Cooking with Mary: April 2014

I'm sorry I've been so absent...I've been just overwhelmingly been obsessed with my last project for one of my new family members... Cinder turned 4 a couple weeks ago, & for her birthday, we had a tea party. This is what I made for her birthday cake. I have to admit this cake is full of things that I can't eat. & I was so proud of myself for only having a small bite off someones plate. But it was so moist, & delicious, and also very sad for me to cut up.

This tea pot cake, is chocolate on the inside, with buttercream frostings I dyed to the birthday girls standards. Total it took me about 12 hours, split between about 2 days. :)

So, a dessert I have always, ALWAYS, loved is chocolate chip cookies. But to make them from scratch with conversions is difficult because of measuring differences. So here we go!

Recipe:

~about 3 cups gluten free flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter

3/4 cup white sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar (packed)

~about 1 teaspoon vanilla

2 eggs

& chocolate chips

I started with my two sticks of butter, I definitely creamed these two sticks of butter until they were soft. Mostly because I buy butter in bulk from Costco and freeze the packs I'm not using until I'm ready. I nuked the sticks in the microwave for about 3 ten second increments, and went from there!

Once the butter was creamed, I added 3/4 C of white sugar..

After I put that in my bowl with the creamed butter, I add my brown sugar. You want to make sure that each 1/4 cup that you do, the brown sugar is packed tight.

As you can see, they come out shaped just like the measuring cup.

Cream the sugars all together, while the mixer is mixing, add you vanilla. I tend to use more than one teaspoon of vanilla, because honestly I like the flavor and after the alcohol bakes out of the cookies, I still want the sweet vanilla taste to be there. **I use real vanilla, & yes it's made with alcohol**

I then cream that all together, make sure if you are using a stand mixer that you scrape the sides as you go along, you don't want to get all finished and have butter at the very bottom of your bowl.

Then add your two eggs. Preferably one egg at a time, but thats up to you.

It should be a little more on the runnier side, than pastey side after the eggs are in. I'm not talking about watery, just not paste.

I of course used my Pamela's mix. Because I absoltuely love this product and will use it in everything!

This is where it gets a little funky. The recipe originally calls for 2 1/4 C of all purpose flour. You're going to want to add about another 3/4 C to that. Because you can see below, that if you don't add more flour than normal, your cookies will be incredibly thin when they come out of the oven. Don't be afraid to keep readjusting even after you add chocolate chips. You don't want your entire batch of dough to be ruined.

Add your 1 teaspoon of baking soda..

& Mix.

This is kind of deceiving because it looks like its thick, but it wasn't thick enough. I went with it anyways.

I love these chocolate chips. I also get the 60% cocoa, because it doesn't have dairy fat in it, but it isn't completely bitter.

I will always say to not measure your chocolate chips, because who am I to tell you how many chocolate chips to put in your cookies. Go overboard if you want, or whatever your fancy. I love extra chocolate chips, so I just dump a good portion of the bag in.

Mix if all together with a spatula

I then use two spoons to create "dollops" of cookie dough. Some people use melon ballers or ice cream scoopers, but you can get the same affect with two spoons. One spoon for scooping the other for molding and scraping off the spoon with the dough.

Put them on a cookie sheet, & Bake at 375 for about 11 minutes depending on how accurate the temperature of your oven is.

Example of how you don't want your cookies....They are so thin, I threw them away took my rings off, added more flour and mixed the dough with my hands to make sure there wasn't any flour left anywhere, & until the consistency was what I needed. Basically, it needs to be super thick for realistic cookies.

After remixing- and doing another tray, much thicker and so tasty!

Enjoy!

We like breakfast for dinner. Well really, we like breakfast in general. We are just beginning the process of moving. & since were moving, and things will be in storage for a while, we need to start working on cleaning out our freezer. Which will be interesting.

So, tonight I made breakfast sausage potato hash. Just like the potatoes we made in the breakfast post a few weeks back. The pork that I used is actually from the pig my husband and I owned last year and harvested this past winter. After doing the "slaughtering" ourselves on a cold winter weekend in Talkeetna, Alaska (approx 2 hours north of Anchorage)...we took "Hamlet" to the butcher to be smoked and packaged. We could have done it ourselves, but after doing two pigs, we were pretty tired of dealing with it.

Holy crap...it was worth it.

I took a one pound package of our breakfast sausage, and browned it. I did this in a separate pan because I didn't want super greasy potatoes. Although, I'm sure it would have been delicious.

While my pork was browning in a pan, I got out some potatoes. Just regular russet potatoes. You can use any potato you'd like and use your judgement on how much it'll make. It'll depend mostly on how big your potato chunks will be & how many people are eating.

& Make sure you wash them. Because really you're not going to be peeling them unless you so choose. I dont.

I then went through the potatoes and made sure that anything that was budding off of the potato was trimmed off.

Once I did that, I sliced the potatoes in relatively thick slices.

Because I use a slap shot. These things are an "As Seen on TV" product. & most products from TV are pretty dumb, but thins thing is pretty cool & makes chopping pretty quick. It also comes with different size options. The only thing, don't put it in the dishwasher cause it'll warp, like ours.

Put a chunk on the grill of the chopper

Press firmly until the potato is completely through

& you have little chunks. You can easily do this with other products or you can be "old fashioned" & just use a knife.

Then I use my potato cooking trick. I put all of my potato chunks in a bowl & put it in the microwave for 2-4 minutes based on how much potatoes you have. Then I throw it in my cast iron pan with some olive oil and let it cook away.