Want the recipe for these yummy chocolate peppermint cupcakes? I am today’s guest blogger over at Frosting for the Cause – please head over there to check it out!

Starting to make macarons was a lot like when I started to bake bread. I knew there was a huge wealth of knowledge out there, but how far did I have to bother learning before jumping in?

One positive point (or at least, I consider it positive) that macarons have going for them: in bread baking, there are elements that we consider “perfection” – crunchy crust, open crumb, for example. But those “perfect elements” change depending on what type of bread you’re baking. I love that about bread baking, but it’s intimidating as a newbie….how do you know if your soft, chewy crust is “perfect” for the recipe you’re using?

By contrast, there is a true definition of a perfect French macaron. Macarons do have to have filling, and there is “traditional” filling, but there isn’t so much right and wrong as there is with the macarons themselves. According to a multitude of sources, a perfect macaron should be:

- Light in color, not browned on the top or edges.

- Not cracked in any way.

- Sandwiched with some type of filling, buttercream is traditional, I personally prefer ganache.

- When bitten into, the outside shell should crack, but not shatter, giving way to a slightly chewy meringue-y center.

- It should not be very thick, and most of its height should be composed of the foot. This is the place where I most often see bakeries diverging from what thins are “supposed to be.” EVERYTHING I read says macarons should be thin. Everything I see is thick, including the “best of NY” Ladueree macarons my father brought me to sample over Thanksgiving.

A big thing to keep in mind is that macarons are classic French pastries. French pastry will drive people crazy. A lot of what they do is dictated by law, the rules behind the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France are wonderfully insane, and even THEY consider macarons to be the pinnacle of what they do.

That doesn’t mean that it’s hard to make a macaron. It really isn’t. Even the cracked ones with air bubbles, cracks, and no feet are still macarons, and as long as you can get them off the pan, they’re probably still just as yummy and edible. But they are not French pastry perfection. And that’s where the crazy-making comes in.

So instead of giving an actual recipe, I’ll link to some of my favorites below, and just give some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way. Learn from my mistakes!

• YouTube is your friend. I cannot imagine trying to learn how to do this without having watched as many videos as I did of people making macarons. The best way to understand what the meringue should look like, what the almond/sugar mix should look like, and when to stop mixing the batter is to watch. Articles online help as well, I’ll link some of the most helpful at the end of this post.
• If baking with the oven door open, as you should be, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN WHILE BAKING. It isn’t entirely ridiculous when you think about it – your oven door is open, therefore susceptible to drafts. Swooshing around the kitchen, possibly opening and closing a microwave door directly over the oven, or opening a refrigerator door, is causing air to move around the kitchen and into the open oven. A strong enough draft can cause enough of a temperature shift to crack the macarons. It took me 3 batches to figure this out.
• No matter what method you use, you are essentially making a meringue and collapsing it around very dry ingredients (powdered sugar and almond meal). You cannot have a very dry, ‘can be held over your head forever and ever without moving’ meringue and expect it to have enough liquid left to properly incorporate the dry ingredients. The meringue needs to be a little beyond soft peaks, but not solid stiff, it should still bend a bit.
• Mixing. Well, folding. This is the most important part of making macarons, and the difference between perfect and broken macarons can be as few as 10 extra folds. People say you should mix it no more than 50 times, no more than 80, 28…numbers are all over, since I suspect the choices made elsewhere in the process (what type of meringue, are any dry ingredients incorporated already, etc.) will change this number, as will your own arm strength and technique for folding. For me, at least, I see the batter change around turn 20. From there I’m watching it very carefully as I fold, basically just thinning it out a little bit more, and I generally end up around 30. I have been going by the advice that it should take 10 seconds for a drop of the batter to lose its peak….this advice differs greatly depending on who you talk to – I’ve seen recipes that advise pushing down the peaks after piping the cookies. I never, ever have peaks.
• You don’t need to be delicate with the mixing either, one pastry chef I saw said to “beat the shit out of it.” Beat it, while carefully folding everything together.
• Oven temperature is crucial. I don’t really believe an oven thermometer is necessary so much as paying attention to exactly what the right setting on your own oven is. For me, it’s just a smidge above 300. If I go as high as 325 I end up with cracked shells.

