But it’s all worth it, though, because these cookies could shame a bakery. They could drive a world-renowned physicist to insanity. They could make an angel weep. The recipe makes a lot of cookies, and each one is really big and really dense, so they should last you awhile. And you can taste the fact that these took a long time to make. I’m serious. You can taste how fancy these are.

These cookies come from here at Sugar Plum and they were featured on Savour. (They are very classy cookies.) They are similar to Levain Bakery copycat recipes floating around, but a fair bit more dense. There is quite a contrast between the “crispiness” of the outside and the chewiness of the inside… though the cookies are much chewier than they are crispy. In terms of changes, all I did was add a bit more chocolate and reduced the bake time a bit, because soft cookies are the bomb. If you want to live up to the classiness and seriousness of these cookies, you should only use very fancy and very expensive ingredients. I did not, because I am a poor grad student, and I buy whatever is on sale at Metro.

Walnut Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground sea salt
• 1.5 cups coarsely chopped walnuts

• 1 cup unsalted butter (two sticks)

• 4.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 2.5 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground sea salt, plus additional for sprinkling

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened (1 stick)
• 2 cups firmly packed brown sugar
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 4 tsp vanilla extract
• 16 oz coarsely chopped semisweet chocolate or chocolate chips

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

• Melt 2 tbsp butter in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Stir in 1/4 cup sugar and 1/2 tsp sea salt, and bring it all to a boil. Whisk frequently until golden brown. Stir in all of the walnuts until they are well coated. Spread the walnuts out onto a greased or buttered cookie sheet and place in the oven for 3-5 minutes, to lightly toast them. (Don’t forget about your walnuts if you move on to the next steps.)

• Melt 1 cup butter (2 sticks) in a small sauce pan on medium heat. Keep whisking, let it boil and start to foam and brown a bit. Remove sauce pan from heat, set it aside.

• Sift together flour, baking soda, and 2 tsp sea salt in a medium-sized bowl, and set it aside.

• In a large mixing bowl and using an electronic mixer, beat 1/2 cup (1 stick) of softened butter with the 2 cups of brown sugar and the 1 cup of granulated sugar until it’s all well combined. (It’ll be grainy; not completely smooth.) Beat in the 1 cup of browned butter you recently heated up. Now beat in the 4 large eggs and the 4 tsp of vanilla. Add the sifted dry mixture (flour, baking soda, sea salt) to your wet mixture, and slowly beat until just combined. Stir in the chopped chocolate and the walnuts until thoroughly mixed. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

• Drop large giant clumps of dough (at least 1/4 cup each) onto your cookie sheet. They won’t spread too much, so they don’t have to be too far apart, and you should flatten them a bit, with your palms or a fork. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 11-13 minutes, or until the edges are just starting to turn golden brown. Remove from oven, let ‘em cool for a minute or two, then transfer the cookies to wire racks.

The streusel topping is from The Pioneer Woman Cooks! If you go to check out her recipe, you’ll see that The Pioneer Woman also knows how to take a darn good looking photo. I cut her recipe in half – and that’s what I have here – but I still found it was just a bit too much streusel, and I didn’t use all of it. However, in retrospect, when I added the streusel to the top of the bread I really could have pushed it down further into the bread mixture and thus added more, OR I could have made a centre “layer” of streusel in the middle of the bread. I regret not doing this extra layer. I have put it as an “optional” step in this recipe, but I really would recommend it. If you do add this middle layer, you may want to reduce the chocolate chips in the bread. Or use cinnamon chips. Or anything else you can think of!

I also modified the streusel recipe by replacing some of the flour with ground up walnuts, and I replaced the pecans with walnuts, just because for a banana bread I think walnuts go better than pecans. The bread was delicious. I used it to make banana bread french toast. (Which was also fantastic.)

Banana Bread with Streusel Topping Recipe

Banana Bread

• 1 stick butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1.5 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup mashed banana (about three medium ones)
• 1/3 cup chopped walnuts
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 2/3 cup chocolate chips

1. Grease a large loaf pan.
2. Cream butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla.
3. Add dry ingredients to the wet mixture, then bananas, then nuts and sour cream. Mix until well combined.
4. Add the bread dough/mixture to the loaf pan.
5. Add the streusel topping (see below). Don’t be afraid to push it down a fair bit into the bread, since the recipe here gives you plenty of streusel.
6. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour.

