Sasha's Kitchen: Superstar Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ahhhh, pumpkin cookies. If Asian marinated Chilean Sea bass with papaya salsa and risotto is my signature dish, then my pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies must be my signature cookies. These are easy to make, amazing and perfect for fall. I made a batch of 40 cookies on Wednesday night, most of which were gone by Friday night. Everyone who ate one wished they had another! And another. This is my favorite fall baking recipe - I have been making these with my mom since I was a kid. We always made them big and decorated them to have faces using various cake icings, so they are really perfect to make with kids. This year, I just made them regular size and plain, which was delicious too. I'm really getting into pumpkin. I plan on making a salad with pumpkin and pears, pumpkin gingerbread ice cream, and pumpkin panna cotta in the coming weeks. It's really the signature food of fall! The oatmeal is the key to these cookies - it adds such a lovely texture!

Sasha's Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
2 sticks butter
1 1/4 cups pumpkin puree
1 1/3 cups old fashioned oats
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

To make these cookies, combine the flour, oats, salt, cinnamon and baking soda in a mixing bowl and set aside. Beat the butter and both sugars in your stand mixer for several minutes, until smooth. Add the pumpkin puree, egg and vanilla to the sugar/butter mixture and combine. At this point, the mixture may look slightly curdled. Don't worry about it. Add the dry ingredients to the mixture, until combined into a cookie dough, and follow by mixing in the chocolate chips.

Line several baking sheets and spray with PAM. Preheat the oven to 350. To make medium sized cookies (the recipe makes about 40), use a tablespoon to make each cookie and drop on the sheets, spaced apart. Bake each sheet, one at a time, for 15 minutes. If you make them larger, like I said above, kids will have a great time decorating them to make pumpkin faces or jack-o-lanterns.

Sasha's Kitchen: Superstar Pumpkin Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Matt's Kitchen In D.C.: Cooking With Kids - Banana Bread

Banana bread needs no introduction, it is a quick and easy bread that is good to eat just about anytime. Zachary eats at least a banana a day, if not more, so this recipe was not a tough sell. The only difficult part was saving three bananas so they could reach the requisite level of ripeness (i.e., over-ripeness). As with many of the "cooking with kids" recipes I have posted, it follows the familiar formula of combining dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately, and then stirring them all together.


This recipe is a version of one found in The Best Recipe Cookbook, an essential standard cookbook, published by the good folks at Cook's Illustrated magazine - also essential, in my opinion.

3 very ripe, browning bananas - browner is better, within reason
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup plain yogurt
2 large eggs, beaten gently
6 tbsp. butter, melted
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/4 cup toasted, chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. You can bake this in a bread pan, if you have one, or in an 8x8 cake pan. I opted for the cake pan, the only difference is baking time. So go ahead and grease whichever pan you are using.

The most fun part of the recipe, is, of course, mashing the bananas - mash them good! Then add the yogurt, eggs, butter and vanilla and stir to combine.


Whisk together all dry ingredients, including walnuts (we omitted the nuts in our recipe because Zachary generally objects to finding crunchy bits in his food).

Finally, add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients. The trick is here is to fold them in gently with a spatula, and just to the point at which they are combined (i.e. there is no "raw" flour apparent in the mixture). The reason is, the more you stir, the more gluten develops and too much gluten will result in your bread being small and tough. That being said, this may be a good task for the parent to handle, if the child is a potentially vigorous stirrer.

Finally, scrape the batter into the greased pan and put it in the oven. If using a breadpan, the cooking time is about 55 minutes but I would suggest testing it at 40-45 minutes just to be sure. The cake pan time is a lot less, try testing at 30 minutes. For the baking impaired, testing means removing the bread and sticking a cake tester into the middle - if it comes out clean, your bread is done. If it comes out with batter on it, put the bread back in for several more minutes and then test again until you get it right.

Once you are satisfied, let it cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove to a wire rack. As the picture illustrates, this bread was extremely popular with Zachary. After spending some time in the fridge, a slice will benefit from a few brief seconds in the microwave to warm it up - or alternatively, you can toast it. Once you have a made it a few times, you could try modifying the recipe - add a 4th banana, for example, or add some chocolate or cocoa powder to the batter.

Matt's Kitchen In D.C.: Cooking With Kids - Banana Bread

Sasha's Kitchen: A Rainbow Of Honey Vanilla Cupcakes!

Vanilla cupcakes are the simplest of cupcake recipes, in that it's similar to forget about them and get caught up making all the fun and unusual flavors of cupcakes.  However, it's actually harder to get vanilla cupcakes just right than any other type of cupcake.  They're less forgiving than chocolate, for sure.

Today's vanilla cupcake recipe is a modification using honey as the primary sweetener, based on Bill Yosses' (The White House pastry chef's) cupcake recipe for honey-vanilla cupcakes found on the Obama Foodorama Website.  My recipe is a bit different for a couple of reasons:  first I doubled the recipe for 24 cupcakes, instead of 12, but also made some ingredient adjustments to get the cupcakes just the way I like them.  However, I was certainly inspired to use organic honey in preparing them, just as the chefs at the White House have been, using their own on-site beehive.  Let's clarify though - I simply bought a large container of organic honey - no beekeeping for me!

