Brown Eyed Susan Cookies/ Chocolate Thumbprints (Eggless)

  I am back to blogging after almost a month!  Has been a crazy moth with a lot of baking and cooking. To top it off, with Christmas and the New Year peeking from the corner, I have lots more baking left to do... Not that I am complaining!
  I made these Brown Eyed Susan cookies last year when I went to meet my best-est friend after 2 years and I made it now for a "Cookie Exchange" event in my husband's office. The only difference is that I made them look neater this year. These cookies had a buttery melt-in-your-mouth texture and the dark chocolate in the middle was absolutely wicked! These were a big hit at the Cookie Exchange and I am happy!

Recipe source: BrowneyedBaker
Ingredients:
For the Cookies : Makes 2 dozen
8 Tbsp Butter ,(unsalted) room temperature
1/2 Cup Confectioners Sugar (Sifted)
1/4 Tsp Salt
1 Tsp Vanilla Extract
1 1/4  Cup All Purpose Flour (Sifted)
1-2 Tbsp Milk (Only if neccesary)

For the Center
2 oz Chocolate, Chopped (any variety you like, I used bittersweet)
2 tbsp Butter, Unsalted
3/4th Tsp Corn Syrup ( I forgot to add this!!!)

• Preheat your oven to 350 F. Grease your cookie sheet and set aside. You can use parchment paper or a baking mat too.
• In the bowl of your mixer fitted with paddle attachment, Beat the butter, sugar, vanilla, and salt until fluffy. you can do this with your hand or with a powerful hand mixer if you don't have a stand mixer.
• Add the flour gradually, in small portions.
• Add the milk only if you feel the dough is really dry. The dough will look crumbly but when you make a ball it will hold together well.
• Scoop out heaping teaspoons of dough to form a dough ball and place on the baking sheet. I placed them about 1 inch away from each other.
• This step was not there in the original recipe- I very lightly flattened the cookie dough  before putting it into the oven. Bake in the middle rack for 8 minutes. Remove from the oven and make an indentation with your finger (Ouch!) or the back of a small spoon or something (I used the nicely rounded bottom of my icecream scoop). This might lightly crack the sides of the cookie, but that is totally OK. Also the cookies will be very soft at this stage so be careful not to disfigure them like I did the first time!
• Put the cookies back into the oven and bake for another 8 minutes. Once baked, place on a cooling rack to cool.
• Melt the chocolate, butter and corn syrup over a double boiler or microwave (at 50% power at 30 seconds interval), until smooth and shiny. You can spoon the melted chocolate into the indentations or you can pipe it in. I used a squeezy bottle it made my life much easier and I got neater cookies. Allow the chocolate to set a bit before you can eat  it all up! While you wait for the chocolate to set on the cookie, you can eat up the leftover melted chocolate (unless you already did that)!

Compliments to the photographer - My Husband, who has clicked these pictures and some others in previous posts. He took such wonderful pictures that I did not even  have to edit them! So much time saved, and reminded me of how crappy my pictures turn out on first take! :-/. I have a loooooooong way to go *sigh*

Glazed Lemon-Blueberry Cream Scones (Eggless)

Every time I go to a bakery, cafe or a coffee shop I always end up getting something chocolate to munch along with my cuppa chai. If I got a second pick I would go for scones. This one time I decided to skip the chocolate (blashpemy! :O) and picked up the scones. It was definitely not chocolate, but it took me to another planet of bliss! Ever since then I have been looking for an opportunity to make them at home.

The Opportunity:At work, my husband is part of a "Breakfast Club" where team members take turns bringing breakfast on Fridays, and it was his turn this one week. So, this recurring event, is a perfect opportunity for me to try making some new type of breakfast items. I will share some of those other recipes later. Also, for Cafe Casa, we had to come up with a side eat to go with our beverage. So, everything had lined up perfectly for making scones. On hind sight, the breakfast club was unnecessary, I could have easily polished off the entire batch of scones without any help ;)

I made the traditional English scones, which are less sweeter than the American variety. The english variety is usually had with toppings such as jam/jelly to add sweetness. The American variety on the the other hand, is eaten as is, and the sweetness is hence baked in.

