Raspberry Crumb Bars

These very delicious bars (if I may say so) were made for the school Science day event breakfast. Surprisingly, I had a hard time finding a recipe that I liked just upon reading. Finally found one that looked promising. I did not have any fresh raspberries so I subbed frozen blueberries and they still turned out great in the end.

2 1/2 cups flour

2/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/4 sticks salted butter softened
1/2 cup rolled oats or quick cooking oats
1/4 cup packed light brown sugar

3/4 cup raspberry jam (I prefer jam here not jelly)
3/4 cup fresh raspberries or blueberries (fresh or frozen)
1 tablespoon lemon juice


Stir together the flour, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Dice the butter into pieces if its cold, or just dump it in if soft, and mix into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter, food processor until the mixture resembles wet sand. Reserve 1 1/4 cups of the mixture, and press the remaining into a foil lined 13x9" pan. Bake on 375 F for 15 minutes.

While that's baking, mix the reserved topping with the oats and brown sugar.
Mix the jam, raspberries/blueberries and lemon/lime juice together and mash lightly.
Spread the jam mixture over the base, then top with the crumb mixture. I clump the mixture a bit before sprinkling it to give it some texture. Bake on 375 F for about 23 to 25 minutes. Let it cool completely before cutting into about 24 squares.

Pinewood Derby Cupcakes

WASC mini-cupcakes with my regular American buttercream colored green and piped on with a grass tip. The cars were made with Wilton candy melts in red and yellow, using a car shaped plastic mold that I got from Mumbai when shopping with my very resourceful niece. I'll do a post on how to make the molded chocolate sometime soon. They're very simple to make, but can be time consuming if you need to make a lot of them. But they really dress up cookies and cupcakes, and the options with the molds available today are endless!

PS. The red and blue cupcake liners were a surprise. I got them for 99cents at Michaels. The brand is Celebrate it and as you can see the colors stayed true through the baking and they didn't separate from the cake either. Yay for that!

Fruit and yogurt parfaits

Very easy to make layered fruit and yogurt parfaits.
The very delicious granola was home made from a friend's secret recipe :-)

The yogurt was Trader Joe's french vanilla yogurt. The fruits were fresh berries tossed with a sprinkle of sugar. I used little 5 oz cups since these were for a staff appreciation breakfast buffet.

Raspberry (Almond) Thumbprint Shortbread Cookies

Its a pity that I have not tried making these cookies before. They're so super simple to make and taste delicious. I've seen them on so many websites but I always pick a vanilla or chocolate flavored cookie over an almond flavored one. 

I was looking for a recipe without chocolate for a change and this one from the Land O'Lakes website seemed ideal.  I rate it 10/10 for ease of making and 9/10 in taste.

Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter at room temp

2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 tsp almond extract ( I used 1 tsp only)

Dash of salt

2 cups flour

Jam of your choice (about 1/2 cup)

Preheat the oven to 350 deg (I set it to 340 so that the cookies wouldn't flatten too much)

Cream the butter, almond extract and sugar for 3-4 minutes, scraping down the bowl a few times.

Add salt, sifted flour and stir on lowest speed a few times until it comes together. Turn off the mixer and mix the rest by hand a few times to incorporate. Kneading or stirring too much will toughen the cookie.

Roll the dough into 1 inch balls and place on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Use your index finger (sorry not the thumb :) ) to make an indentation in the dough. I used a chapstick tube on a few cookies. Add about 1/4 tsp jam into the indentations. Do not overfill (jam will heat and run over) and do not underfill (jam will bake into a thin layer and cookies will look quite sad...this happened to a lot of the cookies).  It takes some trial and error on the 1st few cookies to get it right,

Bake for about 10 - 18 mins depending on the size of the cookies. Start checking on them at 10 mins and take them out when the edges are golden and the tops are still pale brown. Overbaking can make the cookies too crisp.

While the cookies are cooling, mix about 3/4 cup to 1 cup of confectioner's/10x/icing sugar with about 2-3 tbsp of water and a couple of drops of almond extract until it is a smooth pourable glaze. Keep adding water in drops if you feel it is too thick. Add some more sugar if it ends up too thin. Spoon it into a ziploc bag and zip shut. Snip off the very end of one corner and drizzle the glaze over the cookies.