I did not use Yosses' frosting recipe at all, but used the very same frosting recipe that I developed for my Chocolate Stout Cupcakes.  Then I divided the frosting into six bowls and prepared six different icing colors, and used the cupcakes to make a rainbow of colors. 

Here's my recipe for the Honey-Vanilla Cupcakes, adapted from the original Yosses recipe:

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup)
2/3 cups of sugar
1 1/4 cup of honey
4 eggs
1 1/4 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
4 cups flour
2 T baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

My Almost-Famous Honey-Vanilla Frosting

4 cups of confectioners sugar
1 8 oz package of cream cheese
1/3 cup of heavy cream
1 stick of butter
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 T of honey

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  To make the cupcakes, mix the flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl.  Then beat the butter and sugar in the mixer.  Add the honey.  Here's a trick for adding the honey so you don't have it all sticking to the inside of the measuring cup.  Coat the measuring cup with a T of Canola oil and then pour out the oil.  When you add the honey to the cup, it will slide right off and into the basin of your mixer, without leaving any residual honey in the cup.  Add the eggs, buttermilk and vanilla to the mixer, beating at low-medium speed.  Then add the dry ingrediants and mix well.  You can add a tad of additional buttermilk if its a bit too thick (that's how I wound up using 1 1/4 cup rather than 1 cup of buttermilk). 

Fill two cupcake trays with 24 liners.  Fill 3/4 of the way to the top.  Bake the cupcakes for about 25-30 minutes at 350 F, until very lightly browned and cooked through.  You can test with a fork or a toothpick to make sure the inside is done.  My husband usually does the test, and he just seems to know when they are ready to come out.  Allow the cupcakes to cool fully before you frost them.

To make the froasting, follow the instructions for my Chocolate Stout cupcakes, since its the same frosting.  Beat the butter, confectioner's sugar and cream cheese well.  Then add the heavy cream and the vanilla.  I then divided the frosting into 6 bowls.  To color the frosting, use gel frostings, and not the conventional frostings at the grocery store, which would make the cream curdle.  I used the same gel frostings that I used in making Royal Icing for my purse and shoe cookies, from NY Cake.  You could do pretty much any color that makes you happy.

Cupcakes make terrific birthday party cakes, in a less traditional sense.  So, for a child's birthday party, you could make a lot more cupcakes, frost in many colors, and then arrange the cupcakes to spell out your kid's name, a picture, animal or whatever would make your little one smile.  The creative options here are endless!  In this case, my goal was simply to create a rainbow of cupcakes, so I selected the colors that are in a rainbow.



Cupcake
Obama

Sasha's Kitchen: A Rainbow Of Honey Vanilla Cupcakes!

Matt's Kitchen In D.C. - Cooking With Kids: Popovers

Since my son was born almost three years ago, I have unfortunately been up at the crack of dawn nearly every weekend. Over the past year or so, a family tradition has arisen - every saturday and sunday morning, my son and I fix breakfast for ourselves and for momma, who gets to sleep while the cooks are in the kitchen. The only criteria is that the breakfast has to be something special that doesn't get eaten during the week - so no toast or cereal. Most often, we make pancakes or waffles, sometimes with bacon if we have some. Occasionally we will make muffins or coffee cake. These types of recipes work well with a toddler as sous chef because they involve three simple stages - mixing dry ingredients, mixing wet ingredients, and stirring them all together. Thus, there are plenty of opportunities for my son to help out (see picture).

One of my son's favorite weekend breakfasts are popovers. They come out of the oven looking and tasting impressive, but they couldn't be easier. The only problem is that, unlike pancakes, you have to wait awhile for them to cook, which can be difficult. But once they do they are well worth it.

1 cup flour
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tbsp. melted butter, plus more for greasing muffin tin

Put a 12-cup muffin tin in the oven and preheat to 450. Combine the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separately, then stir them together quickly - just until they are combined, the batter doesn't have to be 100% smooth. Remove the muffin tin from the oven (careful, that thing is hot!) and brush them thoroughly with melted butter, or a neutral oil. Pour the batter in each cup until about 2/3 full. I find this will fill about 9-10 cups.

Bake at 450 for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 and bake for another 20 minutes. During this time, do not open the oven - if you don't have an oven window then you will just need to have faith that they are cooking properly. When finished, remove quickly from the tin and put them in a basket, wrapped in a towel. They really need to be eaten warm (read: as soon as possible) so you want to keep them from cooling.

When done right, they should puff up high above the tin they are baked in, with a crunchy browned exterior and a soft, eggy interior. The exterior should be browned and firm and cooked enough to maintain its shape even when you pry them out of the muffin tin. If they are undercooked they tend to deflate when you remove them - they still taste great, but don't have the pleasing puffed up shape. Of course, cooking times may vary by oven, so if you find that they are overdone or underdone according to my timing above, then adjust accordingly.

They can be eaten just plain, with a little salt or with honey or maple syrup. Also, for a variation try sprinkling some grated cheese on the batter in each cup right before it goes in the oven. My son refuses to eat them with cheese, but I think most people will like it. As a note, a large single popover cooked for a crowd is called a yorkshire pudding, and is a traditional accompaniment for prime rib or a similar meat dish. But that is a subject for another post.

Matt's Kitchen In D.C. - Cooking With Kids: Popovers