The Yum Yum Factor

who wouldn't want a cookie with some Bugels on top?? One of my favourite cookies is my Compost Cookie Bar   - I used to make  Compost Cookie Bars for the kiddies  when The Kid was at his Magical Unicorn School, using fun junk like Cap'n Crunch, caramel corn, Bugels, candy canes. I was very popular at his school. I needed a dessert to serve with Chili Verde, Vegan Jackfruit Pozole and a Beet and Roasted Fennel Salad with Pepita Crema for a drop in dinner at The Depanneur . I guess I could have gone the more traditional Mexican cookie route but where's the fun in that? Green & Black had sent me a few bars of their Organic Maya Gold   to play around with and , after tasting it, I knew it would make the perfect base for Mexican Compost Cookie Bars. The 60% dark chocolate bar's flavours are taken from a traditional Mayan drink from Belize so it's full of nutmeg, cinnamon and orange - a love match with salty, porky, chicharron. Whe...

Okay, I will be straight with you. I don't give a rat's ass about football and I have no interest in eating three quarters of the traditional SuperBowl food that I see all all over the internet and on television. If you want to eat 30 layer bean dip and giant casseroles of melted Velveeta you probably won't want to hear my ideas about what I think makes a great game day spread and I am okay with that. I won't take it personally when you tell me I am nuts to recommend middle eastern inspired crashed potatoes instead of nachos covered in queso if you promise to not take it personally when I refuse to taste your delicious dip made with a package of dried onion soup, uncooked ramen noodles and nutella mixed and sour cream. Deal? So, just because I don't care about football doesn't mean I don't care about a good party with great food, drinks and friends and with that in mind, I always accept an invitation to watch the game and, more importantly, eat w...

I have participated in the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap since it's inception so, seeing that this is the fourth annual swap, this is my fourth time baking for three fellow food bloggers. This is always a bit stressful because cooking for other people who blog about cooking is a bit of pressure. What if my cookies are terrible? What if they got lost in the mail and sit on a shelf at some post office in Kapuskasing  for a month and get all stale and hard? What if the recipient thinks they taste like dust and cobwebs, dipped in chalk?

As we all know, we are knee deep into holiday baking season and I wanted to make all new cookies this year and I get sick of making lime meltaways and gingersnaps year after year, even if that disappoints some of my people. I had great success with   Chai Tea Cookies , Cardamom Quince Layer Cookies  and Chocolate Dipped Gingery Pecan Shortbread and wanted one last cookie to round things out. I guess it's because my kid is no longer little that I am gravitating towards more grown up flavours and away from just sweet and easy. After a wine fueled pinning frenzy, I found these cookies on Rock Recipes and couldn't get them out of my mind. The basic cookie dough looked great but I detest chocolate mint chips with a white hot passion. Actually, I only like fresh mint and have never found any sort of food item that contains any sort of mint extract that I would want to eat. I also really prefer chocolate to anything else so I used his basic cookie recipe and then changed it to s...

I have been searching for this recipe for days, knowing that I made them and that I wanted to make them again. I have not lost my mind, it just seems that this ten year old recipe was supposed to auto publish and it never did lol! So, here you are, a tasty cookie recipe from the past. Chocolate Dipped Gingery Pecan  Shortbread 1 cup flour 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/4 tsp salt 1/2 cup butter, room temp 1/3 cup sugar 1/2 cup raw pecans, coarsely chopped 1 tsp vanilla approx 100 grams dark chocolate (I used 70%) 2 tbls butter another 1/4 to 1/3 cup pecans, more finely chopped than the first 1/2 cup 2 tbls finely chopped crystallized ginger 1/2 tsp fleur de sel or some other coarse finishing salt Preheat the oven to 325F Whisk the flour, baking powder in salt together in a bowl and set aside. Cream your butter and sugar together with the paddle attachment until nice and creamy - I like to do this for a good five minutes, scraping down the sides as needed. Add the vani...

It's that time again, time for   Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap    ! Do you have any idea how much pressure it is to bake cookies for three other food bloggers? When you are baking for your kid's teacher, your mom, your neighbour's and your mailman, you can make simple, delicious cookies. You can whip up ginger snaps, shortbread and sugar cookies and everyone is thrilled. You can't send a delicious, simple shortbread to three other food bloggers though because they can do that themselves. That would be like making strawberry freezer jam for Martha Stewart. It is certainly tasty but it just won't do.  I spent the week thinking I was going to make Cardamom spiced palmiers until I realized that those are not the best cookies to be mailing out. They really are best eaten in the first couple of days so what would happen if the package was lost or delayed? What if the palmiers showed up all stale and horrible? I am already in trouble over the whole Marcella Haza...

