Pinwheel Cookies

Oh, it's been a while. So much has happened and much delicious food and little alcohol (huzzah! I can legally drink now!) has passed through my digestive system. And now starts the frantic trying-to-stuff-as-many-posts-into-2013-as-possible. Today, I will talk about making pinwheel cookies. Below are 93 cookies.

I made nutella + jam + dried fruit pinwheel cookies in 2007 or 2008 and they turned out pretty hard and sweet. I guess they were acceptable. I don't recall how I rolled the cookies though, since I don't recall it being a tedious task. Last night, however, rolling the cookie logs took way more time and gnawing away at confidence than I anticipated.

I made a double batch of this typical sugar cookie recipe, which yielded about 100, or 8 dozen cookies and end bits that the little ragamuffin (my sister) nibbled up raw. I left them in the fridge overnight and baked them this afternoon.

Ingredient Changes:

-- 2 cups of sugar instead of 2.66 cups
-- 2 handfuls of melted chocolate chips in half the dough, yielding a light tea+milk type of brown rather than a dark brown.

Regarding the Method:
I don't have parchment paper. I reused an opened-up cereal bag, which worked pretty well as a cookie log wrapper. Unfortunately, the dough was really soft so it was hard to move around. Flouring the surface really helped.

The first method included rolling out both doughs and then folding one on top of the other, and peeling the plastic back. This sort of worked but was really tedious.

I also tried just squashing chocolate dough onto the rolled-out vanilla dough but that was also tedious. Most of the logs (I ended up with three 30-cm-ish logs, each yielding >30 cookies) were just really squishy due to it being a balmy room temperature. Most were done using the roll-two-blobs-and-smoosh-together method. Even though the doughs were not rolled into perfect rectangles, with some trimming and squishing around, I ended up with dismal looking logs, that, the next day, magically sliced into artistic pinwheels. I put two of the logs in a plastic bread bag and kept the other one rolled up in the cereal bag in the fridge.

Next time, I will probably chill the dough for an hour rather than for 20 minutes. A lot of the rolling was done by eye, and my cookie sizes ranged from Oreo-sized to Navel orange-sized.

How surprising! They actually look beautiful!!

The cookies were sliced at about 7 mm ? and baked on the middle rack of a 350 F oven for exactly 10 minutes. It turns out that the bottom rack is no place for a cookie-to-be, and a aluminum foil pan yields a longer cooking time for the cookie. So, I stuck with the cookie sheet I got for my 15th birthday that is still intact and loved.

Perfectly cooked and no burned edges!



The spots on the cookies are chocolate chips that did not melt completely.

The cold logs are only sliced immediately before placing onto the pan and baking. Although I buttered the pan with a butter wrapper for the first batch, subsequent batches did not require any pan-buttering. The trick is to swivel the cookies off the sheet as soon as the sheet is taken out of the oven. At this point, they don't stick to the pan. This means very hot fingertips and quick scooping of cookies onto a spatula, and then the cooling rack (or directly on, if you like hot fingertips).

The cookies do expand a bit during cooking and unfortunately I had to squish some cookies together because I didn't want to bake a batch of only 3-5 cookies.

Look at this stack of equal-diameter cookies!

Whole Wheat "Leftovers" Cookies

Well. It's my last Sunday subletting at HamCore and I have to use up all my food by (Thur|Fri|Sat) of next week.

SP and I made delicious whole wheat cookies with curry powder, cinnamon, and dark chocolate. We did not freeze the dough (as the instructions say), and after baking, we both proceeded to devour the whole batch of cookies (well, we made half a batch of cookies - 1 leftover stick of butter) while watching Sheep in the Big City. These cookies were quite filling (both emotionally and physically) and tasted a bit like gingerbread and had a satisfying sandy texture. I also wanted to just eat the cookie dough raw. So there - no more butter and chocolate! SP tried to grind  a cinnamon stick, first using a knife (nice little chunks, but highly inefficient), and then using a cocktail masher + bowl. We ended up with sizable chunks of cinnamon along with the puny bits.

