Chocolate Chip Cookies!

I've made the standard plain chocolate chip cookies (the back-of-the-chocolate-chip-package butter, and white flour kind) once before in my life and that was on my 15th birthday. We made 150 cookies that day, and a bunch of the delicious chocolate chip cookies were under-baked but so delicious. I also seemed to enjoy peanut butter cookies then, which I moderately dislike now. I kind of wished I started my food blog when I was 11 (instead of doing the... teen blog thingy), but that's a story for another time. I'll archive all my food documentation someday.

I made plain chocolate chip cookies again, this time with SP (the boyfriend). Although they were absolutely delicious (as most chocolate chip cookies go), the bottoms were a tad singed, and I blame it on the oven. The oven is kind of small (much smaller than the one I have at home, so my cookie tray doesn't fit into the oven...not even diagonally), and it heats up really fast. It has no timer, and a dial for setting the temperature, instead of digital buttons. I can't run upstairs to check whether a sweet, crumbly perfume lingers in the air. These are all not necessarily bad differences, and I suppose I have to adjust my cooking style accordingly.

The WORST part, however, goes like this:
Me: ...and you can't open the oven door while a cake/cookies is/are baking, because then the batter will just fall down and won't rise anymore.
SP: But how do you know when it's done?
Me: You look in the window thingy, with the [oven] light on!
SP: But there's no...
Me: *Looks* OH NO. OH MY GOSH NO! NO WINDOW!!!

I also made some chocolate cake for myself and SP from a bag of cake mix left behind by the previous tenant. We dug in while watching Pinky and the Brain. I don't generally use prepackaged baking mix or the atrocious frozen pre-scored cookie dough, unless I happen upon them for free.

(Note: Angry lashing out at society is in next paragraph) 

Am I snobby for looking down on over 12 year-old people who bake solely with baking mix, then brag or post pictures of their photogenic food captioned with "Made these homemade cookies by myself!"? I get even more enraged when I see comments from other people, praising the person for his/her cooking skills or "original" recipe or whatever revelations. For instance, this just angers me to no end. It's merely prepackaged cake mix and oil and eggs that bake into cookies. A comment from the page: "Can you believe this recipe only has 3 ingredients?!?! It is AWESOME. My husband said they were the best cookies I ever made."

First, there are plenty more than THREE ingredients! The cake mix itself probably has around 20, including HFCS, PHO, vitamin E (tocopherol) and colouring -- how else does it have a shelf life of two years?! Despite the fact that prepackaged-mix cookies do taste nice sometimes, homemade ones always taste better. ALWAYS, unless you're bad at following instructions, but even then, the cookie dough is delicious. I understand that baking mix is useful for people who don't have flour and baking powder sitting around, and culturally accepted and loved in the U.S. (brand names...), but I believe that REAL/ASPIRING cooks WOULD have these ingredients in the house, and they TRULY care about making quality food.

Also, how do you mess up making simple cookies anyway (cakes and pies are definitely are more irksome)? You don't even have to follow the simple "Mix wet stuff. Mix dry stuff. Incorporate using figure-8 spoon mixing." instructions! You can just dump all the listed ingredients into a bowl, stir like a mad person, and then bake...

Finally, my first attempt at scrambled eggs resulted in a perfect boat of creamy cholesterol. I followed this video, but my eggs were frozen (very back of the fridge) and I used oil and milk instead of butter and creme fraiche, respectively.

Hot Chocolate

Being increasingly upset with the concept of "instant hot chocolate", I showed my brother and sister that it is perfectly simple to make hot chocolate from unsweetened cocoa powder and sugar (and vanilla, cinnamon sugar, nutmeg, and whatever else). We rarely buy single-serving packaged hot chocolate, but I feel unhappy knowing that THAT STUFF GETS SOLD, and people LOVE IT! It's not my business to poke my spoon into other people's mugs, but I don't understand why one'd shell out more money than necessary for mugs of mediocre -- six packets (packaged in a neat box, which may or may not be wrapped in plastic) of mostly sugar, a tiny scoop of cocoa powder, some sort of creamer, partially hydrogenated oil, flavouring, FD&C Yellow #5, and caramel flavouring. 

Convenience? 

"But, but, but, my method is convenient too!", I whine, with pearly tears gushing down my face. "And my hot chocolate's packaging is recyclable, unlike the foil-and-paper-blend wrapper that most companies use!"

So, here's something that's intensely bitter-chocolatey (whoo!) or super sweet (if you're my sister), depending on your preferences, gives you 8 g of protein, and doesn't take much time at all! No stoves! If an 8 year-old enfant gâté [read: spoiled brat] can do it, so can you (yes, even the time-deprived and sleep-deprived college students)!