Optional Middle Layer: When adding the bread mixture to the loaf pan, only pour in half at first, then add some of the streusel topping to this first half of the mixture, not quite letting the streusel reach to the edges of the pan. Now pour the other half of the bread mixture on top of this, and then finally the rest of the streusel.

Streusel Topping Recipe

• 1/2 stick butter (1/4 cup) (melted)
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 5 tbsp white sugar
• 6 tbsp brown sugar
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 cup walnuts, ch0pped
• 1/4 cup walnuts, ground up

1. Combine all the dry ingredients. Melt the butter.
2. Add the butter a little at a time to the dry ingredients, mixing it in each time until small clumps form.
3. Add the streusel to the top of the banana bread in the pan (or to the centre, too) as per above. Using a fork, mix up the very top of the banana bread with the streusel, just so that not all the streusel falls off loose when the bread is done.

It occurred to me that one way to create my chewy Oreo cookie would be to grind up the Oreos and add them to the batter. The result is this recipe. I also added some cocoa. And as for the Oreo filling, I found that if you separated the filling from the cookies, put it in the fridge awhile, you could then cut it up and shape the pieces into chip-sized… chips.

The recipe worked; the cookies were delicious, and did indeed taste kind of like big, soft, chewy Oreos. My girlfriend thought they were just a bit sweet. Next time I might drop a bit of the sugar.

Soft and Chewy Oreo Cookie Cookies

• 1 stick butter
• 6 tbsp sugar
• 6 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1.25 cups flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp cocoa
• 6 Oreos
• 1/3 cup white chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup chocolate chips

1. Separate the Oreo halves and the Oreo filling. Grind up the cookie portion of the Oreos, and put the filling in the fridge. Set the Oreo crumbs aside.

2. Beat butter and sugars until creamy. Add egg and vanilla.

3. Sift together flour, baking soda, salt, Oreo crumbs and cocoa. Add this to wet mixture. Fold in chocolate and white chocolate chips. Put the dough in the fridge.

4. Take the Oreo filling out of the fridge and cut it up or shape it (whatever way works for you) into a bunch of little chip-sized chunks.

5. Take the dough out of the fridge, and drop tablespoon-sized cookies onto bake pans or sheets. Add the filling “chips” to the tops of the cookies.*

6. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 8-11 minutes.

* shaping the filling into little chip-sized chunks isn’t that easy. Next time, I might consider just mixing the filling in with the dough, and adding more white chocolate chips.

I ended up baking them one tray at a time. The first tray is what you see pictured. The cookies spread out a bunch (’til they touched each other) and were very flat. While the first tray was in the oven I put the remaining dough in the fridge to cool. When I dropped the chilled cookie dough onto the next tray I also used smaller portions, and the result was a batch of slightly thicker cookies. So if you want thicker cookies, chill the dough first. And don’t flatten the cookies with your fork; they’ll do that themselves while they’re baking. I prefer the thin versions, but you do have to be careful to let them cool before you lift them off the tray, or else they’ll fall apart. Anyways, these are great if you like your oatmeal cookies thin and buttery.

In other news, my Ph.D. applications are finally all done, and I just sent the last three (of six) application packages off this morning using Xpresspost. It’s odd that of the schools I applied to, the advantages that each one has varies quite a bit. One has a professor with research interests more similar to my own than any other. Another is the home of one of my favourite journals. Another is one of the few schools doing research into digital media and new literary mediums. Then there’s the one with the crazy library resources. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

Plain Oatmeal Cookies Recipe

• 2 sticks (1 cup) butter, softened
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1.25 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 3 cups quick-cooking oats

1. Cream butter and sugars until smooth.
2. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat until smooth.
3. Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl, then add this to the wet mixture. Fold in the oatmeal.
4. Bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 11-13 minutes. Let cool on the pan for awhile, unless you want them to fall apart on you (especially if they are very thin).

This blondie recipe is simple and pretty much impossible to screw up. I don’t really try other blondie recipes (much), because this is all you need. It’s from Smitten Kitchen‘s blondies. If you check out the URL there, you can see “blondies-for-a-blondie,” which is what I used to type into Google whenever I wanted the recipe.

I’ve tried many things, but my standby with this recipe is to just throw in a bunch of chocolate chips or chopped up semi-sweet milk chocolate. In the pictures for this post, you can see I used chopped up chocolate – those smaller specks are the tinier bits I didn’t bother to throw out.

The blondie recipe is very fast and very easy. It tastes like a chocolate chip cookie and a brownie in one. You can also use these blondies, with some ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate sauce to imitate Moxie’s White Chocolate Brownie dessert. I usually just dip my blondies in milk, like a chocolate chip cookie, because that’s how dreams are made. They’re basically gooier chocolate chip cookies.

