Brown Sugar Boulder-Up!

COOKING ADVENTURE # 82: White Chocolate Chip Peppermint Cookies

Let’s admit it. In winter, especially one as bitterly cold as the one we’ve experienced in Maine, we instinctually gravitate toward foods that make us feel comfortable, warm, and wonderful. This tends to be things like tea, hot chocolate, cake, lasagna, and, of course, cookies. I found myself with a particular hankering for something different than the average chocolate chip or peanut butter styles. I had a bag of white chocolate chips just sitting on my shelf and an almost forgotten bottle of peppermint extract sitting high upon my spice shelf. I knew such combinations were bound to produce beautiful results. That is…until I looked at my brown sugar and discovered it wasn’t about to make anything easy for me.

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“It’s a Twister! It’s a Twister!”

COOKING ADVENTURE # 42: Apple Cider Caramel Cookies

So, readers, once again we find ourselves at the beginning of a Cooking Adventure that was for lack of a better phrase, “easy as pie.” I had decided that I was going to make some Apple Cider Caramel Cookies for a couple of readings that were to happen at the Camden and Rockland Public Libraries in Maine. Now, I had figured I’d have enough time to figure out what I was going to read, bake the cookies, make a poster board featuring all of the readers, and prepare my introduction ahead of time. But in all reality, working on both days of the reading had me doing everything the night before the first one was to begin. I ended up writing a ten page segment to read AND baking cookies. Because I rock at multi-tasking. I actually made two batches of these cookies because they were such a hit at the first reading. However, it was during the making of the second batch in which I encountered a supernatural apple cider phenomenon that I will call “The Twister”. In lieu of the Frankenstorm that’s about to hit here in New England, I felt that the title was fitting for this piece.

That’s The Way the Anissette Sponge Cookie Crumbles…

COOKING ADVENTURE #22: Tiramisu

You don’t want to read this. Truly, in your heart, you are saying to yourself, “I could click out of this right now. I could remove myself from reading about this disaster to come.” Or, you could continue. Only the brave should. For this is one of the dumbest cooking adventures to date, folks. And I lived it. And by the end of it, my reaction was very much like this.

Tiramisu is an Italian dessert, a cake made with layers of coffee and liquor-soaked ladyfingers, a marscapone/egg yolk cream, and finally whipped cream and cocoa powder. I have been dying to try and make this utterly decadent dessert since I began my cooking adventures five months ago. I was ecstatic, I tell you. So when the opportunity to make it finally came, I leaped at it with overzealous joy. And I leaped over a few important ingredients by trying to substitute them with others. Here’s where things get weird.