Pumpkin and Spice

Peanut butter is, for American children, at least, a comfort food without peer. It's sweet, salty, creamy, gooey, and nutritious. Unless you had a nut allergy, odds are it was a lunchtime staple when you were growing up, be it on a classic peanut butter and jelly (apricot preserves have always been my "jelly" of choice) or a fluffernutter (peanut butter and marshmallow goo? Yes, please!) or even just plain on a spoon. To this day, a bowl of Campbell's Chicken Noodle with a PB&J ranks a close second to grilled cheese and tomato soup as my favorite soup/sandwich pairing.

No discussion on peanut butter is really complete without addressing the subject of peanut butter cookies. There are so many variations on the peanut butter cookie that it's difficult to say with any authority what the "best" way to make one is. Some people like them crispy, others prefer chewy, with nuts, without nuts... Well, I'm going to throw this out there, feel free to disagree if you like... I make a pretty damn fine peanut butter cookie. They get my brother's stamp of approval, and he is to peanut butter cookies what a sommelier is to wine, so they have to be decent. And, one of the best things about them is that they are easily customizeable to your cookie tastes. (I'm not claiming these cookies are revolutionary, just that they are a good, solid cookie recipe- one of my trusted go-to recipes.)

My hair has, at various points, been about every color known to Lady Clairol- red, auburn, strawberry blonde, light brown, dark brown, purple, black, and even platinum blonde. You'd think I'd be able to answer with some authority the age old question, "Do blondes have more fun?" Well, I don't know about that... but I do know that you'll have fun (blonde or not) baking and eating these blondies!

As you probably know, blondies are moist, butterscotch-flavored, cake-like bar cookies. As yummy as blondies are, they still tend to play second fiddle to their ooey-gooey chocolate cousin, the brownie. No more! My blondies are a cross between a traditional blondie and a chocolate chip cookie. Moist blondie, flavored with vanilla and plenty of dark brown sugar, and jam-packed with every sort of chocolate imaginable- dark, milk, white and semi-sweet! To keep the sweetness from being too overwhelming, I use the largest proportion of the dark chocolates, and add a "secret" ingredient- coarse sea salt. Since the salt is a little chunky, it doesn't fully dissolve into the batter, so as you eat the blondies, you occasionally get a little pop of salt! I don't know about you, but I love the contrast of a little salt to the sweetness of chocolate.

I'm a little excited, because this week, the restaurant is going to be featuring a dessert I came up with. It's creamy, rich, indulgent and features everyone's favorite childhood treat- Oreo cookies! What is it? Cookies and cream cheesecake! I know, yum, right?

A chocolate cookie crust, vanilla cheesecake with Oreo cookies mixed in, topped with dark chocolate ganache and garnished with white chocolate-Oreo bark. Of course, C, my supervisor and I had to sample it. You, know, for quality purposes...

As promised, I made sure I had fresh batteries in my camera at work! I was going to try to backtrack and get pictures of the stuff I did yesterday, but a lot of it had been wrapped/frozen. So, no pictures of the apple brown sugar coffee cake, or the meringue mushrooms. However, a few things I made yesterday became parts of things I made today!

For example, yesterday I baked chocolate chip cookies. Once they were cool, I layered them on sheet trays and froze them. Today, I made those cookies into massive ice cream sandwiches. Freezing the cookies made them firmer, so they didn't break when I sandwiched them together. It also kept everything as cold as possible so the ice cream didn't melt. Even so, I had to work fast, and have several trays going at once- so I could rotate in and out of the freezer as the ice cream softened. Aww, yeah, look at that. I know there's nothing in the picture for scale, but it is a seriously huge sandwich. You can't go wrong- two made from scratch cookies, ice cream with flecks of vanilla beans... Yum.

 Hoo-ray! I got Flickr to upload my photos. It was slooooooow, but it worked!
This is yesterday's (Friday) post- I didn't change any of the wording to reflect that. I'll combine today (Saturday) and tomorrow (Sunday) together, since I'm going to be doing the same thing at work.

This weekend is opening weekend at the resort, so it's been a busy past few days at work. Since most of the staff just arrived within the last week, yesterday there was an employee fair. There were vendors of all sorts, employees with crafty ventures selling their wares, as well as free food. Since they anticipated about 600 employees at the fair, I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday assembling and plating enough pumpkin roulade for everyone. After plating, I worked the dessert station. Everyone got one ticket for dinner and one ticket for dessert, so I took tickets and gave out desserts.