Clockwork Lemon

Cranberry & White Chocolate Brown Butter Cookies

Brown butter cookies: soft chewy centers, crispy edges, and studded with hunks of white chocolate and cranberries.  They're the kind of cookies that you can accidentally eat an entire plate of when you meant to only have one. The kind that you think about during the day and hope that nobody ate them all before you could get home and have another. I blame the brown butter's toasty flavor and the addictive combination of textures.

A few months ago my friend Rachele and I had the idea to make cookies with white chocolate and cranberries in them, but the Christmas season swooped down on us and we never got around to finishing the recipe. Now that Christmas is over and a looooong prairie winter is stretching out ahead, it's the perfect time to hide out in my warm kitchen and bake cookies. 

Ham and Swiss Muffins

I'm partial towards savory muffins, and this might be the tastiest savory muffin recipe I've ever made.

I had written down the flavor combo in a notebook months and months ago. It was almost forgotten until one afternoon at the grocery store when I noticed a small smoked ham on sale. I decided to buy it and use it for ham and swiss muffins.

As is sometimes the case with recipe development, the first couple of batches ranged from 'meh' to 'lets throw that right into the garbage'.  The ham was used up, the test recipes tucked away in a binder, and the project was put on hold.

It wasn't until a bit of leftover ham from the holidays jogged my memory and inspired me to work the kinks out of the recipe that this verison came into being.

Happy New Year! {2013}

I love New Years almost as much as I love Christmas, and that's saying a lot, because I really love Christmas. The beginning of a new year always feels so fresh, it's the perfect time to sit down and write out some goals for the coming months (this may or may not just be an excuse to buy a new notebook). I also usually use this time to reflect on things that happened in the past year.

Instead of a 2012 recipe roundup I thought I'd do a more personal post than I normally do and share what happened this year and what I'm looking forward to in 2013.  So here it is: The Good, The Bad, and The Goals.

 

The Good

There were so many good things about 2012 that it's hard to narrow everything down into one list. These were highlights that stand out in my mind:

1. Started writing and doing photography for my column Icing On The Cake in The Globe and Mail.

2. Finally upgraded from a point and shoot to an SLR camera

 

Homemade Farmhouse Cheddar - Part One

Before I started this cheese making challenge I had never considered what went in to making cheddar. I would casually throw a brick (or two) into my shopping cart without wondering why cheddar tastes so different from mozzarella or brie or Parmesan when they are all made with basically the same ingredients. I was living in a state of cheese ignorance.

But thanks to this month's Cheesepalooza challenge, my mom and I have a better idea of what steps are needed to create those familiar orange blocks. Since we still have the aging process ahead of us I can't really declare that we have successfully made cheddar yet, but we certainly got a few wheels of it started.


It all began with 16L of milk. Creamy, unhomogenized, organic whole milk that nearly broke my fingers off while I was carrying it all to the car. 16 liters is heavier than I thought it would be.

Savory Cheddar Chive Shortbread

'Tis the season of cookies and Christmas baking: gracing the covers of every food magazine, piled high on platters at parties, stashed away in your freezer at home. I love cookies as much as the next person, but this sugar overload has me turning my back on chocolate, eggnog, and gingerbread in favor of  the salty side of the baking spectrum: savory shortbread.

Could this also be an excuse to cram even more cheese into my diet? Probably. But I'm telling myself that I'll give them away with bottles of wine as gifts. (If you receive a bottle of wine with no cookies then you'll know that these never made it out of my kitchen..sorry in advance).

 

Last time I made savory shortbread I couldn't wait to play around with different flavor combinations. I wanted to use this cheddar  because it's texture is so soft that it acts almost like butter in a recipe, and it's extra sharp flavor gives the shortbread a cheddary tang.

 

Chocolate Coated Peppermint Cookies

 

The past few weeks I've been busy busy busy making an obscene amount of Christmas cookies. If you happened to stop by my house you were probably greeted with a desperate "Help eat these cookies!" followed by "No! Not that one, or that one, or that one! Those are for photos! Only eat the ugly ones" (only the very best for my guests..)

The result of my cookie bake-a-thon were three Christmas cookie recipes:

1. Cinnamon shortbread with eggnog glaze: quick and easy for all those Christmas cookie emergencies

2. Painted sugar cookies: sugar cookies flooded with royal icing and painted with food colouring. Perfect for hosting a cookie decorating party. Who doesn't love little pieces of edible art?

3. Chocolate coated peppermint cookies: these were the most popular cookie of the bunch. I made batch after batch after batch and they have all been eaten up.. so I felt that it was only fair to share the recipe.

 

 

The cookies require a couple of extra steps but they are so, so worth it.

The first step is baking thin, crispy chocolate wafers. The wafers are similar to the ones used in homemade oreos but with the ratios of egg, flour, and sugar changed up.

Next, a creamy peppermint filling is made out of condensed milk, butter, icing sugar, and peppermint extract. This is pressed onto the little chocolate wafers and then the whole thing is coated in melted chocolate.