And last but not least, here are some great links where you can learn all you ever wanted to and more about macarons!

Serious Eats: Macarons – This is my macaron recipe of choice right now, and has the easiest meringue preparation. I will definitely play with other types in the future, but for now – this works great.

David Lebovitz’s French Chocolate Macarons David Lebovitz is a fantastic resource for all things French, and macarons are no exception. While I don’t use his method, I did use his proportions when I made chocolate macarons (but ultimately decided I prefer using food coloring, cocoa powder makes things too chewy).

Syrup & Tang, La Macaronicite This is a series of blog posts that go over all of the different methods for making macarons in great detail. I read this multiple times before deciding on my own strategy.

Tartelette http://www.tarteletteblog.com/2008/06/snickers-macarons.html Yet another macaron recipe. I love this blog in general, so of course I went reading up on macarons there.

Almost Foolproof Macarons Another recipe that’s good reading, this time with pics and geeky details.

Happy baking!!

In case you didn’t get enough food over the holidays, I finally uploaded a whole bunch of baking related pictures to Flickr. Some of them are fairly old (my “standard” mushroom/cheese pizza is much better looking these days), and some of them will end up in blog entries over the next couple of weeks with recipes and more information. I’ve become quite obsessed with macarons as of late, and definitely have a slightly embarrassing backlog of unpublished recipes to catch up on.

For now, I think it’d be fun to revisit a classic. Just plain, old, what I call “utility” bread. My daily bread, basically. I make this with up to 75% whole wheat bread, and will throw in milk, olive oil, sugar/splenda/honey, herbs and spices, nuts and seeds….whatever I want to change it. It’s different enough now than the last time I shared my basic recipe that I think it’s worth giving again. I’m sure I’ll always be improving upon this. So this is my best basic…for now.

Basic White Bread

3 cups of bread flour
1 1/2 – 3/4 cups of lukewarm water
1 heaping tsp yeast
1 1/2 tsp salt

Mix all of the ingredients, and knead for about 10-15 minutes. Cover and allow to triple in size, this should take about 1 1/2 hrs.

At this point, you can throw the dough in the fridge and shape/bake as desired, or go ahead and shape it all now. Allow to rise into final shape, slash, and bake in a well heated 450 oven for 20-25 minutes. It will get dark and brown – this is due to the high salt content and intentional. Cover the top with foil if really concerned about burning, but it’s unlikely that will happen.

Bread is done when it sounds hollow when thumped, and should crackle when removed from the oven. Let cool for at least 15 minutes before slicing, and enjoy!!

I love to make muffins. They’re quick, easy, and can take on just about any flavor you want to throw into them. They can be healthy or unhealthy, sweet or savory, and, no matter how complicated you make them, they never take more than 15 minutes to mix up.

So, after making the Whoopie Pies with my coworker’s lemons, I decided to use up some more of them in some muffins. This recipe is my standard muffin formula, adjusted for the lemon/cranberry mix.

Ingredients:

* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 tablespoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 3/4 cup sugar
* 1 lemon, zest of
* 1 lemon, juice of
* 1 cup dried cranberries
* 1/4 cup buttermilk powder
* 1 cup water
* 1 egg
* 1/4 cup oil
* for glaze: 1 cup powdered sugar, 2-3 tbl milk, icing coloring as desired

Mix up the wet ingredients, add the dry ingredients. Pour into greased or lined muffin tins, bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes, until golden brown around the edges.

Mix together the sugar and milk for the glaze, add coloring as needed. Remember how I mentioned in my last post you need to be careful with gel colors? Yeah, well, you can see the results here in the muffin glaze. PATIENCE is the important word when coloring anything. Only add a little bit of color at a time. I wasn’t particularly patient, threw in a glob of gel, and this is what I ended up with. Oops.

Wait for the muffins to cool off, then drizzle the glaze over the tops for a little extra sweet shine.

These muffins will keep for at least a week in a bag at room temp, or even longer in the freezer (if frozen, nuke ‘em for a minute or so to defrost, they’ll be fine).

Enjoy!!

One of my coworkers brought in some fresh picked organic lemons from his backyard, and I couldn’t resist bringing a bunch of lemons home to do some baking. After all, what’s more perfect for spring, sunny weather than lemons?

