CAFFEINE Coffee Cookies!!!

My brother, JM, and a few other high school people are currently competing in an... M3(?) competition that started this morning at 6am and ends at 9pm. Basically, they are presented with a problem, and have to make some sort of model and proposal for fixing the problem. This year's problem has something to do with a drought in a lake in Colorado, I think. Anyway, I just went to visit them and they had a lot of untouched food just sitting there because they're so busy. It looks pretty hectic. My brother told me last night to make them coffee-infused finger foods because they would need the caffeine. So, I made coffee cookies.

I found a recipe online but I changed it a lot because for some reason, I feel confident in my cooking/altering everything. So, here is my version of ridiculously humongous soft, moist coffee flavoured cookies.

Ingredients for 26 ridiculously large [size-of-your-palm], flat, and moist cookies:

1. 1/2 cup oil

2. 1 cup white sugar

3. 2 eggs

4. vanilla

5. coffee [I'll explain this in the Method]

6. 2 cups self-raising flour

7. 1/2 tsp baking soda

Method:

1. At the crack of dawn, get half a cup of boiling water and spoon in 3-4 heaping tbsp of ground coffee. Add a few tbsp of instant coffee just for the caffeine kick. Add more tbsp of instant coffee to your liking! Actually, I'm not even sure I saturated the water that much; I'm sure I could've added MUCH more instant coffee. The end result was a cookie that tasted like coffee, but was not tremendously bitter. This, I would say, is the amount of coffee needed to make "normal" tasting coffee cookies.

2. Mix all wet ingredients in a giant bowl. Add in the coffee mixture with the granules, although if you don't like the spotty appearance, you can filter out the granules. The batter should be dark brown.

3. Add in dry ingredients. I used self-raising flour, which already had some baking powder and salt in it, for simplicity. [a.k.a I didn't have non-self-raising bleached flour]

4. The mixture should be quite gooey, a bit stickier than cake batter, and look like the very first image above.

5. Spoon onto cookie sheets and bake at 380 degrees F in a unpreheated oven on the bottom rack for 9 minutes.

6. Let them sit in oven for 10 minutes at least, or longer if you want. Alternatively, let them bake for another 1-2 minutes.

7. Let them cool on cooling racks, and they should harden a bit but still be moist, flat, and a bit cakey.

Note: They puff up to 2 times their original size.

Coffee Ice [or...Granita?]

I'm technically not supposed to have much caffeinated stuff anymore due to the fact that it apparently interferes with methimazole efficacy, but this was made with decaf coffee [so, it has 2% of the caffeine it otherwise would have] which means that it probably has the same caffeine power [if not less] as some chocolate. I started off with coffee, fat free milk, some honey, and some saccharin. I froze it for an hour, and it looked like the image above.

An hour later, a layer of ice had formed on the inside sides of the plastic container, but the centre was still liquidy [or, slushy, after I mixed it]. The whole point of making this is to chop up the ice crystals every hour or so. I actually should've used a shallow container, since it was more difficult to reach the bottom parts which were frozen.

In total, six hours later, this is what I ended up with. Granules of frozen coffee and milk! The volume had [evidently, due to not only the lattice structure of ice, but also to the air between each crystal] increased to... about 157% its original liquidy volume.

I'm not sure whether this is "Italian Ice", "ice" or "granita". When I was younger, my brother and I used to make watermelon granita, which I recall included 150g of caster sugar dissolved in water, a lot of watermelon juice, and lemon juice. It was made in the same way as this, and did NOT taste like artificial watermelon flavour. It used to be such a big deal! Today, I felt like making this since it's too humid to drink hot coffee [even though it was pouring with rain all afternoon] and I felt like this would be yummy. Before freezing, the slurry tasted like normal sweet coffee with way too much milk [I tend to like coffee without milk]. After freezing, I feel as though it tastes even more watery than originally... which means that next time, I have to brew super-strong coffee. This is saying something, since I generally make really strong coffee. However, it isn't super sweet, which is great. I'm just worried that it's going to freeze into one huge mass by tomorrow morning, since I probably didn't add enough sweeteners to keep the ice not-that-frozen, since adding sweeteners means that the freezing point of the solution increases, which means that, in theory, the granita would freeze at a higher temperature [because the sweetener molecules prevent the water molecules from bonding to each other as efficiently].

Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush...

This morning, I got back from my blood test and decided to have some mulberry yoghurt. My friend JM has a mulberry tree in her yard, and she's been feeding us with A LOT of mulberries, which has been awesome since I have never had mulberries before. They're these tiny [as in, Centrum sized] berries that look like mini blackberries, but taste completely different. For one thing, they're not very sweet, and the texture is smooth, save the grittiness because of the puny seeds. My mum added some sugar to the mulberries to stop them from getting mouldy [after all, these are pretty wild mulberries. They aren't cultivated].

This was definitely a change from the typical strawberry or blueberry yoghurt. I'm not even that fond of strawberry yoghurt.

Anyway, now I'm consuming dried jujube berries [red dates, hong zao], because my mum says that they have a "high iron content" [well, not entirely true], which would help replenish my lost blood today. There's also a lot of vitamin C, of which I wouldn't mind having 400% the daily value, since I want to be extra protected against colds or illness, especially as I have Graves' Disease. I remember during the last few weeks of October, during college applications [2 E.A. and 1 E.D.], I basically consumed over 800% of my daily vitamin C every single day in the form of citrus, Centrum, granola bars/cereals, and Zipfizz [I don't know why my mum bought so much Zipfizz, way back]. That, coupled with a ton of caffeine, made my hands shake uncontrollably, and I felt exhausted and irritable. Luckily, I don't have to go through that again... until college...

My doctor told me to cut caffeine down, though, since I have Graves' Disease.