Cherry Bombs

Things don't seem to run quite smoothly lately. Ah, what am I talking about? Quite some long time and things are really out of hand, but I try my best to make this blog still working.
Ah, I really should stop pestering people with that rubbish, so ...

Warning! This recipe is not suitable for everyone as things are going to be a little bit lethal. Maybe that's why I have picked the name. What do I know.
I would be very lovely to get a lot more things from  the garden ... at least from some friends' gardens. He he he! Well, I did work for things, too. I got the chance to pick some sour cherries for my own needs, although I didn't know I had any need. Anyways, it would have been a shame to give it all to the birds. So I picked a small bucket full. 
Some went to be used as a dessert simply together with some curd cheese. A bag full went to the freezer and the remaining ones went into a jar ...

It's useless to resist - Double Chocolate Macadamia Cookies

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ...

... "It's useless to resist." ...

... "I am your father!" ...

... "No, no, that's not true. That's impossible!"

CUT! CUT!

Let's start over: A few weeks ago in a small, normal kitchen ... It's useless to resist. No, not the dark side. No, rather the dark chocolate of those Double Chocolate Macadamia Cookies. I'm your cookie. Yes, it is true, it is possible. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Just have a look at the list of ingredients first and you will see ...

Ingredients (get them and join):

200 g icing sugar

200 g butter

25 g cocoa powder

60 g macadamia nuts, chopped up

300 g flour

100 g dark chocolate, broken or cut into chunks

Method (no tricks, no nonsense):

Carefully melt the butter in a large saucepan. Then take it from the heat and stir in the sugar and the cocoa powder.

Add the macadamia nuts and incorporate them as well.

It's time for the flour then. Sift it in if you like or ... just go for it.

Finally give in to your feelings and use the chocolate chunk to make the cookie dough complete.

Did I say finally? Well, must have been for the cookie dough. 

Almost there! 

We only need to put small pieces of the dough on baking trays that have baking parchment on them and then put the whole lots of them into the oven for 15 minutes at 180 °C.

After a bit of cooling down ... for the cookies ... but if preparing them was too much hard work for you, you might cool down as well.

Said and done! Now it's useless to resist those lovely Double Chocolate Macadamia Cookies.

On the other hand you might reconsider your strategy. While Wookies might pull out the arms of innocent droids when they loose, you might let the cookies win anyway, but they might change something in connection with your body, if you eat them all at once on your own ... Don't ask!

Well, as far as I can see it, it's May the 4th. Does this have anything to do with Star Wars? Or with cookies? 

Don't have a bad feeling about this. Remember, if you go and make those cookies now, the 4th will be with you ... always!

Alternatively, you can put the cookies into your cookie jar and eat responsible. Well, this month's Tea Time Treats from Lavender and Lovage and What Kate Baked is about that Eh, not necessarily about eating responsibly - we are doing that anyway ... most of the time - but the theme is rather: The Biscuit Tin and Cookie Jar! Biscuits and Cookies. So for sure you find also some alternatives as to cookies at Lavender and Lovage, who is hosting Tea Time Treats this very month.

So ... have a look around and join forces for that ...

All Good Things Come to an End ...

I guess it's over! All good things come to an end. That is at least what I heard. I'm not sure right now whether to tell it, but ... I might not even have heard it, but ... well ... you know ... again ... there is this song of that ... eh ... person and ... at least she sang it. There was also something about dogs barking at the new moon, but I didn't get that quite well. Maybe I'm not the smartest kind of person. 
Anyhow, the year 2012 is drawing to it's end. Was it a good one? That depends on any persons self. You ought to know it for yourself. With 2012 being over, this will pose a few challenges ... hm ... the first few days or even weeks of the year I have to focus on writing 2013 instead of 2012. Then it will be winter still as well and the coldest months might still be ahead.
Well, then, let's say it as it is: All good things come to an end. This will be the last you are hearing from me ...
However, before that is going to happen, have a brief look at the (somehow) most viewed posts of my blog in 2012:

On rank number 5 we find TMC - Tipsy Mint Cookies. Those greenish shimmering cookies had a really short life. They definitely have come to their end as well.



Next on number 4 is Rocket, Ricotta and Chocolate ... Triple Feature Random Recipe. In fact it was more then just a recipe. As the title suggest it were three. That was really a dangerous time for a lot of chocolate was involved here. On the positive side - if you want to call it that way - there was at least also some salad involved.



We are coming to number 3. Challenge warm up à la française ... escalope de porc aux champignons brought us to some French cooking. Even with seeing that now, I get hungry again, which in fact I shouldn't, because I just had something to eat. Well, it looked slightly similar.



We are heading for number 2 with some Leftover Risotto. That was relly a good way to use some leftover risotto, although you could as well use plain rice. I wrote about this at a very nice time of the year, in May. Thinking about that, I long for warmer weather.



Finally we come to number 1 and our all time favourite: Pass me that chorizo ... eh ... we are having a chorizo stew. Somehow it must have been someone else's favourite as well. Chorizo works!



As I said: All good things come to an end and so does our top 5 for the year 2012. Talking about that, which one was your favourite post for 2012 on my blog? Just let me know!
Now, this was the last you heard from me ... for the year 2012. 
See you next year then ...

TMC - Tipsy Mint Cookies

It's time to get some ideas again and get busy in the kitchen. Although things don't feel quite easy these days, I do my best to ... eh ... do things.
Hm, maybe we can do something that is not too complicated. Do you know TMC? 
For some it is 'Traffic Message Channel' for getting some information for your navigation system, for me today it is 'Tipsy Mint Cookies'.