I’ve been reading whoopie pie recipes left and right in various baking blogs lately, and had been looking for an opportunity to try to make some myself. I started with a basic lemon cake recipe, and adapted it from there.

Ingredients:

2 cups AP flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1/4 cup dried buttermilk
1/2 cup flour
2 tsp lemon rind/shredded peel
2 tablespoons lemon juice

For frosting:

6 oz cream cheese (softened)
1/2 cup butter (softened)
1 tsp lemon rind/peel
2 tsp lemon juice
4 cups powdered sugar

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 325.

Measure out the 2 cups of sugar into a bowl. Grate the lemon rind directly into the sugar. Mix (I use a plastic container with a lid and just shake). Set aside. You can do this in advance of baking – the longer you let the rind and sugar sit, the better. Shake the container every so often to encourage those lemon oils to go into the sugar.

Mix together the flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and buttermilk powder, set aside.

Cream the now lemony sugar together with the butter until fluffy. Add the lemon juice, then the flour mixture. Slowly add the water until you get a thickish batter, feel free to use less of the water if you want thicker pies.

Yum, lemons!

To bake:

Drop the batter by the teaspoon onto a cookie sheet. These will spread – a lot – I could only really bake 6 or so at a time on a full size sheet. The larger the batter drop the larger the cookie will be widthwise, you will not get more thickness by using more batter (use less water for that).

Bake for 8-11 minutes, remove to a rack to cool. The “cookies” should be slightly brown around the edges, but still mostly yellow. When the cookies come out of the oven, sprinkle the tops of the cookies with yellow sanding sugar (or other coarse, decorating sugar) if desired for a little crunch and sparkle.

The icing:

Mix together the cream cheese, lemon, and butter until fluffy. Add the powdered sugar a cup at a time until the desired stiffness is achieved. If desired, add yellow coloring gel at this point. Be careful with icing, a little goes a very long way! I got the color right on the icing for the whoopie pies, but…as you’ll see…I kind of made neon day-glo glaze for the muffins. Oopsies, you can laugh at me in the next post.

To assemble: Easy as pie. Once the cookies have cooled, take one, spread icing on the flat side with a knife or offset spatula. Top with another cookie, flat side down. You can get fancy with piping if you want, I did for a little while, but the results are barely visible and not really worth the extra effort.

Let the cookies sit for another hour or so for the icing to set and the cake to firm up, then dig in!

Yield fully depends on how big you make the cookies – I’d guestimate I got about 20-something cookies out of this batch. The icing was the perfect amount.

Aren’t they pretty?

At least 2-3 times a week, I am baking something or another. It tends to be a combination of food for dinner and some kind of “fun” stuff to feed my boyfriend, his kids, or the office. I don’t keep track of my experiments as well as I should, so I figure I might as well write stuff up in here.

I had intended to take pictures of what I baked for this entry, but totally forgot – look for those next time!

This week’s adventures have been:

Pizza.

I have an ongoing quest for the perfect pizza. There is my personal favorite pizza to eat (thick crust and crunchy), the pizza I aspire to bake (thin crust neopolitan), and then the pizza those around me most like (thick crust and bready). Trying to find a good balance between the three hasn’t been easy.

This week’s pizza experiment was definitely one of the best results yet. I’ve recently been experimenting with 00 italian flour, which I have to say, I should have done a long time ago. I used a 60% hydration dough, all 00 Flour, and it blew up on the second rise (I was making thick crust pizza), falling off the sides of the pizza pan. Instead of cutting the dough, I folded it over the toppings back on itself, which resulted in a stuffed crust kind of pizza. It was amazing! Chewy, crunchy, yummy crust, and the cheese and toppings hidden in there were awesome. I will absolutely be making it again this week, and take pictures.

Snickerdoodles.

I’d done one of my “ask person what their favorite junk food is” things the weekend before, and was told snickerdoodles. This is my go-to Snickerdoodles recipe, with some tweaking. I used all butter, since I don’t particularly like baking with shortening unless there’s a very good reason to do so. I also added extra vanilla to the cookies. I didn’t add cinnamon, which I should have (and usually do), simply because I forgot. So if you make this recipe, I highly recommend adding another teaspoon or so of cinnamon to the dough, otherwise all of the cinnamon-y sugar taste has to come from the coating.

