I felt like experimenting today, and luckily it turned out great!

These are an alteration of my basic chocolate chip cookie recipe.  The pecans are toasted until fragrant and then chopped up and added to the dough.  The browned butter also adds a great depth of flavor that nicely compliments the toasted pecans.  I browned one stick of unsalted butter and one stick of salted butter because that’s what I had on hand. Feel free to use whatever butter you prefer.

Since I didn’t need to have a box of two dozen freshly baked cookies on hand (because I would eat them all at once), I only made one batch and froze the remaining dough. To do this, just portion out your dough like you would before baking (excluding the salt topping), but instead of slipping the cookie sheet into the oven, put it in your freezer. Once fully frozen, you can put the dough into resealable bags or containers. Whenever you feel like freshly baked cookies, just take out a few of the frozen dough balls and bake them as normal. Be sure sure to increase the baking time to account for the frozen state of the dough.

Miss Anthropology’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

with Toasted Pecans and Brown Butter

Makes about 24 1.5oz cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks of butter, browned
• 2.25 cups bread flour
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more for topping
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 0.25 cup sugar
• 1.25 cups brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tablespoons milk (fat free works just as well as whole)
• 1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2-2.5 cups semisweet chocolate chips or chopped bars
• 0.5 cup of pecan halves, toasted

 

Method:

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

2. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low-medium heat until browned. Pour into a bowl and let cool slightly.

3. Toast the pecans in a frying pan over low-medium heat until fragrant. Once toasted, chop and set aside.

4. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.

5. Pour the melted butter in your mixing bowl.

6. Add the sugar and brown sugar and cream the butter and sugars on medium
speed, about 5 minutes.

7. Add the egg, yolk, 2 tablespoons milk and vanilla extract and mix until well combined.

8. Slowly incorporate the flour mixture until well combined. Dough will become stiff at this point.

9. Carefully stir in the chocolate and toasted pecans either by hand or on the lowest setting of your mixer.

10. Chill the dough for at least an hour, then scoop 1.5oz portions (about the size of a golf ball) onto parchment-lined baking sheets.  I usually fit 6 cookies/sheet.

11. Sprinkle a pinch of sea salt or kosher salt onto the tops of the portioned out dough.

12. Bake for 5 minutes and rotate the baking sheet for even browning.

13. After rotating, continue baking for an additional 5-10 minutes or until golden brown (I like to keep an eye on them during the last few minutes because every oven is different).

14. Transfer cookies to a cooling rack and allow to rest about 5 minutes before eating (watch out for the hot, melted chocolate!) Be sure to have lots of milk on hand.

*Note: I have made these without a mixer (read: elbow grease) and they turned out fine. Whatever you end up using, just be sure to mix until everything is incorporated, but stop after that. Over mixing will result in “hockey puck” cookies.

 

 

-People who play their music through their tinny cell phone speakers instead of through headphones.  This usually happens on the bus or while waiting for the bus. No one wants to hear your crappy music.

-The use of war as a metaphor.  War on women, war on Christmas, war on cars. Enough already. This rhetoric has long ago lost its efficacy.

-Televised singing competitions. Olde.

Working the total station

This will be my second year on staff at the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, IL.  I’m looking forward to another productive field season at our excavation site in the Lower Illinois Valley, as well as surveying two other sites with both GPR and a magnetometor.  Head over to research.caa-archeology.org to see what I’m up to this summer!

UPDATE: It’s me!

I love the quiet minutes before the rush of the passing period.

(Taken outside Roger Adams Lab, UIUC campus, 21 April 2011)

In Denmark it’s known as a kringle.  75 miles across the Kattegat it’s called a kringla.  Continue east across the Baltic Sea and you’ll find the Estonians call it a kringel.  Regardlesss of the name, it’s delicious.