Recipe source: Baking Illustrated

Ingredients:
For Scones:
2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 Tbsp Baking Powder
3 Tbsp Sugar
1/2 Tsp Salt
5 Tbsp Cold, Unsalted Butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup Blueberries, Fresh (I used a frozen variety for the first batch and it was a disaster! not the taste, but the appearance of it! They looked like Smurf scones!!! I recommend buying fresh blueberries if you can)
1 Cup Heavy Cream, Cold
1 Tsp Lemon Zest

For Glaze:(Optional)
1 Tbsp Heavy Cream
1 Tbsp Sugar

• Preheat the over to 425 F/ 218- 220 C
• In a large mixing bowl whisk the flour, baking powder,sugar and salt. Else, process in your food processor with quick pulses.
• Add the lemon zest
• If making by hand, use 2 knives, a pastry blender, or your finger tips, and quickly cut in the butter till the mixture resembles coarse meal with a few skightly larger lumps.If using a food processor , distribute the butter evenly over the dry ingredients and process with twelve 1-second pulses.
• Add the blueberries and quickly, but gently, mix in.
• Stir in heavy cream with rubber spatula or fork until the dough begins to form, this takes about 30 secons- 1 minute
• Place the dough on a floured surface and very gently knead it, until it comes together into a rough and slightly sticky ball.

Remember, all the steps above once the mixing starts, needs to be done very quickly and moved to the cake pan for baking in a relatively cold state to avoid the scones ending up being hard and flat. Another alternative is to make the dough and quickly transferred to the refrigerator for 1-2 hrs before baking.

• Press the dough into a 8-inch cake pan, then turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface.
• With a sharp knife or bench scraper, cut the dough into 8 wedges.
• Place the wedges on an un-greased baking sheet.
• Brush the tops of the scones with heavy cream and sprinkling them with sugar just before baking them.
• Bake until the scone tips are light brown - some 12 to 15 minutes.

• Cool on a cooling rack for atleast 10 minutes, then watch them vanish in record time!

Eggless Chocolate Pound Cake (FSB)

Here I am with my second post. I started writing it and in parallel was working on a project the night before I was leaving for my 2 month visit to India!! It may have seemed strange that I launched my blog in all that excitement, headed off for vacation 2 days later, and have not been heard from since... or, maybe that’s how it is initially? Maybe be not the one blog in a week type of a scenario for my start?

Well, this might explain some. The reason I started my blog after much procrastination was due to the motivation behind this particular post (I know I have said in other entries and pages there are many that got me to where I am.. but there’s more!). I doubted it would take me a couple of days after I got to India, that I get to complete this entry (as is the case), but the mission was to complete the project by the end of April !! OK, before I start sounding like the person who tried to write about some secret spy mission, with a end of the month deadline on a blog, let me explain the project before you get totally confused.

About 2 months back, my dear friend Madhuri, with her fervor and enthusiasm, came up with this innovative idea for a series of blogger events that would be ‘something totally different’ - Free Spirit Bloggers (FSB), and included me in the mailing list announcing this idea. There I was, seen in a mailing list with some very enthusiastic and inspiring thought leaders in the food making and food blogging society, super excited, but had a slight problem… I did not have a blog to be using, to join a blogger event like this one!

Either Madhuri’s was the final kick-in-the-butt I needed to start my food blog, or this was just plain embarrassing and I had to do something! I had been wanting to do this for some time now whereas I was satisfied with posting some pictures I clicked of the food we make at home, and derived my pleasure talking about, and serving food to people around me when I got the chance - but was I really getting to something with this interest? Don’t get me wrong, I still love that experience and I am sure everyone who enjoys food and cooking, does too... but to take the effort to organize thoughts, recipes and pictures in trying to represent the taste of the food, while also sharing a good recipe, and facing a larger audience on the web, is something that takes some hard work and being inspired, to make happen! It is a bit harder for me than cooking and eating itself! I wondered for a while... did I have it in me? Is there a right circumstance that would present itself.. ‘a while’ here btw, being almost 2 years!!