I am going to be very honest with you right now. The Great Blogger Cookie Swap was happening and the deadline for shipping was only days away. I had assumed, this whole time, that I was going to make cardamom/rosewater palmiers and had planned to make them at the very last minute to ensure their freshness upon delivery. As the time approached, I started panicking. What if they got lost in the mail? What if the Canada Post truck fell down a sink hole? What if my recipients opened their package only to find stale, horrible palmier train wreck cookies that would bring shame upon all of our houses??? Instead, I made the Cardamom Quince Layer Cookies that went out to the three bloggers who were assigned to me. These are really good but very strongly flavoured and when they are warm, out of the oven, they are incredibly cardamomish and after eating one like that, I had a mild breakdown. THEY WERE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO SEND TO OTHER FOOD BLOGGERS FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING OH HOLY NIGHT! ...

For a few years I made artwork with glass. When The Kid was a toddler and we owned a SFX (that's special effects for you civilians) shop, I was awarded my own Harry Potter workspace in a corner, under the stairs. I had been dabbling in stained glass before that and this enabled me to finally work in a bigger format, all on my own.

I volunteered to make a dozen of some sort of baked good for The Kid's christmas party at school tomorrow and he requested the compost bars. The only problem is that these have to appeal to kids from the age of 3 to 13 so I had to rethink them a tiny bit to make them more kid friendly. They also had to be nut free since you can't take anything with any nuts in them anywhere anymore. I took out all the nuts and seeds and subbed in milk chocolate to make them a bit sweeter. I also kept the salty toppings to a minimum and only used to some crushed up bugles although, potato chips would have worked well too but I saw the bag of bugles in the store and was instantly transported back to my childhood. I used to LOVE bugles and quite frankly, I didn't even know you could still buy them. I couldn't resist. I love the look of the whole kernels of caramel corn on there too. The toppings you can throw on these things are pretty endless but I thought I would share another v...

It was either drink that damned eggnog or cook with it and the last thing I need to do right now is drink a container of eggnog so I had no choice. I know that might sound weird because you would think eating a ton of cookies with eggnog in them is worse than drinking the stuff, but i rarely eat much of my own baking so it's kind of like putting it away in the back of the closet where I will forget about it.

It's time for the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap again! I participated last year and not only was it fun to  bake a new kind of cookie and send them to other people, but I received three different kinds of cookies in the mail myself. I had actually not even considered the cookies I would be getting until the first batch of cookies arrived. The best part of a cookie swap was the one part I hadn't factored into the situation - THE SWAP ASPECT. It's always wonderful to get delicious cookies that someone else baked for you and there is something about getting a care package of treats in the mail that is still so exiting. So, this year I wanted to make something different a bit from all of the traditional christmas cookies. To be honest, I would have loved to make my compost cookies because I am all about those babies but it has to be something you haven't featured on your blog before so they were out. Because I made some oatmeal bars last week, I had bars on the...

Christmas season is upon us and, as always, I have a couple of cookie exchanges coming up and  have been combing the internet for inspiration so I can make something shiny and new. I also wanted to enter the cookie contest over at  Manitoba Canola Growers  but the deadline is today at 4pm so that put me on a bit of a deadline. I tend to procrastinate until it's almost too late and then I fly into action - I enjoy working under pressure. I have been told that all that stress will burn away the pounds but I have yet to find this to be true. It probably doesn't help that my stressful energy is spent baking things that must be tasted I suppose.

The Compost Cookie   (<---click for the recipe) Okay, I have made a couple of slightly different versions of this cookie and they just keep getting better and better. Today I made them with blue corn tortillas, pretzels and roasted pumpkin seeds for the savoury and equal amounts of skor bits, milk chocolate chips and butterscotch chips for my sweet baking ingredients. I also used plain dark coffee grounds instead of the vanilla flavoured coffee I used for the first couple of batches. Although the vanilla coffee was fantastic in the cookie, using just a good, dark sumatra changed the game for me. You know, I don't like flavoured coffee to drink so I am not sure why I thought I would love it in a cookie but it's probably along the same lines as "only cook with wine you would also want to drink". While I am being real here, let's also call it like we see it. Sure, this cookie is heaven for all of us who love salty and sweet altogether but you know what thi...

