Tessa Thai Tea Cookies and Iced Coffee, or The Caffeinated Special, or I'm going to pretend like it hasn't been three months since I've updated this thing!

     We really have so much to catch up on. And I'm hoping this won't take TOO long, because our computer room is the hottest room in the house. And we do have the air on. However, I have been doing nothing but consume caffeine all day, so actually this might be the longest post ever. I mean it IS the Caffeinated Special! (My first special edition! Isn't it so exciting? Should there be a sweepstakes? What did I win?)
     First of all, let me apologize. I have gotten several hundred angry emails that I never let you guys know how the Cookiesperiment ended up. Well, shame on me. I don't even know why I still have friends. Basically, this guy Jacques Torres (that's a French ass name) has come up with arguably the best chocolate chip cookie recipe there is. It is indeed very tasty, and it's pretty much due to four things:
     1. The dough sits in the fridge for up to 36 hours before baking.
     2. They're topped with a liberal amount of sea salt.
     3. They use high-quality dark chocolate DISKS (feves- what?)
         instead of chips, resulting in puddles of molten goodness.
     4. They're huge, resulting in freakin' ZONES of cookie. The rims
         are crunchy and golden, and the centers are chewy and
         ridiculous.
     So now you know. To catch us up the rest of the way, I will bless you with two artfully prepared photo collages. Number one:

Clockwise from top-left:
1. Spaghetti with home-made pasta sauce, and Ina Garten's glorious meatballs. Seriously, look them up.
2. Hot-cross buns made for my momma, as per request on Easter Sunday.
3. Probably less than half of the cherries picked on a recent trip to Charlottesville.
4. Michael getting in touch with his feminine side.
5. Cherry clafoutis made with aforementioned cherries. Julia Child recipe. Very tasty.
6. Joy the Baker's yummy yummy brownies that I made the night before I had a scary phone interview that turned out to be not scary at all.
7. Michael taking over the whipped-cream whipping (for the cherry shortcakes. with the same cherries.) because my arms were getting tired. Why didn't I just use a mixer? Because Martha says it's too easy to over-whip, and it should always be hand-whipped. Well. You know what, Martha? Screw you. The mixer works fine. I've done it before and it tastes NO DIFFERENT. Also- if you want my favorite fancy shortcake recipe (I love it so much) look no further than on the back of a box of Bisquick.
8. That stuff in the middle? I can't really remember. Chili made by Michael, maybe?

     Montage numero B is Michael building our raised beds that we turned into a cute little veggie gargen in the back yard. I'm missing a few steps in between, but we now have a jungle of tomato plants that give us several yummy tomatoes a day, and some Simpson lettuce. And one beet that's doing quite well. Everything else is taking it's time. I planted approximately sixteen (three) types of carrots, so I hope those turn up soon because we are LEAVING at the end of July and our landlord wants us to DESTROY our veggie garden. Really. If he had told us in the first place (when we asked him for permission) that we were to take them down when we left, would we have even bothered? NO! I'm pretty pissed about it. Also, a dumbass robin built a nest under our front porch roof. I was initially very excited about this, but after having to clean (ok, ok, Michael did it) two dead baby birds off the porch, I no longer support fauna procreating on my property. I hate nature.
     Why are we leaving, you ask? I got a new job near Richmond! I start July 5th, so I'll be staying with family in Midlothian during the week, and coming back on weekends to pack up our cute little house.
     I think that brings us to today. I chose not to go to work due to an unfortunate incident involving my nose deciding to exsanguinate whilst putting in my contacts. I never get nosebleeds. It was terrifying. I made myself feel better by cleaning the kitchen, brewing a batch of iced tea (which is LOVELY with orange mint in it, which I also happen to be growing) and a batch of coffee, and baking some cookies with Tessa (!!!) Thai tea drink mix. I made up my own recipe before realizing that there was one on the back of the damn box. Such is my life.
     First, I will share with you my recipe for ASTOUNGING iced coffee.

Iced Coffee
You will need:
Ground coffee in an amount that you deem necessary
Water in an amount that you deem necessary
Whole milk (don't be a pussy)
Sweetening agent of your choosing

With which you will:
1. Brew a really strong pot of coffee.
2. Chill it unless you like watery ice-melt coffee.
3. Pour over ice and top with WHOLE milk and mix in sweetener.

