Caramel Cinnamon Apple FAIL cookies

This week's recipe is the worst kind of fail: a great tasting, horrible looking fail. The taste is amazing but the rest just disapoints. I wanted to make a caramel apple cinnamon cookie but everything out there was an apple cookie dipped in caramel. Now I know why.

I found a vegan recipe that looked promising and made it back into something, I hoped would be, fit for human consumption. Unfortunately the recipe doesn't call for nearly enough leavening and the results are....well, they're visible below. Adding insult to injury I ran out of parchment paper and was left with bare cookie sheets, which further aggravated a bad situation. Adding to that are the thermal properties of caramel and I begin to understand why caramel is dipped or added after baking.

In short, everything turns into a gooey catch-22: if you take the cookies from the pan straight away without letter them set the caramel is too melty but if you let it set for a few minutes (or longer, or in the refrigerator) then the caramel bonds like epoxy to the pan. I even tried to salvage the remaining batter (after I had cemented apple chunks with caramel mortar to every cookie sheet I had) by making mini muffins. Again, I hit the caramel catch-22.

I'm posting the recipe as a challenge to someone with more talent than I to fix it. I'm pretty sure it's a baking soda/powder thing because all the other ingredients are right. Also, maybe freeze the caramel chunks so they don't melt as fast. Input is appreciated.



Ingredients

Cinnamon Apples

• 2 Fuji apples, diced (depends on size of your apples.)
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 generous tablespoons brown sugar

Cookie Batter

• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 2 cups + 5 tablespoons flour
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 7 or 8 caramel candies, cut into small chunks

Directions

1. Prepare the cinnamon apples: Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat. Add the apples, sugar, and cinnamon. Cook until apples are tender. Let cool before adding to dough, this step is critical.
2. Prepare cookies: Preheat oven to 350
   
3. Beat sugars, butter, vanilla, and egg with flat beater at medium power.
4. Sift in the dry ingredients and beat.
5. Mix in the cinnamon apples and caramel (you want enough so that there are apple pieces in each cookie. you might need more apples or fewer) , and drop dough by VERY SMALL tablespoons onto parchment paper. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until done. Let cool.

Monday Musing: Sifting

The muffins came out a little tough but with fairly good taste. In retrospect I would have use an orange cupcake recipe instead of a muffin recipe. Also, there was a typo in my transcription of the recipe, I used about 1/4 cup of milk, not 1/4 tablespoon.

This recipe didn't call for dry ingredients to be sifted together, but in my zeal to use my new sifter I added it, which might have been a mistake. Muffins aren't supposed to be uniform consistency and I think sifting the flour took some of the texture out of the recipe. With that said there are certainly times where sifting dry ingredients benefits the overall product, for instance in cakes. Powdered sugar should also pretty much always be sifted. But here the muffins turned into golf balls. Perhaps after five weeks of well received pastry it was time for a stumble and this certainly falls under that category.

Monday Musing: On My New Mixer

Last night's recipe failed. Part of it was my fault. The recipe calls for a 15"x10" pan. As far as I can tell, no such pan exists or has ever existed. I used a 13"x9" quarter sheet cake pan and because I didn't reduce the proportions, that's where things went awry. The crust layer was too thick, the middle cream cheese layer didn't set properly and the top lemon filling layer didn't set at all. It ended up tasting great but it wouldnt' win a beauty pageant. Instead of a lemon bar, it was more like a lemon dessert, to be eaten on a plate with a fork.

But with that said, the mixer didn't work exactly as I planned either. The cream cheese layer was supposed to be mixed until creamy but there were still small chunks of cream cheese. I think this could be solved with my latest purchase, the Side Swipe (pictured below). It's a replacement for the flat beater that scrapes the side of the bowl down with silicon fins as it mixes. Because it's constantly in contact with the bowl I'm hopeful that it will do a better job mixing. Unfortunately, it's back-ordered with an estimated shipping date of March 23 for the attachment that fits my mixer, so we'll have to wait until then to test it out.


With that said, I'm not sure the role I see for the mixer in my kitchen. I generally prefer hand mixing things. I like the control and being able to feel when a recipe is coming together, which you don't get with a mixer. However, I'm reserving judgment until I make bread dough with the mixer. The weather is just getting to be the right mixture of heat and humidity for proper rising and I'm hoping the cold front we're forecast to get on Wednesday doesn't ruin this.

Strawberry Banana Muffins

About five minutes after I stepped out of the office door to leave on Friday evening, I started to get sick. I spent Saturday and most of Sunday in bed and between being sick and daylight savings time, feel like I've had my weekend pretty much stolen. I chose this recipe because I had everything on hand but the bananas, which I ran up to the corner store for. Apparently I'm still sicker than I thought because when I prepared the muffins this evening I left the melted butter in the microwave. So while I think this recipe has a lot of potential, what I'm bringing to the office tomorrow will be...hardy. In case you're wondering, I'm chilling the melted butter in the ramekin, hoping it will come back to a usable consistency.



Ingredients
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted -- and not forgotten in the microwave!
3/4 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 large ripe bananas, mashed (about 1 cup)
1 cup fresh or frozen strawberries (cut into small pieces)
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C). Position rack in center of oven. Line the muffin pan with paper liners or grease with butter or a vegetable spray. Set aside.
2. Melt the butter. Set aside and don't forget!
3. In a medium sized bowl whisk together the brown sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and mashed banana. Add the melted butter to the brown sugar mixture and stir to combine.
4. In another large bowl combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Gently fold in the strawberries, making sure they are coated with flour. This helps to prevent the strawberries from sinking during baking. Do not over mix or the strawberries will end up coloring the batter red. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir only until the ingredients are just combined. Do not over mix the batter or tough muffins will result.
5. Fill each muffin cup about two thirds full of batter. Fill any unused muffin cups halfway with water to prevent warping of the pan and/or over browning of the muffins. Place in the oven and bake until a tester inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Makes 12 regular sized muffins.