Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Tonight I made Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies (page 228) for dessert after our Shabbat dinner. This is a fairly simple recipe, but the cookie is loaded with goodies. I made a couple of substitutions - I do not have whole wheat flour in our pantry, so I used all-purpose flour and I hate natural peanut butter, so I just used regular old Jif (yum).

My daughters helped me measure out and pour the ingredients and we used our medium sized Oxo cookie scoop to ladle out the dough. The optimum baking time for our oven was 14 minutes and the cookies needed about two minutes to cool on the baking sheet before transferring them to the wire rack.

My mom's boyfriend suggested that the peanut butter flavor was a little understated, but I thought the cookies were delish!

Striped Icebox Cookies

The recipe that I made today was Striped Icebox Cookies (page 227). These are a beautiful shortbread tea cookie with stripes of jam running through them. We get a weekly bag of fresh, locally produced goodies from our farmer's market, and this was a chance to use some of those wonderful organic ingredients from local vendors. The dried cherries, cherry jam and yellow cornmeal were all products that I got from the Greener Grocer at the North Market in Columbus.

Making this cookie involves several steps: preparing the jam filling on the stovetop, mixing the dough, freezing the dough, assembling the cookie layers and freezing again, then baking in the oven. Each step was fairly quick, however, and it did not seem like an overwhelming or labor-intensive process.

I will say, though, that working with shortbread dough is quite difficult. I thought maybe it was just the last recipe that I did, but now I'm starting to think it's just the nature of shortbread dough. It is very sticky and hard to roll out. I think in the future, I would refrigerate the dough before I began rolling it out to see if that helps. Rolling it between two sheets of parchment paper was helpful as well.

When baking this recipe, I was able to use my silpat mat for the first time (pictured above). This is a specialized baking mat that fits on a typical baking sheet (they come in different sizes) and is the best non-stick surface available. It worked perfectly - nothing stuck to it at all. The cookies were fairly delicate when they came out of the oven. I let them cool off for a full minute before removing them from the pan, which I did very gently with a long offset spatula.

The cookies are delicious - the sweet/sour taste of the jam filling balances nicely with the crunch from the cornmeal shortbread. Plus, they look interesting which is always good too. They would be a great treat to bring to a party.

Coconut Macadamia Shortbread

So this is the first cookie from Martha that I do not love, even though it has all the components that would normally make it a favorite - coconut and macadamia nuts. I chose this recipe - Coconut Macadamia Shortbread (page 148) to use the macadamia nuts I had in the pantry. This recipe calls for a couple of ingredients that I consider somewhat obscure - cream of coconut (not to be confused with coconut milk) and coconut extract. While imitation coconut extract can be found in most neighborhood grocery stores, I of course sought out the pure extract which I had to order online, along with the cream of coconut (which might be able to be found in a Mexican grocery store). Strike one.

Following the recipe was not complicated, but involved several steps and was quite time-consuming. Toast the macadamias, grind them in the food processor, grind the coconut, mix the dough, various steps of refrigeration. When I got the dough out of the refrigerator to roll out, it was quick crumbly and difficult to work with (appropriately, this recipe can be found in the "crumbly & sandy" section of the cookbook). Strike two.

Finally, the suggested cooking time (20-25 minutes) is definitely on the long side. My first batch of cookies came out a little too brown (baked at 20 minutes), but the second batch looked better at 18 minutes. The crumbly nature of the dough made it hard to roll it out to an even 1/4" inch thickness, and therefore the cookies baked unevenly as well. Strike three.

The cookies tasted all right, a little caramel-y and sweet, but not sure they were worth the effort.

Addendum:
My husband loved the cookies and says they taste wonderful, and suggests that they be paired with ice cream.

Snickerdoodles

Today I am celebrating a friend's 38th birthday. What better way to celebrate than cookies? If you can't indulge on your birthday, then when can you? So I chose the Snickerdoodle recipe (page 82) to take over to her house for our little get-together.

I have linked to the Snickerdoodle recipe on Martha Stewart's website, but that is slightly different than the recipe in the cookbook. The cookbook recipe is simpler, with no cream of tartar or vegetable shortening. It's just a simple sugar cookie recipe, and then the balls of dough are rolled in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar before being put on the cookie sheet and into the oven.

The result is a lovely, soft cookie with a nice cinnamon flavor. My daughter helped me make the cookies, and she even got to sneak a bite!

Double Chocolate Coconut Cookies

Tonight I looked up "white chocolate chips" in the index of Martha Stewart's Cookies and found this recipe: Double Chocolate Coconut Cookies (page 173). From the "chunky & nutty" section, these cookies are a perfect storm of all of my favorite things: chocolate, coconut and almonds. Yum! (Actually, the recipe called for walnuts, but in my humble opinion, almonds are a better combination with chocolate and coconut.)