     I know. Revolutionary, right? Really this whole thing was just a way for me to let you know that when it comes to cold coffee beverages, just use the damn whole milk. Plus, the handle on my spoon is fancy, no?
     Without further ado: more cookies. Tessa Thai Tea is something that came into my life thanks to my friend Andrella, who found a box of it somewhere and brought it to me at work one day. She had no idea that I actually LOVE Thai iced tea, she just thought it was awesome because it had my name on it. Which is clearly also true. So I went through that box pretty quickly. About two years later, I found a box at T.J. Maxx- of all places! So tonight I was trying to come up with something new to make, and decided to make these. I mixed up a basic cookie recipe batch, subbing most of the sugar with tea mix and throwing in some vanilla for good measure. They weren't quite sweet enough, but then I came across the damn recipe on the back of the box- which calls for almost the SAME ingredients and proportions, with the exception of more sugar. And shredded coconut. So I decided for the second batch to go in the oven that I would top them with a coconut macaroon-y mixture. They turned out much better.

Tessa Thai Tea Cookies
You will need:
4 oz butter
1 oz sugar
1.5 oz tea mix (if not thai tea mix, any instant mix that has sugar listed as first ingredient)
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
.5 tsp baking powder
6 oz flour
.5 cup sweetened coconut
1 egg white
1 tbsp confectioners sugar

With which you will:
1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. Cream tea mix, sugar, and butter until light and fluffy.
3. Add egg and vanilla and beat until incorporated.
4. Add flour and beat until dough forms.
5. Roll dough in wax paper in a log and chill until slice-able.
6. Meanwhile, combine sugar, coconut, and JUST enough egg white to make it stick together.
7. Slice cookies 1/4 inch thick and top with a little coconut mixture.
8. Bake about 12-15 minutes until lightly browned.

     Yummy,
     And The End.

Kitchen Awesomeness (Buttermilk Panna Cotta Round Two, Perfect French Toast, Hoisin Glazed Shrimp, Mushroom and Caraway Soup, and the Cookiesperiment!)

     Prepare thyselves. This will be an epic posting. And not because I've been up to a lot in the kitchen in the two weeks or so since I last wrote, but because I've done a lot in the past two DAYS. It really has been a mini-marathon.
     First thing's first. I know you all have pretty much been sitting on the edge of your respective sitting machines just WAITING for me to tell you how the Buttermilk Panna Cotta turned out using real buttermilk instead of the reconstituted powdered variety that I used with great success before. Well, exhale, my friends because I am about to tell you. It tasted remarkably similar. The real stuff turned out a custard slightly lighter in color and a bit lighter in flavor, perhaps, but all in all about the same. Now that that is out of the way, I will share the first of several recipes.

Buttermilk Panna Cotta
You will need:
2 cups of buttermilk, fresh or otherwise
1.5 tsp unflavored gelatin
2/3 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar

With which you will:
1. Sprinkle the gelatin over 1 cup of buttermilk and set aside to soften.
2. Bring cream and sugar to a boil, turn heat to low.
3. Stir in gelatin mixture, whisk for 3-4 minutes until dissolved. Remove from heat.
4. Stir in remaining cup of buttermilk.
5. Pour into serving dishes, cover with plastic wrap, refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

So easy, right? SO delicious! Has a nice tangy quality to it. It's great with sweetened strawberries on top, or by its lonesome.
     That happened a week or so ago, but it didn't really make for an entire blog post, so I waited until the urge to get cooking hit me again, and it did a few days ago. And again, our story starts in Harris Teeter. After I ceremoniously spread some sample Irish Butter on a piece of sample Pecan Raisin Oval loaf (which was very tasty, and when I found the loaf, it was tiny and more than five bucks! CRAZY!), I stumbled upon a loaf of challah bread. I'd been toying with the idea of making french toast with something other than supermarket sandwich bread for a while, and here was a lovely loaf of challah! For an outrageous price. Eff that. So I moved on. But the next day I was back to pick up some lunch, and lo and behold! My challah loaf was now a day old and less than two bucks! Cha-ching! Sold! And day old bread is perfect for french toast!

     This recipe is from good old Alton Brown, with a minor tweak, and it was very tasty. Apparently he's lost a good bit of weight recently, and good for him. But it probably was not by eating this every day for breakfast. Yeah, I know you want in on that bacon action.

