Baking Feature: Coconut Rum Raisinet Cookies

Today is our friend's birthday, and I believe that old saying "the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach" was written about him, so I am making him food for his present.
I found this recipe a few months ago when I was eating Raisinets and said to Google, "these are amazing and I love them utterly. Can I put them in other sweet foods I love to make them better?" Google said yes...kind of. Google honestly said "here's a blog entry from someone who put coconut, rum, raisins, and chocolate into a cookie, but used 'raisinet' in the name, so I thought I'd mention it."
That's why I keep you around, Google.

The blogmaster over at Oatmeal Cookie Blog created these cookies and posted the recipe, and they look like something our friend would really love. As an awesome bonus, I actually already had all of the ingredients at home.

First I started soaking the raisins in rum; already I liked this recipe. My personal favorite liquor is Malibu Coconut Rum, so I had to take this opportunity to soak half of the raisins in that, and I soaked the other half in (what I assume is "regular") Bacardi which I found upstairs. There are pictures in the slideshow if you have no idea what I'm talking about. The recipe said to soak them for 30-45 minutes (or more if you can) but since I had a little "incident" with the coconut (keep reading) I soaked them longer.

I used the method mentioned at Oatmeal Cookie blog to toast the coconut by putting it in a skillet in the oven. I then got distracted seeing if I could set Firefox up to open with multiple homepages in tabs and then starting this entry, and I burned the hell out of my coconut.

NEVER BAKE AND BLOG

But my second try was a success and it smelled WONDERFUL. At this point, I had a bowl of toasted coconut, and two bowls of raisins soaked in rum. I was tempted to stop there and call this recipe a success. But I pressed on...

I followed the recipe for the most part from here on, except that I waited to add the raisins until last and separated the batter into two equal parts so I could keep the Bacardi and the Malibu raisins separate. I must mention that this cookie batter was probably the MOST delicious cookie batter I've ever tasted in my life, and I think it's the dark brown sugar that did it. I also used spiced rum for the batter itself, because I saw a picture on Oatmeal Cookie Blog of the wet ingredients and noticed that it included Spiced rum

Overall, the cookies were AMAZING and I will definitely have to keep this recipe. They're not very pretty, but the golden rule of Aly's baking is that the uglier it is, the better it tastes. I don't really taste a difference between the Malibu and the Bacardi raisins, so I don't know that it matters (but I think I'll stick with Malibu... just to be sure).


-Aly

Recipe from Oatmeal Cookie Blog:

Ingredients:
Creamables:
1 stick butter
1 cup + 2 Tbsp dark brown sugar

Wet Ingredients:
3/4 cup raisins soaked in 3/4 cup rum, drained (I split these in half between Malibu and Bacardi)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp rum (I used spiced rum)
1tsp coconut extract

Dry Ingredients:
1 Cup Oatmeal
1 Cup coconut, toasted
3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Directions:
1. Soak the raisins in 3/4 cup rum to plump for 30-45 min
2. Toast the coconut (See directions on Oatmeal Cookie Blog)
3. Preheat oven to 350
4. In your Kitchen Aid or a large mixing bowl, cream together the creamables.
5. In a small bowl, combine the wet ingredients. Whisk together until smooth.
6. Add the combined wet ingredients to the creamables. Mix together until well incorporated.
7. Strain the raisins, discarding the remaining rum. Add the plumped raisins to the combined wet ingredients and creamables. Mix together until well incorporated.
8. In a large mixing bowl, add the dry ingredients. Using a spatula, fold together until evenly distributed.
9. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the combined creamables and wet ingredients. Mix until evenly combined.
10. Shape dough into balls - about Tbsp each
11. Place the dough balls about 2 inches apart on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets
12. Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove the cookie sheets from the oven and let stand for 2 minutes. Then place cookies on wire racks to cool.

Cooking Lull

Sorry for the lack of entries. Jeff's work schedule has become less predictable (and usually less convenient again) so we're often back to the old dinner style of me eating a bowl of cereal while talking to him on Instant Messenger; on the nights that he is home we're falling back a lot on repeat recipes or "let's cook eggs" which doesn't make for very intriguing entries.
Once his work settles down again we'll resume the more adventurous meals and post again.

Brown Sugar Pancakes

The night we made crepes, we were originally going to make pancakes and Jeff found a recipe for these brown sugar pancakes. They sounded good, so we thought we'd give them a try,

There really isn't much to them. It's a basic pancake process with quick oats and partial wheat flour. The batter came out pretty thick and lumpy compared to what I'm used to, but they cooked up like regular pancakes.

I'd say that they were just nothing special. They didn't taste very different than regular pancakes. We didn't keep our printout of the recipe.