Growing up in near Chicago, I always knew kringles (or kringler in the proper Danish) to be a rich pastry filled with fruit and topped in thick white icing.  They typically showed up in the local grocery stores around the Christmas season where my mom would sometimes buy one to go with her morning tea.  I liked kringles, but sometimes all that icing was just too much.  So when I saw this recipe for an Estonian kringel, I was wondering to myself where all the fruit and icing went.  Apparently, the Estonian kringel is based on the classic combination of cinnamon and sugar, which simplifies the recipe a great deal.

I made this Estonian kringel tonight and was really pleased with how it turned out.  This bread definitely looks impressive with all of it’s twists and folds, but it’s really very simple to put together.  I only spent about 15-20 minutes on active preparation.  The dough does need to rise for 1-2 hours, so be sure to plan ahead.

Estonian Kringel

Original recipe (in Romanian) from Ana of Just Love Cookin’.

Note:  I did the conversions of the ingredients and found that they yielded a very dry dough.  I fixed that by slowly adding in milk until everything came together and felt right. I also had to rely on Google Page Translator, so I’m not sure if the recipe asked for 1 egg or 1 yolk. Google seemed to think the Romanian word galbenus could mean either egg or yolk. Other websites that I found gave yolk as the only meaning, so I decided to use only the yolk. If egg is the correct translation, however, then the missing whites could be why my dough was so dry. I’ll keep experimenting…

For the dough:
1/2 c. warm milk (110°F-115°F)
1 tsp. sugar
1 egg yolk
1/4 stick of butter (melted and cooled)
pinch of salt
2.5 tsp yeast
3 c. flour (I used bread flour)

For the filling:
1 stick of butter (softened)
3-4 Tbsp. of sugar
1-2 tsp. cinnamon

1. Combine yeast, sugar and warm milk in a large mixing bowl. Let this mixture rest until is has foamed up (5-10) minutes.

2. Lightly mix in melted butter and egg yolk.

3. Sift flour into the wet ingredients and add a pinch of salt.

4. Mix ingredients until they form a cohesive ball of dough. You may have to add more milk if dough is too dry or more flour if dough is too wet (see note above). Once you have a good consistency, knead the dough for 10 minutes. You can either knead the dough by hand or with a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment.

5. Cover the dough and let rise 1-2 hours in a warm place away from any obvious drafts. While the dough is rising, mix up your cinnamon and sugar filling.

6. Preheat oven to 400°F.

7. Remove dough from the bowl and punch it down to remove any air bubbles.

8. Roll dough out into a thin rectangular sheet (about 1cm thick).

9. Spread the cinnamon and sugar mixture all over the sheet of dough, reserving a 1/4 of the mixture for the top of your kringel.

10. Roll the dough up into a log.

11. With a sharp knife, cut the log in half lengthwise.

12. Twist the two halves together, making sure to keep the pretty stripes facing outwards. Once they are twisted to your liking, connect the ends to form a circle.

13. Transfer to a baking sheet (lined with parchment paper or a Silpat) and spread the reserved cinnamon and sugar mixture on top of the kringel. A pastry brush works well for this.

14. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Sorry for the shoddy cell phone picture. I went to take a picture with my real camera and the battery was dead. I’ll be sure to update this recipe with better pictures whenever I make this bread again. Until then, enjoy the photos over at Just Love Cookin’.

UPDATE! (29 Dec 2011)

I made this kringel again today and used brown sugar instead of white granulated sugar for the filling.  This gave it a much better flavor- more Cinnabon less Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Instead of mixing the butter, sugar, and cinnamon together, I spread softened butter across the rolled out dough and sprinkled the cinnamon and brown sugar over the top.  This is the same technique used for making cinnamon rolls.

Finally, as promised, I experimented with the ratios and tried using a whole egg instead of just the yolk.  I used about 2-2.5c. of bread flour and 1c. of whole milk. This time around, the kringel was more dense and didn’t rise nearly as much as the first one I made (pictured above).  The flavor is still good, however, which is all that really matters.  For the next time, I will go back to the original ratios but keep the new brown sugar filling.