I also had about a liter of skim milk leftover and I was afraid that it would go bad, so I decided to freeze it with some maple syrup, to make milk and maple granita. Basically, you break the ice slurry every hour or so until you have pin-sized ice crystals. You can easily chip at this structure to get a good amount of dessert. It is not creamy but it's fine. I'm not sure why I didn't make this with all the leftover milk and half&half during the semester. So, milk used!

Finally, I was a counselor for an Engineering camp last week, and at the final reception, there was a giant cake, with an anticipated 100+ servings (I assume - there were 69 students, and you have to include their families!). Miraculously, there were about 13 slices leftover, and they were going to trash all those slices! So, I claimed it, took it to DRL, fed some physicists, and brought the rest home to eat. Unfortunately, the end pieces of cake were slathered with "American Buttercream Frosting", a publicly-celebrated disaster. To me, that stuff is vile. Fatty and flavourless. I scraped off most of it from the cake parts and ate those, but I didn't want to throw out this butter+powdered sugar concoction, like I have done in the past (at least three times, especially whenever we got the Costco cakes). The answer hit me like a slice of pie hitting a serving plate - bake with it! Duh!

So I mixed it with the rind, juice and pulp of two lemons I happen to have, 1.5 c of whole wheat flour, a sprinkle of instant rice (just for experimentation) and some baking soda, and baked the stiff dough at 350 F for 10 minutes on the middle rack of the oven. I ended up with 18 cookies with a crusty exterior (crispy bottoms) and a cooked gooey filling. The cookie is not particularly sweet, and did not expand significantly while baking. It was quite lemony and I'm pretty glad I found a use for gross "American Buttercream Frosting"!

So, all I have now are about 6 eggs, some Brie, flour, almond meal, cocoa powder, oil, cooked pasta, rice, frozen mango, frozen veggies, an apple, and yogurt.

Vegan Cookies and Cake

I enjoy the blog "The Life". Although I'm not vegan (actually, I can't call myself lacto-ovo vegetarian anymore either), the baking recipes are great because I use oil more often in my overall cooking. After a terrible end of the week, which was slightly alleviated by the consumption of a whole packet of marshmallows (284 g) in three sittings (2 am, 11 am, and 7 pm), I figured I might as well bake some things and binge on them all. I made vegan chocolate cookies which kind of remind me of Oreos (without the cream) or chocolate graham crackers and lemon cake which I didn't mix well enough. These recipes came from "The Life" and are simply amazing.

Notes/alterations to the chocolate chip cookies:

1. No chocolate chips

2. Substituted the white flour with whole wheat flour and a packet of lotus seed flour that I had lying around

3. Less sugar

4. 1/4 cup water + 1/4 balsamic vinegar, and 1 tsp baking soda instead of baking powder

5. It doesn't matter which rack I use in an unpreheated oven for 15 minutes. They turn out perfect, even according to SP

6. Added red pepper flakes!

Notes/alterations to the lemon cake:

1. Didn't have enough lemon juice, so added some vinegar

2. Baked for 35 minutes + left it in oven for 10 minutes

3. 1.5 cup of white flour + 1 cup of whole wheat flour... + unknown extra bits of flour...not sure how much I ended up using

4. Added red pepper flakes

A great thing that happened two nights ago (after I went to get marshmallows for my binge) was that I happened upon a baking tray, a cake tin, and a dish drying rack next to the dumpster in the courtyard. The baking tray fits perfectly in the small oven that I have for the summer (I actually had brought my own baking tray, but it was too long!). I'm hoping to find a mini-fridge with shelves next (last month I found a fridge without shelves and a microwave without the turntable, unfortunately). Although some people will think that this is disgusting or weird, I believe that it's helping the environment and my finances.

