If you ain’t dutch … Anise Koek

If you know what I’m talking about, fistbumps / secret Dutch handshake (which I imagine would be a regular handshake but taller and with blue eyes.) (I’m 5’6” – 6’5” was a typo lol -with peasoup greenish/hazel eyes, for the record.) You probably don’t need this recipe. In fact, you’re probably still off baking right now after your New Years overindulgence on Olliebollen.

Otherwise, if you aren’t Dutch, you probably have no idea what Anise Koek is, or even refers to. You might be familiar with anise, it’s a spice/seed with a liquorice flavour. Its flavour is sweet on it’s own, and if you enjoy black jellybeans then you’re a fan. Alcohol-wise, it’s used in Jagermeister and Sambuca, and herbally it can be used to treat menstrual cramping.

Now “koek” (pronounced kook) is quite simply ‘cake’ in Dutch. The koeks of my childhood have all been heavy moist loaves, well buttered and often served on Sundays in between church services, or if you were lucky you had a slice buttered and cut in half, buttered sides together, in your lunch box. I went to a private school where about 90% of the students were dutch and if you brought a bag of dropjes (salty Dutch liquorice) to school you were instantly popular and/or mobbed.

Anise koek is a moist, heavy, chewy loaf. Warm it is served with or without butter, cool it is generally cut into slices, buttered, and often will be served with those slices cut in half again. It is sweet but not cloyingly so, and accompanies a good strong cup of coffee quite well. When it comes out of the oven the crust is crispy and the rest is soft, and then when it has been left covered overnight the crust will soften up, becoming slightly sticky and quite chewy, and unlike regular breads I have many childhood memories of koek crusts being fought over.

The recipe I’m sharing with you today comes from a church community cookbook, adapted a bit, and makes two loaves. You can eat one hot and one cold, you can freeze one for later, or you can give one to a friend. I suppose you could always cut the recipe in half, but what’s the fun in that? Lately I’ve been lining my loaf pans in parchment paper, which makes for easy removal, makes it hard to burn, and also means I don’t have to replace my crummy loaf pans.

Anise Koek

6 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
3 tsp baking soda
3 tsp baking powder
3 tsp anise seed (found in the spice section) or ground anise (never used it)
1 cup syrup (originally likely corn syrup, I use a pure maple syrup, but really any syrup will do)
2 cups strong coffee
(optional: 1 cup raisins, depending on whether you think raisins in baking are a treat or a false promise of chocolate)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then add the coffee and syrup and mix again. I will often stir my anise seed into the coffee while it is cooling. I also like to let it sit for a while, covered, to let the anise soak in to the dough, and then give it another quick mix. Pour equally in to two prepared loaf pans (either greased or lined with parchment paper.)

The recipes I’ve looked at all call for baking at 350 for an hour, but I actually like to bake at 350 for about half an hour, and then turn it down to 300 and finish the baking, keeping an eye out for doneness rather than counting on the timer. The finished loaf is dark and has a firm top, and an inserted knife comes out clean. If you make other loaf cakes, like banana loaves, then you should have a basic idea of what they need in your own oven. Baking times can vary by oven a bit, but if you’re not comfortable with playing around feel free to just leave the oven at 350 for exactly one hour.

My carb-loving middle child loves this, my picky-pie eldest won’t even eat it without raisins, and my youngest eats all the things. Obviously my husband and I are both fans.

Worthit Chocolate Chip Cookies

(featured on luvinthemommyhood … actually, you can thank Shannon that I blogged this recipe at all. I’m not sure why I haven’t before. I apologize.)

These cookies are sooooooo bad. These cookies are soooooooo good. These cookies are totally Worthit.

Worth baking even if you hate baking. Worth working out over even if you hate working out. Maybe even worth love handles from cookie binges. Your significant other won’t notice your love handles if your lovely hands each have a cookie for him in it, is all I’m saying.

Now, a quick note. Butter and margarine are totally interchangeable in this recipe, BUT… and I might have to go into Witness Protection over this one… I actually prefer the margarine. Also… I prefer this recipe doubled. As-is, it makes about 3.5 dozen cookies. Doubled, you can freeze half the dough and make cookies whenever you want, works great. Or freeze the finished cookies for later. Also? If you use bricks of margarine, like my own good self, then when you double the recipe you get to use three bricks instead of one and a half - which is a pain, for the record. (But still worthit.)