I think you get the idea.. FSB + realization that I was being a lazy bum, got me to seek some help I much needed, from my husband and Madhuri. This connects back to some other stuff I said here. Believe me, I’ll soon stop talking about why and how I started blogging :P, but for now, I am saying this to myself so I keep myself motivated. Now let’s get to the project at hand.

FSB is a group of 8 bloggers. We will work together every month to pick a theme and share 8 recipes based on that theme, but only at the end of the month (still wondering what this post is doing coming out mid-month?!- I am late posting, as I was leaving for a 2 month trip to India, and no this is not an example of IST :P). While each recipe can be quite different, and sometimes not even the same general dish, we will all stick to the central premise of the theme of that month. Read more here.

April's theme was egg substitutions. I think most of us Indian vegetarians have at some point wondered about egg substitution - be it for ourselves, for our parents who do not eat eggs, for a friend/ relative who is allergic, of course the Brahmin sect that traditionally considers egg as non-vegetarian and would not eat it, while many of the same sect have said “egg is allowed, but chicken, mutton, beef, sea food not allowed” (as though the latter covered everything that’s not vegetarian!), or “ I will eat it in cakes, but not omlettes or boiled eggs that stink of the Hydrogen Sulphide I remember from the Chemistry Lab” (me talking anything remotely chemistry is my husband’s influence or his input to a post... sure, you guessed that if you know my relationship with the subject :P).... or maybe egg replacers simply because you feel like substituting something that is so vital to baking! We FSBs had around 16 substitutions (!) for eggs at our disposal to work with, and we each picked 2 out of that list to work into a recipe that otherwise needed eggs. I picked Ener-G, a commercial egg replacer, and a combination of water + oil + baking powder. These 2 were to be used in the making of 2 separate chocolate pound cakes.

As you can tell, I was very excited to start working on this project, get my blog going on the side, and I started out very optimistically and excited, and must say had a great experience doing this and writing about it. Let’s go to the recipes and the outcome, shall we?

.

*I have presented the original recipe in italics and my notes on alternative approaches adopted in regular bold font as I walk you through this.

Ingredients:
250 Grams All purpose flour/ Maida
250 Grams Sugar
250 Grams Butter
50 Grams Cocoa powder

( I accidentally reset the scale before the Photo. That was about 50 grams of Cocoa Powder)

4 Eggs –

I used :

for cake (a), 1 ½ tsp Ener -G + 2 Tbsp warm water in place of 1 egg, and

for cake (b), 1 tbsp oil + 2 tbsp water + ½ tsp baking powder in place of 1 egg.

1 tsp Baking soda
½ tsp Baking powder
½ tsp Salt
1 tsp Vanilla extract
Upto ½ cup Milk

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350f/ 180c and grease the baking tin - Check
• Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa powder, and salt 2-3 times and set aside - Check
• Cream butter and sugar until creamy and pale . Add vanilla extract and beat well - Check
• Add the eggs one at a time and beat till well incorporated. - For cake (a), I mixed Ener-G and water, whisked it, and set it aside for 5 minutes. Then I added that mixture to the mixture with butter and beat it till nice and creamy. For cake (b), I added Oil and beat it till it was well incorporated.

• Now, add the sifted flour mixture to the butter mixture little by little and beat well till blended smoothly - Check
• Add adequate milk to achieve a batter of dropping consistency - I maxed out on the ½ cup milk . For effort (a), I found that the batter was not of dropping consistency and that it was slightly thicker. For effort (b), I found that the batter was very thick in spite of adding ½ cup milk + 8 Tbsp water ( part of the egg re-placer)

• Pour the batter into the prepared cake tin and bake @ 180C/ 350F for 45-50 mins or until done - Check, I baked Cake (a) in a 8*8 pan and it took me 45 mins. I baked Cake (b) in a 13*9 pan and it took me 20 mins.