Honey Wheat Bread.

Every couple of months I place an order from King Arthur Flour, and happily spend the next couple of months playing with new ingredients. This time around among the playthings I bought was a honey bread base. I experimented with bread bases way back when I first started baking, but at the time decided I needed to master “normal” ingredients before branching out into add-ins and funky flours. The honey base adds a touch of honey (obviously), spelt flour, gluten, and some seeds to any bread. I added it into a whole wheat recipe I use (2/3rds whole wheat flour, 1/3 bread, 50% hydration) along with some salt and honey (for happy yeast and flavor). It was…ok. I’m still not sold on the usefulness of bread bases and think I could probably make my own just as well with minimal effort (and customized for me), but it is a nice way to “kick up” a basic whole wheat. A lot of what I got from KAF this time around was specifically for whole wheat bread baking, so expect a lot of “I tried this…” type stuff. No recipe to share due to the use of the custom ingredient.

I also tried making two low-fat, sugar-free versions of the mug cakes (one chocolate cake, one vanilla lemon almond yellow cake) that have been spinning their way around the internet. Nothing worth sharing yet, but suffice to say – eggs make them too eggy/soufflee-ish, and extracts/flavorings do not do enough actual flavoring for a “cake” like this – stick with chocolate. The results haven’t been terrible, but I need to do some more tinkering before I can truly call this a good, quick, diet-friendly cake, which is what I’m trying to achieve.

This week: I have a big batch of french dough in the refrigerator (which had taken on a life of its own when I looked at it this morning, will be interesting to see what state it’s in later today). I want to repeat the pizza experiment from last week and see if it can be replicated. And I have some pre-party baking for the freezer to do. I’m thinking simple chocolate fudge brownies, and maybe Jacques Torres’ New York Times chocolate chip cookie recipe, since it’s a slightly “kicked up” version of a cookie. I’d wanted to do some playing around with filled brownies (marshmallow filled, in particular), but I suspect marshmallows won’t do very well in the freezer, and I’m probably better off waiting until I won’t have to freeze. I’m also considering making a cinnamon sugar pull apart bread or monkey bread, inspired by Annie’s pull apart bread recipe.

We’ll see, though. I always start the week thinking I know what I’m going to be baking, then as the week goes on a combination of what I feel like doing and what just seems to happen as I pull recipes together mutates things a bit.

I bake a lot. I’m regularly bringing things I bake to work or to friends, since part of the fun of baking is being able to share, and seeing other people smile when they eat your yummy creations. Last time I brought something to work, one of my coworkers asked me how long I had been baking. I answered without thinking, “I’ve been baking seriously for about 15 years.” Her response “what’s seriously baking?”

Good question, and one I had to think about. I believe I did give the right response. I’ve been baking my entire life, but for years and years I was like most people and just pulled out a random chocolate chip cookie recipe or something every once in a while. But 15 (or so) years ago, it all changed.

It wasn’t really intentional, I didn’t set out to become a baking geek. A friend of mine had a bread machine, I saw what it could do, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. I bought a second hand machine off of Ebay for next to nothing, and discovered I could bake very good bread very cheaply. Financially, bread baking made a lot of sense for me at the time. I joined a bread maker Yahoo! Group, and found that the science behind baking was really interesting and fun to play with.

I still think I tend to approach baking as more of a science than an art – most bakers would agree (in fact, “if cooking is an art, baking is a science” is one of my favorite quotes). I tend to think about what I want as the end result and back into a recipe from there. I think that’s different than what most chefs do, which seems to be more adding ingredients to see what the end result will be, playing with various combinations that seems like they’d work well together. Baking is a bit more complicated.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m a perfect baker. I screw up ALL the time. That’s part of playing around. I always have a couple of recipes I’m working on perfecting, and more and more I tend to make “kitchen sink” bread where I open the fridge/cabinets and throw stuff in randomly. I made an awesome loaf last night this way (and will share the recipe below), but often have disasters. My recent explorations into ciabatta baking have resulted in a number of disasters. My one successful loaf looked like ciabatta, but was fairly tasteless – there is a lot more perfecting to do.