Blondies Recipe

• 1 stick butter (melted)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 pinch salt
• 1 cup¬† flour
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips or chopped chocolate

Directions

1. Mix melted butter and brown sugar. You don’t need an electronic mixer; use a fork and stir until smooth.
2. Add the egg and vanilla and mix.
3. Sift salt and flour together, then add this to the wet mixture. Throw in the chocolate chips or whatever ingredient you’d like.
4. Pour the batter into an 8×8 square bake pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Err on the the side of underbaked. I pretty much take them out right at 20-21 minutes. (Though you have to add more time if you’re using a glass bake pan.)

Substitutions / Additions:

• Add 1/2 cup of walnuts, pecans, white chocolate chips, or anything, really, either in addition to or in place of the chocolate chips.
• Add in a mashed banana (and some walnuts).
• Add in a few tablespoons of peanut butter and some peanuts.
• Add a streusal topping.
• Throw on some mini chocolate chips and demerara sugar on top.

These blondies are pretty much a blank slate for anything you want to try. But I like ‘em simple.

I got this brownie recipe from Cookie Madness. My criteria when searching for this recipe was that it had to use an 8×8 or 9×9 pan, it had to be relatively simple or quick, and it couldn’t advertise itself as particularly “cakey.”

The recipe I used said to use pecans, but I used walnuts. I just sprinkled as many as seemed reasonable on top of one half of the brownie batter once the batter was in the bake pan, and just pressed down on ‘em a bit. The brownies also came out of the oven after 33 minutes, which is the minimum time in the recipe, because the gooier the better. Also, I used a microwave instead of a saucepan on low heat to do my butter and chocolate melting. I think I’ll save the saucepan for the fancy brownie recipe, when I want to spend more than 10 minutes in preparation. I changed the ratios, too, of the sweet vs. semi sweet chocolate, based on what was in my cupboard. There were certainly no complaints about too much sweetness, though. In fact the official verdict was, “Perfect,” so huzzah.

Simple Brownies Recipe

• 1 stick butter
• 3 oz semi sweet chocolate
• 1 oz unsweetened chocolate
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup well packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• Some walnuts or pecans (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8 or 9 inch square bake pan with non-stick foil.

2. Melt most of the butter in a microwave. Add in the chocolate, and continue melting, but take it out and stir it occasionally. Don’t melt it all the way in the microwave – there should still be a few small chunks of chocolate that will finish melting from the residual heat of the butter and the other melted chocolate. Let cool.

3. Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl. Add in and mix salt, both sugars, and vanilla. Add and mix in chocolate. Fold in/mix in flour until just combined.

4. Pour batter into bake pan. Sprinkle walnuts or pecans on top if you want. I like to press down on them a bit so they don’t fall off the finished brownies.

5. Bake for 33-35 minutes, until the top just seems to start cracking. Cool in pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes.

Cut into individual sized brownies, as small or as big as you want. But bigger brownies taste better.

I still haven’t discovered anything worth putting on a good banana bread. Butter, peanut butter, Nutella–all of these fail to improve upon that which is perfect. Although I have found that Banana Bread is a good bread for French Toast, even if it is a quick bread without all that fancy yeast. I’ve seen others do this online, but when I mentioned it to people in real life they thought I was just weird. So be it.

I like my banana bread with tons of walnuts and chocolate chips. Some people prefer it with none of these extra ingredients. These people are crazy, but that’s okay, because these people don’t get any walnuts and chocolate chips.

In the ingredients here I’ll go with 1/2 cup each of walnuts and chocolate chips for the bread. I like to use more (and in the pictures here, certainly, there are more), but I’ll stick to what most people I think would enjoy. It’s also what was on the original recipe I had, at some point. But I forget where it is from, and I forget what I modified. However, this banana bread recipe is moist, delicious, and awesome. And it can pretty easily be doubled or tripled.

I’ll also note that every banana bread recipe I read always says, “the riper the bananas, the better.” I guess it releases sugars or some such thing. Anyways, I don’t ever plan ahead enough to have three ripe bananas, so I buy bananas as ripe as I can find them, and then leave them in a bag for a few hours, which helps a bit. People also freeze them, but then they’re hard to mash up, so I generally don’t do that.