Surprisingly, I have only bought baking powder once in my life. 55 g in 5 sachets. Most of the time, I use baking soda in my baking. If a recipe calls for baking powder, I just substitute some of the liquid with vinegar and use baking soda instead of the powder. It always works. I've been reading Cooking for Geeks by Jeff Potter, and he (along with other chefs, I suppose) claims that bakers are more precise and antsy about measuring than cooks, who like creativity and splashing in ingredients here and there.

I have to disagree with him. I splash in tablespoons of vinegar, I throw in pepper flakes, and I even didn't measure the flour for the lemon cake today (so, I might have 2 cups of flour in that lemon cake, but it could also be 3). I'm not extremely precise with measurements, and things mostly turn out fine. The book also lists a stand mixer and a whisk as essential for bakers, but I have neither and I consider myself decent at baking. The book is geared solely towards stereotypical computer scientists who don't cook (the stereotypical humour, writing style, everything!), and I guess I was a bit distracted by this (in addition to the "BUY THIS BOOK!" message studded in every chapter. The worst part, however, is that there are barely any citation of sources. Sure, I don't think he's lying when he says that there's gluten in wheat flour, but there are no scientific papers cited! Interviews, pictures, and blogs are listed (but not by MLA or NEJM standards), but it's not enough. Monell isn't even mentioned! Also, I guess I'm disappointed that the existence of non-tasters for quinine aren't mentioned either.

However, it was an overall good read because there were some useful tips, and there were explanations of a lot of things that I've never questioned. For instance, why do we bake at 350 degrees F for some things [e.g. cake], and 375 F for others [e.g. cookies]? Well, one reason is that sugar caramelises above 350 degrees F, and you don't want your cakes to caramelise, but cookies that look brown and caramelised appear more appetizing. I have two pages of notes for things that I'd want to explore further, particularly adding maltodextrin to peanut butter and cooking with a slow cooker.

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.

Bubble Tea Cookies!

I know that this sounds really cheesy, but I had a dream in which I was making bubble tea cake. I remember considering the logistics of the cake - how would it stand? Where do the bubbles go? How much does it have to look like a container of bubble tea? Straw? Do the bubbles stay at the bottom or are they distributed evenly throughout the (tea) cake? I remember applying bright orange icing to a cake shaped like a bubble tea container in the dream; in fact, it looked like this, except it was standing vertically and lacked the bottom and top. The rest of the dream seemed to be slightly morose, but I don't remember. 

Note: Throughout this post, I will refer to these tapioca pearls/bubble tea bubbles as "tapioca pearls" for consistency.

It turns out that no one has yet BAKED a tapioca pearl cake (or at least, I REALLY hope no one has ever done it). So, it's a race against time: I need to bake tapioca pearls into some sort of attractive cake thing, and post it on here. It will be an original product. When some famous celebrity chef finally does it in the future, people will search for recipes. MINE WILL SHOW UP and I WILL BE KNOWN AS THE ONE WHO DID IT BEFORE IT WAS COOL.

But first, what happens when you bake tapioca pearls?  Do they shrivel up? Or, do they get hot and steamy? Swell up and go hard? Explode? Pop like cherries? (Okay, I'll stop the jokes...)

So, here's a pilot test!

First, I made some cookie dough. I made half a batch of this vegan recipe, but I substituted the baking powder and water with baking soda and balsamic vinegar. There are also no chocolate chips or marshmallows. I added the balsamic vinegar right before adding the tapioca pearls, because the vinegar reacts with the baking soda.

Rehydrating "5-minute" tapioca pearls! A few months ago, they were $1.68, but now they are $1.98 at the underground Chinese grocery store in Chinatown :(. Throughout the semester, I would do this by boiling water using the electric kettle, pouring this water into my loose tea leaves in a tea strainer, sugar, and pearls, and cover my mug with a lid. After stirring about every 3 minutes for 10 minutes or so, the pearls would be chewy and edible.

However, I think that the pearls taste much better and are plumper when heated in boiling sweet tea on the stove.

