Mad Men Inspired Chocolate Bourbon Cherry Cookies

Warning- This post may contain spoilers… but only if you never saw the very first episode of the very first season of Mad Men. If you’ve seen that you’re probably good.

In a way, I’ve always associated Mad Men with baking cookies.

When the first season started, in 2007, I was preparing for Ellie’s first birthday party. It was, more or less, the first time I had made decorated cookies. Then every year after, the first episode of the season fell around the time of her birthday (for the first three seasons, at least). So I spent many late nights watching Don pathologically cheat on Betty while decorating birthday cookies and packing up party favors.

To celebrate the premier of the sixth season on April 7th, naturally I wanted to make cookies. Just not the decorated kind. The cookies I wanted to make reflect Don’s recurring downward spirals  a drink that was popular during the era. An Old Fashioned. Only, instead of bitters, I used chocolate- for obvious reasons.

Ingredients

• 1/8 cup plus 2 TBSP bourbon
• 1/8 cup maraschino cherry juice (or grenadine)
• 1 stick of unsalted butter (room temp)
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg (room temp)
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder (I use Hershey’s Special Dark)
• 1/4 tsp baking power
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 30 maraschino cherries (roughly one per cookie- I can usually get about 2 1/2 dozen out of a batch)

1. In a small sauce pan, bring 1/4 cup of the bourbon and the grenadine to a boil. Reduce to about a Tablespoon. (About 5 minutes or so- keep an eye on it) Let cool.
2. Preheat oven to 325F and line two- three baking sheets with parchment.
3. In the bowl of an electric mixer with a paddle attachment, blend the butter and both sugars.
4. Add the egg and mix well.
5. Mix in the vanilla and the other 2 TBSP of the bourbon.
6. Sift in the cocoa powder, baking powder, salt, and flour. Mix until combined.
7. Mix in the cooled cherry/ bourbon mixture
8. 
9. (Apparently the picture is the 8th step so don’t worry that there is something missing…..) Using a tablespoon sized cookie scoop, scoop the dough onto the prepared cookie sheets.
10. Use the back of a spoon to make a little indentation in the ball of dough, place a cherry in the indentation.
11. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Cool for five minutes or so then remove from pan to cooling rack. These are really good warm from the oven. There isn’t too strong of a bourbon taste. If you let them cool completely, you’ll taste the bourbon a bit more.

You can definitely soak cherries IN bourbon, but I have small children with sneaky cookie stealing hands so, for the time being, I tend to avoid recipes where the alcohol doesn’t bake out.

So, make these and pour yourself a Canadian Club and tune into AMC Sunday night to watch with me. (I’ll be putting my obsessive Netflix Dean Winchester Supernatural viewing on hold for the night.)

I’m linking these up to Simply Sweets Saturday at Simply Sweets by Honeybee.

 

Also, don’t forget to check in at The Cookie Puzzle for a month of posts in honor of Autism Awareness Month. Please take the time to tell Kim what an incredible thing she’s doing!

Blogging For Autism (Making a Puzzle Piece Imprint on a Cookie)

Good Morning! I am so proud to say that today you can find me over on my friend, Kim’s blog The Cookie Puzzle.

 

Please head on over there to see my post. Make sure you check back there every day in April for more Autism Awareness.

Thank you!

Inspiration Challenge: April {April Showers}

Rain is not my most favorite thing in the world. I have thick, curly hair which frizzes easily, and frizzing is the only thing that it does easily.

Actually, I don’t really hate rain. I hate my hair.

To be perfectly honest, I like rain. As long as it’s warm. A good warm spring rain. It’s good for puddle hopping, and it’s good for the environment, too. It’s not really good for my sinuses, but it helps the kids sleep well. So I can live with it.

This month, Melissa (Simply Sweets by Honeybee) and I chose to use spring rain as our inspiration to make some cookies. Specifically April Showers.

I made some rain splatters and some umbrellas (to keep our hair as frizz free as possible).

I don’t actually have an umbrella cookie cutter, but I realized that you can make an umbrella out of just about any shape! A raindrop, a circle, or a square. The best part, is that if you own the sets of graduating cutters in these simple shapes, you can make them in any size!

I didn’t make an umbrella tutorial, but it is fairly straight forward.

Cut out and bake your shape. Outline the top half of the cookie and decorate it in the umbrella pattern of your choice. Let this half dry for a while. Then outline and flood the bottom half in white. Let the whole thing dry for several hours or overnight. To make a stormy sky background on the white half, cover the umbrella half with a paper towel and spray the white with Wilton’s silver color mist. Be a bit heavy handed (although it goes against your instincts). Before the alcohol evaporates and the color dries, use a paper towel or a clean paint brush (that you only use for food) to wipe parts of the color away in streaks. After that dries, outline and detail your umbrella top and add a handle with grey piping icing. When the handle dries, you can use a bit of silver luster dust mixed with vodka to paint the handle and make it pop.

