Tester Cookies and Snowy Days

Some recent goodies from Isa and Terry's cookie test kitchen:


Banana Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies


Spiced Sweet Potato Blondies


Swedish Chocolate Balls (uh huh huh)


Call Me Blondies

My non-baked food of late hasn't been much to blog about. The recent cold weather here in Denver has inspired lots of soup and copious cups of tea. Split pea soup, while delicious, is not particularly inventive or photogenic.

Soup weather

Dobby has the right idea:

Chocolate + peanut butter = BFF

Who doesn't love chocolate with peanut butter? (No seriously - who? Give me their names and addresses and I will take care of them.) The other night I was craving the classic combination and decided that the old chocolate-chips-dipped-in-peanut-butter routine just wouldn't do. Thus, these thin, chewy morsels were born. Rarely does a recipe made up on the fly turn out damn near perfect the first time, but I kind of think that these are the shit and can't find any room for improvement. Bonus: As cookies go, they're not too terrible for you, since the only added fat is a ¼ cup of natural peanut butter. That is, at least, until you eat them all in one sitting by yourself.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies (I'm not going to call them something cutesy like "You got your peanut butter in my chocolate" cookies because I think that's really effing annoying.)

¼ cup natural creamy peanut butter
¼ - 1/3 cup non-dairy milk
1 t vanilla
¾ cup sugar
¾ c whole wheat pastry (or a combination of wwp and all purpose)
¼ c cocoa powder
¾ t baking soda
¼ teaspoon of salt

Preheat the oven to 350. Spray cookies sheets with cooking spray or line with parchment paper. In a large mixing bowl, cream together the peanut butter and ¼ cup of the non-dairy milk. Add the vanilla and sugar, mixing until well combined and smooth. Sift in the rest of the ingredients and mix. If your batter looks too dry, add another splash or two of milk.

Drop onto cookie sheets two inches apart. With wet fingers, press down on the cookies to flatten them a bit. Bake for about 10 minutes. Let cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to cooling rack. Make sure not to over bake these - you want them to be a bit underdone so they stay chewy and creamy in the middle. The tops should still be a little soft when you take them out of the oven.

Treats forgotten

Chocolate cupcakes with a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough baked into them.

I found this picture while going through my Flickr photos and realized I desperately need to make these again. (I suppose one might think that the use of the word "desperately" to describe a "need" for baked goods is a bit of hyperbole, but I assure you that it is, in fact, not.) I used a low fat cookie dough with much of the fat replaced with applesauce so that the cookie portion would be fairly light and cakey on top of the cupcake. I don't remember the exact recipe I came up with, but it shouldn't be hard to recreate.

This is only a test.

I recently became a recipe tester for Isa and Terry's upcoming vegan cookie book. In addition, I've been testing recipes for Joanna's sequel to Yellow Rose Recipes (which if you don't have yet, um...why don't you? Go buy it already!) Food is my biggest obsession - making it, eating it, thinking about it - and being a recipe tester gives me a sense of purpose and productivity while allowing me to revel in food geekery. It's a good time.


Terry's roasted almond cookies with fluer de sel


Isa's whole wheat chocolate chip cookies


Joanna's raw cashew ricotta

Make sure you buy these books when they come out, ya heard?