Perfect French Toast
 You will need:
6 thick-ish slices of slightly stale bread (brioche and challah are great choices)
2/3 cup of milk or half and half
2 large eggs
1.5 tbsp honey, heated in microwave for 20 seconds
Pinch of salt
Splash of vanilla
Butter for cooking

With which you will:
1. Preheat oven to 375. Whisk milk, eggs, honey, salt, and vanilla together. Pour into a dish good for dipping bread into.
2. Dip bread into mixture, allowing each side to soak for 30 seconds. Let slices rest on a baking sheet for 1 or two minute before cooking.
3. Melt butter in pan over medium-low heat. Working in batches, cook slices for 3-4 minutes on each side until nicely browned.
4. Slide slices directly onto oven rack and bake for 5 minutes. Serve with topping of your desiring.

     It's a really great recipe. I know it's a little more high maintenance than most french toast recipes, but the baking really makes the insides fluffy and decadent. I topped mine with sugared strawberries and it was perfect. Michael stuck with maple syrup.
     That was yesterday's brunch. But that wasn't the end of the day. We still had to have dinner. It was a doozy of a dinner, too! We decided to go lighter since we had already had an insane amount of french toast, so we went the shrimp and rice route with a side of homemade quick pickles (another batch, made with my mandoline this time!). Remember those? From my second post? My, how time flies.

     The shrimp was kind of insane. Three ingredients: Shrimp, hoisin sauce, sesame seeds. I'm not even going to type out a whole recipe for this. Just stick some peeled and deveined shrimp on some skewers, baste it in hoisin sauce while grilling, and then top with sesame seeds. Kind of stupid easy, and totally stupid delicious.
     Which brings us to today. Another light-ish but super good dinner consisting of garlic bread (the rest of the challah) and Mushroom and Caraway Soup. If you like mushrooms and/or rye bread, you have got to try this soup. It came from Food Network magazine, but I tweaked it a tiny bit, too. I can't help it.

Mushroom and Caraway Soup
You will need:
2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp caraway seeds
10 oz sliced mushrooms
Salt and pepper to taste
3 carrots, sliced thinly and chopped into soup-sized bits
4 cups of low-sodium chicken broth
Sour cream for garnish

With which you will:
1. Melt butter over medium-low heat. Add caraway seeds and cook for about a minute, until it starts to smell awesome.
2. Add mushrooms and cook until they wilt a bit, season with salt and pepper.
3. Add carrots and broth, bring to a simmer. Cook for 10-12 minutes until carrots are tender.
4. Ladle it out and garnish with sour cream.

     Food Network mag also adds a garnish of red onion, but I hate raw onion. So it did not even slightly happen. The soup was broth-sippingly delicious, and I will probably make this over and over again.
     That's pretty much it for tonight, but I feel a Cookiesperiment blog coming on Thursday, and I will leave you fine people with this to think about: This chocolate chip cookie is inappropriate. Look at that slut showing off it's redonk chocolate filled interior to God and everyone. For shame, cookie. For shame.

Gingerbread with Lemon Sauce and Very Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

     I recently gave up my Farmville obsession on Facebook, deciding I was wasting precious moments of my life clicking thousands of tiny plots of land that comprised my Utopian farm where crops rarely fail (only whither when you don't harvest them in time), chickens laid golden eggs that hatched into scarecrows, and I always received a fair price for my goods. Yeah, right. Instead, I now waste precious moments of my life reading food blog after food blog after food blog. Better, right?
     One of my favorites is called One Perfect Bite, and it's updated daily and has beautiful pictures and lots of great recipes. Last week there was a recipe for gingerbread with lemon sauce recipe that sounded so delicious. Whenever I visit my dad in Charlottesville and go to their local Whole Foods Market I like to pick up a square of their fresh-baked gingerbread. It's great....but gingerbread with LEMON SAUCE?! I had no idea that was a traditional combination. So yeah. Of course I had to try it. Her recipe is adapted from a Maine hunting camp recipe that used bacon fat (which she omitted), and my recipe is even slightlier (yep. new word.) adapted from hers, due to some ingredients I didn't have and was too lazy to drive a mile down the street and get. So shoot me.

