There are some things you don't say "no" to. One, I recently encountered, involves four and five year old children, selling lemonade in my office building's lobby. The daycare they attend was apparently raising money for a graduation party for the elder children who will not be returning next year. They will be starting full-day school. $5 for a small glass of home-made lemonade? Sure!

When my better half's sis asked me to help her bake white chocolate macadamia cookies to celebrate the 6 month anniversary of she and her boyfriend's first date, my heart likewise melt. As a trained project manager, I instinctively asked her for "requirements."

Receiving a blank stare, I rephrased the question, "What texture of cookie would you like?"

Her response: "cakey." And, she wanted to "bake" a message into it.

"Eh?", I thought. "Why don't we try making fortune cookies then."

Nope! White chocolate macadamia cookies are his favourite. So, there and then, I had been issued a project, complete with mandate, requirements, acceptance criteria, and apparently funding. I was not allowed to buy the ingredients.

After some quick research, which mostly consisted of wandering the web, I decided to develop a proof of concept recipe, using research and development funds, of course. My better half and I always stock our pantry with the necessary ingredients for chocolate chip and sugar cookies, contingencies for when we need to bake something hurriedly for a bake sale or an unexpected potluck.

Using Alton Brown's sage "puffy" chocolate chip cookie recipe as a base, here is what we turned out:

Cute Kitty Photo
Before you ask, little Jasmine is a big fan of Hello Kitty, so I thought the picture appropriate.

Recipe:

Batter

Disher'ed Portions

Baked Cookies Cooling

What You'll Need

• 1 cup butter
• 1/2 cup finely granulated sugar
• 1 cup light brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/4 cup cake flour
• 1 tsp kosher salt
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• As many chocolate chips as you'd like (minimum: 1 cup)

Prep

1. Soften the butter by leaving it out at room temperature or taking a rolling pin to two sticks, wrapped in wax or parchment paper. I've been using the rolling pin technique lately. It's a lot of fun...
2. Sift together the salt, baking powder, and cake flour an set it aside. We use a flexible cutting mat for easy dosing.

Method

1. Preheat an oven to 350F and line sheet pans (or cookie sheets) with parchment paper.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together using an egg beater or stand mixer until it is fluffy. You could use a wooden spoon and a metal bowl like I did, but it takes a while.
3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing them in completely after each addition
4. Mix in the vanilla
5. Gently fold in the flour mixture in batches. Overworking (overmixing) the dough wheat flour dough produces gluten, which will make the cookies chewy. We're looking for cakey this time around.
6. Fold in the chocolate chips
7. Cover the cookie dough with plastic wrap and chill in the freezer to relax any developed gluten and firm up the fat. This will keep the cookies from spreading too much.
8. Disher up the cookies onto your sheet pans (6 to each pan), pressing them down to form thick pucks.
9. Return the unused dough to the fridge, covering again with plastic wrap.
10. Bake until cookies brown inwards from the edges, halfway into the center. If the cookies brown completely, the bottom maybe over browned or burned. For us, this took 18 minutes. We recommend checking after 10 minutes, and every 3-5 minutes thereafter.
11. Remove the cookies from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes on the sheets.
12. Place the cookies on cooling racks.
13. Repeat the dishing and baking until you have used up all your cookie dough.

We highly recommend against doing the "message" thing as it involves wrapping slips of paper in aluminium foil and placing the "silver nugget" into the uncooked puck.

That said, the resultant cookies baked up tall and cakey. The recipe will do well with white chocolate and macadamia nuts.

Apparently, the Family Circle magazine is again holding a potential first ladies' bake-off. Before anyone asks, this is not a tasting competition. Cookies will not be mailed to randomly selected recipients. The bake-off is in fact a recipe competition. Both Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain have submitted cookie recipes to the magazine and readers are asked to try each in their own kitchens. Depending on the relative success of each recipe, participants are invited to submit comments and vote in an online poll. Results will be published in the Family Circle's mid-October issue, just ahead of the November elections.

According to yahoo.com, the magazine's bake-off has been a good predictor for determining America's next first lady during the past four presidential elections. Also, based on the past bake-off's, a potential trend has emerged: those recipes that include chocolate seem to fare better. For example, Laura Bush's Oatmeal-Chocolate Chunk Cookies beat out Teresa Heinz Kerry's Pumpkin Spice Cookies during the last election.

Past election's recipes are available on the magazine's parent website.

Regarding the current election, Cindy McCain?s recipe makes approximately 5-1/2 dozen oatmeal-butterscotch cookies. It reportedly comes from an unnamed good friend and not a TV Chef from the Food Network.