I realized that this blog needed some attention, so I went ahead and made a few changes that will hopefully better represent my current interests.

First…more content!  I’ve been far too neglectful.  This blog is really for my own benefit anyway. Let’s be honest, no one else reads it or cares about how I finally got around to cleaning out my closet.  So, by posting more (regardless of substance/extrinsic value), I’ll be rewarding myself with a bit of satisfaction.

Second…Recipes!  These past few weeks, I’ve noticed my culinary impulses have amplified.  I’ve always enjoyed cooking, but now even more so.  As a result, I hope to be posting more recipes, which can now all be found collected on a single page called Recipes (naturally).  I also replaced the Downloads link in the header navigation with the Recipes link.  The Downloads page was for when I made flyers promoting local rock shows, but I’m not doing that anymore.

Third…Links!  I updated the Links page with blogs and local establishments that I’ve been frequenting.  Check them out!

::::

So, if anyone is reading this blog, let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to write about.

I’m also up for recipe requests!

So I was supposed to be looking up some info on Plato, yet somehow I ended up reading about Suleiman the Magnificent. He was one of the great Sultans of the Ottoman Empire and he completely reformed the Ottoman legal code. With an empire that comprised nearly 40 million people across three continents (at its peak), it’s no wonder that the Ottoman legal code was so complicated.  Every time a new territory was conquered, new laws had to be made. Suleiman the Magnificent took it upon himself to assemble all of the legal documents that were enacted before him (Ottomans were great record keepers, true bureaucrats), remove the duplicates, and resolve any conflicting laws. Because of his reforms, he is known as “The Lawgiver” in the Eastern world.

Not only was Suleiman a great administrator, but he was also a patron of the arts. His support of various artistic trades within the empire engendered a truly Ottoman culture, combining European, Islamic, and Turkish styles. Suleiman, himself, wrote poetry under the name Muhibbi (meaning lover). Many of his poems were directed towards his wife, Haseki Hürrem Sultan (aka Roxelana). Roxelana was a Ukrainian girl who was captured by Crimean Tatars and forced into their slave trade. She eventually came into Suleiman’s harem and quickly became his favorite. Suleiman eventually freed her from the harem and asked her to be his wife. This was very unorthodox, yet it seems their love was accepted and Roxelana went on to affect many changes in her own right (e.g. setting up women’s hospitals and soup kitchens).

A couple of other cool facts about Suleiman:

-   His image can be seen in the Chamber at the United States House of Representatives.  Twenty-three marble reliefs are installed in the House Chamber, each depicting a leader “noted for their work in establishing the principles that underlie American law.”  Shhh…don’t tell the Christian zealots that there is a portrait of a Muslim permanently installed in the House Chamber.  Or that a Muslim is regarded as helping to establish “principles that underlie American law”.

-   He had an awesome signature.

In today’s Latin class, Magister Leon handed out a fun little weekend exercise. It’s an English to Latin translation of a popular American hip-hop song heard at most social gatherings (especially karaoke bars, weddings, and your average carousal) since the 1990s.

Do you know what song this is? If you give up, click the “more” link at the end of the Latin passage to see my English translation.

“magnae clūnēs mihi placent, nec possum dē hāc rē mentīrī
vōs enim, amīcī meī, nōn potestis negāre -
quando puella venit mediō corpore gracile
sub quō manifestus globus est -
īnflammat animōs virōrum…”
-Vir quī multa miscet

More »

[rant]
I know how you can save money and the environment! Try running a computer algorithm on your database to ensure that only one catalog is sent to each unique address. Having two catalogs sent to the same address is just wasteful.

In fact, maybe you should not send catalogs by default and instead send them only after they have been specifically requested by the customer. Especially if said customer only ever places orders online. I know you can put in a request to not be sent catalogs after the fact, but this seems like a waste of time and money.
[/rant]