Girl Cravings & Genmai Cha Snickerdoodles...

I wouldn't call myself a sweet tooth. I mean, I like a good sweet for sure. But when someone calls themselves a sweet tooth, I assume they crave sweets far more often than I do, which is probably once a week or so, and almost never when I'm grocery shopping. Which explains why I never seem to have sweets around when I'm craving them. Which is probably a good thing in a way. Because I have a feeling I could learn to crave them more if I ate them more, if that makes any sense.

A girl's got needs...

When I do want something sweet, the fact that I am a crap baker (by neglect to some extent), means I rarely have the ingredients to bake anything too complicated. While I have been thinking about baking green tea sugar cookies for a while, when it comes to *baking*, unlike *cooking*, *thinking*, rather than *doing*, is usually the operative word. Add in the fact that I'm an hour and a half away from anywhere I can buy matcha, and the green tea sugar cookies are just gonna have to wait another month. or two. or three...

On the other hand, if I'm taking inventory of the foodstuffs that need to be consumed before we move at the end of the month and happen to find a box of genmai cha in the cupboard, and I have everything I need to bake a basic cookie, and I'm mad hormonal jonesing for something that resembles those sugar cookies I've been thinking about for way too long, I really don't have a choice but to bake these Genmai Cha Snickerdoodles.

green tea + toasted brown rice = genmai cha.
*Cha*, btw, means *tea* in 
Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

A lightly sweet cookie with that little bit of fluff and chew that I love in a snickerdoodle, paired with a hint of roasted, nutty genmai and mild green tea flavor. A little East meets West kind of treat that's extremely easy to make, and perhaps a little too easy to eat. It's a good thing the Man's good at disappearing cookies.

As with most cookie recipes, it's a good idea to bring your butter and eggs to room temp (20 minutes or so out of the fridge - less if it's a blistering hot summer day) before starting.

GENMAI CHA SNICKERDOODLES
Makes about 3 dozen 2-inch cookies

This recipe is essentially Martha Stewart's 2005 Holiday Cookie recipe, minus the cinnamon sugar, plus some genmai cha thrown into and atop, and with a few minor adjustments to size and bake time. But the concept would work well with any basic drop sugar cookie or snickerdoodle recipe. 

My notes/additions in italics.

• 2+3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1+1/2 cups sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 4 Tablespoons (about 8 packets) genmai cha for the batter
• 2 Tablespoons (about 4 packets) genmai cha to sprinkle atop

1) Preheat oven to 350F.

2) Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; set aside (if you have a stand mixer, you can do the sifting while the butter and sugar are beating). Put butter and 1 1/2 cups sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Mix in eggs. 

3) Reduce speed to low; gradually mix in flour mixture and 4 Tablespoons genmai cha.

4) Shape dough into 36 1-inch balls. Space 2 inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper (or a Silpat / silicone baking sheet) and sprinkle the tops with a pinch of genmai cha. (My silpat and baking sheets are in storage. I used the Man's scratched and banged up cookie sheet, and it worked just fine after I very lightly buttered and floured it.)

roasty, toasty sprinkles...

5) Bake cookies, rotating sheets halfway through, until edges are golden, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool for 3 to 5 minutes before removing from cookie sheet to avoid breakage.

I saved half the dough to bake off another time, and though it is hot as Hades up in this place, I think I'm going to make me some more cookies tonight. What's a little extra heat from the oven when you're sweating like a pig from making dinner anyway?

*oink*,

shinae

Sugar Cookies, Facebook & Frenemies...

My daughter Maddi turned 10 last December, and she has a facebook account, set up by me (I set one up for her brother as well) so I can be a part of her online life.  Say what you will about how premature or unnecessary it is, but I like to think myself a realist. And reality is that my kids will grow up living a big chunk of their lives online. 

I want to participate as much as reasonably possible in that life, and I'm hoping that a low key and nonjudgmental presence on their friends lists will give me a glimpse into their perspectives on life, friendship, and, even if it's not always positive, their relationship with me.

This past weekend, Mads and I baked some colored sugar cookies together and enjoyed a really lovely afternoon relating, cooperating and eventually gobbling more than a few cookies together. As always, I took my pics with my usual fussing, angling, framing and whatnot, and when I was done, Mads asked me to log onto her facebook page to upload this pic to her profile:

Status: "Made sugar cookies with my mom.
Took over an hour!!!!! But they tasted great."

Luckily, she's still at an age when she has relatively few secrets and allows me free and easy access to her page.  There were a couple of new notifications, a few new friends from school and her father's side of the family, and a new PM (private message) from a (girl) friend from school.  And the message was one of those *She said, SHE said* exchanges having to do with a third girlfriend, my daughter apparently the rope in a tug-of-war between warring factions known as pre-teen frenemies.