Enjoy!

 



Our Current Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookie

This is our current favorite recipe for Chocolate chip cookies. Its from the King Arthur Flour website. I do not use the almond extract as recommended by the recipe and I use milk chocolate chips or butterscotch chips instead of semi-sweet.

• 2/3 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed
• 2/3 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup Crisco/Vegetable shortening
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon vinegar, cider or white
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 large egg
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 cups milk chocolate chips/any chips

Bring your eggs, butter to room temp.
Add the sugars, butter, shortening, vanilla, salt, baking soda, vinegar in this order in a bowl and cream on medium speed for atleast 2 minutes, scraping down the sides and bottom intermittently.
Technically speaking. creaming is a process of mixing the sugar and butter well so that the sugar is partially dissolved in the softened butter. So if its looking grainy because the butter was too cold or the brown sugar was too hard, beat it some more until you see a creamier, sticking to the sides of the bowl kind of mixture. Make sure your butter is not melted before creaming because you will never be able to cream melted butter and sugar.
Enough about creaming! Add the eggs one at a time, stirring lightly between additions. Mix well for about 30 seconds. Add the 2 cups of flour, sifted and mix in spurts to avoid overmixing, After about 10-20 seconds of mixing, I usually mix the rest by hand. Add the chocolate chips and mix well. Drop tablespoonfulls on wax paper lined cookie sheet and freeze the sheet for atleast 30 mins. Once frozen, I dump them all into a bag and place in the freezer for about 12-24 hrs. Next day, I preheat the oven to 350 and bake the cookies for about 9-12 mins until the cookies are pale golden at the edges. The top may look underdone but it continues cooking for a few seconds after you take it out. It also yields a chewier cookie.
Freezing the dough is supposed to bring out the caramel flavor in the cookies. For me its a make-ahead kind of conveninence. I can bake smaller batches as required. Nothing beats fresh from the oven, warm, chewy chocolate chip  cookies!

Happy Holidays!

Nothing but the usual....decorated cookies for the Holidays.

Also pictured here are my new stackable cookie racks. I bought a set of 3 racks on sale for 7.99 at ACMoore yeah..!

These cookies were part of a tray of goodies I prepared for Altaf's workplace...I heard they got good reviews. Yay! Happy Holidays Everyone!

Rainbow cookies

These were cupcakes for little birthday girl Shivani who loves rainbows! The toppers are rainbow shaped iced cookies. I don't have a rainbow shaped cookie cutter but I was able to combine a few cutters to make these cookies ("jugaad" as they say back home in Bombay).
From the picture below you should be able to see I used a round cookie cutter, a tiny scalloped circle cutter and the bottom of a tulip shaped cutter. Each circle I cut into two using my bench scraper (not pictured but a knife would do). Then cut off the corners with the same. Cut out two scalloped circles and cut off a small portion. Shaped the  inner curve of the rainbow using the tulip cutter bottom (any small circle would do) and then pieced it all together.

The dough was very firm, straight from the freezer. I roll out the dough into sheets between freezer paper/wax paper/parchment/cling wrap and then freeze for 15 mins before cutting cookies. It preserves the shapes well when transferring to the final baking sheet.

Once the cookies bake, the shapes merge together to form a single cookie. They should still be handled carefully as the joints are a bit fragile. Let them cool completely before picking them up.
Here they are all ready to be iced!

The icing was Royal icing (Sweetopia's recipe) iced in 6 colors of the rainbow...I didn't feel like doing indigo :-) and piped on with parchment cones. I realized I did not have 6 piping tips in size 3 or 4..so I had no choice but to try parchment. This was my1st ever attempt with making and using parchment but it went a lot smoother than I thought it would and results wise you wouldn't know the difference. Speaking of differences...do you spot the odd one out in the cookies below? Arsh got to eat that cookie :-)

 The icing consistency I kept thicker than usual (about 8-9 seconds on Marian's 10 second scale) so that they wouldn't run or spread but at the same time would blend with each for a smooth top. I was afraid that the colors would bleed into each other but thankfully nothing of the sort happened.

Here they are with the clouds piped on in white.

And the final result...as toppers on the cupcakes!