Bouchon Bakery First Bake: Pecan Sandies

I didn't want just to bake out of Dorie Greenspan and I've had Thomas Keller: Bouchard Bakery which includes many recipes by Sebastian Rouxel who heads up the Bakery. I
decided to bake out of it as well. The beginning recipes are cookie recipes and the first recipe is for pecan sandies, baked by Thomas Keller's mom on a regular basis. The recipe is on page 10.

I had a great time with them and am on board with baking my way through this cookbook as well.

As a woman who owns four sets of measuring cups, I am delighted to acknowledge that I am now only using my scale. I use the cups to dip out whatever I am measuring, but I go by the scale altogether these days.

So first I weighed all the ingredients and had them prepped and ready:

I even weighed the individual cookies. They were supposed to weigh 3 ounces each. I had a few that were slightly light so I ended up with 19 cookies instead of the 18 that the recipe promised and the last one was on the light side!

The instructions said to flatten each mound to about two inches. I have another cookie recipe that says to grease and sugar the bottom of a glass to accomplish this so since the recipe didn't say how to flatten them, I employed this method. I used the paper from the unsalted butter to grease the bottom of the glass and then dipped it into powdered sugar. They looked like the photo below going into the oven.

The photo above is how they looked coming out after 18 minutes in a convection oven. I cooled them for five minutes in the pan and then moved them to a cooling rack and covered them with powdered sugar.

They are so delicious that I took a bite before I took the photo!

     
I gave most of them to my friend Julia who has boys at her house when I ate lunch with her today. I hope they enjoy them....so much better than the ones in the bag at the grocery!

Colossal Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Chips

This is my mother's recipe:

1 cup butter (salted butter works best for this recipe)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs beaten
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour (1 cup white, 1 cup whole wheat)
2 1/2 cups oatmeal
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 bag Ghiradelli chocolate chips (note: the recipe actually calls for 1 1/2 cups raisins, but we always use chocolate chips instead)

Cream the butter and the sugar.
Add eggs and vanilla.
Combine the dry ingredients (Dylan is working hard to do this with his whisk)


Mix dry ingredients into creamed mixture. Add raisins (or in our case - chocolate chips)

Dylan carefully poured in the chocolate chips.

These are supposed to be "colossal" cookies - very large and baked for 15 - 20 minutes at 350. We baked them in my Thermador oven set for convection at 350. We made the cookies about 1 1/2 inch balls and baked them for about 10 minutes.


Although this is not a freezer cookie, my mother freezes this dough all the time. So we rolled most of the dough into 2 inch diameter rolls and wrapped them in waxed paper, bagged them in a ziploc with baking instructions. They are in my downstairs freezer, waiting to be baked the week of the wedding in April.

Chocolate Hazelnut Crinkle Cookies

My youngest daughter is getting married next month and we are baking and freezing cookie dough for cookies to put in bags for the out of town guests. We mixed up three kinds in the last few days. Each time we baked a test batch of about a dozen cookies (who could blame us?) because we thought we needed to make sure they really were good.

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of our results in baking these delicious cookies. I got the recipe from epicurious. Trust me, our dozen cookies looked exactly like the picture from Gourmet and they tasted fantastic.

What I did get were these wonderful pictures of Dylan licking the beater after the chocolate treats had been all mixed up!





Getting to bake with this wonderful grandson is a treat for me!

I rolled the dough into rolls about 2 inches in diameter, wrapped them in waxed paper, put the rolls in a ziploc with a label of baking instructions. I'll thaw and bake them right before the wedding in April.