Orange Kissed Cookies

Look, I'm no dumb bunny. If I can see a way to maim two birds with one stone (I don't really feel like killing them), then I'm gonna do it. So when I decided to make THIS for dinner recently, I thought "That's going to be some perfectly good orange zest going to waste." And then I was trolling through "Our Best Bites" dessert section (read the post below this one if you need to know why) and saw this cookie recipe and said to myself "GENIUS!"

Do I say too often that everything on this blog is easy and delicious?

Well guess what, these cookies are easy AND delicious!
You might note that these call for shortening instead of butter and you might be thinking "Sandi, you'll do shortening instead of butter but not cool whip instead of homemade whipped cream?" And to that I would say "YES. DEAL WITH IT!"
Also, even though you judged me about the whole shortening thing, I would not be judging you if you stole a few tastes of the dough. Or the frosting.
Oh the frosting.
Please be adding orange food coloring into your frosting so as to get the whole, beautifully delectable, orangey effect.

Orange Kissed Cookies

1 c. white sugar
1/2 c. butter-flavored shortening
1 egg
1/2 c. sour cream
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour (add another 2 tablespoons for high altitudes)
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 c. + 2 Tbsp. thawed orange juice concentrate
1 Tbsp. grated orange zest

Frosting1 tsp. grated orange zest
1/4 c.  thawed orange juice concentrate
1/2 c. softened butter
3 c. powdered sugar
2-3 drops orange food coloring (optional)

Preheat oven to 375.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Set aside. 

In a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a mixer, combine the white sugar and shortening.  Beat until well-combined.  Add the egg and beat well, then add the sour cream and vanilla and beat for about 1 minute or until the mixture is light and fluffy.  Add the flour mixture and beat until combined. Add the orange juice concentrate and orange rind and mix well.

Using a cookie scoop, drop the dough/batter (the mixture will be VERY moist–thicker than a cake batter but thinner than traditional cookies) by the tablespoon-ful onto a lined, un-greased baking sheet.  Bake for 10 minutes or until the cookies are set and just starting to turn golden brown around the edges.  Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire cooling rack and cool completely.

For the frosting, combine the frosting ingredients with an electric mixer until light and fluffy.  Pipe or spread over the cooled cookies.

Yield: Approximately 36 cookies.

I got nothin' to add to this recipe. Isn't that great? Oh wait! I didn't let mine sit on the cookie sheet for 5 minutes. They got too brown on the bottom for my liking. I took them off after about 2 minutes.

Less talky, more pictures!

The dough is going to be something between cake batter and cookie dough consistencies.

They're not going to be all the same shape (unless your OCD, which I'm not?). I would recommend being a TINY bit OCD however, and smoothing out the pieces of dough that stick up, or...

You'll end up with little brown pieces that bake faster than the rest of the cookie. If this happens, feel free to break them off and munch on them. If you want.

ORANGE COOKIES!!!!

Oh also, I had about two tablespoons orange zest leftover. Did you know you can freeze citrus zest for a few months and it's totally fine???? Freeze it in tablespoon sized portions, pull it out when you need it, and there you go. Awesome.

Recipe Source: Our Best Bites

Root Beer Brownies

Okay, look, I'll be frank. These brownies turned out a million times better than those pumpkin muffins did. Not that they can really be compared... I think this is just me doing self affirmations or something, that I actually CAN bake things and have on hand all ingredients and not forget to put any of them in.

So anyways, these are delicious! The brownies themselves do not have a really root beery flavor, but the root beer added into the batter makes them dense and kind of fudge-like. Oh it's so good! The FROSTING! Oh the frosting is divine!!! Putting in root beer extract is optional, but I HIGHLY recommend it. Although it might be hard to come by this time of year... But you should definitely use it if you can!
There's something else you should add, but I'll mention that in the pictures. YUM YUM YUUUUUM!!!!!!!!!!!