For heating these instant tapioca pearls, I used about 1/4 of a saucepan of water, a handful of tapioca pearls and a tablespoon of brown sugar. There wasn't any tea in this rehydration, but I did use the leftover sugar mixture for tea.

After the pearls were cooked, I fished them out with a tea strainer and plonked them into the cookie dough. Leaving them in hot water for too long renders the whole pearl to taste uniform and starchy (well, it happened once, and I do not want to risk it happening again). After a quick mix, I scooped out the dough and baked the cookies according to that recipe. The mixture was really crumbly (think sand-like), so what I did was scoop up a tablespoon, squeeze my hand against the spoon, and keep squeezing until a ball was formed. The dough was kind of spongy.

AND THEY WORKED! They harden as they cool, so I ended up with crispy (but delicious) cookies that were devoured by my friends and SP. SP ate 5/12ths of the batch (of 12 cookies). The cookie recipe produced cookies that remind me of the almond cookies, like these, I used to get for 2 HKD  in HK near my piano exam place.
The tapioca pearls were chewy, not dry, and delicious! So, I will make a cake next time!

On the 18th day of the 6th month of the 2012th year of our wholesome flying spaghetti monster, I, PIE-314, OFFICIALLY MADE THE FIRST TAPIOCA PEARL COOKIES. EVER.

Tartes

Went to Tartes! Had a really cute-paper gift card! With a typo! ("Past tries", eh? -- instead of ""pastries'). Tartes is this little pink shack with a little bit of floorspace, a display window with a whiteboard sign, and an electric mixer (no mixing/folding by hand, I guess...).

There's also a huge rip in the wall.

Surprisingly enough, I managed to obtain four representative items for exactly $15, which is pretty neat when you consider that the items end in .25, .50, .75, and .00.

1. Chocolate chip pecan cookie - $2: Extremely normal chocolate chip pecan cookie. There aren't even that many chocolate chips or pecans in the batter! I.e. I can make a dozen of these for ~$2.

2. Key Lime Pie - $5.75: Gooey lime curd (but is it KEY LIME curd? I don't think I know the difference between "limes" and "key limes"...which is good because I can use inexpensive normal limes to make lime curd) without sizeable zest. Shortcrust shell that wasn't sweet. Normal whipped cream. Cute, though.

3. Chocolate Chip Toffee Bar - $2.50: Lots of chocolate chips, walnuts, oatmeal and pastry. Toffee bits in 2 forms: tiny crispy chunks, and globs of toffee goo.

4. Lavender Pound Cake - $4.75: Normal-textured poundcake, but it smells and tastes like lavender! Who knew that lavender could be a cake flavour? The icing is also extremely lavender-y and melts perfectly in my mouth. ICING!

Overall...not particularly impressed (except for the lavender icing), mainly because
1. kind of expensive (well, it was "free", but I wouldn't exchange $15 for this), especially as these aren't even made with local or special ingredients
2. I have higher standards since I know how to bake these things/make curd

Tartes
212 Arch St.
Philadelphia

2 Days in Philadelphia

I hung out for 2 days with SP before the semester begins (tomorrow)! We ate a bunch of food (no surprises there...):

1. Falafel food truck on 35th and Market St.

Thought I had escaped from rice since I'm not going to be home until at least March. Guess I was wrong. At least it isn't plain ol' steamed white rice (actually, the older I get, the more and more I appreciate eating plain ol' rice. Maybe it's because I have just grown to love food/carbohydrates, in general).
The falafel was kinda dry and crumbly and uniform in texture.

2. Ramune (Japanese drink with the marble that seals it until you push it down).

3. Singapore Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant 1029 Race St. (six stars out of five)

 Dim lighting (how utterly romantic!), cool tablecloth*, light green tea, and multiple utensils (fork, spoon, and chopsticks that seemed to be made out of a really absorbent wood). When passing me a fork, the owner (?) of the restaurant jokingly asked me, "Do you know how to use this?", and I replied "I'll try...he'll teach me [referring to SP]." (because SP isn't ethnically Chinese, but I am). Since moving to the US over five years ago, I've used chopsticks maybe 20 times in total, usually at restaurants that don't offer alternatives. My favourite eating utensil is probably the metal teaspoon.