Gingerbread 
You will need:
2 cups of Flour
1.5 tsp Baking Soda
.5 tsp Salt
.5 tsp each Ground Cloves, Dry Mustard, and Ground Pepper (trust me)
1 tsp each Ginger and Cinnamon
.5 cup Butter
.5 cup Brown sugar
2 Eggs
3/4 Cup Molasses
3/4 Cup Boiling Coffee

Yes. That is a lot of ingredients.
And this is what you will do with them:
1. Preheat oven to 375F. Butter and flour your baking vessel of choice. Make it a good choice.
2. Combine flour, salt, baking soda, and spices.
3. Beat butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time.
4. Add molasses and beat until smooth.
5. Starting with dry ingredients, add to egg mixture alternately with coffee and mix only until combined.
6. Bake until set and toothpick comes out clean.

Lemon Sauce
You will need:
1 tsp lemon zest
1/4 cup Lemon Juice
.5 Cup Granulated Sugar
1 tbsp Cornstarch
2/3 cup Water
1 tbsp Butter
1 Egg Yolk (optional, for creaminess and nice yellow color)

That is fewer ingredients.
And this is what you will do with them:
1. Put everything in a saucepan.
2. Bring it to a boil, stirring constantly.
3. Cook for about a minute more, until thickened. Remove from heat.
4. Add egg yolk while whisking so you don't end up with lemony scrambled bits. Yum.

     So that's that. It's really good. I don't have a picture for this one, but the gingerbread on the One Perfect Bite blog looks about the same as mine did, just mentally add some yellow lemon sauce on top and subtract the lemon garnish because I am not that fancy.
     Ever notice how at the end of lots of recipes, it tells you how long your finished product will last for? It usually says something to the effect of, "Will keep in an airtight container for up to two days." Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on like 90% of those little blurbs. I love Martha Stewart and all (she always has these blurbs), but PLEASE! Why I am going to bake four dozen chocolate wafer whatevers if they're only going to be good for two days? No. Those cookies are going to last me a week, and I bet they are going to taste just fine. Thank you for indulging me in that rant. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

     I cleaned out one of the kitchen cabinets today because a.) it was not logically organized and was therefore driving me crazy and b.) I had no idea what was in there and thought it would be like a treasure hunt. Now that it's done I would hardly call it a treasure hunt, but whatever. I did find a box of oatmeal pancake mix that I purchased thinking it would be a healthy, tasty alternative to normal pancake mix. As it turns out, when the instructions posted on the back are followed, it makes really shitty pancakes. Therefore, Aunt Jemima has been reinstated in our kitchen, and this box has sat undisturbed for some time now. So I decided today that something had to be done with it. And seeing as the major ingredients are flour, sugar, and leavening, I'm guessing you can do a lot more with pancake mix than just make so-so pancakes. So I made super oatmealy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies! I followed the Quaker Oats Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies recipe, just omitting the flour, baking soda, and salt, and subbing in the pancake mix. They turned out perfectly! I would cut back on the sugar a little next time, I neglected to factor in that there was sugar in the mix already, so these cookies are a little on the sweet side. But I'm not complaining.

     The last thought I have for right now is this: For someone who goes nuts when her cabinets don't make sense, I am a ridiculously disorganized baker. I am not a "mis en place" kind of girl. I just measure the ingredients out right before I throw them in the bowl. I think I just get so excited when I decide to bake something, that I can't put it off by carefully measuring every ingredient out into its own little bowl beforehand. Eff that. Occasionally I will gather the ingredients into one place before I start, but that's rare.

The end.

Snow Cream, Crackers, and Boston Cream Pie Cookies

Yeah, I'm a terrible blogger and it's been over two weeks and blah blah blaaah. Get over it, I bake when I want. And today, I wanted to bake. And since I had an epic baking day, I'll go ahead and fill you in on all the other random things that have been created in my kitchen since January 18th.

1. Yogurt cheese. Yep. I bought a big tub of plain yogurt and let it drain, rigged like this, overnight. And it's surprisingly yummy. And a whole lot better for me than cream cheese, that's for sure. Mostly I just wanted to include this picture because it's ridiculous.

