Raspberry Lemon Cookie Bars

It’s been a few weeks since my last baking adventure so I decided to try a new recipe this week for the office.  I made a batch of regular sugar cookies (or you can use the Pillsbury refrigerated dough) and added 3/4 of a teaspoon of lemon extract.  Take 2/3 of the dough and press it into an 8x8 glass pan lined with foil.  Top the dough with 4oz of seedless raspberry jam. Take the remaining third of the dough and crumble small pieces over the top and sprinkle with sliced almonds (optional).  Then bake in a 350 degree oven for 30-35 minutes. When they are brown around the edges and the center is cooked, that them out and lift the cookies out of the pan using the foil.  Let them cool then slice into bars.

I learned a few things making this recipe:

1.  Lemon extract is very different than lemon juice.  Thankfully I researched that before I tried to make the substitution.  My local grocery store had the lemon extract in stock and it was only about $2.50 for the bottle.  Well worth the investment – that stuff is potent!

2.  Seedless raspberry jam is harder to find than you might think.  I settled for seedless raspberry preserves and when the cookies came out I regretted that choice.  The raspberry sunk all the way through the cookie dough and ended up on the bottom of the cookies.  I think the jam probably holds up better to the heat and stays put.   Next time I make this recipe I will use jam, even if it has to have seeds in it.

3. You need to make a double batch of these to satisfy an office.  

I think I might try this recipe again and just make them into thumbprint cookies instead of cookie bars.

Red Velvet Cake Balls

My first baking adventure of the new year is a recipe I've never tried but thought it sounded great.  I love red velvet cake but hate the hassle of icing a cake and bringing plates/utensils/napkins for everyone to have a slice of cake.  Cupcakes are super trendy right now, but again, they aren't the easiest to ice and transport to the office.  So, why not make cake balls?

These bite-sized balls are reminiscent of a holiday cookie my family always makes called buckeyes which are essentially sweetened peanut butter balls covered in chocolate.  I'm not one for peanut butter so I never really got into this recipe but it brings back fond memories of baking with my Grammy as a kid.  As an adult, I'm free to substitute anything I want into so I decided to go with my favorite cake - red velvet.

The recipe is simple enough.  Bake a red velvet cake from scratch, or cheat like I did and use a box mix. After the cake has baked and cooled, use a fork to break up the cake into crumbs.  Then add a tub of cream cheese icing and stir until it's evenly distributed.  Roll the mixture into 1/2 inch balls and put them in the fridge overnight (or freezer for an hour or so) to set.  Then melt chocolate in a double boiler and coat each ball completely.  Set them on wax paper to set and keep refrigerated.

Sounds easy right?  Well it was until I got to the chocolate coating.  I don't own a double boiler so I created a makeshift one using a pot and a pyrex glass bowl.  It worked like a charm and the chocolate melted smoothly.  I used a bag of milk chocolate and only got through about half of the balls before I ran out.  I had half a bag of white chocolate in my cabinet for I figured I'd give it a try.

A word of caution - white chocolate is a bitch to melt.  It  fluctuates between seizing up and being too running and the second you remove it from the heat it solidifies into globs that never look even on the balls.  I did about 6 balls and realized it was a lost cause and gave up for the night.  I packed up all the remaining balls and stored them in the freezer until I could get to a store for more chocolate.

I did some research the next day on how to properly melt white chocolate and found a  recipe online that suggested using candy coating instead of chocolate.  I figured I'd give it a try and set out to find some.  3 stores later I finally found vanilla candy coating and brought it home to try.  It was the easiest thing in the world.  I melted it in the microwave the tray it came with and it covered cleanly and left a beautiful even coat.  I'll never use anything else.

When I brought the balls to work today they were a massive hit.  Several people suggested I quit my job as an attorney and go into baking full-time (I'm not sure whether to be offended that they think I'm such a lousy attorney or pleased that they love my baking).  I also received three marriage proposals (two from men and one from a girl I work with.)

I think I may have found a new stand-by recipe and possibly the best way to land a man in 2011 :)

Welcome to Baker-Esq

This is my first attempt at a blog so please bear with me.  This first post will hopefully give you a little bit of a background on how the blog came to be, what I hope to talk about on here and a little information on me in general.

Who I Am and Why I am Doing This:

I’m a 26 year old attorney living in Richmond, Virginia with my dog Ernie.  Much to Ernie’s chagrin, I refuse to feed him any people food and therefore I’m stuck making meals for one. When feeding myself I prefer practicality and efficiency and therefore often resort to eating basic, boring, minimal ingredient meals. It is usually not worth the effort for me to plan ahead for an interesting meal, shop for special ingredients (since my fridge is pretty bare), spend time cooking and cleaning up after cooking, and then be forced to eat the same leftovers for a week.

Despite my lack of regular cooking adventures, I still consider myself to be a foodie.  I love trying new restaurants and I'm always looking up recipes online.  I even keep a large stack of what my friend’s lovingly refer to as “food porn” (it’s really just Food + Wine Magazine) on my coffee table. 

I am an attorney by day and for the last six months I have eaten three meals a day at my desk while my firm works on a huge project.  Thankfully, in December of 2010 the project slowed down for a little while and we all had a chance to breathe and return to our regularly scheduled lives.  Since I had already done all my holiday shopping, I took the opportunity to get home early and relax with my dog.  That got old pretty quickly though and I began to look for ways to stay occupied. 

One of my favorite things to do around the holidays is bake massive quantities of cookies.  However, living alone with no family for 100-miles, it seemed pretty pointless to bake holiday cookies.  Despite this, one snowy day I decided to entertain myself by baking.  In one day I made about six dozen cookies in four varieties.

Since I have been watching what I eat, I certainly did not want all those yummy cookies staring me down at home.  I decided to take a batch to work to share.  I sent out an e-mail to the other attorneys and some of the staff on my team inviting them to my office to partake in the holiday treats.  You would have thought I said I had a million dollars on my desk for the taking.  People flocked to my office all day and enjoyed the cookies. One of the partners asked what cookies I was bringing the next day and an idea was born.

From that day on, I brought a different cookie to the office each day.  At first it was easy enough because I had a backlog of cookies that I had already baked.  Once I was through with those I started on new recipes.  When I finally called it quits at Christmas everyone was a bit disappointed.

It wasn’t long into the New Year before some of the partners began asking about my baking.  One partner came to my office for no other purpose than to ask what my New Year’s resolution was.  When I said I didn’t have one, he not so subtly indicated that baking for the office on a regular basis would be a good one.  (For those of you that aren’t new attorneys in a terrible economy with soul-crushing debt lingering over your head, you might not appreciate how rare it is to even be spoken to by a partner, let alone how important it is to keep the people who sign your paycheck happy.  Needless to say, when a partner says jump, you should already be airborne.) Keeping the partners coming to my office and on a perpetual sugar high seemed like a great career move and honestly it sounded like a fun new hobby.  I decided to make my 2011 New Year’s resolution to cook and bake more.  Ideally, I aim to try a new recipe every two week and bring something to the office at least once a month.  I plan to chronicle my adventures in the kitchen (successful and otherwise) on this blog.