Oatmeal Cookies
Source: Parents.com

Michelle Obama's recipe makes approximately 6 dozen 2-inch x 3-inch shortbread cookies. It reportedly comes from the godmother of both of Obama's daughters.

Shortbread Cookies
Source: Parents.com

Interestingly, Bill Clinton (once-potential first gentleman?) also submitted an entry. His recipe also makes oatmeal cookies. It produces approximately 3-1/2 dozen cookies. and reportedly comes from longtime family cook Oscar Flores.

Oatmeal Cookies
Source: Parents.com

With an average 62 cookies per recipe, it seems that first ladies bake a lot of cookies. I wonder what will happen if Bill Clinton's recipe wins?

Personally, I want to try Michelle Obama's delectable-looking shortbread cookie recipe. Though, given that I am Canadian, I'm not sure I am permitted to register or vote. Besides, Parents.com's privacy policy reserves the right to use collected information information to forward offers from "vendors and service providers." I have enough spam.

The recipes themselves follow:

More after the jump...

Two weekends ago, two of Jenn's former house-mates came to Ottawa for the weekend. They came to visit and enjoy some of the festivities of Ottawa's annual winter festival, Winterlude. Unfortunately, the weekend was fraught with blisteringly cold temperatures and freezing rain, so, from time to time, we had to stay indoors. Happily, poor weather really can't keep a houseful of foodies down. Besides visiting Ottawa's premier shawarma establishment, the Shawarma Palace, a lot of the weekend was spent swapping old recipes and trying a handful of new ones.

Here's what turned out:

Pernil

Anyone for Cuban Sandwiches?

Biscotti Baby!

Dried Cranberry and Pistachio Goodness

What's Frying Doc?

Southern Fried Chicken

Recipes follow:

More after the jump...

A friend of mind sent me an e-mail, containing over 200 links to Christmas Cookie recipes. With the holiday season fast approaching, I heartily welcome new cookie recipes to try. Christmas cookies make great gifts.

Just in case you're not familiar with Christmas cookies, here is Wikipedia's entry on the subject.
Christmas cookies

Christmas cookies are traditionally sugar cookies (though other flavors may be used based on family traditions and individual preferences) cut into various shapes related to Christmas. In the United States, since the 1930s, children have left cookies and milk on a table for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, though many people simply consume the cookies themselves. The cookies are often cut into such shapes as those of candy canes, reindeer, and holly leaves. Oreos are also popular.

The recipes came from the northpole.com website.

Northpole.com
Northpole.com is very content-rich website, providing many Christmas-related resources for parents, children, and teachers. The site is also activity-rich, offering games, puzzles, and even online post cards. Come Christmas Eve, children can even point and click to track Santa's progress across the skyline.

Here are the first 16 recipes:

1. 1-2-3 Cookies
2. 7 Layer Cookies
3. Allie Nelson's Famous Snickerdoodle Cookies
4. Almond Crescent Shortbread
5. Amish Sugar Cookies
6. Andies Candies Cookies
7. Angel Crisps
8. Angenets
9. Applesauce Cookies
10. Apricot Fold-Overs
11. Aunt Edy's Molasses Crinkles
12. Auntie Linda's Ginger Gems
13. Bakeless Dream Cookies
14. Banana Drop Cookies
15. Best Chocolate Chip Cookies in the World
16. Biscotti

The other 262 recipes follow:

More after the jump...

Sometime during Christmas, I went looking for new cookie recipes and I spent some time wandering around the foodtv website. There, I ran across a short video clip from Everyday Italian with Giada De Laurentiis. The clip showed Giada making Almond Blueberry Cookies. They looked so great, that I dug out the recipe from the foodtv site and decided to try my hand at making them. Unfortunately, my stash of almonds were destined for biscotti and I had no frozen blueberries on hand, so I had to make some modifications to the recipe.

With the exception of the blueberries and almonds that made this recipe distinctively Mediterranean, the recipe itself seemed very standard: cream some butter with sugar, add an egg, add some liquid, add sifted flour and baking powder, and add your featured ingredients. I decided to imbue the batter with citrus. My featured ingredient was 3-4 tablespoons of orange zest.

The result was wonderfully citrus cookies that went into a Christmas cookie tin for a dear friend. The package also included shortbread, but that recipe will have to wait for its own posting later.

Yesterday evening, I revisited the recipe and added back the blueberries. In hindsight, I think I should have reserved some blueberries to top the cookies with. Otherwise, the recipe came out great.

Recipe follows:

More after the jump...