Pumpkin Snickerdoodles!

I've been having some issues with the knitting front today. I went to wind a couple more balls of yarn and I encountered an enormous tangle in the first ball of Felici. Luckily, I managed to save most of the yarn and only had to cut 1/8th of an inch off of the ball of yarn.

Though, if I didn't spend two hours unwinding the and untangling the knot myself, I would have sworn that Monty had jumped up and broken the yarn himself. I adjusted his eyes today and he sure looks devious enough right now to do it himself!

So, instead of spending more time winding yarn, I decided to take a break and bake a little bit. When I was on the Loopy Ewe blog earlier this week, I managed to find a recipe for cream cheese filled pumpkin snickerdoodle cookies. They looked so good that I had to try them myself! Of course, that isn't the only reason why I wanted to make the cookies. They happen to be filled on the inside and I've never made a cookie with a filling before or even had a cookie with a filling. The closest to that I have ever had was a thumbprint cookie and you can see the filling on top of that one.

The verdict for the cookies is: tasty, but far too challenging to make.

They are big fluffy cookies with the cream cheese filling inside them. And I do mean big! Even when I tried to make them smaller they were still large cookies that took up at least half of a dessert plate. They are so fluffy that it is like eating pumpkin bread instead of pumpkin cookies.

The cookies were fairly difficult to make. The dough was so sticky that it would stick to everything even if you did chill it in the fridge for an hour. It made it really hard to flatten into pancake shapes and put the filling in the cookies. It is even more difficult if you tend to run warm and you can't get your hands cooled down enough to handle the dough without it sticking to everything. And the amount of filling you had to put in was too small an amount to actually see or really taste when you ate them.

I really, really love the idea of these cookies, but I don't think the recipe and I agreed with each other. I think I might take this as inspiration and try to make a more user friendly recipe. I would totally save the base cookie of this recipe though and just make them drop cookies for a big fluffy pumpkin cookie. They are good, but they just aren't what I was looking for.

 And as a final note about the yarn tangle disaster: I did manage to do a decent Russian Join on the two broken ends and then finish winding it into a ball. I think Monty approves too!

The Phenomenon of Mug Cakes

Moistest Very Vanilla Mug Cake from Table for Two

Remember that one fateful day on the internet when you got really bored and started getting interested in cooking because your roommate could cook better than you?

I remember that day well. I have such a massive sweet tooth and I was looking for quick cakes and cookies. I stumbled upon the mug cake. It was quick and easy to make if you measured everything right. And it made the perfect amount for one person so you didn't have to share.

Then time passed and I forgot about the humble little mug cake. I had moved on to bigger cakes and fiddling with perfecting the proper cup of tea. Then cookies came out to play with a brief but still lingering interest in velvet cakes. Then the savory side of cooking called to me and the mug cake was all but forgotten. A novelty in a bookstore when you turned to your mom and scoffed that somebody actually published an entire cookbook on how to make different mug cakes.

Oh, sweet little tasty mug cake, forgive me in my arrogance. I see now that you are something special. Something to be written down in every family cookbook just waiting to be played with and perfected in each passing generation. Small enough to have big disasters with and big enough to satisfy a sweet craving especially made for one or two people. And the perfect way to make a cake without an oven as long as you have a microwave.

I bet you would be the perfect venue for finally figuring out my perfect red velvet cake.

Egg Nests

Taken with Instagram

“Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way” ― Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

A while ago I stumbled across a recipe for egg nests. Being the curious person that I am, I followed the recipe to the letter and made an egg for my brother and me. If you remember having eggs in a basket when you were little, this is almost exactly like that. Only instead of using bread for your basket, you whip up the egg whites to create the basket. Since this recipe came from an old french children's cookbook originally, I don't think very many people know about it.  My mindset is if a child could do it, then I can do it. And I know that if I can do it, then other people can do it. I am still a beginner cook after all.

Step 1: Preheat oven to 450. Separate egg yolk and whip egg whites

In my opinion, the hardest part to do is the very first step. You have to separate the egg yolk from the egg white. This requires some hand-eye coordination to do and some patience. As you can see, I separated the egg well, but I wasn't very careful putting the egg yolk in a separate container. It broke and I had a little puddle of yolk instead of a whole yolk like I did the first time.