These days, if I want to bake something specific and don’t know how, I tend to read a bunch of recipes and combine them into something I like. But if it’s totally unfamiliar (like ciabatta) I will follow the recipe to the letter until I get the technique and procedure down.

Enough blabbering, onto the recipe. I fully intended to make a pizza for dinner last night, but when I started pulling together the dough, got a bit carried away, and it mutated into something else. This obviously isn’t a tested recipe by any sense of the word, seeing as I only made it once (I wouldn’t put it up there with my perfect French bread or anything), but it is good, healthy, whole-wheatyish sandwich bread. I am out of real sugar at home, which is why the splenda, substitute real sugar if desired.

Ingredients:

3 cups white bread flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 tsp salt (this made for a slightly salty bread, which I think worked well with the other ingredients)
heaping 1/4 cup splenda
dash of honey (this was for the yeast more than anything else, there isn’t enough for flavor)
2 tbs olive oil
1/4 cup non-fat milk powder
1/2 cup seeds & grains (I use this – I love everything about KA’s harvest grains blend except for the poppy – this lets me make my own).
2 tsp yeast

Throw all the ingredients in your bread machine set to dough, OR…mix the yeast, honey and water, let sit. Mix all the dry ingredients, then add the yeast/water mixture and olive oil.

Once the dough is kneaded (if by hand, about 20 minutes kneading should do it), let it triple for the first rise. In my case, this means I have to pull it out of the bread machine – the machine will automatically knock the rising dough down before it can fully triple. Took about an hour.

Now to decide what to do with the dough! I made this into 4 rolls (for dinner that night), and 1 big loaf. The rolls baked at 450 for 15, the loaf at 375 for closer to 30. Both batches were sprayed with water 5 and 10 minutes into baking.

Allow to cool off completely before slicing, then enjoy!!

I was reading King Arthur Flour’s April Fool’s Day post about baking diasters and started thinking back to my own messes in the kitchen. I’ve had many, involving cats and handmixers and all sorts of explosions and overflows, but which one would I consider my biggest disaster?

I think that award goes to my attempt to make Chocolate Brioche. This was very early on when I’d first started seriously baking. I loved chocolate, and loved bread…it seemed natural to combine the two, right? Destined for failure, but I was still at that point in baking where I thought if a recipe was in print it must be great.

The recipe called for nearly a cup of coco powder, well over a cup of sugar, and two sticks of butter. Three cups of flour, an entire packet of yeast, oil, egg, salt, and milk. I mixed it all up, kneaded it, and was thrilled. The dough was literally bubbling in front of my eyes, it was rising so well!

I put it in a rising basket, and before I knew it, it had doubled. I had never seen dough rise like that, it was really exciting.

I didn’t know enough at the time to predict what was going to happen next, so, thinking that my massively airy dough was fantastic, I shaped it, put it in the pan, waited for it to double again (which took next to no time) and popped it in the oven.

Twenty minutes later, a nasty, almost rancid burnt smell filled the air. When I opened the oven, I could only laugh at what I saw.

Picture a mushroom cloud. Now turn the mushroom cloud brown, and explode it all over your oven.

That was my “chocolate bread.” It had risen so much it hit the top of the oven, flowing over the sides of the pan and spreading all over the place. Any bread that came into contact with the oven had burnt to a crisp, while the inside of the bread was still doughy and uncooked. I don’t think I ever fully got the smell of burnt chocolate out of that oven.

I have had very few kitchen disasters that ended up inedible, but this was my first. It was a great lesson, though, how else would I know what over-risen dough looks like, or what a “lid-thumper” truly is. There’s only one way to learn, and that’s to make the mistake.

So next time you see a recipe for something that’s completely insane, give it a shot and try it. Even if it’s not edible, you’ll probably learn something, and have some laughs along the way.

I’ve been on a quest the past few months to figure out the recipe for the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. Why? Because it’s fun, and just like my bread-making experiments, even the “bad” results are still pretty good.

I also wanted to have a general “go-to” chocolate chip cookie recipe that wasn’t a massive amount of work, and wasn’t from the back of a box. Previously, if I needed to make cookies I’d make toll-house. Which aren’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but I did want to make some improvements.