Some time ago I did those cookies with Ouzo. Well, things can be quite easy in life ... just substitute the Ouzo with mint liqueur and here you go. Maybe a few more little adjustments, but basically, things don't have to be so, well ... eh ... complicated.
While doing this, it reminded me of holiday in France. There we had mint water and also some ice cream with mint. Once we even made mint tea with mint water ... so we had the double power.
For our cookies, though, we are not going full power. We try to go easy on it. I still remember the rum incident ... still, however, I have a feeling those cookies are once more, not for kids, either.
Let's do it then!

Ingredients:
250 g butter
250 g icing sugar
500 g flour
100 ml mint liqueur
80 g dark chocolate

Preparation:
Get yourself a bowl for working the dough in. Add the sugar and the butter and give it a good mix through-beating-kind-of-thing.

Whilst you could use an electric device, you could do it perfectly well manually.
I don't want to go in any way political here, but ... if you do it without electricity you got some advantages. You burn some extra calories and in time you can save some money and don't go to the gym anymore (of course you need to do more then just a few cookies) and you save electricity (your hand mixer may not have such a great wattage, but still you save a bit). No wonder, we have to build so many power plants and so on. We don't have to worry so much about nuclear power, but rather about the fact that everyone wants to have so much electricity for so many things.
However, as I said, I don't want to get political, neither do I want to endorse any form of power generating or to speak against it. Just some food for thought. Do we really make things easy for us by always taking the easy way. You know it from food: fast food and convenience food seem to be easier and more convenient, but ... well, you know!
Where were we? Right, making cookies.
Once the sugar and butter got kind of creamy, we can go on and add some of the flour and some of the liqueur and start incorporating it. Bit by bit we go on until all is in and we have a nice dough.

The dough is a bit on the greenish side. That is good. We can work with that.
Hm, we might get about 16 cookies. So you can divide the dough into 16 bits, form them to small balls and then flatten them to place them on a baking tray.

Then they go into the oven at 220°C for about 15 minutes. Keep an eye on them (my oven is a bit less powerful than it pretends to be)!
After that you can take them out and leave them to cool down. Meanwhile melt the chocolate over boiling water. Then have a small spoon ready and try to get some kind of chocolaty pattern on your cookies.

I hope you enjoy them. They do not taste too strong of mint, but still they are quite nice.
Still there is a bit of greenish look on them. Those might be Tipsy Mint Cookies, but they are not that tipsy. If you have a few, you still can use your car (if you didn't have something else).

Ouzo Cookies

I must be out of my mind. One minute I thought, now would be the time to retire for the night and get enough sleep, next minute I'm in the kitchen and prepare cookies with aniseed schnapps. Maybe this would be a good recipe for a cookbook: "The drunken baker". It should be next to the Scottish whisky cake. This reminds me of a sketch comedy I once was forced to perform at a wedding. It was about baking the Scottish whisky cake. In between testing the whisky was necessary, which resulted - of course - in deteriorating speech quality.

Anyway, here I am in the kitchen preparing this cookies using up all my leftover Ouzo from the bar. Actually, the following is a Mexican recipe. Nevertheless I have refrained from using chillies in any form (but maybe I shouldn't have).

Ingredients:

250 g butter

250 g icing sugar

500 g flour

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

90 ml of aniseed schnapps (Ouzo, I didn't want to use the Ricard)

Juice of one lime (you may try as well lemon or orange, using also the zest)

Vanilla sugar for icing

Method:

Whisk together the butter and the sugar until it gets creamy, sort of. Then add the bit by bit the flour, the schnapps, the juice, and the cinnamon. Don't put all ingredients in at once. Always mix together in between. Then form a nice ball of dough, which you can roll out on a floured surface to a thickness of about 1 cm. If you have time you can also let the dough rest for half an hour, wrapped in cling film, in the fridge. I didn't bother though.

Then I used a small cup to cut out the cookies. If you have a more professional way, just do it. You could use even different shapes. I kept it simple, though. Arrange the cookies nicely on a baking tray. The oven should be heated up to 220°C by now. Transfer the tray to the oven and bake for about 15 minutes. This is if you trust your oven. What you want to achieve are nice and golden cookies. Therefore the time might be longer or shorter.

Once the cookies have the appearance you want them to have, remove them from the oven and let them cool down. A good opportunity to go for a short walk with the dog.

When you are back (that is, if you have a dog). You can sprinkle the cookies with vanilla sugar.

And remember: Don't eat this cookies and drive! That is if you eat all the cookies on your own in one go. Whatsoever, I don't know anyone who would do this, do I?

Finally, if you try them, let me know whether you like them or if they should be any different!

Cookie mania

Lately I flipped through the pages of one of the latest issues of the Jamie Oliver Magazine. There are always nice recipes inside. So I ended up trying a recipe for cookies with cranberries and white chocolate. The result was very delicious. However, within two days all the cookies were gone again.
Well - I took time and started making cookies again today. I followed the same recipe again. But this time I also felt a bit like experimenting and did additionally two other kinds of cookies:
First 100 g of butter mixed toegther with 85 g of caster sugar. This was the beginning, like in the recipe for the cranberry cookies. But now I added lemon zest and pieces of almond. Then some baking powder and some starch and finally flour until I got a nice dough.
The third kind of cookies were a bit more - hm, strange. It were going to be ginger-chilli cookies with chocolate chunks. Therefore I put some chopped fresh ginger and chilli in and pieces of dark chocolate. Apart from the flour, the starch, and baking powder I added also a few spoons of rolled oats.

However before you can start baking the cookies, you need to wrap the dough in cling film and put it in the fridge for an hour. Then you cut the dough in 1 cm thick slices and bake them for 15 minutes at 180°C.

Well, the cranberry cookies taste fantastic - really. The almond-lemon cookies are also fine, however, a certain extra crunch is missing. About the ginger-chilli-chocolate cookies - ok - you have to like ginger and chillies ... if you don't try, you don't know.