Banana Bread with Walnuts and Chocolate Chips

Ingredients

• 3 medium bananas (the riper the better)
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1.5 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup walnuts

1. Butter/grease/spray with Pam a 9″ loaf pan. I also like to add a long strip of parchment paper across the center and long sides of the pan so that you can lift the entire loaf using the paper when it’s done.

2. Mash up the bananas. Beat in with butter, sugars, egg, and vanilla.

3. Mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt; add this to the wet mixture. Throw in the chocolate chips and walnuts.

4. Pour mixture into loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the centre of the banana bread comes out clean.

To the recipe I added ground up white chocolate (using a magic bullet), took out some dark chocolate to compensate, and threw in a bit of cinnamon. I love cinnamon on everything, so I am biased, but my girlfriend assures me it was a wise choice. The taste is subtle, bit it’s clearly there.

The white chocolate spread throughout, combined with the oatmeal and cinnamon, makes for a pretty good cookie. If you don’t want to try the white chocolate just add a corresponding amount of regular chocolate chips.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Ingredients

• 1¬†cup butter
• 1¬†cup sugar
• 1¬†cup brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2¬†cups flour
• 1¬†tsp baking soda
• 1¬†tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 2¬†cups quick-cooking rolled oats
• 2¬†tsp vanilla
• 8 oz dark or milk chocolate, chips or chopped
• 4 oz white chocolate

Directions

1. Chop up dark chocolate if not in chip form. Grind up white chocolate chips into a powder.
2. Blend butter and sugars until fluffy. Add and beat in eggs.
3. Sift flour, baking soda and salt; add to wet mixture. Stir in oats, vanilla and chips. Add cinnamon.
4. Drop by batter by rounded tablespoon onto a greased cookie sheet.
5. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes or until the edges seem cooked. Remove and let cool on wire rack.

I got about 50 oatmeal cookies.

Here is the result of two minutes of Googling: cream of tartar is most often used, it seems, to help stabilize and give more volume to beaten egg whites. Wikipedia has more uses. In baking and making cookies, however, cream of tartar (the acid) is added to baking soda (the leavening agent) so that when combined with the wet ingredients, it causes the reaction that gives cookies their rise. Think back to the volcanoes you made in school: you added vinegar (the acid) to baking soda and water, and that caused the awesomeness you subsequently witnessed. Now, baking powder, on the other hand, contains the acid, the leavener, and other stuff. The more you know.

Back to the cookies. I didn’t add walnuts because, well, I didn’t want to. So I added more chocolate chips to compensate. This little bit of baking genius I thought up all on my own. One thing I’ve also started doing with chocolate chip cookies so to cover up the bottom of the cookies so no chocolate chips are visible. That way they don’t melt to the baking pan.

Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 stick (1/2 cup )butter, softened
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp. hot water
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1.5 c. chocolate chips

Directions

1. Cream butter and sugars. Beat in egg, then vanilla extract.

2. Dissolve baking soda in hot water (I used a measuring cup to hold the water). Add to batter along with salt and mix. Mix flour and cream of tartar, then add them to the batter and mix it all up. Stir in the chocolate chips. Refrigerate for an hour, even longer if possible.

3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Add cookies to baking sheets in average sized portions (use an ice cream scoop, maybe?). Bake for about 8 to 10 minutes, or until edges are lightly browned. Remove from oven and cool completely on wire racks.

I made 19 chocolate chip cookies; not huge ones, but they’re bigger than, say, Chips Ahoy. I like my chocolate chip cookies soft, so I leaned quite close to eight minutes.

The original recipe on the bag says you need 1 egg and 2 tbsp butter, and the bag makes two servings. I find it’s easier to just throw the whole bag in a bowl and alter the ingredients accordingly.

I don’t like small cookies, and I usually get around 36-40, though I’m not creating giant cookies. If you get 60 cookies out of this (as the bag says you can) then you’ll probably have awfully small cookies.

Ingredients

• 1 bag Quaker Cookie Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk
• 1 bag sweetened coconut (about 200g)
• 1 handful of Chocolate Chips
• 2 eggs
• 5 tbsp butter (melted)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

2.Throw cookie mix into bowl. Throw coconut in with it. Add as many chocolate chips as you like. Add eggs, then 5 tbsp melted butter. Mix it up with a fork. Don’t use an electronic mixer.

3. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove and let cool on pan.*

*I always only bake for exactly 10 minutes, and then put the pan in the freezer after they’ve cooled at room temperature for a minute or two. I like soft cookies, and the freezer seems to keep them from falling apart, even after they warm up later on.