Tasty Tuesday - Molasses Cookies

I host an annual cookie exchange now. Really, it isn't so much about the cookies as it is about getting together with friends and actually having some time to spend together, chatting and enjoying each others' company. Of course, cookies are involved, and it's all yummy. Just like with bake sales, I don't want to choose something obvious and similar to what others do. I also happened to have just cleaned my cabinets - two days of pulling everything out, tossing it or cleaning it, washing the inside and outside of the cabinets twice and letting them dry then putting everything back again - and discovered a partially full jar of molasses.

That made the decision easy, right?

Molasses Cookies

Ingredients:
2/3 c vegetable oil
3/4 c brown sugar
1/4 c granulated sugar
1 egg
1/4-1/2 c molasses
2 1/3 c flour
1 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 1/2 t cinnamon
1/2 t ginger
1/4 t nutmeg
1/2 t cloves
Additional white sugar for rolling (1/3-1/2 cup)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease your cookie sheets (or get out your sil pats).

In a bowl, beat your oil and sugar until it’s lightened in color and has come together nicely. Add the egg and beat well again. Stir in the molasses (use ¼ if you aren’t huge into molasses or closer to ½ cup if you like the stronger taste – we went about halfway between). Add the baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves to the batter and mix well. Slowly stir the flour into the dough. This will be a stiff dough, more so than a chocolate chip cookie dough and definitely less sticky. The cookies will still be fine.

Prepare a small bowl with the extra granulated sugar. I use my dough baller to portion these out to make a smaller cookie. It made 40 cookies for me, but you can make larger cookies, too. Place a single portion into the sugar bowl and gently roll in in there. You can shape it a bit in the sugar, but don’t push the sugar into the dough. Set them onto your baking sheet, and bake for 9 minutes for smaller cookies potentially up to 11 or 12 for large cookies.

When you take them out, not all the tops will have cracked yet. That’s fine. So long as you’re starting to see cracks in many of the cookies, you’re good to go. If you want your cookies soft and not crunchy, leave them sitting on the sil pat to cool, or put them on a sheet of wax paper. It makes a huge difference. I let mine cool for three or so minutes, then carefully lifted my sil pat to place it on the counter and let it cool the rest of the way. Fortunately, I have three sil pats, so I could rotate them through the batches as I was baking. If you don’t have enough sil pats, the wax paper works just as well.

Enjoy this and more with Blessed With Grace and Tempt My Tummy Tuesday. Also posting now with A Southern Fairytale and her Mouthwatering Monday.

Tasty Tuesday - Pumpkin Chocolate Muffins

There was a bake sale at Mister Man's school last week. Remember those and how fun they were to pick and choose what you wanted from all the great bakers in the community, ooooing and ahhhing over the delectable delights? Most schools no longer allow this or just have store bought items (boo!), but we're lucky that ours still allows a bake sale from homemade goodies. Of course, I had to bake, too.

I couldn't choose something easy or simple that I knew a lot of people would be making. No brownies or chocolate chip cookies or sugar cookies for me. I had to find something that I thought would be unique for the bake sale but still appealing and somewhat seasonal. I finally decided to make pumpkin chocolate muffins, and they were awesome. Even better, they were dairy and nut free, so some students who normally can't purchase treats were able to enjoy them, too.

Pumpkin Chocolate Muffins

Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 1/2 c granulated sugar
1 15oz can pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)
3 c flour
2 t baking soda
1 1/2 t baking powder
2 t cinnamon
1/2 t nutmeg
1/2 t salt
2 c chocolate chunks (mini chips work, I chopped a bar of dark chocolate)

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (I always bake with my convection oven, which means I preheat to 300 for baking - mine has a great feature that recalculates the temp and time for baked goods using a convection). You can make these regular size muffins (about 2 dozen) or mini muffins (up to 8 dozen). Either grease your tins or line them with muffins papers.

Beat the eggs and sugar in a large bowl until it's lighter in color and has grown in volume. Add the pumpkin puree and oil, and beat again.

Add the baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt to the bowl and mix well. Add the flour and stir slowly until mostly blended. While there are still some white streaks add the chocolate chunks/chips. I would not use full size chips if you're making mini muffins. And the unique shapes that chopping a bar of chocolate adds was pretty cool in the muffins, something I would definitely do again.

Add the batter to the muffin tins, filling about 2/3 of the way full. Bake in your 350 degree oven for 20 minutes, until a tester comes clean (or they spring back when you touch them - with mini muffins, especially, I go for the touch test when baking). Let the muffins cool a couple minutes, then remove them from their pans. If your muffins are stuck to the pans, check out my cool solution. Because, yes, some of my muffins stuck. I successfully rescused them all, however.

Enjoy this and more with Blessed With Grace and Tempt My Tummy Tuesday. Also posting now with A Southern Fairytale and her Mouthwatering Monday.