A New Kitchen

We've moved to a temporary home until the end of February.   It's a home with a much smaller kitchen and so I had to make some decisions while packing up about what items needed to go into storage.   I kept only a couple of cookie sheets and a couple of mixing bowls and send the rest to storage.   I also sent my springform pans, my bundt pans, my mini loaf pans, my mini muffin tins and a few other specialty pans to storage.   I think I might miss them.

In the meantime, I have a lot of ingredients for cookies and cakes and other desserts that I need to use rather than moving them again.    So my goal is to continue working my way through the cookie book making new recipes (and some old ones) while using up ingredients in my freezer and pantry so I don't have to move them.   On Sunday I decided we needed some cookies, but I didn't have any eggs.    I did have peanut butter and chocolate chips and found a recipe for Chewy Peanut Butter Cookies that only called for peanut butter, sugar, evaporated milk, cornstarch and chocolate chips.    But when I went to bake them the first ones started to brown after only being in the oven for about 8 minutes (the recipe said to bake them for 12 to 15 mintues) but when I took them out they were still kind of gooey.    I turned the temp down on the oven (it had been set at 350) and tried again.   This time I left them in for 10 minutes, but then they were crispy on the outside but gooey in the middle.   I think this is how they are supposed to be, but they don't look pretty at all so I didn't take any pictures.    However, Mark swears they are delicious.

Today I went to the kitchen againdetermined to have better success than on Sunday.   (After all, today I had eggs!).    I started with Cherry Coconut Bars because I had maraschino cherries and coconut that I would like to use rather than moving.     I thought things were going fine, until I took them out of the oven after the recommended time and they were dark brown on top -- not quite burnt but not very pretty at all.   Grrr!    Oh well, I sprinkled some powdered sugar on top of them to camoflauge the dark brown tops and they seemed to taste pretty good.    And lesson learned -- the oven temperature is hotter than the dial says that it is.   

So for my next attempt I had a 1/2 bag of caramels that I needed to use so I found a recipe for chocolate caramel cookies and even though it said to bake them at 350 I turned the oven down to 325.   The cookies turned out beautiful until it was time to melt the chocolate chips for the chocolate portion of the cookie.   And that is when I discovered that the microwave here is hotter than my old microwave too.    Know what happens when you try to melt chocolate chips but get them too hot -- they kind of turn into a play dough type substance (tasty, but not spreadable with a knife).   Since Foster isn't old enough to play with an edible play dough, I decided to use it anyway on top of the coookies.   So on top of the shortbread cookies I placed a caramel and then used my fingers to shape the chocolate topping on the cookies.   Again, not pretty, but tasty, although I think the chocolate overwhelms the caramel in this cookie so I'll need to tweak this recipe for the future.  

So now I know that both the microwave and oven are hotter than I expected.   Hopefully my next attempt at dessert will turn out better -- and prettier so that I can post pictures!