 Stuffed tofu with amazing chunky ginger-peanut sauce. Dude. I could drink this sauce! I realise that I would probably be terrible at getting a guy via a dinner date. Especially with the picture-taking and my indecision. Particularly if there is a vegetarian menu with sections labelled "Beef", "Poultry", "Pork", and "Tofu" (all made with soy or gluten, of course).

 VEGGIES!! I am going to make stuffed tofu one day. I think they stuff the tofu AFTER stir-frying it, else the veggies would fall out.

 We also got dumplings. I want to drag SP here for dim sum one day, just because I love dim sum, and every time my family and I go to some dim sum place, most of the stuff has animal pieces. I didn't particularly love the dumplings because the filling was kinda mushy, and there was a lot of extra space inside the dumpling. SP liked them though.

 SP got a curry hotpot, and the veggies at the bottom were still tongue-burning-hot by the time the meal was over. It was pretty amazing, although I got my tongue burned a bit. I was going to get curry with gluten (read on the menu as "Curry with Beef") but I ended up getting Crispy Sweet and Sour Spare Ribs (gluten). I was debating between that and Sweet and Sour Pork Loin (soy), but the owner (?) recommended the gluten, so I got it. I mean, what do vegetarian chefs substitute animal bones with, right?

The sauce was really sweet. There were chunks of pineapple, tomato, pepper, carrot, and broccoli in the dish. I'm glad that this restaurant uses sundry vegetables in all its dishes (unlike other Chinese restaurants that pair broccoli with EVERYTHING) -- well, duh, it's a vegetarian restaurant.

The gluten ball tasted a bit like potato, a bit like gluten, and sort of had the appearance and texture of pig flesh. It obviously didn't taste like pig flesh. The sauce masked everything, though, which was neat. I'm going to believe that the "bone" part is just a potato fry, because that's what it tasted like. It was odd chewing the "bone". Seriously. It's like having an edible popsicle stick.
Note the brown rice.

At the end, we got 2 orange slices, 2 fortune cookies (grr) and 2 fried sesame balls with custard filling. My fortune was "The weather is nice". Great.
I think that for a sit-in vegetarian restaurant in the city, the meal was reasonably priced. With presumably fresh ingredients and a lot of veggies in the dishes, dim sum at night-time, a regular customer sitting in the corner reading a book (who ate a meal and also ordered take-out before leaving), and pretty tablecloths*, Singapore Chinese Vegetarian Restaurant is quite charming. SO BRING YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER(S) THERE!

*In looking at pictures of this restaurant online, I realised that they also have pink tablecloths. I prefer the paisley blue ones more)

4. Lotte Koala's March (cookies) - not a huge fan of them but SP loves them.

5. Lovash Indian Cuisine on 37th and Spruce St.

 More rice (long grain, rather cold -- but that may have been due to the weather, but the peas and paneer cheese were still warm). Some of the peas were still a bit hard, which means that they use dried peas, and not frozen ones. I love frozen peas and frozen corn. I eat frozen corn while it's still frozen, and I intend to do that with peas too, in the future (for other frozen things I eat, read here). The panner was less plasticky/smooth compared to paneer I've had before, and I'm not sure if that makes it more/less authentic.

 SP got chicken with something...It looked good because it was in a plastic container while mine was in a styrofoam one.

6. The Crepewalk, 36th and Spruce
Nutella crepe. Obviously better than the crepes that I made (which SP said were too thick). These are pretty much translucent!