I’ll write out the full recipe quickly at the bottom for those of you who’d like to just start the cookies asap. I can’t say I blame you.

Ingredients assembled… if you like to bake with your kiddos this is a great plan, especially with the younger set. Then they can just dump everything into the mixer. You really don’t need any type of mixer to make these, you can do it with a good old-fashioned bowl and wooden spoon. I use a mixer because I’m lazy a professional.  (why yes, my bag of chocolate chips is bigger than my 4 quart mixing bowl. Don’t judge me.)

My lovely assistant Nicole has a cold today. I washed her face before we did this but she foiled me anyways. At this point, you let your kid dump things into the mixer bowl as directed by the recipe below.

Nicole and her good buddy The Mixer. She can operate this thing, with supervision, and often does. Also, while you’re letting The Mixer do all the work, you can tease smiles and giggles out of your Lovely Assistant. 

I call licking the beaters!

Do you see the metal shiny thing in the bottom right corner of that picture? That is my Medium Cookie Scoop from Pampered Chef. It makes perfect mounds of nicely-sized cookies. So easy, I’ve done it one-handed while nursing. I like it because I’m too lazy distractible busy to scoop them the normal way. Also, I bake cookies on parchment paper. Less cleanup, and they slide right off. Plus I don’t have to take photographs of my permanently grody baking sheets that my hubby used to catch drippings when he was making goose jerky in the oven.

Cookies go in the oven for 8-10 minutes, during which time you may play with small children, eat cookie dough, and/or shove oreos inside cookie dough to try Cookie In A Cookie.

Whaaaaat? Cookie in a cookie?!

Why yes, my friend. Cookie in a cookie. Just in case super-soft super-delicious cookies weren’t naughty enough on their own. 

Aaaaand after my usual wordy blathering, here we get down to business. If you’d like to print this out, just copy and paste the recipe text into your word processor – or even into a New Email – and print.

“Worthit Chocolate Chip Cookies”

3/4 cup butter or margarine
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate chips
2 cups flour

Cream butter/margarine, sugar, and vanilla. Add eggs and beat well.

Combine flour, baking soda, and salt. Add to the wet ingredients. Once everything is well combined, add in your chocolate chips and stir to distribute.

Drop onto ungreased cookie sheets, or cookie sheets lined with parchment paper. Bake at 375 F for 8-10 minutes, or until lightly browned. Cool slightly before removing from sheets.

Baked cookies and unbaked cookie-in-a-cookies.

To make these cookies doubly naughty, the original recipe – which came from a friend’s mom – calls for 2 cups of chocolate chips. I don’t know if you were paying attention, but in case you weren’t, that is a 1:1 ration of flour:chocolate. If you make them this way and eat them straight out of the oven, it is waaaay too much chocolate (for me.) If you make them this way and eat them the next day, you will gain forty pounds but they will be such a happy forty pounds that the dimples on your thighs will form smiley faces.

:D !!

edited to add: I don’t know if anyone else is getting the same LinkWithin links at the bottom of the post as me, but the ones I get are previous posts about weight loss and healthy recipes. Hardy har har, linkwithin.

C is for Valentine’s Day

So, on Sunday night I was sitting there (presumably. or possibly pacing with Olivia.) and then suddenly I was struck with an idea. Wouldn’t it be fun if for Valentine’s Day I made some heart shaped sugar cookies? And decorated them? And invited my sister in law and some littles (hers and one borrowed one as well) to come over and decorate the cookies with us? YES! It would be! So I fired off a facebook message and boom, there you have it, we had a date. Of course, the fact that I acted on a whim instead of planning ahead meant that I had to choose between setting up for cookies or cleaning the bathroom on Monday morning. Guess what I picked?

MMM, these were a lot tastier than my bathroom, let me assure you. I used to be one of those swish&swipe people and I really need to be again, because with Chris’ line of work it takes exactly 2 days for my bathroom to look like a truckstop.

Mine are the cookies with no sprinkles. I like sprinkles well enough in theory, but I had my eye on eating my cookies so they were pretty much sprinkle-free. The white “V” cookie I made for my husband. And don’t worry, I scraped the sprinkles off of one of those big heart cookies and ate that, too. For the children. I’m not sure whose children, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And of course, cookie pops for the kiddos. Everything tastes better on a stick! The age range of the kiddos, by the way, varied from 1 to 3 years. The one year old was pretty good at it, my SIL spread on icing for him and he put on sprinkles to his heart’s content!