Speaking of heavy-handed, I may have gone a little overboard with Picmonkey’s photo editing options! I had a lot of fun making my cookies look “stormy”. Here is a straight out of camera version.

Now, go check out Melissa’s cookies at Simply Sweets by Honeybee. They are so perfectly spring rain like!

So, we are nearing the end of our year long inspiration project. May marks our twelfth project and we thought it might be fun to take some risks. Is there a set of cookies that you have been wanting to make, but you’ve held back because you were afraid? Maybe a character or theme that you’ve been wanting to cookify, but you didn’t have a specific reason and you felt it was too intimidating to try only for fun? Here’s your reason! Next month, May, we are going to face our cookie fears. Make that set that you didn’t think you could. Then share it.

Until then, don’t forget to stop by The Cookie Puzzle everyday in April. Say “hi” to Kim and when you can, share a few posts. Help spread awareness for autism.

Little Bunny Family

A few weeks ago, my friend Melissa texted me a picture of two bunnies sitting side by side. In the picture, you see their backs as they look out into the sky behind them. It looks like they are either enjoying a nice conversation, or enjoying a comfortable silence together. Either way, they were obviously bunny friends having a nice time together.  She said she had sent the picture to our other friend, Kim, because it reminded her of them. Then, she said, she looked at it and it reminded her of me and my kids. I’m kind of obsessed with them. I really liked that, the idea of sitting and looking at the stars with a child on either side of me, talking about their day.

So I made the idea into cookies.

The larger of the bunnies is my absolute most favorite cookie cutter for Easter (it came in a two pack with a carrot last year or the year before from Walmart or Target- I really should have been more diligent about remembering). You could make it a front facing bunny, absolutely, and give it a little face with whiskers and eyes, and little buck teeth, maybe include little paws holding a little carrot. Absolutely. (I may be a little dependent on the word “absolutely”?) Since I was making this based on a picture of bunnies facing AWAY from the camera, I made their backs… with little sugar bead cotton tails.

Since this is my ABSOLUTE favorite Easter bunny cutter, I wanted to make a smaller version of the same shape to be my little bunny Ellie and bunny Ben. This is what I came up with.

I used the mini bunny face (again, I forget where this is from- maybe Wilton’s Easter mini set?) and a small heart (that I KNOW came from Wilton’s graduated heart set). I cut out the bunny face, and a heart. Then I used the pointy part of the heart to cut a notch into the bunny face. I fit the heart, upside down, into the notch, then used a knife to cut the heart flat. Then I used my fingers to pinch the bottom of the heart into two little feet. Now we have little mini bunnies that match my favorite bunny cutter!

This is a quick easy bunny set you can make if you need something for tomorrow. After baking your bunnies and letting them cool, mix up your icing and divide it into several bowls. (As many bowls as shades of icing you want.) Dye one bowl with white food coloring (if you use clear vanilla in your recipe, you may not need to do this.) If you want an ombre shading like I did, line your bowls up next to each other. Start with two drops of color in the first bowl, one drop in the second, one drop of color with a drop of white in the next, and one drop of color with two drops of white in the last. Reserve some white thick icing for outlining. Thin the rest of the white and all of the colors down to a thicker flooding consistency. I like about a five second count for this.

Outline your bunnies with white and let them set for a few minutes. Then begin to flood your bunnies with your colored icing. Do one to two at a time (depending on your climate and how fast your icing dries) then add your white polka dots while your colored base is still wet. Add a large sugar bead for a tail. Continue until all of your bunnies are covered and dotted and… tailed. Let dry completely, or overnight if you can.

So, speaking of my friend, Kim. Keep and eye out for her blog, The Cookie Puzzle, all throughout April.

Speaking of Melissa, I’m linking these bunnies to her blog, Simply Sweets by Honeybee for Simply Sweet Saturdays.

Lorax Cookies

About two weeks before Ben’s Willy Wonka party, we were walking around Target looking for things I needed when Ben announced that he decided he wanted a Lorax party instead. Now, I had just sent out the invitations (golden tickets wrapped around Hershey bars), but I hadn’t bought anything else. So we walked around the store debating the pros and cons of Willy Wonka verses the Lorax as far as party-ability. In the end we finally agreed (and yes, I negotiated a deal with an almost three-year-old) that we would have a Wonka party and bring Lorax cupcakes into daycare.