Ginger Pepper Coconut Cakies

Today, the kitchen is overwhelmingly nutmeggy. Urg. I'm not sure why I dislike the sweet smell/taste of nutmeg. I was going to make gingersnaps but we don't have molasses. We've never bought molasses before...so instead, I sort of invented ginger pepper cookies/cakies, which I am sure exist elsewhere in the world. They look more like mini scones/cakes than cookies, mainly because I did the whole orange juice citric acid+baking soda thing again. Using this recipe as a basis, I flung around ingredients and burned down the kitchen. Luckily, I am going back to UPenn today, so I'll have somewhere to live while my family live in a kitchen-less house. Just kidding, I'm not Chowder. But we did have a 90 minute power outage yesterday.

They are cakey, slightly gingery, are a bit moist and textured due to the whole wheat flour and coconut, and lack crunch and buttery-ness. Not gingersnaps at all...more like a spice cake?

INGREDIENTS --makes 25 pretty big cakey cookies.
75g white sugar
75 g brown sugar
1 stick butter
1 egg
3 tbsp orange juice

some cinnamon
some nutmeg (I put in 1 tbsp, which was too much, as I'm not a fan of nutmeg).
some tablespoons of ginger powder
some tablespoons of ground black pepper (add dried chili flakes if you want?)
300 g whole wheat flour
50 g dried coconut (I used unsweetened, local)

1 tbsp baking soda

METHOD
1. Cream sugars and butter. Throw in the egg and orange juice.
2. Add the dry ingredients, ~80 g at a time. Fold.
3. Add the baking soda. Fold.
4. Scoop onto pan-greased-with-butter-wrapper.
5. Bake at 350 F in an un-preheated oven for 15 minutes on the middle rack. Let sit for about 10 minutes, or more. Just keep checking with your fork (it should come out clean, and the cookie should look solid).

Rocky Road Cookies

Apparently, there are different versions of the "Rocky Road" flavour. Therefore, I don't think it's wrong calling these leftover-Halloween-candy-pieces cookies "Rocky Road" cookies. They have oatmeal, marshmallows, peanut M&Ms, rock-shaped chocolate with realistic rock-like sugar coating (I used to pass by a chocolatier at Penrith Plaza when  I was younger, in Australia, and they used to have golden and silver beads/sprinkles/candy balls on display. I don't remember if they had rock-like coating chocolate, though), one peanut butter bunny from April, 3 malt balls, and milk chocolate chunks.

My sister and I made half a batch of cookies using a recipe from a brand-name sponsored recipe book. Why did I buy a recipe book full of food company advertising? ...This was 4 years ago (wow...that long?) and I was in NY and the Strand was having a sale (closing sale?) and I got a thick hardcover recipe book for $1 with pages after pages of shiny, colourful pictures of scrumptious desserts!! So, I did it for the pictures.

Come on, why else -apart from the images- do recipe books sell nowadays, with millions of equally fancy (or, even better...like the recipes I have, which have comments on better technique and economical energy usage?) recipes online?

Half the batch ended up providing us with 31 cookies. Yummy.

By the way, the Australian version of "Rocky Road" is evidently superior to the American version (in my opinion, drawn from experience). According to Wikipedia (I know, not a completely correct source), the American version is just marshmallow, nuts, and milk chocolate--that is true. The Australian definition, however, includes things such as COCONUT, TURKISH DELIGHT and jelly!--that is true also.

Friends!

TJ made me some iced peach juice. Actually, I think's more of a... hm... It's basically ice and peaches stuck in the blender. I really liked it, since it was icy cold (frozen peaches, I found out, don't taste as juicy or sweet as fresh peaches), but there was still a pleasant peach taste. TJ didn't enjoy it though, and proceeded to throw away a plate of cut up peaches, which kind of irked me.

 In other news, SR gave me a peanut butter cookie that his mum made for him. It's funny, because my mum came to Penn to give me my glasses (whoo!!! I can see far away now!) and brought along a bag of broccoli, cauliflower, mangoes, peaches, and basil from the garden. She also brought me a slice of pizza, which is pretty silly considering I have at least 9 slices of pizza in my fridge right now.