These cookies are big, chewy in the middle, and crunchy along the edges. They are sweet and kind of butterscotchy, but have a little salty taste that works really really well with dark chocolate.

This recipe is based off of a ton of recipes I’ve read from various
places. Due to that, I can’t claim it’s “original,” every technique was
swiped from somewhere, but the combination is all mine. The recipe is
very specific with just about everything, but given that I’m talking
perfection with these cookies (or as close to perfection as I can
attain), the devil is in the details.

Ingredients:

2 sticks of unsalted butter
2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour (King Arthur recommended)
1 tsp sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1 tsp baking soda (FRESH! Not the stuff that’s been sitting in your fridge for a year.)
1/4 cup white (cane) sugar
1 1/4 cup well-packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 yolk (fresh eggs separate better)
2 tbl whole milk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 cups dark or white chocolate chips (recipe works well with either)

You can also use all white sugar (and kosher salt – don’t use sea salt with all white sugar). The result is a sugar cookie with a slightly crunchy, very chewy texture. It’s a little strange, but they do taste good, and are best served straight from the oven. I prefer the brown/white mixture. The recipe doesn’t really work with all brown sugar.

Sift flour, salt (it is very much worth an extra step to grind fresh sea salt. People may laugh at me for it, but test it yourself – it does make a difference.), and baking soda. Set aside.

Melt the butter. Stove top is always recommended, but I usually just stick it in the microwave.

Add sugar, brown sugar to the butter. Cream. Cream means continue mixing until the texture is smooth and even with air bubbles popping up. It really is important to mix everything well.

Add egg, yolk, milk and vanilla. Be very, very careful not to scramble the egg at this point. I often have to let the whole thing cool down a bit.

Add flour mixture. I generally add half, mix, then add the other half. The idea here is to not overmix the dough, that will make it tough. Stop when it’s all well combined.

Add the chocolate chips, mix. The dough will not be mixable once chilled, so the chips must be fully incorporated.

Chill the dough in the fridge for at least one hour, preferably overnight. 24 hours is always recommended, especially if grocery store vanilla is used. If you’ve never done this before, split a batch. Make half after an hour, save the other half until the next day. The difference is obvious in the way the cookie looks and the flavor, there’s an almost chemical tartness that the cookies lose after the 24 hours. I never noticed the tartness until I tested this, now I can’t ignore it.

When ready to bake, scoop the cookies onto a parchment paper or silpat lined baking sheet in large round balls at least an inch apart. I use a non-stick ice scream scooper. Do not forget to line the sheet, the cookies will stick to a non-stick pan, and this recipe does require multiple batches to be cooked. I can’t fit more than 9 cookies on a single pan. Line the pan = no washing in between batches. Using a hot pan will result in thinner crusts on the cookies, which I don’t mind. Yield is 20-ish, it’s always different for me, since I make the cookies as big as feasible.

I have never tried to make regular toll-house sized (tablespoon) cookies out of this recipe. It would probably work, but they may not be as chewy in the center.

If desired, sprinkle the tops of the cookies with a teeny bit of sea salt. It’ll result in a nice little crunch.

Bake the cookies in a well pre-heated (pre-heat for at least an hour) 375 degree oven for 9-13 minutes. Baking time will depend on how long the dough chilled, the cookies will brown better (and faster) if the dough sat for at least 24 hours. Rotate the baking sheet once.

Do not overbake the cookies, they need to be watched carefully to make sure they don’t get too brown. The taste changes if they’re baked too long. I’ve had them take as few as 8 to as many as 14 minutes.

Remove from oven, let cool for 5 minutes. Gently separate any cookies stuck together with a knife or spatula, then move to a cooling rack with the spatula. They should cool for at least 10 more minutes. The cookies will break if not properly cooled. Guaranteed.

The cookies have a pretty decent shelf life (up to two and a half weeks or so in a fridge), and get better with time. I really like the way they are straight from the fridge, almost hard but very chewy, but they’ll be softer if warmed to room temperature. They’ll be very soft and almost fall apart if quickly microwaved, which is also yummy. They can be stored in a sealed container at room temperature for a week.

If you try these, let me know what you think, and if you think any improvements can be made. These are the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve come up with, but any recipe can almost always be tweaked further, and I’m always ready to play some more.

