSP powdered sugar¼ tsp salt1 stick unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and chilled1 large egg yolk, lightly beaten

For the Filling:
½ cup sugar3 TBSP water1 ½ cups salted peanutsAbout 1 ½ cups store-bought dulce de leche

For the Topping:
7 ounces bittersweet, coarsely chopped½ stick unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces, at room temperature

Getting Ready:
Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a 8 inch square pan and put it on a baking sheet.

To Make the Crust:
Toss the flour, sugar, powdered sugar and salt into a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Toss in the pieces of cold butter and pulse about 12 times, until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Pour the yolk over the ingredients and pulse until the dough forms clumps and curds-stop before the dough comes together in a ball.Turn the dough into the buttered pan and gently press it evenly across the bottom of the pan. Prick the dough with a fork and slide the sheet into the oven.Bake the crust for 15-20 minutes, or until it takes on just a little color around the edges. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool to room temperature before filling.

To Make the Filling:
Have a parchment or silicone mat-lined baking sheet at the ready, as well as a long-handled wooden spoon and a medium heavy bottomed saucepan.Put the sugar and water in the saucepan and cook over medium-high heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Keeping the heat fairly high, continue to cook the sugar, without stirring, until it just starts to color. Toss the peanuts and immediately start stirring. Keep stirring, to coat the peanuts with sugar. Within a few minutes, they will be covered with sugar and turn white—keep stirring until the sugar turns back into caramel. When the peanuts are coated with a nice deep amber caramel, remove the pan from the heat and turn the nuts out onto the baking sheet., using the wooden spoon to spread them out as best you can. Cool the nuts to room temperature.When they are cool enough to handle, separate the nuts or break them into small pieces. Divide the nuts in half. Keep half of the nuts whole or in biggish pieces for the filling, and finely chop the other half for the topping.Spread the dulce de leche over the shortbread base and sprinkle over the whole candied nuts.

To Make the Topping:
Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water. Remove chocolate from the heat and gently stir in the butter, stirring until it is fully blended into the chocolate.Pour the chocolate over the dulce de leche, smoothing it with a long metal icing spatula, then sprinkle over the rest of the peanuts. Slide the pan into the fridge to set the topping, about 20 minutes; if you’d like to serve the squares cold, keep them refrigerated for at least 3 hours before cutting.
Cut into 16 bars.

Chocolate Chip Cookies by Bobby Flay

I warned you.

Yes, more chocolate chip cookies. This time brought to you courtesy of Bobby Flay.

Look at him

So cute and boyish. With his freckles and red hair.
I'm not sure what it is about him. I'm generally not attracted to pasty dudes, but there is something so all-american about him. Whenever I see him on television, I watch him. And the other day I caught the tail end of his show Throwdown (it's a show where he challenges cooks/bakers/chefs in a little contest) and this episode was Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Now, by this point, everyone is well aware of my recent chocolate chip cookie obsession. What is it???? I have no idea. But, it's like I can't get enough of chocolate chip cookies. I dream about them, I obsess over them, I seek out new recipes. So, when I saw this episode, I knew it was only a matter of time that I'd be making chocolate chip cookies again.

Little did I know it would be like 2 days later.

Anyway, the thing that struck me the most from the episode was everyone said that Bobby's were very buttery. This caught my attention. I loves me some butter.

These cookies were very buttery! And delicious! But, as I've noticed with all chocolate chip cookies, they could use a little chill time in the fridge before they go into the oven. I'll try that next time and hopefully they won't spread so much. Even with the spreading though, they still tasted chewy and oh so buttery. Yum. Incidentally, his cookies didn't win the throwdown, but the other cookies looked too cakey for me. I have some copycat recipes for the cookies that won, that I will eventually try and then I can do my own little throwdown experiment.

Bobby Flay's Chocolate Chip Cookie

White Chocolate Chip & Peanut Butter Cookies

I spared you all. I really did. Last night I decided to bake something sweet, because I hadn't baked anything since last Thursday night (a long drought for me) and more than anything, I wanted chocolate chip cookies. It's a phase , apparently. I'm blaming Anna at Cookie Madness for re-sparking my interest with her multiple Chocolate Chip Experiments this week.

But, instead of the standard chocolate chip recipe, I pulled out the 500 Cookies cookbook and tried a recipe I had bookmarked in it. Originally the recipe was for Orange and White Chocolate Chip Cookies. Which, sounds good to me most of the time. But I wanted something richer, something less dainty than orange and white chocolate. So, I opted for the variation recipe of substituting peanut butter for orange zest.

