All posts by Barbara

I have a PhD in American Literature, taught in higher education for over twenty years, and directed two Centers for Instructional Technology before retiring.
Cookies, Dessert

Inside-Out Snickerdoodles

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Put the cinnamon inside and avoid the rolling!

I kinda like Snickerdoodles, because I like cinnamon, but I’m not really crazy about the burst of sugar and cinnamon on the tongue as soon as you take a bite. So I just added the cinnamon to the basic dough and left out the additional sugar used to coat the cookies. The end result is a crackled cinnamon cookie with a kind of a sandy, chewy texture.

You could do this with any Snickerdoodle recipe, such as this one I made a few years ago, which by the way has pretty much the same ingredients, but more flour. The older one is from my Betty Crocker cookbook, and this newer one is from America’s Test Kitchen (paywall). ATK makes it sound like they thought up the cream of tartar, but it was also in my old Betty Crocker recipe, so maybe they just meant that they agreed with all the other recipes that use it. Both recipes also suggest using a combination of butter and solid shortening. In the past I just used all butter, but today, I went with the suggestion of both.

Here’s the ATK video of Snickerdoodles, followed by photos of my own cookies with the cinnamon inside:

Here are my cookies. I used a 1/4 cup scoop for my cookies, about twice the size of the ATK cookies, so they were larger than normal, some of them spreading out into the next cookie, even with only 6 per sheet. If you make large ones, they will need to bake for up to 6 minutes longer than the recipe suggests:

Inside-Out Snickerdoodles

  • Servings: 1.5 dozen
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Preheat oven to 375º and line cookie sheets with parchment paper. I got 1 1/2 dozen large cookies from this recipe, but you could get 3 dozen smaller cookies.

Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon cinnamon
  • 1/2 cup (one stick) softened butter
  • 1/2 cup vegetable shortening
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 2 large eggs

Instructions

  1. Whisk dry ingredients, including cinnamon, in bowl and set aside.
  2. In stand mixer or large bowl with portable mixer, beat together butter, shortening, and sugar until smooth and fluffy.
  3. Beat in eggs, one at a time.
  4. Carefully mix in dry ingredients until there are no dry pockets of dough.
  5. Scoop out dough with cookie scoop of desired size and place on parchment lined cookie sheets.
  6. Bake smaller cookies at 375º for 8-12 minutes; larger cookies for up to 18 minutes. No need to over-brown the cookies. They will set upon cooling. I let mine cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes before trying to lift them onto the cooling rack.

Meat, Pork, Tips, Vegetables

Those Prosciutto Asparagus Bundles—Some Tips

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Blog posts for bundles of asparagus wrapped in prosciutto are ubiquitous. Some are roasted until the prosciutto is crispy and some are wrapped at the last minute, after only the asparagus are cooked. I’ve even seen some that have cheese either under or on top of the prosciutto. Whatever kind you’re looking for, here are a few tips to save you some headaches:

  1. Precook the asparagus before roasting. Just a 2-3 minute simmer will cook the asparagus enough that it won’t be tough after a short time in the oven to crisp up the whole bundle. I don’t think I would use the very fat stalks, but if you have to, you should probably peel them before simmering.
  2. If like the prosciutto I always find, yours tears into pieces just trying to separate them—even when they have paper or plastic between the slices—don’t panic. Prosciutto pieces will stick to themselves and you can easily piece them together. Every single one of my slices tore into three identical pieces, one small square, one long straggly strip, and one nice looking rectangle that was large enough to go around the bundle itself. So I put the ugly duckling pieces on the inside and wrapped the big rectangle around the whole thing. No one would be the wiser, if I actually had company, instead of being in self-quarantine with just my husband.

I brushed mine with olive oil and roasted them at 400º for about 20 minutes.

Asian, Beef, Bread, Cakes, Casseroles, Dessert, Eating, Meat, Vegetables

Still Eating, If Not Writing

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What’s been for dinner lately:

Sheet pan pizza with prosciutto, Parmesan, and white sauce. The crust is from America’s Test Kitchen’s “Pizza al Taglio with Arugula and Mozzarella,” but I baked it with a Parmesan/garlic white sauce, fresh mozzarella, baby spinach, and prosciutto. [There’s a paywall on this site.]

Beef stir fry. This is just a version of the one I make on the grill in the summer, with more veggies. I used some steamed frozen broccoli to avoid the longer cooking that fresh broccoli requires.

Rigatoni and butternut squash casserole with pancetta and Parmesan. Just like the one I’ve made before with bacon, but I find the pancetta to be milder and less overpowering than the bacon.

Boston Cream Pie—made this for my husband’s birthday. Specifically the Wicked Good Boston Cream Pie from America’s Test Kitchen. One word of caution: The written recipe omits the most important line from the video. When making the pastry cream, you don’t stop when bubbles break the surface; you continue whisking until the whisk leaves a trail in the bottom of the pan, sort of like when making jam. Otherwise the pastry cream will be runny. It’s a delightful cake. [There’s a paywall on this site.]

Dessert, Fruit, Pies

Apple Pie for Thanksgiving

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It’s way past Thanksgiving, but I did save the pics from baking the apple pie—Whew!

I decided that I was kind of tired of the traditional pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. We weren’t having turkey, either, so tradition was kind of out the window.

As I know from many years of making apple pie, there are pitfalls:

  1. Sometimes the apples aren’t done by the time the crust is done.
  2. The filling can shrink away from the top crust as the apples cook within it. When you cut into such a pie, you think you’ve been cheated out of some filling.
  3. Sometimes the apples are too sweet or too tart because you don’t get to test the filling before it goes into the pie and make adjustments.

So this year, I cooked the filling first. In hindsight, it seems like a no-brainer. The best part of cooking the filling in advance is that you can do it the day before making the pie. You can also make the crust a day ahead so that the day of baking is just assembly and baking. I ended up making the whole pie the day before Thanksgiving so I could just eat on the big day. 👍

I found this terrific recipe for a Classic Apple Pie with Precooked Apple Filling. It also has what looks like a good crust that you might want to try, even though I opted for a different one. I used a combination of Granny Smith and Macintosh apples to cover both the tart and sweet flavors. I can’t imagine ever making another apple pie without a precooked filling.

For the crust I used the Foolproof All-Butter Dough from Cook’s Illustrated—it’s not the one with vodka. (There may be a paywall that prevents you from reading the recipe if you are not a member.) It’s a nice dough that almost resembles a puff pastry, with many flaky, tender layers, as you may be able to see in the photos. If you look closely at the slits in the baked pie, you can see the layers in the crust. We thought it was the most tender crust we ever had:

I can’t believe I didn’t take any photos of the pie after it was sliced!