Dragon Landing

This week’s cookies were the Orange-Pistachio Milk Chocolate Chippers.  However, as I much prefer dark to milk chocolate, I decided to swap the type of chips.  The smell of the almond extract was a little overpowering as I scooped the cookies out but it mostly baked out.  I’m curious how these would have turned out using vanilla extract instead, but I suppose that is for another trial.  The orange gave them a nice amount of tang without overpowering the pistachio and chocolate.

These cookies have been voted Tim’s favorite so far of the cookies I have made.  They created a bit of a surprise around here since they contain regular chocolate chips as well as white chocolate ones.  I really liked these, but getting the macadamia nuts was a bit of a pain since my grocery store only had them in the small bags that were rather expensive by the time I’d gotten 4 of them.

The whole time I am making these, all I can think of is the “Robin 101” episode of How I Met Your Mother that I recently saw.  I may not be Canadian, but I do like my butterscotch (dark chocolate is still better though).  However, these fell a little flat to me. I think it was the granola. It was neither fish nor fowl and just stuck out as an oddity in the cookies. But the one I got which didn’t have any granola in it was really good.

I’m skipping the Mega-Chippers recipe as the whole point of those is “make them bigger.” I am perfectly capable of doing that without needing to actually spend a week‘s recipe on them.  Since the purpose of this adventure was to learn to bake better by baking a lot of things (practice makes perfect or so they say) something that is exactly the same except for the cookie scoop used will be passed over.  Maybe I’ll make one of the later recipes big.

Given that, you may ask, what’s the big deal about adding some nuts in then? Ahh, here was a challenge for me.  For most of the rest of these recipes I’ll be swapping in some different ingredients for part of the chocolate chips (and some of the other ingredients) in the Essential Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.  The swapping will let me work from a baseline to learn how different things go together (or don't).  The real challenge I had with this one was I toasted my own pecans.  Previously when putting nuts in cookies I didn’t bother toasting the nuts, but it makes a difference I found.  These were great!  I think the full 4 dozen cookies might have lasted 18 hours around here.

These had the added bonus of explaining to Jackson some cooking terminology with which he was unfamiliar.  I got to feel smart, which is a rare thing these days.

Today I re-kicked-off baking my way through the The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion with the Classic Crunchy Chocolate Chip Cookie.  I took a 6-week hiatus due to some issues with my oven.  But the issues seem to have resolved themselves, and the cookies went off without a hitch.  Both Tim and Jackson gave them a rousing thumbs up.  I'm not usually a big fan of crunchy cookies, but these were good. However, the general consensus around here is that the rest of the recipes that call for one of the Essential Recipes use the chewy one.