The combination of white chocolate and peanut butter is something that has intrigued me recently. So, I was excited to try these cookies. I did notice that this cookie was listed in the "tea-time" section and I briefly thought... that's not just nice cookbooky talk for "dry and tasteless" is it? But, I decided to try it out anyway.

I'm a cookie dough girl. Anytime I make cookies (or brownies), I eat about 3-4 cookies worth of raw cookie dough. I love the stuff. Usually, by the time the cookies actually come out of the oven, I'm already sick of them from nibbling on the dough. So, I had my doubts about these cookies when when I tasted the dough. It was bland and not very buttery.

The first batch, I used white chocolate chips and peanut butter chips. But they turned out too bland, so I threw some semi-sweet chocolate chips in the last batch. The semi-sweet chocolate helped a little, but still these cookies were pretty boring and definitely dry. I tried spicing them up a bit by melting some hershey kisses and icing some of the cookies with that. But, I found myself just licking the chocolate off the top of the cookies, instead of eating the cookies.

Oh well, at least I only made a half batch. But be forewarned... more chocolate chip cookie recipes are on the horizon.


We had some snow this week!! Check it out!!!

S'mores Bars

So, I’ve been eyeing this recipe for awhile now. I saw it a long time ago on Anna's Blog and I printed the recipe awaiting the perfect time to whip these up.

Unfortunately, it took about 6 months for the perfect time to roll around. I made them Thursday night to take to the Bachelorette Weekend honoring my friend Leigh. Who doesn’t love s’mores?

A funny story about this recipe from this weekend... Everyone who knows me… knows about my blogs. But, most of the girls that were at the bachelorette weekend, I either didn’t know at all, or just barely knew. So, on Saturday night, when I passed my camera over to a couple of the girls so they could review the pics from the weekend, I didn’t even think about the 40+ pictures of the s’mores bars that I had taken Friday morning that were still on my camera. That is until I noticed them surfing through the pics and then looking at each other funny, giggling and whispering to each other.

Crap, I thought. Now, they are going to think I have some weird food fetish or something. So, I tried to yell over the loud music at the bar… “I HAVE A BAKING BLOG, THOSE PICTURES ARE FOR MY BLOG, I’M NOT INTO FOOD PORNOGRAPHY.” Which, I think probably made me sound even weirder.

Whatever. They were excellent and the perfect pot luck crowd pleaser. They will definitely be made again.

Here’s the recipe . I doubled it to make a 9x13 inch pan.

I do have one suggestion. Line your baking dish with parchment paper or quick release foil, so that you can remove the bars by the parchment paper or foil and then cut them into squares. Also, I refrigerated the bars overnight before I cut them.

So much easier than building a campfire.

Supernatural Brownies

I have a bad habit. Whenever I find a recipe for something that I like, I generally feel like I don't want to try any other recipes. Like, other recipes aren't going to be better, right? Well, this is something that I definitely need to get over. As made apparent to me by these brownies.

I saw this recipe on Jennifer's Blog and immediately printed the recipe out. But, it's been sitting in my recipe folder since then. For whatever reason, I don't bake brownies that often. Probably because I know how dangerously tempting they are.

This weekend I'm heading to Isle of Palms, SC for my friend Leigh's Bachelorette Weekend Extravaganza. I volunteered to bring baked goodies and I thought some brownies would be the perfect goody, since they travel well (we're talking a 9 hour drive, folks). I went through my recipe folder and picked this recipe and thought... hmmm.. "well I have all the ingredients.. maybe they'll be okay."

Holy crap!!!!! These brownies are delicious! I mean seriously. Moist and fudgy and chewy all at the same time! And incredibly simple to make!! (I just zap my chocolate and butter in the microwave, instead of using the double boiler method).

I baked them in a glass 9x13 inch pan that I had laid a piece of parchment paper in (so that I could lift the brownies out of the pan and cut them easily) for about 40 minutes, but I started checking at 35 minutes. Nobody likes an overcooked brownie, right? After I let them cool on a wire rack, I pulled them out of the pan by the parchment paper and trimmed all the edges off. Nobody likes to see the edges, right? (Okay, I'm totally lying, I don't cut the edges off for aesthetic reasons, I actually cut the edges off, because that's my favorite part and so I gobble that up immediately and just use the excuse... ohhhh the edges are so ugly and you just can't serve brownies with an ugly edge! It's a good thing that I don't own this pan).

Now I understand the title of these brownies... They certainly are Supernatural! I can't wait to serve them this weekend!