As an almost 40 year old woman, I have spent most of my life forging an uneasy peace with the mere idea of female friendships for this very reason. I don't really understand what spiritual, biological or evolutionary function it serves, this desire to possess, manipulate, and ultimately control another human being in this way.  But it's fairly rampant among young girls across cultural and socio-economic lines and sadly doesn't seem to temper itself well with age. 

My initial reaction was to talk with Mads then and there - to tell her that this is not how good friendships are built, that some people are toxic in the way they relate with others and that as much as we should empathize for the unique life path that made them that way, the best we can do is to be outwardly empathic to that person and yet inwardly compassionate enough to protect ourselves from their bile...

But then I remembered there's a reason why I knew to bring the butter to room temp before mixing the cookie dough, to keep the dough refrigerated between baking batches, and to let the cookies cool momentarily before removing them from the baking sheet... Because years of experience taught me that a cold stick of butter doesn't incorporate very well into dry ingredients; but also that if the butter gets too warm while mixed into the cookie dough, the cookies will spread too much in the baking process; and finally that the cookies have a good chance of bending, warping, or just plain falling apart if you try to remove them too quickly just out of the oven. I screwed up a lot of recipes before I observed and understood for myself the nature of certain ingredients and processes.  And in some cases, that meant a lot of fucked up cookies before I finally turned out a good one.

And while it gives me indigestion to know that I can't spare my child from the angst, betrayal, loneliness and confusion she will suffer, and cause others to suffer, in her journey to define and cultivate the positive, enriching and fulfilling friendships I hope for her to have, I sit well with the knowledge that I eventually stopped fucking up the cookies. And that I now have a handful of truly good, decent, fabulous, positive and encouraging woman friends with whom to share them.

That's not to say we'll never have the talk. I'm thinking chocolate chip in a few weeks will be a good time to gauge what she makes of the situation and to remind her again that the butter needs to sit out for a while before we begin...

shinae

Baking For Dummies (Why Cobbler Is Like Concealer...)

There is a short list of things I do well in this life: cooking, singing, dancing, reviewing contracts, listening, and, on a good day, making my friends and family laugh.  Note this list does *not* include BAKING.

It's not that I don't love baked goods, but I grew up in a home where dessert most days was fresh fruit - peeled, cut just so, and neatly arranged for company, or just peeled and/or cut and taken directly from the hand of the handler and munched indiscriminately if no one was watching. We would pick up the occasional napoleon or fruit tart from the patisserie, but bake we did not.

The other thing is that I am a practical kind of gal, and cooking was, if nothing else, a very useful pursuit that allowed for efficiency, substitution and improvisation.  Baking, on the other hand, always seemed to me an exercise in folly what with all the precise measurements and mise en place and list of ingredients and equipment I never seemed to have on hand and all that BAKE time...

But then one day I had all this leftover bread that had gotten too stale to eat, and conservationist that I am, I resolved to make bread pudding.  At last a baking recipe after my own heart: short and practical ingredient list (Who doesn't have milk, eggs, butter and sugar on hand?), short prep time, and of course the very efficient idea of repurposing an ingredient that would otherwise have gotten canned. 

From that day, I realized that there were indeed baking recipes for pragmatists like me, and every once in a while, when inspiration (sweet tooth) and situation (main ingredient already in pantry or fridge) collide, I will bust a Betty Crocker and bake something like this here cobbler:

What to do with a week old basket of blueberries
and a handful of frozen strawberries.

Berry Cobbler

Serves 4-5 over ice cream, 2-3 eaten by itself

Berry Mixture

- 1 small basket of blueberries (I think it was 4.4 ounces.)

- 6 strawberries cut in quarters (fresh or frozen)

- 1 teaspoon sugar (2 if berries are extra tart)

- 1/8 teaspoon salt

- 2 teaspoons flour

Stir gently until berries are
coated with dry mixture.

Streusel Topping

- 2 Tablespoons butter cut into cubes

- 3 Tablespoons flour

- 5 Tablespoons brown sugar

- 1 teaspoon cinnamon

- 1/4 teaspoon salt (or 1/2 if using unsalted butter)

Get in there with
your hands...

...and mush it up til it
looks like cookie dough.

1) Preheat oven to 425F.

2) Make streusel topping and put in freezer while mixing berries in a baking dish, 5 - 10 minutes. This gives the butter a chance to re-solidify before baking, otherwise the topping will spread too much in the baking process.  I used a Pyrex bowl, but if you're using a pie dish, stack the berries in the middle of the dish, leaving about a 1.5 inch margin around the sides.  (It's a small recipe.)

3) Spread streusel topping over berries:

4) Pop that sucker in the oven for 25-30 minutes or until it looks like:

Bubbly berry juices thickened by the flour. Sweet,
lightly salted and slightly crunchy streusel topping.

5) Serve over vanilla bean ice cream (or don't).

And THAT, folks, is how berry cobbler makes a crap baker like me appear a little less crappy.

shinae