My son has his first week of March break this week so we are hanging out and doing all sorts of fun stuff. He certainly deserves some cookies to enjoy on his week of nothing but video games til 1am, sleeping in till mid morning and munching bon bons on the couch while I fan him with a palm frond and rub scented oils into his tender feet. Originally we were thinking chocolate chip but that just seemed so boring. We all know there are amazing chocolate chip cookies to be had out there and The Neighbour makes them for him all the time. As I was nosing around the internet I kept coming upon versions of these compost cookies from Momofuku Milk Bar. The only problem was that they all made too many cookies and as I have said many times, I have no self control around certain foods and a cookie that was full of salty AND sweet? Forget about it.

I volunteered to bake some sweet treats for our school's Ladies Night this weekend and really wanted to try something new. I happened to have a bag of meyer lemons AND had a request for lemon bars  so those were definitely on the table. Those lemon bars are so good it's a shame to not make them and I want to make sure that at least one dessert is going to be guaranteed to be delicious. I have a reputation to uphold over here. That said, my lemons were small so I threw TWO into the food processor instead of one and it was just a bit too much - they had a really mild, bitter aftertaste that wasn't strong enough to make me not want to eat them, just enough to prevent them from being fabulous. Learn by mistake and even if you think your lemon is tiny, just use one. For a second treat, I was thinking of something chocolately to balance out the sweet, tarty lemon bars but then I saw these Espresso Meringues and pinned them and couldn't stop thinking about them. I love...

I like to bake at christmas time and up until recently it was pretty much the only time I baked all year and unless they are all lying to me, my friends and family seem to really enjoy the treats I make for them. I get special requests for specific things and I always like to throw one or two new things into the mix. This year I had decided I would do chocolate pecan toffee, chambord dark chocolate truffles, lime melt aways (my mother in law would probably stop talking to me if I didn't make these for her), the cardamom ginger cookies I made for the Great Blogger Cookie Exchange and a delicious Lemon Almond Meringue that I found on Joy the Baker. There was one small snag this year though. We decided on Wednesday night to book a week in Tulum, Mexico, leaving Saturday, which is fabulous, no? Except that when I woke up Thursday morning, I realized that if I was going to put together baking gift boxes for Little Shack's teachers, I was going to have to make all of those thin...

 I was so excited to sign on to participate in  The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap  because it meant I could connect with three other bloggers (most likely Canadian as shipping food across borders gets squicky in a post 9-11 world where xmas cookies are now eyed suspiciously ). It also meant that I would receive a dozen cookies from three of my fellow bloggers and that is always a great thing. I love eating other people's baked goods. My favourite and most requested cookie is a really spicy, crispy ginger snap but I have written about that on my blog and we were instructed to make something that we have never blogged about so that meant I either had to make something completely different or change up my standard ginger snap. I have been pretty obsessed with cardamom for the last few months so I started searching out a yummy sounding cookie with cardamom but all I was seeing were sugar cookies with cardamom added to the dough and that didn't interest me...

Okay people, the holidays are quickly approaching and that means people dropping by with gifts and lovely bottles of wine to share and you need to be prepared. In the olden days, I would make fussy appetizers and hor d 'oeuvres that would require hours in the kitchen and would often take me away from my guests. The oohs and ahhs were good for the ego but I realized that just as I was ready to sit down and relax, my friends were getting their coats on to leave. I thought it was more important to wow them than to sit and have a glass of wine with them but with age comes wisdom and with wisdom comes a much more enjoyable, relaxed holiday season.  What I do now is make sure my fridge is stocked with a variety of nice cheeses, a couple of nice charcuterie items like pate, sliced italian salamis etc and spicy, savoury jams.jellies  and chutneys.  This way, I feel like I can invite friends over last minute without having to worry about what I am going to serve the...

I didn't want to make soup today. It was 12 degrees F outside, the windows are open and Little Shack and I spent the afternoon doing some spring cleaning. Soup is for -10 and snow so I think that it's time to put Friday Soup day on hiatus. There was something else that I did want to make instead of soup. I wanted to make oatmeal cookies today but couldn't find an oatmeal cookie that didn't require something I didn't have in the house. Suddenly, the image of a peanut butter cookie popped into my head. I NEVER make peanut butter anything anymore because all schools, community centres and camps etc are peanut free zones so if you have kids and you live in Toronto, you just don't bake with peanuts. It almost feels like I am making my son a stiff martini when I am baking up a peanutty confection to be honest and I do like to live on the wild side. I really liked the sound of this recipe  from Dolcetto Confections and I had everything on hand, including some c...