christmas kitchen messings - one step at a time!

another one of the reasons why this girl loves christmas, is the fact that it gives me the opportunity to mess about in the kitchen and whip up (at least try to whip up!) some yummy cookies and sweet treats to pass on to good friends as part of the holiday festivities. i would have liked to mess around a little bit more but with everything that was going on, i have only so far managed to work through three new recipes and am hoping to experiment a little bit more the rest of 2009!

for the fantastic crew at my old office, i decided to try out two new recipes discovered through the fantastic montage at tastespotting.com. with a cookie name like cafe volcano, and ingredients like almonds, walnuts, espresso powder and an egg white meringue base, i knew this cookie would be a hit. they were surprisingly easy to make (from dorie greenspan's baking: from my home to yours) and although i did over estimate the time to roast the nuts (yes, the recipe did highlight the need to be careful!), the cookies still came out nice and crisp, with a strong coffee hint and nutty flavor.

the other recipe i absolutely had to try was the chocolate caramel cookie brittle. yup...think a salty cookie brittle base, smoothered with a sweet creamy caramel layer and topped with a thick layer of melted chocolate. enough said don't you think? *grin*

for the last and most recent kitchen messing, i decided to try out a classic chocolate chip cookie recipe from the book 'baking: one step at a time' which i got sometime back. i think it is a secret dream for all aspiring bakers to be able to whip up a good batch of this classic cookie and to be honest, it is extremely hard to get it right...as there are those who like these crunchy, while others (me included) like the cookies soft and chewy. in any case, these recipe churned out some pretty crunchy flatish cookies that were surprisingly good. they were a tad too salty but were other than that, yummy enough for me to consider already whipping up another batch and serving them up between some homemade ice cream!

here's looking forward to more kitchen messings before the year runs out! check back soon for more!


ps: do leave a comment and contact if you want any of the recipes yah? didn't want to make this post too long!