rejection cookies. healthy rejection cookies.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Wow Kilbride. WOMP. To which I say, you knew you were reading a cooking blog written by college seniors in the height of their job-seeking neurosis. So deal with it. That said, I wanted to make healthy rejection cookies because unemployed and fat is just too much for me to handle. And we descend on the Dominican in 34 days. Wallowing in self pity is no excuse to use more butter than Paula Dean. As such, I give thee: healthy rejection cookies. In all lower case because you're sad and without job.

Scavenge & secure:

1 cup Whole wheat flour
little baking powder
little salt
1 cup instant oats
1/2 stick butter
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/3 cup white sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
little vanilla
egg
a rejection-appropriate amount of chocolate chips

You know how this works. All the dry stuff (first part of the list thru the oats) goes in a medium bowl. Soften the butter in a big bowl in the microwave, add oil, sugars, vanilla, and the egg. Mix til its all smooth and such. Add in all the dry stuff, taking time to appreciate how healthy you are despite your propensity for life-long failure. And hyperbole.

rejection. now with fewer calories.

Once its all mixed add in unseemly amounts of chocolate chips. Which you can do because your saintly roommate stocked up during last week's string of rejections. Old rejected selves lookin out for new rejected selves. Classic.

Eat most of the cookie dough. Bake whats left for 15ish minutes on 350 degrees. Pass out to roomies, accept their assurance that rejection cookies are yummy. Small victories.

peace.love.summerhousing2012herewecome

THE SECOND BEST THING I EVER DID

The first thing I can’t talk about on the internet.

Anyway, Erin and I have been trolling cooking blogs for weeks trying to find something worthy of posting up on crackden, and we finally did: brown butter. It’s a huge deal in the world of internet kitchens, and quite yummy. And then I mixed it with more yummy things and boom, cookies. Round up the following:

1 stick butter
3/4 brown sugar
1 egg
little splash of vanilla
big splash of rum (spiced, of course)
1 cup plus 1 spoonful flour, with dash salt and baking soda
LOTS of cinnamon, like unscrew the top and dump
slightly less nutmeg and ginger
ground cardamom if you have it, cardamom pods (?) if you don’t

So first, you gotta make the brown butter. Which you do like anything else you brown, actually. Dump the stick of butter into a frying pan, and stir kinda a lil bit so it browns evenly. It gets kinda frothy at first, but if you look at it in the spoon it goes from yellow to kinda golden brown and smells delicious. Once it’s golden, pour it into your mixing bowl and let it cool down. At this point, if you have whole cardamom put 3 or 4 into the butter to extract the flavor (SCIENCE, ERIN), but if you have ground cardamom just wait til you do the other spices. For the love of god, take the cardamom pods out before you mix the rest of the stuff in.

When it hits about room temperature, whip in the brown sugar, and then the egg, vanilla, and rum. Gradually mix in the 1 cup of flour with salt and baking soda. In a the measuring cup or a small bowl, mix together the other spoonful of flour, plus a heaping spoonful of cinnamon and healthy amounts of nutmeg and ginger (and ground cardamom, if that’s what you’re using).


Refrigerate the cookie dough for a little bit, approximately the length of one pong game, and then drop by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet and bake for 13-14ish minutes in a 325 degree oven. Then nom away!

In defense of their deliciousness (and possibly my roommates’ propensity for drunk food), I offer the following: the plate of cookies was empty this morning when I woke up :)

GINGERBREAD FRIENDS

We’re uncommonly blessed by Alissa’s fetish for cake decorating, which has provided us with baking tools heretofore unknown to mankind/ErinandMelissa. Did you know they have markers to draw on cookies?? They do. So gather all the decorating bits and pieces you’ve got, and you will also need:

3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoonfuls ground ginger
1 large spoonful cinnamon
a couple shakes ground cloves
a couple shakes nutmeg
1 stick butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg

Mix your flour / salt / baking soda / spices in one bowl, and beat together sugars / butter, and then egg, in another. Combine bowls. Mush the cookie dough into a ball, cover it, and put it in the refrigerator overnight. 

Now is the messy part. If I were you, I’d put down a lot of wax paper onto whatever surface you’re working on, then sprinkle a couple of spoonfuls of flour onto said surface and spread it out. Now I know there’s no chance in hell you own a rolling pin, so wash the outside of an empty wine bottle out of your recycling pile, thoroughly dry, and flour the wine bottle.

I’m not fucking with you. 

Use the wine bottle to roll out the dough until it’s about 1/4 inch thick, sprinkling more flour as necessary to keep things from getting too sticky. Flour a cookie cutter, and cut out gingerbread people! Or, dip a knife in flour and freehand it, but that’s awfully ballsy. Bake those bad gingerboys for about 12 minutes. It depends on the size of your cookie cutter, but the edges should start to brown and the centers should be firm.

