Rollo Cookies!

A coworker of Dana’s made these and brought them in to work. Dana brought one to me and asked me to make them for him. Hooray for the internet and its searchable contents! I found a recipe quickly and made these delicious cookies.

1 cup of butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

1 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 1/4 cups flour

1 tsp soda

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

48 Rollo candies*

1. cream sugars and butter together. Add eggs and vanilla.

2. Combine dry ingredients and add slowly to egg mixture. Transfer dough to dry ingredients bowl and press in slightly. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours. (I don’t usually go through the trouble of combining the dry ingredients separately, but I did this time. And if you put the dough into the dry ingredients bowl to chill, when you remove it from the bowl, it comes out readily.)

3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Separate dough into 48 balls (Just keep halving the batch of dough till you get 16 sections, then split each of those into 3rds. Or feel free to eyeball it; that works too.) Wrap each ball of dough around 1 Rollo candy. Place on a greased cookie sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes. Remove from oven when done, but let sit on the cookie sheet 4 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.

Here are my cookies cooling deliciously. Feel free to eat them warm; they’re kind of amazing that way.

 

*Did you follow the asterix? You really do have to use Rollo candies. The caramel is nice and soft and already chocolate coated, which helps keep it from making a mess. You may ask how I know this. It is because I foolishly tried to use caramels. The hard cube-ish kind you melt to cover apples with: that kind. This is what I got…

Are you thinking about the picture that the man drew of a snake eating an elephant? Because I am. These caramels aren’t in the oven long enough to get all nice and gooey. They just stay shaped like caramels. Then when the cookies cool, you have a nice soft cookie with a hard, yucky caramel in the middle. Go ahead and spring for the Rollos, you’ll be happy you did.

Stuffed Peppers

I made stuffed peppers once in college and filled them with my own mixture of mostly rice and some ground beef and vegetables.

We had our own early Thanksgiving a few weeks ago and had the inevitable leftover turkey. I don’t like leftover turkey. Every year I search for another thing to do with leftover turkey that will make it yummy. And this year I finally found one!

This recipe comes from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

3 large stuffed peppers halved and seeded

3 Tbl olive oil

1 onion, chopped fine

1 lb. ground cooked or uncooked beef, pork, veal or lamb (or cooked, chopped turkey!)

2 tomatoes peeled and chopped (I used 1 15oz can of stewed tomatoes, drained

2 Tbl minced parsley

1 1/2 tsp dried basil

salt and pepper to taste

1 cup bread crumbs

 

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a shallow baking dish. Cook the pepper halves in boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain and set aside.

Heat oil in the skillet and add chopped onion. Cook, stirring until soft. If using uncooked or cold meat, add and cook until done or heated through. Add tomatoes, parsley, basil, and salt and pepper to taste. Lightly fill each pepper half with some of the mixture. Top with breadcrumbs (I put some parmesan cheese on first). Bake for 30-40 minutes.

These are super yummy and I’m definitely making them again.

And one fuzzy picture, sorry guys.

The Cake

Ever heard of a video game called “Portal”? In the game you are helping a company test this portal gun. You use the gun to solve puzzles that GLADOS gives you and the promised reward is cake.

At the end of the game GLADOS sings a song (written by Jonathan Coulton) and mentions the cake and that it is delicious and moist. There is even a picture of it.

So one year for Dana’s birthday I made him The Cake. I used this recipe that always gives me something delicious and moist (if some times more structurally sound than others).

Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolaty Cake and Frosting (from the Unsweetened Cocoa box).

2 cups sugar

1 3/4 cups flour

3/4 cup cocoa

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup boiling water (yes, for realz).

 

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees

2. Combine dry ingredients. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water – batter will be thin.

3. Pour into 2, nine inch round (greased) pans. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Remove when a toothpick comes out clean, but the tops of the cakes should still look moist.

While the cake is cooking, you can make the frosting:

1/2 cup butter or margarine

2/3 cup cocoa

3 cups powdered sugar

1/3 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Melt butter and mix with coca. Once well mixed – no lumps – add the other ingredients and mix until thick and creamy.

To assemble The Cake: let the cakes cool to room temperature before removing from pans. Place one round, flat-side down, on a plate. (Some cakes end up with too much cake and have bulgy middles: store bought cake mixes, for example. This cake tends to sink a bit in the middle. So you might need to use some frosting to make the middle even). Frost with a thin layer of chocolate frosting. Fill with some sweetened fresh berries (I think I used raspberries for this, but strawberries would be good too) or jam. Or just put some more frosting in the middle and use that as the filling. Place the next layer, flat-side up, onto the frosting. Cover the outside with frosting till it looks good to you. (I was taught to do a thin, crumb layer and let that dry a little bit before putting on the “show” layer of frosting.

With either whipped cream or some white frosting (whipped cream from a can would be super easy to do this with, but you’ll have to eat it right away. I used cream cheese frosting before I had some on hand) make 8 rosettes around the edge of the cake. Place gummy raspberries or cherry sours in the middle of each white rosette. To make it really authentic, press chocolate shavings into the outside of the cake and place one candle at the center of the cake.

The cake is not a lie!

Cream Puffs

I got this recipe from an old roommate of mine whose mother used to make these for weddings professionally. They are super easy to make and very delicious. I used this recipe to make cream puffs for my own wedding. I know now that the cream puffs were undercooked and probably not up to her standards (she claims that making these cream puffs correctly in her family is a sign of arrival into womanhood). But she never said anything about them, so we’ll just leave it be.

Choux Pastry:

4 Eggs

1 cup water

1/2 cup butter cut into 8 pieces

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

1. Place butter and water into saucepan. Bring to a full boil over med heat. Boil till butter is melted. (I think my butter is usually melted long before the full boil arrives.)

2. Add flour and salt all at once. Stir vigorously until a ball forms. Remove from heat.

3. Add eggs ONE AT A TIME mixing THOUROUGHLY after each addition. It sometimes seems that the eggs won’t incorporate: be patient and keep stirring. Mix 30 more seconds.

4. Shape as desired (I scoop spoonfuls of desired size onto a cookie sheet). Bake 425 degrees (in a preheated oven) for 10-15 minutes, until dry looking. And here is where My Mistakes came in. No oven I have used has cooked them right at 425 for 15 minutes. You can take them out at this point and eat them filled or unfilled; they are delicious. But you are supposed to wait until the butter bubbles stop bubbling off the top of the puffs. They stop glistening. So I recommend putting them in a 400 degree oven for closer to 20 minutes (and don’t be afraid to give them more time). These freeze well but only if you cook them dry. Otherwise when they come out of the freezer they are kind of grainy and gross. And make sure to open the puff and take out what extra pastry is inside before freezing them. This makes thaw and prep much quicker.

For the filling my friend recommends using 1 small box of instant vanilla pudding, 2 envelopes of powdered whipped cream (brand name: Dream Whip) and a cup of milk. Mix it at a high speed till the color changes and it gets very stiff.

I tried the filling and it was OK. I’d much rather just use real whipped cream. Or to save time, chocolate or vanilla pudding. To serve, dust your filled puffs with powdered sugar.

The pastry is delicious and reminds me a lot of popovers, which I love. Consequently, I have been tempted to try filling these puffs with a savory meat filling, but have not tried it yet. I’ll let you know it that ever happens.

The funny thing is that as I write this, I am also playing Scrabble.