Recipe: Root Beer Float Brownies

Ingredients

• 2/3 cup flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa powder
• 6 oz chopped semi sweet chocolate
• 3 oz white chocolate
• 4 Tbsp. butter
• 3 large eggs
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 8 oz. root beer
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 1/2 tsp salt

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375°
2. Line a 9×9 baking dish with aluminum foil and spray lightly with cooking spray.
3. Sift flour, cocoa powder and salt in a bowl and set aside.
4. Over a double boiler (or in microwave) melt the butter, semi-sweet and white chocolates together.
5. Remove from heat when just melted and allow to cool for 5 minutes.
6. Using your mixer mix the eggs, sugars and vanilla together.
7. Slowly add in the cooled chocolate mixture.
8. Now add half the flour and half the root beer. Mix on low, scraping the sides.
9. Repeat with the remaining flour and root beer until just combined. Batter will be on the thin side.
10. Pour batter into your prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes, until center is just set.
11. Let cool completely before cutting or frosting.

Recipe: Root Beer Frosting

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup room temp butter
• 1/3 cup root beer, no foam
• 5 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 tsp. root beer extract (optional)

Instructions

1. Beat butter on medium speed until smooth.
2. Slowly add in your powdered sugar and mix in.
3. Now add your root beer and extract, if desired.
4. Beat on medium until smooth and all ingredients are incorporated.

There really wasn't a need for me to take a lot of pictures. The instructions are pretty standard. Don't these look good?  :) If I hadn't had to share these, there's a very good chance I would've just licked all of the frosting off of them.

BONUS TOPPING!!! You should definitely, absolutely get some of this stuff to add on top of the frosting! 

And also, I would eat these brownies with ice cream. And when you have ice cream and topping leftover, but all of the brownies are gone, then you should just eat the topping on the ice cream. As it was intended to be in the first place...

Oh! Also! Side note. I found that the frosting made too much. I think if you did half, it would be enough for a 9x9 pan. Or you could just make the full batch and keep the leftover frosting in the fridge to use at your leisure...

Recipe Source: Cookies and Cups

A brownie, minty fix

My poor baking blog. I think it feels like it's the red headed step child of my two blogs. I've been baking lately, just things that I've posted on here already, and also I'm not baking as frequently as I used to. Did you know ingredients cost money and a lot of the things that I want to bake have ingredients that cost even more money?

Anyways, I'm going to beat everyone to the punch on resolutions and resolve to give more love and care to this here baking blog!

I will start with the fix I needed Sunday night. I looked in my fridge. I thought "What is it that I want?" I glanced in the door, where I keep ridiculous amounts of bags of baking chips, and saw the bag of Andes mints. Then I remembered I have a couple boxes of brownie mix, and a plan was formed.

Basically this is nothing spectacular, but if you're in need of something chocolately and minty, you need to make this.

This is what you'll need:

Also stuff like eggs and water and oil. But anyways, make the brownie mix. Add the mint chunks. I dumped in the whole bag. Actually there was a little less than a whole bag. I don't know what recipe I had that just called for a small amount of Andes mints. In all reality, I probably just had a craving, opened the bag, and ate a few. 

A note on mixing these into the batter: The whole time I was mixing these up, I kept saying to myself "toss the mints in flour first, toss the mints in flour first, toss the mints in flour first."

Did you know that if you're mixing something like Andes mints into batter, if you toss them in flour first, they won't sink to the bottom when baking?

As I was mixing the mint chunks in, I thought "I forgot to toss the mints in flour first." 

So all of mine sunk to the bottom. It was okay. They were still delicious.

So anyways, bake accordingly and then let cool. If you're going to just hack into them at this point, then just hack into them. If you're going to frost them (like I did) then you need to be more patient than me and let them cool completely before frosting them.

Use whatever frosting you want! I looked up an easy cream cheese frosting and it was delish. Also, mix in some green food coloring just to make things more festive. ALSO, go to your Wilton food colorings, give them a stern look and say "From now on, I'm not using you for important things that need to be colored."

And then go out and get some of these, like a lot of them:

Best. Food coloring. Ever.

Y'all, my mom made black frosting with it, and it was black. BLACK!!! 

The quality of AmeriColor is just fantastic!

Anyways, here's what my brownies looked like:

So. More serious blogging on this here blog. Soon. I promise.