To finish off yesterday’s basic ingredient tips:

Milk: Another “not required” ingredient. I leave it out a lot, as I prefer harder, crunchier crusts that you don’t get with milk in your bread. When I do use milk, I use powdered milk, since it frees you up to use as much milk as you want without worrying about the liquid vs flour ratio. Plus, powdered milk doesn’t spoil, and it really makes no difference at all to the actual bread. If real milk is used, again, count the liquid as part of your water. Milk will help create a softer texture inside the bread, and can darken and soften the crust.

Salt: NEVER LEAVE THIS OUT. Minor, but trust me, you’ll notice if it’s not there. You can experiment with fleur de sel or other fancy schmancy french salts – they do change the flavor a bit. Personally, I like plain old kosher salt.

Other stuff: Berries, seeds, cheese, anything can be added to bread. Just keep in mind the texture you want in the final bread, if you’re adding something mushy (raisins are a good example), don’t add them until just before the first rise. Stuff like cheese is better added earlier, so it melts and can flavor the whole bread.

Now, about my favorite appliance, my bread machine.

I adore bread machines. In fact, the way I got into bread baking as a hobby in the first place was by finding some old janky bread machine for $10 at a yard sale somewhere. I took it home, started playing, and was hooked.

I only use my machine for the dough cycle. I don’t think I’ve ever baked in the machine I have now, and I’ve had it for over 4 years (still running strong too!). Why use a machine instead of a mixer? Some say it rises bread better, some say it’s just lazyness. I think it’s a combo of the two. I will never pre-warm ingredients, rise, and mix them as well and as consistently as a machine can. My dough cycle ends just in time for the final shape and rise (unless I’m feeling very fluffy, in which case I’ll rise it again), and has been kneaded for at least a good half an hour. That makes my arms tired.

So obviously, I highly recommend bread machines as a good way to take some of the work out of bread baking. Just please, don’t bake in the machine. Any machine worth anything will contain a dough cycle.

What you pay for when buying higher end machines:

• Dishwasher safe parts
• Closed mixing bowl (my first one was open, which meant liquids had to be carefully placed on top of the flour or they’d seep through)
• Better handles for mixing (one of the handles on mine is permanently stuck, but that’s fairly common). Cheap machines have one, better machines have at least two.
• Programs, both pre-set and custom – Mine has a bunch of pre-sets (wheat, white, sandwich, rye, etc), but they all refer to actual baking methods. I’ve programmed my own dough cycle that contains that extra rise I like, but I still mainly use the prebuilt dough cycle
• Timer – throw all the ingredients in before leaving for work, come home to either dough just finishing up, or a fresh baked loaf of bread. You’ll pay for the timer length, almost all machines have at least a 12 hr timer. Mine’s 24.
• Baking – both shape and how well it bakes. Cheap machines bake the dough upright, like a loaf standing on its end. Better machines will bake a longer loaf. I still have yet to find a machine that bakes as well as an oven, though, and any bread baked in a machine will still have the tell tale holes in it from the mixing hands.
• See through top and light, warning when to check your dough before the final rise. Both of these are nice since you’re really not supposed to ever open the machine until the final rise is done, you want that steam and heat in there to stay consistent. That said, you always have to check your dough before it’s done. A light and glass top allows you to do this without opening the machine. I find I can’t really see through the top of mine (despite the glass), so when it beeps, I open it anyway.

It’s really not worth laying out hundreds for a fancy machine until you’ve reached the limits of a basic. $20 will get you something decent enough. If you are looking for a higher end machine, research. Every machine out there is best at something, you want the one that fits your needs. Mine’s the best for dough, not so hot at baking, which is perfect for me.

Any yeast bread recipe can pretty much be shaped any way imaginable. Just please, please don’t bake it in a bread machine, as wonderful as bread machines are (I ADORE mine), use them for the dough cycle ONLY. It’ll only take you 5 extra minutes to shape and rise the bread yourself, but there truly is no comparison.

All that said, don’t ever make sourdough in a bread machine. Sourdough starter should not come into contact with any metal until baked (although that’s something of a debate – some say you can mix with metal, so on. I figure why risk it.). If you’re making sourdough, you’re gonna be spending a good half hour to an hour kneading it by hand. But that’s fun, right?

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