Whipping the egg isn't very difficult. The difficult part is knowing when to stop. You basically stop when the egg whites get nice and fluffy and you get stiff peaks hanging off of your beaters when you pull them out. It is fun watching the liquid whites turn into clouds. It is also the same technique that you use to make the meringue on top of the lemon meringue pies. I hope to make one of those one day since whipping the egg whites up into clouds is so easy.

Step 2: Fold in 1/4 cup of cheese and put on foil lined baking tray

The second part is where I decided to experiment a little this time. The recipe calls for Parmesan cheese and salt to keep the egg whites a pretty white. I didn't have any Parmesan on hand, so I decided to put in some cheddar cheese. I also ground up some rosemary and a little bit of sage go fold into the egg whites too. It doesn't make it look as pretty, but it was tasty.

The part you have to remember about this step is that you have to press a deep hole in the middle of your cloud. This will let you have an indent to put your yolk in so it won't slide out. The deeper you make this indentation, the more obvious it will be when you go to put the yolk in. The tin foil makes for very easy clean up later. You won't have to clean the baking tray because the egg won't even touch it. If it does stick, it will be on the tin foil. My mom keeps the non-stick tin foil in the house, so I didn't have any trouble with sticking at all.

Step 3: Bake for 3 minutes, pour in yolk, bake for 3 more minutes

The baking step actually takes place in two separate steps. First you bake just the egg whites for three minutes. Then you have to slide the tray out of the oven and carefully pour in the egg yolk.Then you cook the egg whites again with the yolk for another three minutes to get a light browning on the egg whites and to bake the egg yolk.

If you accidentally break the yolk like I did, it will still fit in the egg basket you have made. It will just cook up a little bit harder and won't be as runny as it would be if the entire yolk was in tact. You might want to experiment breaking the yolk on purpose if you are one of the people that doesn't like runny yolks. You could also bake the egg whites until browned and then scramble the egg yolk and put it in the egg white basket. That could also be a very yummy variation if you don't like runny yolks.

There are probably several other ways to take the basic recipe and make it your own. I do recommend following the recipe I linked to one time before branching out and trying different variations. That way you know what it is "supposed" to taste like. I think it tastes like a savory meringue with a very silky yolk.

Of course, half of the fun with cooking is experimenting and you won't learn anything new if you don't try. The one thing that I took away from making the egg nest for the second time is that the taste of sage covers up the taste of rosemary. I probably won't be using those two spices together again. I wouldn't have learned that if I didn't try it in the first place.

Socks and Cookies

Taken with Instagram

"I like making a piece of string into something I can wear."  ~Author Unknown

Today has been a fairly stressful day. I haven't been feeling that well today and I think that made my job searching go down the tubes. Instead I took the day to knit some. I have been working on these socks and I made it past the heel and they are currently zooming down the foot. I should be ready to start the toe within a day or two if I keep working on them at this pace.

Since it is August, the Sock Knitter's Anonymous (SKA) group on Ravelry has entered their yearly sock-finishing competition. The rules are simple: to finish as many pairs of uncompleted socks that you can that have been cast-on before July. Both of the socks I am working on right now qualify. These socks were cast-on June 2 and the Wedge socks for my mom were cast-on in June 27, 2011. I'm not sure if I want to participate in this one though. It just might add up to one more thing I would feel obligated to do and right now, I don't think I need that. I'll just wait for the end of the month and see what the schedule is for their monthly sock challenges and plan appropriately.

Taken with Instagram

Since I have been fairly bummed out recently because of my lack of finding a job, I decided that I needed to do something that I would have to focus on. So, I made cookies. Warm and gooey chocolate chip cookies.

Baking calms me down when it is something I have made several times before. There is also something with sharing something you have made with friends and family that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The cookies will also be a surprise for my parents because they don't know I'm making them.

The only thing that I find funny with making these cookies is I can never get the shape to come out fully circular. They are always a little wonky. At least people will know that they were made by hand because they were wonky and not store-bought.