Now the results ...

Cake (a) using Ener-G Egg replacer

Cake a) The cake tasted absolutely great and it was super soft. But what seemed odd after I set it to cool, was this mini meteor crater/depression that had formed in the middle of the cake! My husband said it must have been plate tectonics/faulting created by angered ingredients for not seeing their egg around them in their good times in the hot sauna, the oven (the show-off Civil Engineer!)! 

Don’t think seeing the picture and the missing patch that looks like the boundary of the state of Bihar (before jharkhand), and think I am calling that the crater, or that my husband dug into it while I was not looking, it was just a patch that would have been covered with the icing, and now it sat in the middle of this crater/depression. Nevertheless, I covered it up with blissfully- gooey- chocolatey-goodness i.e., Chocolate Ganache!. No one would know about the crater unless I tell them, right ?

Cake b) This cake was super duper fragile (which, of course, I did not know when I took it out of the oven) and when I turned the cake upside down to cool it, only half of the cake came out. The rest decided to stay in the pan for a bit longer!. I tried to coax the rest of the cake to come out of the pan and I think they got pissed off with me and decided to crumble when I forced the rest of the cake out of the pan. Disaster, ain? Well, They don’t know me that well I am not the one to give up a fight so easily.... not when I have been trained for fights by my brother who I am so pally with now! So this is what I did: I crumbled the entire cake in a big bowl..Mugahahah! I am evil. crumbly cakes get more crumbled. All this in a state of mind where I am wondering what I did wrong and I still have not figured it out, and did not want to conclude that the substitution did not do the trick for me. Then for a change, the usually rule book, recipe following, chart-out-a-plan-well-before-you-can me, was taken over by some experimental rush. I was motivated in wanting to get something out of this. I poured some nice warm chocolate ganache on its crumbly head (Mittu to cake: You didn’t expect that for revenge did ya? hah! If you thought that was evil, you have no idea what you are in for) . I mixed up the cake and ganache well and I made lemon sized balls out of it, and stuck in some lollipop sticks (serves you right). I refrigerated them for a while. Once they were a bit hard, I dipped them into some more Chocolate ganache I had set aside. I should have stuck these on a piece of Styrofoam, but well, this was disaster recovery being performed by someone who is usually very bad at it (I will be very mad if anyone provides any snippets in the comments section to prove this :P). Oh, I also did not have a Styrofoam ready in hand. Hence, I placed them in a muffin tray ( not the best idea, but it worked) and again put them back into the fridge. After about half an hour later, we had some sinfully chocolate, cake pops!.

Cake (pops) (b) using Oil+Water+Baking Powder Egg substitution

Then those little rascals started going after her.. and then shortly chomped together (Yumm!)

So, I guess with both my substitutions I could have done better. Given what I ultimately did with my second cake (you got chomped, ***** ), I probably was not my usual self - one following recipes down to a tee, and being a little more in control of the outcomes (Baking is a science with rules unlike cooking where you have more room for experimenting). Maybe a slightly more experimental self of me took over. This could be because these are substitutions, and already an attempt to break the norm :). 

I will be sure to try these substitutions again and report back to you on how it worked and what I did better to get the consistency right, not just the great taste I got and in the altered form. Having said that, I had a lot of fun this time being part of the FSB initiative, enjoyed the hard work and the challenges I had to overcome (phew!). Hope that I have not let the team down by pulling a stunt and not figuring out what went wrong and fixing it, but instead, that I have shared with you, a fun experience I had. I have continued determination to make these egg substitutions work well, and hope to try some of the other options too. Thanks again to Madhuri and other Free Spirit Bloggers for the company, and for being part of inspiring me to start this blog.