A Yuletide Experiment

Okay, I know I promised that my next Christmas treat posting would be my mom's caramels, but my candy thermometer and I are on the outs currently. You know, a real "she said, it said" type of thing.
Anyways, the other day I was talking to my mom about these:

These are the sorts of things my mother and I talk about frequently. Have you ever had the pleasure of eating a candy cane kiss? This is the time of year when all kinds of kiss flavors start making appearances. Some are great! Some...hmmm.

So, I said to her, I says "I've been thinking about doing maybe a chocolate cookie with those candy cane kisses, kind of like the peanut butter blossoms." And mom says "Ooo like a brownie cookie!" And I said "Now you're talkin'!!!"

It might not have been just like that, but close. I don't have a brownie cookie recipe, so I went in search of one, and I found Martha Stewart's. It's alright. I was really hoping for thicker, fluffier cookies. The batter for these was basically just brownie batter. They didn't seem very cookie like at all, and they spread all over the place and were thin. Here's how they looked:

Cute, I suppose. Yummy looking, maybe. My frosting/glaze was a very spur of the moment minty concoction that I was not at all pleased with.

At this point, I am bound and determined to make this chocolate/brownie/minty/candy cane kiss combination work in some form or fashion.

This is where y'all come in. Have any of you ever made anything like that or seen anything like that? If so, please pass it on to me! I'd love to do a tried and true recipe, or combine a bunch of different ideas into something awesome!

I will not rest, this holiday season, until I have figured this out AND it becomes magical!!! So, if you have any thoughts, or ideas, either leave me a comment or email me sandiroughton@hotmail.com. Please entitle the email "Yuletide Experiment" as it will probably go to my junk folder first...

And you KNOW I'll be sharing the outcome on here!!

Root Beer Cookies

My most favorite thing to bake is cookies. Sometimes, I get bored with baking the same cookies, so I go through the "small" collection of cookbooks I have devoted to cookies and find something new. Sometimes the chosen recipe gets a big black line marked through it, meaning don't ever come back to my kitchen again. Other times, it gets a star next to it, meaning it is so dang awesome it will end up in the lineup of cookies that I get bored of making so frequently because they're just delicious. These happen to fall in the latter category. Like I would share a bad cookie recipe with you anyways?? The only way I could describe the taste of this to you, is to say it tastes kind of like if you took a root beer float and turned it into a cookie. Don't take my word for it though, you should definitely make these and find out for yourself!

 

 

Root Beer Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

2 cups packed brown sugar

2 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

3/4 tsp root beer concentrate or extract

4 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1-1/2 cups chopped pecans (Yeah, do I have to tell you at this point in my blog that I did NOT include those?)

Frosting:

3 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar

3/4 cup butter, softened

3 TB water

1 1/4 tsp root beer concentrate or extract

1. In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and brown sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addtion. Beat in buttermilk, and root beer concentrate or extract. Combine the flour, baking soda and salt; gradually add to creamed mixture. Stir in pecans, but only if you want these to be disgusting... in my humble opinion...

2. Drop by tablespoonfuls 1 1/2 inches apart onto ungreased (or just parchment covered) baking sheets. Bake at 375 for 10-12 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove to wire racks to cool.

3. In a mixing bowl, combine frosting ingredients; beat until smooth. Frost cooled cookies.

Yields about 6 dozen

 

I have never done anything with root beer extract before, so this was new to me! This is what I got because it's all HEB had and it was the last one. SUCKAS!

 

 

If your dough looks like this, all oatmealy and whatnot, after adding the extract and buttermilk, don't freak out...

...because it will end up looking like this! This dough is very airy and reminded me of sponge cake batter a bit. Also it's delicious, so.... you might not get as many cookies as the recipe says if you eat, say, 3 cookies worth of dough... I don't know. I hear that happens sometimes. In other places besides my kitchen.

This is what they should look like when they're done baking.

And here they are frosted. The frosting makes the PERFECT amount if you use about 1 TB on each one. This makes a lot of cookies, so unless you're going to pass them onto friends or help feed an army, I would do a half recipe if you're just making them for fun :)

Resource: Taste of Home: The Ultimate Cookie Collection