 

I took some pictures along the way, because it was actually very easy to make this cookie topper. I used a mustache cutter from this set and a small oval cutter.

 

1. Cut out your mustaches.
2. Cut out two small ovals per cookie. Use the oval to cut notches into the mustache to fit the eyes- I did take a picture of this step, but it was blurry
3. Outline your mustache in yellow piping icing (I used an Ateco 1 tip)
4. Flood the mustache.
5. Pipe two white eyes, using a one step consistency (thick enough to hold its shape, but thin enough to settle flat, 10-20 second consistency). Let this dry overnight.
6. Add details. Using the yellow, pipe lines on the mustache and eyebrows. Using the orange, pipe a nose (I actually was going to use orange jelly beans, but I didn’t have enough. I think it would be really cute to use jellybeans.) Color the eyes using black and blue food coloring markers.

I baked vanilla cupcakes, topped them with a swirl of orange colored vanilla icing, and topped each with a cookie. Ben was happy. I’m a sucker.

 

Passover Matzo Bark (Special Guest Post)

HI,I’m back!It’s Ellie!Here is my next YUMMY recipe!

Ingredients

4 sheets of matzo.

1 stick of salted butter.

1/2 cup sugar.

1 bag of chocolate chips. (kosher for passover.)

1/2 cup chopped almonds.

Directions(**means that a grownup should do this part)

1- Line a baking sheet with foil or parchment paper.

2- Preheat the oven to 350 (**)

3- Line the baking sheet with matzo, do not overlap, break them into pieces if you need to.

4- In a small saucepan, combine the butter and sugar and bring to a boil, pour mixture over the matzo. Place in the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes until the matzo is lightly browned. (**)

5- Remove pan from the oven (**)

6- Being careful not to touch the baking sheet or the hot butter, sprinkle the matzo with the chocolate Let it melt slightly then use an offset spatula to spread the chocolate over the matzo.

7- Sprinkle with the chopped almonds.

8- Let it cool completely in the refrigerator for a few hours.

9- Break into pieces before serving.

So that is my yummy recipe!

ANNNNNNDDDDD- we lost Ellie to Hannah Montana. Lol.

Anyway, make this because the only acceptable way to eat matzo is covered in chocolate.

So if you want to leave a comment, be nice Six and a half year olds are still easily distracted, lol.

(Quick note- I’m not sure exactly where this recipe came from, I copied it onto an index card several years ago. I did modify it a bit from the original.)

Fruit Salad (To Go)

Remember, in science class, learning about saturation? I remember hanging a piece of string in a glass of sugar water, adding more sugar, and watching as, over the course of a few days, the sugar left the sugar/water mixture and clung to the string. What I’m trying to say is that I feel like that sugar/water mixture, and if you hang a string near me, in a few days you’ll have rock candy.

I guess that’s what happens when you have Halloween, followed by Thanksgiving, followed by Christmas/Hanukkah, followed by New Years, followed by Valentines Day, followed by your son’s third birthday! That’s why when Ellie was “star student” the week following her brother’s birthday, I decided to NOT make cookies or cupcakes to send in. (Sorry first graders!)

These treats were a big hit with the class, despite the lack of added sugar. Just a warning, though. You’ll want to prepare them as close to snack time as possible. The shelf life for these is pretty much non existent.

Ingredients:

(Makes about 12 bags)

• 12 strawberries
• 6 easy peel clementines
• 3-4 bananas (depending on size)
• 1 1/2 pears
• about 96 blueberries
• about 72 grapes
• 12 cellophane dipped pretzel bags
• ribbon

1. Cut your fruit- you should get about 4 chunks of banana per fruit (depending on size) and about 9 slices per pear (note- if your child’s class is allergy  sensitive, lay wax or parchment paper on your counter and use a plastic knife. The pears can be difficult to cut, so I cut a few slices with plastic, and packaged them with a different color ribbon so I knew which bags they were in. Then I switched to a regular knife. If you need to make sure all fruit is safely cut, you could always substitute green grapes for the pear.)
2. Place fruit in bag according to the rules of ROY-G-BV: about 6 grapes, 8 blueberries, 1 pear slice, 1 banana chunk, 1/2 clementine, 1 strawberry (halved when needed- there were some mutant huge strawberries in that container!)
3. Tie with a ribbon.
4. Serve immediately.

Just a little note. I tend to try to buy organic where I can. In this case, the grapes and bananas are non organic. I know it tends to be more expensive, and in some cases harder to find. Just do what you can, where you can.

And I am definitely not off sugar for good! I just needed to take a little break from it, you know?

I’m linking this up to Simply Sweet Saturdays at Simply Sweets by Honeybee.