2. The twelve cookie experiment. One night, I really wanted to make a batch of chocolate cookies. For some reason, I made twelve differently flavored cookies instead and make Michael split every single one of them with me in a sitting so we could pick some favorites. That Ratio book I went on about in blog numero uno has a basic BASIC cookie recipe, so I made a batch of that and then took chunks out and flavored each one. I think there was a plain, a vanilla, a rosewater, a rosewater and sugar, a plain orange, an orange blossom water, cocoa, cocoa vanilla, cocoa orange, oat, and two others that apparently weren't good enough to remember. Maybe I mixed the orange blossom and the rose waters? Whatever. They were all tasty. Michael hated the ones with the waters, saying they tasted like perfume. I liked them, and argued that they were "boutique-y," not perfume-y. I also really liked the cocoa orange one, but Michael doesn't like that flavor combo. He liked the plain cocoa. Sigh. Anyway, the point of the story is that I'm a crazy person and didn't make a SINGLE chocolate chip cookie, but instead made twelve other cookies out of whatever crap I had lying around.

3. Graham crackers. From scratch. That's right. This idea came from that "cooking project" book I've blogged about. That's also where the yogurt cheese came from. These came out super yummy, and now I can say that I have made a graham cracker from scratch. Before that night, I didn't even know what the hell was in one of those things. Well, let me tell you. Molasses and honey. They were so good. Not pretty though, and I'm guessing that's why I didn't take a picture. I'm also having problems with this "cooking project" book, as this was the first of now two of her recipes I've made that didn't call for nearly enough flour. It is not possible to roll out a sticky mess and cut it into shapes and bake them. MORE FLOUR, LADY!

     

     Somewhere around this point a whole bunch of fluffy white cold stuff fell on the ground. I have no idea where the hell it came from, I just woke up on Saturday morning and there it was. Michael and I being, the adventurers we are, we went outside to play. I hit him with a few snowballs, he debated on whether or not he could drive to work, I fell on my ass, and we felt bad for the mailman. Then it was time for snow cream! We decided the snow in our backyard was probably the safest since we have zero shrubs and even zero-er trees back there, and we found that we had some pretty badass icicles on our back porch, as did most people with porches did, I'm sure. Moving on. I filled my big red bowl with a lot of snow and then we trudged back inside for the day, because by that time we were freaking cold and it wasn't fun anymore. So I dumped a can of sweetened condensed milk (which was intended for a tres leches cake, which STILL has yet to be made) and some vanilla into the snow, mixed it all up, and hunkered down on the couch with Michael and a couple of spoons and it was delish. The sweetened condensed milk was Paula Deen's suggestion, and a damn good one.

     Which brings us to today, my day off and my oven's day on.

4. Boston Cream Pie Cookies. For no reason whatsoever, I googled boston cream pie today. And then for even less of a reason, I googled black and white cookies. And then for every reason EVER, decided to mash the two together and make these damn cookies. I have no idea whether or not I like them yet. After tasting batter and test cookies and pastry cream and ganache all freaking day, I just do not want to eat one. So maybe after I have some real food I can give some real feedback. One thing I can say? They look awesome. It was minorly terrifying making pastry cream, and I'm pretty sure I did it wrong, but it tasted okay so we're just going to run with it. At one point it was not looking healthy, and I wish I had a picture of it, but I was too busy freaking out at the time. Michael just tried one and he says, "It was a wicked pissah!" Which is apparently a good thing? I think the most important thing we can take away from this whole Boston-cream-pie-cookie experience is that the picture of the bowl of ganache is awesome, and pretty much just makes me want to eat ganache. The cookie/cake things didn't turn out quite perfectly, like those wonderful soft spongy black and white cookies, but they sure did the trick. Anyway it was fun and I'd do it again.

5. Onion, Poppy-seed, and Sesame Crackers. This was recipe numero cuatro from the "cooking project" book, and the second recipe that doesn't call for nearly enough flour. Regardless, I wanted to try to make crackers, cuz I've never done it before, and this flavor combination sounded good. I should start by telling everyone that I'm not Onion's number one fan. Probably not even close, I've never tried to eat a Vidalia onion like an apple before, and the thought of it pretty much gags me. I decided since cooked onions are slightly less heinous, that I'd probably actually like them in these crackers. HOWEVER. Being such an onion newbie, the chopping process had me almost sobbing, EVEN with the aid of my new shiny food processor. So I had to leave the kitchen for a good ten minutes to regain composure. Which was fine, since it had been about five minutes since I had checked Facebook last. So then I browned the onions, made the cracker dough, refrigerated it, took it out, realized that no amount of refrigeration was going to compensate for the lack of flour action going on, added a lot more flour, rolled 'em out, cut 'em, baked 'em, and here we are. They're pretty tasty, and darn cute to boot. I think I'll make cheese crackers next time.

Suggestions?