Perfect Peanut Butter Cookies

As a major cookie lover, I couldn't resist National Peanut Butter Cookie Day (June 12!!!). Truthfully, I've always struggled with peanut butter cookies. I love peanut butter, and clearly I love cookies, but peanut butter cookies usually disappoint me. Either the peanut butter flavor isn't strong enough, or, more often, the cookie texture is too dry and sandy. Peanut butter isn't dry and sandy, why are peanut butter cookies dry and sandy?

When I say these are perfect, it's not just my opinion; these cookies were a collaborative effort. Mutliple recipes and tweaks were attempted and sampled by my neighbors (as well as Chad and I, of course), until we were all convinced that these were the BEST peanut butter cookies we had ever had. Ever.

These cookies are very peanut butter-y with a cookie texture similar to the best chocolate chip cookies. Just a little crisp on the outside, with a moist chewy cookie within. The key to this is in the flour. First, don't use too much flour, because it will dry out the cookies! Second, use bread flour! Unlike many baked desserts, here we are aiming for a more chewy texture. To accomplish this you want to use a flour with a high gluten content, and mix the cookies for a little bit longer. The butter and the peanut butter will prevent most of the gluten formation, but the little bit you get makes a huge difference. You can substitute all purpose flour, but you will lose a bit of the chewyness of the cookie.


Peanut Butter Cookies

1/2 stick butter, softened

130 g or 1/2 cup peanut butter

230 g or 1 cup sugar 1 tsp molasses

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 egg
150 g or 1 1/4 cups bread flour 

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream together the butter, peanut butter, sugar, molasses, salt, and baking powder. Beat until the mixture is light and fluffy.
3. Scrape the bowl, then add the egg and beat until light and fluffy again. Scrape and beat one more time before adding the flour.
4. Add the flour and mix until just combined. Scrape the bowl well, then mix for an additional minute.
5. Place heaping tablespoonfuls of cookie dough on a prepared baking sheet spaced 2-3 inches apart.
6. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
7. Allow to cool on cookie sheet for at least 5 minutes before transferring to rack to cool completely.

Rocky Road Cookies

June 2 is National Rocky Road Ice Cream Day. As much as I love Rocky Road ice cream now, I have to admit that I wasn't actually a fan of Rocky Road growing up. I loved ice cream, I loved chocolate ice cream, I loved marshmallows, and I hated nuts. That last one? It ruined a lot of desserts for me. Countless trays of brownies I considered useless. However! I have thankfully come to my senses, and can now say that I love 'em.

When I saw National Rocky Road Ice Cream day as and option I was immediately thrilled. The only problem is that I don't have a way to actually make ice cream. Hmm. I know that you can make ice cream without a machine by stirring and breaking things up over the course of a few hours, but I also know that it results in an inferior product. I love making high effort foods, but not for inferior results!

So I adapted Rocky Road ice cream into a cookie. Because the truth is, I have a near uncontrollable weakness for cookies. I have some decent control over the boxes of cookies from the store, but put a cafeteria cookie in front of me and I'm done. Homemade cookies? I consider myself to have shown great self control if the dough even gets baked. Basically, I will make anything I can into a cookie.

The result is a delicious and very chocolately cookie, with marshmallow and almond inside. The marshmallows largely bake into the cookie (hence you can't see them in the photo) giving a great chewy texture on the inside to complement the crisp exterior. If you want your marshmallows to remain more visible, just let them sit out on a plate or in a bowl overnight to dry out a touch.

Rocky Road Cookies

1/2 stick butter, softened

230 g or 1 cup sugar
1 tsp molasses

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 egg
scant 1/2 cup cocoa powder

125 g or 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup chopped almonds (or other nut of choice)
1/2 cup mini marshmallows

1. Cream together the butter, sugar, molasses, salt, and baking soda until fluffy.
2. Add the egg, and beat until light a fluffy again.
3. Add the cocoa powder and mix until well incorporated, scraping the bowl several times.
4. Add the flour and mix until just combined.
5. Wrap dough in plastic, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
6. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and remove the dough from the refrigerator. Separate into dough balls; I made 16 dough balls with this recipe and divided them by cutting the dough into a grid on my cutting board.
7. Take each dough ball and place it in the palm of one hand. Use the thumb of your other hand to make a hole in each dough ball. Place marshmallows and almonds into the hole (I used 2 marshmallows and a generous two finger pinch of almonds per cookies).
8. Carefully seal the cookie closed, and roll between your hands to bring it back to a ball shape.
9. Place cookies on baking sheet, spaced 2-3 inches apart.
10. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
11. Allow to cool on cookie sheet for at least 5 minutes before transferring to rack to cool completely.

Cherry Almond Cake

I've long since had a fascination with food holidays. You know, like National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, National Drink Beer Day, National Coffee Day (which is brilliantly the day after National Drink Beer Day). I don't understand the point of them, not even a little bit, but they seem so fun all the same. I mean, why not? This year I realized it was National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day on the actual day (little late), and then got curious about what other food holidays there were. Since I was supposed to be writing my dissertation, it almost goes without saying that I was suddenly enthralled with all of the various days. 

I realized that in any given week there was at least one food holiday that I could get excited about. Excited enough to try or create a new recipe for it. 

Challenge Accepted.

This Sunday, May 26, is National Cherry Dessert Day. There are a lot of cherry-containing desserts out there, and a lot of them are good. But what if you're in the mood for something a little less sweet? A little more "special Sunday breakfast" and a little less "there goes bathing suit season." Then I highly recommend this cake. It's a more dense, coffee cake-ish, cake. Don't get me wrong, it definitely could qualify as dessert. But with half of the flour being almond flour, and hefty amount of egg, and a moderate amount of sugar....I think we can call it nutritious. Unlike a lot of cakes, I thought this one improved with age. At two days post-baking it seemed to hit just the right level of moist, with the flavors having some added depth.