The recipe for these cookies is from Our Best Bites over here. They were YUM. YUMYUMYUM. Soft, and buttery, and I do love a short ingredient list. And the icing was milk, icing sugar, and a bit of pancake syrup. That sounds totally insane perhaps, but I didn’t have corn syrup to make a shiny glaze so I tried it and it worked.  They hardened to a hard glaze but still soft to bite into. Did I say YUM yet? Okay, NOMNOMNOM then.

Cookie cookie start with C!

Cinnamon Coffee Cake Loaves

This can easily be done without a stand mixer, but my instructions are for with one because a) I have one and b) it saves time to do two things at once, yay! This is adjusted from a Company’s Coming recipe, the ingredients are mostly the same but the instructions are changed to make this super efficient. Once you’ve done these once or twice you’ll be able to whip them up in just a jiff. No pictures with this post, to make it easy to print.

FILLING

Brown Sugar, packed  - 1 cup
Ground Cinnamon – 2 or 3 tsp, to taste (i love me some cinnamon)

CAKE

Butter or softened hard margarine – 3/4 cup
Granulated sugar – 1 1/2 cup
Large eggs – 3
Vanilla – 1 1/2 tsp

All-purpose flour – 3 cups
Baking powder – 1 1/2 tsp
Baking soda – 1/4 tsp
Salt – 1/4 tsp

Sour cream – 1 1/2 cups

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Cream butter and white sugar together in your mixer bowl. While that’s mixing, stir the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt together in a medium bowl.
Beat the eggs in one at a time. While the first egg mixes, put your brown sugar in a small bowl. While the second mixes, add the cinnamon to the brown sugar and mix the two together with a fork. While the third egg mixes, spray two small loaf pans with cooking spray. Finally, add the vanilla to the mixer bowl, and while that mixes in sprinkle a little brown sugar mixture in the bottom of each pan.

Next you’re going to add the flour mixture and sour cream to the mixer bowl alternately, the flour in three parts and the sour cream in two. (If you have the Pampered Chef Measure-All Cup for your sour cream this is super easy.)

Once this is all mixed together, spoon 1/4 of the batter mix into each of the two cake pans. Sprinkle 1/4 of the remaining sugar mix in each of the pans, then spoon in the remaining batter mix into the cake pans. Finally, sprinkle the rest of the sugar mix on top of the loaf pans.

Bake in 350 F oven for 50 to 60 minutes. Eat cooled. Freezes well, tastes really great on day 2 or 3. Two loaves makes this a great recipe to gift one loaf to a friend who might be having a rough week!

Big Giant Baby is one month old

Big Giant Baby… That should be my new nickname for Olivia. Also toying with Meatball, Porkchop, Chubby Monkey, and Rolie Polie Olie. She’s one month old today. Here’s what else she did today:

- roll over from front to back. Several times. Once in front of witnesses.

- started wearing cloth diapers. This does not exactly have a slimming effect on my little meatball. But that’s okay, cos we like big butts and we cannot lie.

- weighed in at a whopping 11lb 10oz !! What a champ. Olivia started off with a weight advantage, but Nicole and Olivia were both pretty much 9lb on the nose at one week old. Olivia has regained the lead with a vengeance.

We were looking at a picture of her at two days old and we don’t think she’s changed much… she kindof came out looking about a month old. And smiling. And giving us strange looks. And farting; man, how quickly you forget. Such a tiny tiny person… amazing how she can clear a room with one little pffft. Okay, that’s a lie, it’s rarely a little pffft. It’s more like an echoing rumble. Guess how the adjustment to shampoo free is going?

aslkdjfaw;oeiyrwqe;oainraoijasklefj ;4iut0429ur5k!!!!! That’s how. Thanks for asking. I’m ready to give up. I am just hovering at that point where you don’t want to give up because you have tried soooo hard/long and maybe it will get better soon? It’s like where you watch a movie to the end because you figure it has got to get better at some point. Except sometimes? It never does. I grow suspicious that my hair may just be that movie.