These cookies are TROUBLE ... they are soooooo delicious that I will not be able to keep my hands off of them!!!

I used two tablespoons to drop them onto the baking sheet instead of the ice cream scoop as recommended by Martha, and as a result, my cookies are a little larger than hers and therefore yielded a lower number of cookies (I got about four dozen rather than the five dozen suggested in the recipe).

Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

So, this is my third batch of cookies for the boys' poker weekend. The other batch of cookies (about which we will not blog) was a disaster, due to a horrendous error on my part. Let's just say it's a good thing I'm not a surgeon, because I'd probably be the one who accidentally amputated the wrong limb. My bad.

Anyway, so the fallback is the "undisputed champ of the cookie world" (so says Martha): the chocolate chip cookie (page 58). Not such a bad alternate, but not what I wanted to send with him either.

It was a cinch to pull together - all your typical cookie ingredients. The only deviation I made was to substitute mini chocolate chips for regular ones, since I didn't have any regular-sized chocolate chips in the pantry. The result is a more chocolatey cookie. Very tasty.

Almond Macaroons

So because the best cookie is one you share with a friend ... I decided to send the next two batches of cookies with my husband to his boys' poker weekend in Hocking Hills. I chose two recipes in Martha's "Soft & Chewy" section. These were the Almond Macaroons, from page 91.

The recipe is fairly simple and calls for only six ingredients, most of which you probably have in your pantry already (except for maybe the almond paste). I did have some almond paste in my pantry, actually, and I chose this recipe as a chance to use it. In fact, I doubled the recipe so that I could the entire can.

It was a good thing that I did double the recipe, because it doesn't make very many cookies. Martha claims that her recipe yields a dozen, but I only got a dozen and a half out of the double recipe (of course I think my cookies were a little bigger than hers).

The cookies were soft and chewy. The first batch stuck to the parchment paper a little, so I cooked the second batch 2 minutes less, and they came off the parchment with ease. When my husband and brother-in-law got home and saw them cooling on the rack, they were DYING to eat one, but I am making them wait until their trip tomorrow. I know, so mean.

Magic Blondies

The first recipe that I attempted from Martha Stewart's Cookies was the Magic Blondies recipe from page 180. I am not going in any particular order in the cookbook; I chose this recipe because I was looking for something that contained coconut to use up the large amount of shredded coconut that I found in our pantry (no idea why we have THREE bags of shredded coconut in there anyway).

The recipe chapters in this book are divided by texture. This recipe was deservedly located within the "chunky and nutty" section of the book, as they call for chocolate chips, coconut, walnuts and dried cranberries (or cherries). Because my husband has an almost pathological aversion to dried fruit, I omitted the cranberries/cherries.


The cookie batter itself is fairly basic - flour, baking powder, salt, brown sugar (no white sugar), butter, eggs and vanilla. No special techniques or tools are needed.

You add the coconut/nut/chocolate chip mixture to the top of each cookie. These are meant to be baked in muffin tins, I like a mini portion better, so I used my mini muffin pan with excellent results (same baking time).


They were absolutely delicious! The consistency is somewhere between a cookie and a brownie, with a nice crunch from the coconut and nuts and a little gooey-ness from the chocolate chips. The mini portion is perfect for a two-bite snack. The topping is a little crumbly and probably would not withstand a lot of jostling if you wanted to take them somewhere else, but I was able to pack away a few for my mom without any major damage.

Welcome! Have a Cookie!

I love cookies! I find them a delicious, perfect snack. While I try to live a healthy lifestyle and make generally nutritious choices, I am often caught with my hand (literally!!) in the cookie jar.

I also enjoy baking cookies. This is a fun activity to do with the children, and I love the feeling of creating something new from basic ingredients. I have recently been trying out all kinds of different cookie recipes, and I really felt a desire to branch out into new territory for me. So -- I got a cookie cookbook (say that five times fast!). Not any cookie cookbook, mind you, but Martha's cookie cookbook. That's right, the Martha.

So, in the spirit of Julie & Julia (I so wanted to call this blog Bitchy & Bitchier, but resisted), I am embarking on a challenge to bake all the recipes in Martha Stewart's Cookies. Without gaining 150 pounds (or 15, or 5). Unlike Julie, I am not imposing a time limit upon myself. It will probably be something like one recipe a week.

Feel free to join me on this journey and try out anything that sounds good! If you want a cookie, let me know, and I'll send a few over your way.