Blondies

Not mine; this is a stock photo, but WOW!

I don't much like baking cookies. I like making cookies because I like eating the raw dough. I don't enjoy portioning out sticky globs, standing around for 12 minutes, and then coaxing the cookies off the the baking sheet and onto a cooling rack. Sooooo very boring.

I really like making bar cookies, though. After mixing up the recipe, you get to smush the dough into one baking dish, put it in the oven, set the timer, and walk away for 40 minutes. Plus, the entire thing needs to cool once it comes out of the oven and that takes a couple more hours which gives you more than enough time to sit down with a book or whatever it is you do to relax. I had a friend ask me what I did to relax and when I said that reading relaxes me, he looked at me in disbelief. His idea of relaxation was skiing or mountain biking. To each their own; I'm sticking with my books.

Oh, and also? There is no such thing as a brownie blondie or a blondie brownie; it's one or the other. If the dessert is primarily chocolate and looks dark brown and tastes fudgy, it is a brownie. If the dessert is a light golden brown, it is a blondie. Maybe it's pedantic or nit-picky; I prefer definite definitions.

Ingredients:

3/4 c butter, melted

1 c brown sugar, packed

1/2 c granulated sugar

1 TBSP vanilla extract

1 whole egg

1 egg yolk

2 c flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

Optional: up to 1 1/2 c of any kind of nuts, candy pieces, chocolate bits, and/or dried fruits.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Grease the sides and bottom of a 9" by 13" glass baking dish and set aside.

Combine the melted butter and the two kinds of sugar; cream for two minutes til it looks pale. Add the vanilla, the whole egg, and the egg yolk. Beat together for an additional two minutes.

Add the dry ingredients and beat thoroughly. At this point, use a spatula to fold in whatever optional nuts, candy pieces, chocolate bits, and/or dried fruits you wish to include.

Transfer the dough to the prepared baking dish and use your hands to press the dough down evenly.

Bake for about 40 minutes or until the top is golden brown. Remove from the oven and allow the entire pan to cool on a wire cooling rack before cutting into squares. The recipe yields between two and three dozen cookies, depending on what size you want.

Cook's Notes:

1. Wire cooling racks. If you don't have any, why not? You can pick some up at your local dollar store and while they're not the highest quality, they get the job done and that job is to allow air to circulate around and under your baked goods so the don't steam and become soggy. I have a really nice cooling rack which is laid out in a small square pattern and it provides better support to more fragile baked goods. The cheaper racks generally consist of parallel wires and are better for cooling glass baking dishes and loaf pans. 
2. The original recipe from which this one as adapted, calls for those lovely mini Cadbury eggs that are only available at Easter. I'm not much of a candy-eater (candy-consumer? candy-devourer?) any more with two exceptions; those crunchy, chocolatey eggs and the milk chocolate Lindt balls. Those things are lusciously, meltingly evil. I digress. You can customize the blondies in any way you choose; white chocolate chips and craisins or M&Ms (plain or mint or peanut butter) or butterscotch chips or whatever.
3. Unlike many cookie recipes, this one calls for melted butter. Why not make beurre noisette? That's French for browned butter. Since it imparts a nutty flavor to baked goods, enhance that flavor with some toasted, chopped almonds, with chunks of high quality dark chocolate and maybe some chopped dried cherries.

Irene's Peanut Butter Cookies

I have a love/hate relationship with making cookies. I love mixing up a batch & sneaking bits of raw dough; I hate standing around for minutes at a time waiting for each tray to bake. Also, the ovens I've used in the last several years have tended to run hot and as much as I've tried to adjust the temperature, I just am not pleased with the results. The cookies spread too much & the edges get darker than the center and I get frustrated.

Irene was my paternal great-grandma and I'm fortunate enough to have known her into my teens. She lived to be 94 and was just a character. She loved watching WWF, the Seahawks, and the Sonics; she wore a perpetually crooked wig; and I believe there's only one photograph of her in trousers. She always wore house dresses. She grew African violets and had a dozen or more in her living room window. I've tried to have a few over the years in her memory and I just don't have good luck with them. Probably because I prefer my living environment much cooler than Irene and the violets did! At least I can make her peanut butter cookies.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

1/2 cup shortening i.e. Crisco or good ol' lard, room temperature

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3 to 3 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Combine 3 cups of flour and baking soda in a separate bowl & whisk to combine.

Using a large mixing bowl or stand mixer, combine the butter, shortening, brown sugar, and white sugar. Cream together for at least 2 minutes; you want the resulting paste to be light in color and creamy. Add the peanut butter and vanilla beat well. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Tip in about half the flour mix and mix well, then add the remainder of the flour. If you need to, add up to a half cup more of flour to make a thicker dough.

Portion out the dough on ungreased baking sheets. Using a fork dipped in granulated sugar, gently press down the dough, creating a criss-cross pattern on top.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until the edges are brown and the tops of the cookies don't look greasy. Leave on the baking sheets for an additional two minutes before carefully transferring to coolong racks.

Cook's Notes:

1. I prefer crunchy peanut butter for everything, even Thai peanut sauce. You can certainly use creamy peanut butter if that's what you have in your pantry.

2. Listen. Creaming the fats and sugars together is really important. Sugar granules have sharp little edges and as they're agitated during the mixing, they cut into the fats and add air to create a leavening effect.

3. Don't over-bake the cookies; check them after 8 minutes and see if the tops have lost their sheen & gotten a little darker on the edges. Cookies also continue to bake as they sit on the baking sheets. You want them to cool for at least 2 minutes before transferring to wire cooling racks so they don't fall apart.

4. These are nice sturdy cookies which freeze well and even ship well. 

5. You can easily turn them into peanut butter blossom cookies which just means that you place an unwrapped Hershey's Kiss in the center of each unbaked cookie. Yum!