On a sweeter note, I will take advantage of this public forum to announce that I made cake pops. No, that’s not what I was going to say. I’m such a glory hound. I was going to say that Chris is awesomesauce. He beat me home today, and by the time I pulled in he had cleaned the kitchen (no small feat today, trust. I was fearing and dreading the task) and turned on the dishwasher. Then he built a gingerbread house for/with Nicole. He then proceeded to make sortof a chicken parmesan kind of dinner that was super yum, give Nicole a bath, cuddle Olivia while I put Nicole’s jammies on, go downstairs and sew something (I’m not joking. He fixed the dog leash after the dog chewed it up, and came upstairs cackling like a maniac and leashed the dog up just to show her he had won this week’s Man vs Beast.) Then he laid down on the couch and let Nicole make him pretty with her toy blow dryer/curling iron/curlers. She was hilarious because she kept asking him how his day was and after the third time he got kind of flustered. He even lay there like a champ while she put on my lip stain, even though I was shaking with silent laughter on the loveseat. And of course he helped me put Nicole to bed. I’m pretty sure what I was doing for most of this was sitting on my duff.

(that last paragraph was about my cake pop bouquets, right??)

Now, Chris is not awesomesauce all the time 24/7/365. See anything related to hunting. But when Chris is awesomesauce he loads it on with nuts and cherries and caramel and sparkles. So I’d like to order a pair of confetti cannons and a marching band to celebrate the awesomeness of Chris. Powpow bwah bwah bwah boom boom.

(I’d like to and I am going to are different. I can’t afford that shit, you crazy?)

Cookies and milk

I give myself a blue ribbon for my multitasking last night. I was baking cookies/nursing/watching Gossip Girl something incredibly educational and non-trashy/blogging all at the same time. After 11pm. Actually maybe I give myself a blue ribbon for Batshit Crazy. Probably that. But you know what, I love my cookie scoop. Only with a cookie scoop can you nurse a baby and fill a cookie sheet with cookie dough balls at the same time. Mine is the size medium cookie scoop from Pampered Chef and I love it. Two scoops to fill a muffin/cupcake cup… one scoop for a generous meatball or cookie. I know some people prefer the smaller scoop but I like my cookies and meatballs to be HEARTY.

(click the scoop to be brought to the product page.)

I was totally going somewhere with this but then baby and three year old and hours passed and I watched a movie and I have no idea what I was up to. But somehow I still feel its important that the world know that everyone needs a cookie scoop. I used to get bored/annoyed halfways through making cookies because while I love the idea of making cookies, and the taste of cookie dough, and the smell of fresh cookies… when it comes down to actually placing a gazillion cookies on sheet after sheet with 8-12 minute pauses in between, snoooore. However, if you can’t find a cookie dough scoop or a Pampered Chef consultant to get you one, I highly recommend freezing cookie dough in a container when you get bored of devoting your life to scooping cookies, and pretend your endgoal all along was to have frozen cookie dough so you could enjoy fresh cookies whenever the mood hit. I recommend this MUCH more than I recommend polishing off the cookie dough you don’t feel like scooping. Trust me on this one. It seems like a good plan, but you will immediately regret that decision.

Actually I just decided you should give somebody a cookie scoop and a bucket of homemade frozen cookie dough for Christmas. Tadaa! I just went somewhere useful with this post. Merry Christmas. If I was a real blogger I’d have a picture of beautifully presented cookie dough in a bucket wrapped up with a cookie scoop and there would be ribbon and beautiful tags and it would be amazing. If you want a real blogger I can provide you with a good long list, actually… since I’m not a real blogger I’ll distract you instead with pictures of my adorable girls. Olivia was two weeks old yesterday!

  Olivia has some newborn rashyskin going on… Nicole still loves her super bad… I still am pretending Olivia might have my green eyes even though its definitely looking like she’s leaning towards blue like everyone else in our families… and yes, those are coordinating outfits. And I didn’t even leave the house with them today. I just do it because Nicole loves it. Okay, and maybe me too. 

 

So, back to the beginning… what’s the your best/craziest multitasking victory so far? Mine is pretty amazing for me because normally I can’t multitask AT ALL. Also, do you have a slightly unusual kitchen tool you’re madly in love with, like my beloved cookie scoop? I’m always up to try more, especially small ones that fit in drawers.

Also, I apologize to those of you who ‘got’ the title and are like ‘awwwwww that’s not even funny’.