Recipe from All recipes

-Aly

Beef Wellington

T has been watching some of the Ramsey shows. Hell's Kitchen and if he has some other shows them as well. I haven't seen them, so I'm not sure how accurate this is, but apparently Ramsey always makes them make Beef Wellington. Its always wrong, and he always yells about it. Its supposed to be really hard, and T got it in his head we should try. He googled a recipe and sent it my way. I bought ingredients and we went at it.

While making it we hit a few hitches. The major being that neither of us knew what it was supposed to look like or what was involved. We had a surprise guest, Aly's sister showed up, which only added to the pressure of cooking with an audience. We could basically feel Ramsey there.

 We learned a lot about cooking on this project. Like that you can mush pastry cracks back together with milk/water before you cook them and they pretty much mesh back together. We also improvised an hour d'oeuvre. Steamed broccoli, then we layered swiss cheese and diced ham on top of it, then threw it in the oven till it melted. It was basically like nachos and awesome. We made that up on the fly. We also made a dessert, parfaits. We bought yogurt, and added strawberries, granola, and some sugar to them. Also great, and a nice healthy light dessert. You will probably see both of those sides in a future  meal.

In the end, the food came out undercooked once we sliced it.Which per T, is exactly what happens on the show. We went ahead and cut the rest, and put it back in for "a bit". It turned out alright after that. The sauce was really good, but there was so little of it that I don't think most people bothered.

Now we know for next time.

-Jeff

Baking Feature: S'mores Cupcakes

This idea started in the grocery store seeing a new product that sounded tasty, and it grew from there. Our grocery store had this new Duncan Hines plain frosting base that you add a flavor mix packet to in order to make a flavored frosting. I suppose the idea would be that you could keep packets at home and just need one tub on hand to have whatever you need for whatever you make rather than buying one of every flavor tub to be sure you have one in advance.

I don’t tend to stock icing in general. I buy the one I want when I buy the rest of the ingredients for whatever I have planned to make. However, this product has mix packets for flavors that aren’t available in regular tubs, so it’s still a neat option. The one that particularly caught my eye was “chocolate marshmallow” because that sounds awesome. From there, I thought “I bet I could make s’mores cupcakes” and that was about it. I bought graham crackers and a yellow cake mix thinking that would be a good combination, and I went home stirring some plans around in my head.

Before I actually started baking, I googled “s’mores cupcakes” for ideas on how to incorporate the graham crackers. I thought I could either crumple them at the bottom, or mix them in the cake batter. I found recipes that did either, but I liked the look of the ones that had the graham crust bottom best. However, all of these recipes used a chocolate cake and a marshmallow-based frosting. I didn’t have any chocolate cake mix or the necessary almond milk to make the one from scratch (according to the recipe), and on top of that I didn’t feel like making a marshmallow buttercream frosting; that sounded very messy and it was a work night. I opted to use the graham crust, and then kind of wing it from there.

The crusts turned out fine. Next time I might press them a little more because these crumbled when you ate them. Before baking them, I chopped up some semisweet chocolate chips and sprinkled them on top of the crusts because the one recipe used bittersweet bits in this way, but I didn’t have any bittersweet chocolate. I then spooned the batter in and put them in the oven. While they were baking, I remembered an article I had seen on Lifehacker about using a marshmallow as an alternative to icing. Evidently you put a marshmallow into each cupcake at about 5 minutes before the end of baking, and it melts down and makes an icing-like cap. I already had an icing in mind for these, but I thought that an opportunity to test this as well as get more s’mores elements into the cupcakes was too good to pass up. I stuck three mini marshmallows into each because one regular-sized one seemed too big. They made it difficult to determine when the cupcakes were done because they slimed a little and made the cake seem like it was still batter, and I had to dodge them to test with a toothpick. Still, the cupcakes turned out alright. The marshmallows just sort of sank in and got melty- they didn’t spread at all like I’d thought they might.

I then mixed the flavor packet into the frosting base which was probably the easiest step up until now. From there, it was just frosting cupcakes as usual. I found that the icing did seem thin compared to most tubs, but it tasted awesome. There also seemed to be plenty left in the tub, so Jeff and I started smearing it on extra graham crackers and sandwiching them together, which was a delicious unhealthy snack.

Overall I liked how the cupcakes came out, but I think the flavors could have blended together a little more. I wanted to bite into it and pause and say “oh my god, that’s amazing,” but it didn’t happen. Still, they were very popular at work and only 3 came home with me (a new record) since people found ways to transport some home for later. Several people also stopped me or emailed me to tell me they were delicious, which is also very rare, so perhaps I am just too hard on them.