OK now decorate! Let the cookies cool completely, cause otherwise the icing will melt and you’ll be sad. You can use icing with those fancy decorating tips, or you can use tubs of icing or the recipe below:

2 cups sugar, 1 stick butter, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 1/2 tablespoons milk. Beat it up. Like, really.

Anyway, if you don’t have fancy decorating tips, load up icing into a ziploc bag, close it (obvi), and snip a tiny bit of the corner. You can also divide up icing and make different colors by adding a few drops of food coloring. If you run out of ideas for decorating, scroll through facebook.

Or, pick your favorite celebrity. Say a basketball player you’d love to marry.

Please come back, Chris.

Hands down the creepiest thing I've ever done.

MAN COOKING

Sunday Night Mouse Movies. The few, the proud, the greatest Henle tradition since not-being-written-up-ever. After a few SNMMs filled with female-baked pies, cookies, and assorted carboloaded, chocolate covered bars, the men decided to storm the kitchen. And by that I mean Phil showed up with peanut butter and Hershey's kisses and told us to GTFO the way. Bufe helped. Cause hobbits stick together.

And I speak with utmost uncertainty when I say it involved the following :

1 stick of butter (ya, we know)
1 cup peanut butter (go with low-fat if you wanna save yourself way more guilt than is proportional to how much fat you're actually saving)
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 egg
rittle bit vanilla
rittle bit baking soda / powder / whatever / you do you
2 tablespoons of milk
1 and 1/2 cups flour
teeny bit of salt


Get out your mixing bowl (in some cultures they call it a pasta pot), and mash the butter and peanut butter together with your mashed potatoe masher, because this is man cooking and you can. It will get stuck in the masher, but fear not, you're men, and YOU CAN HANDLE THIS. Get a fork. Behold:

Add both sugars, mix, then the egg and vanilla, mix again. Summon your sous chef, secure 2 more pots, don apron (its about to get man-messy) and glare in the direction of giggling women. Mix flour, baking soda, and salt, concentrating deeply on your pot. Look generally adorable.

"its all queer domestic bliss in the foreground... and crack den in the background" (copyright: Us, 2010)

Mix until you don't feel like mixing more. Compliment self on facial hair. Combine pots.

Roll into cookie dough balls, and to add a bit more fat & sparkle to Sunday Night Mouse Movies, roll in sugar. Cause why not. Men love sugar.

Bake for 9 minutes (Not eight to ten. Nine.) at 375 (again, depending on your apartment's cooking ability) until they look like cookies. With whatever Hershey's kisses you have left after being absolutely pillaged by the fat girls that live in the apartment, press immediately into warm cookies. Utter the phrase "MAN COOKING" several more times, snuggle up to your women, and commence SNMM.

PUMPKIN CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

...cause sometimes you just need a baking session before you casually perform in an Indian Bhangra show on a casual Friday night.

So, arm yourself with the following and get excited cause these things are effing phenomenal.

1 cup canned pumpkin
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
just a rittle bit o salt
1 teaspoon baking soda (re: another tsp baking powder cause you can't find the god damn baking soda to save your life)
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon milk
teeny tiny bit of vanilla extract (finger-to-bowl-to-mouth test proved the batter so good pre-vanilla that I was hesitant to put any in at all, but its just one of those things your supposed to put in cookies all the time always no matter what as though there's some sort of vanilla extract mafia just waiting for you to screw up if you don't... so I did it)
2 cups (plus more depending on what kind of mood your in) chocolate chips

In one bowl combine flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon. In that bowl's slightly larger cousin, combine pumpkin, sugar, egg, and oil.

NOW PAY ATTN CAUSE IT'S ABOUT TO GET REAL: put the baking soda (or last tsp baking powder, as the case may be) INTO a little thing of milk. The word "dissolve" would come in handy here, if I weren't allergic to science.

Now add that crazy white stuff to its wet friends. Add all dry stuff to all the wet stuff (if you wanna feel fancy, employ the old add-some-then-mix-then-add-more-then-mix trick... as though that somehow affects ANYTHING.) Throw in lots and lots of chocolate chips. Then...

"Drop by rounded tablespoons onto greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes."

... jklolz I don't actually give a shit how big you make your cookies, I've just always wanted to write that. Cook for 10ish minutes (again, depending on your cooking machine), put onto plate to cool, leave out, and await late-night roommate freakout when they find them. Consider self Christmas hero.

Note: picture not even a little bit mine, but I swear this is what they looked like.