Ingredients -- for a mugful

1. UNSWEETENED cocoa powder

2. Sugar (or honey/molasses/aspartame/candy)

3. Water (preferably at room temperature)
4. Fat-free milk! (preferably at room temperature)
5. Flavourings/garnishes -- vanilla, cinnamon sugar, coffee powder, nutmeg, chilies, marshmallows, pudding...

Method
1. Add 1-3 tsp cocoa powder and 1-3 tsp sugar. Add flavourings. I would prefer 2-3 tsp cocoa powder and 1 tsp sugar... but my sister would honestly just want a pinch of cocoa powder and some 50 g of sugar.
2. Add enough room temperature water to submerge the solids, microwave for 30 s, and stir.
3. Add room temperature milk until your mug is 6/7 full. I don't want to add more because I'm scared that things will explode in my microwave.
4. Microwave for 50 s. Stir. Repeat until your hot chocolate is hot!
5. Add garnishes. We added ice cream and coloured marshmallows.

Actually, if you really wanted to, you could eat half a canister of unsweetened cocoa powder (bake with it, make pancakes with it, mix it with peanut butter etc.) and then pour sugar into the canister's remaining space. Now, you have enough hot chocolate mix to last a winter. Or just the finals season.

While my brother and I were enjoying our cocoa-studded hot chocolates, my sister was complaining that we don't have whipped cream in the house, and that the hot chocolate at the Diner is so much better. She was on the verge of shooting out those irksome tears. I sometimes wish that she understood that when my brother and I were her age, we didn't have hot chocolate in the house. We didn't have an oven or a microwave! I didn't even know what cinnamon was!

Why Follow?

Why follow the instructions on the package?

Do you ever follow the recipe on the can of sweetened condensed milk? No! The one on the plastic wrapper that envelopes chocolate chips? No! The one on the back of cake mix?

W-WAIT! Of course you follow the one on the back of cake mix, or cookie mix, or pudding mix... there just is NO other way to use up that powdery stuff! You MUST add three medium sized [yes, medium] eggs, one stick of butter, and half a cup of water. Otherwise, the cake will cease to ever exist! It will blow up the oven, or stick to the spoon, or end human intelligence [not that THAT would be a huge deal, since it happens if you DO follow the recipe down to the millimole]!

However, since this household lacks butter, I decided to make this gluten-free cake mix that my mum bought [I don't know why, since she knows that I rarely use mix, let alone gluten-free cake mix] using my brainpower.

Also, I didn't want to use the oven because it would waste a lot of energy.

All I did was add two eggs and some water. In other words, this cake is pretty much "fat-free". Then I microwaved a bowl of it, for about 148 seconds.

And... it tasted like plain store-bought-cake-mix chocolate sponge cake. Without the burnt parts, and the wasted oven heat.

Easy.

You don't see cakes in bowls much.

This is technically the 27th, but I microwaved my first cake on the 26th.

100 Gingerbread Crumbs!

For the 100th post, I decided to add some spice to the items that I usually blog about. :) [haha...] By spice, I mean gingerbread. Not "real" gingerbread, though. It's microwaved gingerbread.

"Microwaved? Inconceivable!", you say. I'll let you mull over that while I talk about the tomato couscous soup I made again today! This time I added soft tofu, which added this amazing soft nuttiness to it, which contrasted with the grainy texture of the couscous.

Anyway, back to gingerbread. Or, gingerbread mix. This is actually a gingerbread cake mix from Target [Archer Farms?] that I was too lazy to follow directions and add the butter and stick it in the oven. Instead, I just added an egg, water, and a bit of oil [Not sure how much, though]. Then, I mixed it until it looked like cookie dough rather than egg batter, and stuck it in the fridge.

About two tablespoons of this dough, covered with a spoon of cold milk, then microwaved for 60 seconds, yields the image above. GOOEY AWESOMENESS! Well, awesomeness for those who like cakes that are of a brownie consistency. I stirred up the bottom which was still liquidy and microwaved the whole thing for another 20 or so seconds. If you want a more "cakey" [read: dry] cake, stick it in the microwave for another 30 seconds, and then another 10. Just because. Last time, I microwaved one spoonful for about 90 seconds, which yielded a really CRUNCHY COOKIE rather than cake.

In other words, this stuff is really versatile. For those of us who aren't afraid of salmonella [I'm not afraid!], it tastes great "raw", too. It's gingery, but much sweeter so that the ginger taste isn't prevalent. I guess if you want an authentic nutmeggy gingery taste, this isn't for you, but since I honestly dislike the taste of ginger, or ginger candy, or ginger tea, this "ginger"bread works just fine with me. Oh, and if any of you end up walking around 59th ish near that park at NYC near the Lincoln Centre, BUY THE GINGERSNAPS. THEY. ARE. AMAZING.