Cherry Almond Cake

1/2 stick butter, softened

175 g or 3/4 cup sugar

1/4 cups honey

2 tbsp cream 28 g

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp baking soda

5 eggs

150 g or 1.5 cups almond flour

150 g or 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour*

1 can cherries, drained (I used cherries in water to keep the sweetness level down. Let your tastebuds be your guide!)

1. Preheat your oven to 325 degrees, and drain the cherries. Prepare a 9 inch round baking dish; I'm a fan of buttering and flouring the pan.
2. Cream together the butter, sugar, and honey. It will not become particularly fluffy because of the honey, so just mix until well combined.
3. Add the cream, and salt, mix until combined.
4. Add the first three eggs, mix completely into the batter, then mix in the remaining two.
5. Add the almond flour, mix completely.
6. Finally, add the flour and baking soda, and mix until just combined.
7. Place the drained cherries into the bottom of the baking dish. I used about 3/4 of the can, though you could certainly add the entire can.
8. Pour the cake batter over the cherries, and place in oven.
9. Bake for 25-30 minutes.
10. Once baked, allow to stand for 5 minutes, then turn the cake out onto a pan.
11. After the cake has completely cooled, dust with powdered sugar.

*If you're feeling particularly wholesome, substitute the all purpose flour for white whole wheat. 

A Hike to Remember

Among the many, many things we did this summer, Chad and I took a trip to Colorado. There is a race out there called the Leadville 100 Mountain Bike Race. As the name implies, it’s 100 miles (closer to 104, actually), raced on a mountain bike, and at high elevation (mostly over 10,000 feet). Chad got an entry to the race through a lottery last winter, so we’d been planning to make the trip for a few months. But I’ll talk more about the race itself later this week.

We knew that since we were going to take over a week off to make the trip, we wanted to do more than just the race. So we made plans to camp, hike, and ride for the first half of the trip. In the week before leaving, we found out that some friends of ours would be camping in a different part of the state than we had planned to. We could go camp with them, which would be a lot of fun, but it would have come at the sacrifice of hiking a 14er like we had planned. We discussed it for a few days, but Chad insisted that he wanted to do the hike more than being able to mountain bike with friends.

Tuesday, August 7, we set out to hike Mount Shavano. I was really worried about getting caught in an afternoon storm while above the treeline, after having read and heard a number of horror stories. We started the hike before sunrise, and planned to be back at the car shortly after noon. I was dealing with an ankle injury, so we figured we needed to plan for almost as much time to descend the mountain as we would need to ascend it.

It was absolutely gorgeous. The path had us follow the Colorado Trail for about a quarter of a mile before we began up the path to summit Mount Shavano. The trail alternated between incredible steep sections, and less steep sections, but there was never any doubt that you were headed up. At one point we walked along a beautiful little mountain creek, which we took advantage of for pictures on the way down.

Finally, we made it above the tree line! In Colorado the average elevation of the treeline is 12,000 feet. Since the trail head is at about 9,800 this marked the halfway point! Above the treeline there were soooooo many chipmunks! Seriously, they were everywhere. It was adorable. We also spotted what we thought at the time to be a groundhog, but later found out was a marmot...also adorable.

Above the treeline the trail was really steep. There were a lot of sections where the percent grade was at least 100% (100% grade equates to a 45 degree angle). We’re both in pretty good shape (well, depending who you ask, we have high standards and tend to compare ourselves to high level athletes), so the effort of climbing was intense but manageable. We had taken precautions to handle the high altitude, and in fact noticed no issues aside from using more of our lung volume. But. My ankle was struggling. The steepness of the trail was forcing it to stretch back much further than was comfortable. The steepness also prohibited me from stepping only on the front of my foot, as that simply wasn’t enough traction on the rock/gravel trail. I pushed for a while, but promised Chad I wouldn’t injure myself further. Personally I was okay with regressing the injury-it was worth it for the chance to do this hike-but I wasn’t okay with making it worse.

Finally I realized that I was on the edge of making it worse. I decided to try a few steps down the mountain to see how difficult that would be. From a time standpoint, if it was going to take me as long to go down as it had to come up we were close to needing to turn around. When I started stepping down I realized that the poor traction while traveling up was much worse going down, which quite frankly scared me. If I’m going to be completely honest, I wanted to panic a bit.

I turned to Chad, and apologized. I needed to turn around. We weren’t to the summit yet, by our estimates we were at about 13,000 feet. It was a clear, crisp morning, and the view was gorgeous. Already we were above the other summits we could see from that side of the mountain. When I told Chad that I needed to turn around he reassured me that it was fine, but that we needed to pause where we were for a moment because he had a surprise.

I promptly sat down. Right in the middle of the trail. To be fair, we had not seen a single person out there besides ourselves, so I wasn’t worried about being in the way. But still, I probably wouldn’t have plopped quite that way if I had known what was coming.

Chad set his pack down behind me. While I stared out at the view, he rummaged down to the bottom, then stood up.

He came around and kneeled in front of me, and proposed.

I emphatically said yes, kissed him, and wiped my eyes. 

Like I said, there wasn't anyone else around, so this is our immediately post-engagement self portrait.

The ring was originally my great-grandmothers. The story goes that it was given to her by her parents on her 16th birthday. They told her that they wanted her to marry whoever she truly loved, and not for a diamond. So they gave her a diamond of her own. As it turns out, she married a doctor who bought her many other treasures, but they were certainly in love. A rather apt history for an engagement ring, don’t you think?