Have my taste buds been altered?

You know how people who give up sugar say that after a few weeks of no treats fruit tastes so much sweeter. Well, I have been wondering if eating whole grains has caused my taste buds to just expect the wholesome taste in my goodies. Last week, I made some Multigrain Snickerdoodles from a recipe in the King Arthur’s Whole Grain Cooking. I actually made them the previous week also, but I didn’t leave them in the fridge long enough and while baking spread too thin. My family ate and loved them anyhow, but they were not presentable to share with friends. Last week, I followed the instructions to leave them in the fridge overnight and they turned out perfect. They looked so good that I shared them with a couple neighbors. When my neighbor thanked me for them the next day, I told her that they were made with whole grains. She said, “Oh, I knew that.” Now I am perplexed. Did she know that because they obviously tasted that way, or did she know that because I have a reputation of whole grain baking? Either way, these cookies will definitely be in my cookie jar again!

Multigrain Snickerdoodles

Dough
3/4 cup unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon orange juice
2 large eggs
1 cup whole barley flour
3/4 cup hard white wheat flour
1 1/3 cup oat flour

Coating
1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon

Cream butter, sugar, baking powder, salt and vanilla in a large bowl. Beat in the orange juice and eggs. Add the flours and beat until well combined. Refrigerate the dough, covered, overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease 2 baking sheets.

Combine sugar and cinnamon in a gallon size Ziploc bag. Drop the dough by tablespoons, 6 pieces at a time, into the bag. Zip the bag closed trapping some air inside. Shake gently to coat the balls with the sugar mixture. Place them on prepared baking sheets and flatten to about 1/2 inch thick, using the flat bottom of a drinking glass.

Bake the cookies, reversing the pans midway through (top to bottom, bottom to top), until they are beginning to brown around the edges, 12 to 14 minutes. Transfer to a rack to cool. Place them in an airtight container once they are cool. 

My Dessert Dilemma

Sometimes it seems just impossible to please everyone in my family with one dessert. We have some who love nuts in their brownies and others who won’t eat them with nuts. My one daughter loves whip cream as a cake topping, and my son wants frosting. Hot fudge is a favorite with some while others just like a cold chocolate sauce. Pumpkin pie pleases three of my children, and the other two want chocolate. Even a simple chocolate cake brings the struggle between white or chocolate frosting. I love to make desserts, but I hate the look of disappointment on my child’s face when they ask what I am making, and it’s not what they like. It is hard to please everyone, and yet they all think that is my job!

Last week, I decided to make a dessert pizza. I knew four of my children would be excited, and one would be very disappointed. I had this great idea to make extra cookie dough and make sugar cookies for the non-fruit dessert lover. I also had been eyeing this cookie recipe in my King Arthur’s Whole Grain Baking Book. And now I have created more dessert dilemmas. My husband and one daughter loved the flavor of this recipe as the crust, and another preferred the simple sugar cookie dough I made before. I am definitely in a cookie quandary!

Soft Barley-Sugar Cookies

1 cup unsalted butter

1 3/4 cups sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

2 tablespoons lemon juice

2 large eggs

3 cups barley flour

1 cup spelt flour*

2/3 cup sour cream

Coarse white or granulated sugar for topping

Cream the butter, sugar, baking powder, soda, salt, nutmeg, vanilla, and lemon juice in a medium bowl. Add the eggs and beat until smooth.

Whisk together the flours in a separate bowl. Add half the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beating to combine. Beat in the sour cream, then the remaining flour. Refrigerate the dough overnight.

Scoop out dough and form into a ball and roll in sugar. Bake on a greased baking sheet in a 450 degree preheated oven for 8 minutes.

I rolled out about 2/3 of this dough and placed on a greased cookie sheet for my dessert pizza crust.

* Original recipe called for unbleached all-purpose flour, but I used spelt flour instead.



Finally cookies!

My son had been asking me for weeks to make some white chocolate chip and macadamia nut cookies. I really didn’t feel like baking or eating baked goods after the holidays, so I kept making up excuses. Finally, the guilt got to me, and I baked. I got creative and tried something new. I found a recipe on-line and made whole grain adjustments. My son loved them and ate almost a dozen the first night. My husband thought they were a little too sweet but seemed to eat his fair share anyway.

White Chocolate Chip and Macadamia Nut Cookies

1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 ½ cups sugar
½ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 ½ tsp vanilla
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 ½ cups hard white wheat flour
½ cup spelt flour
1 cup barley flour
1 (12 ounce) package white chocolate chips
1 ½ cups chopped macadamia nuts

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat well. Blend in flours, soda and salt. Stir in chips and nuts. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes.

Warm out of the oven melt in your mouth chocolate chip cookies :)

Who doesn’t love warm out of the oven chocolate chip cookies with a tall glass of cold milk? Whether your mom made them from scratch or sliced and baked from a Toll House tube, it seems everyone has a memory of coming home from school and smelling chocolate chip cookies baking. Every once in a while I love to surprise my children with the scrumptious smell of baking cookies as they enter our home after a long day at school. Many years ago, I tried to convert a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe to whole grain. The mouth watering smell was easily duplicated but the taste was more like chocolate chips stuck in a slice of not very good whole wheat bread. I remember being so excited that I was baking something so healthy for my family, but after one taste I was feeling defeated. This experiment was long before I owned a wheat grinder, and I had used store purchased whole wheat flour. That is never a good idea. Since that time I have experimented with a variety of grains. This is my favorite whole grain recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

The dumbed down kid version:

1 ½ cups shortening
1 ½ cups brown sugar
¾ cup white sugar
3 eggs
3 tsp vanilla
¾ tsp salt
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 ½ cups hard white wheat flour
3 ½ cups spelt flour
1 ½ cups milk chocolate chips

Cream together shortening and sugars. Add eggs and vanilla and blend well. Whisk together dry ingredients and mix with wet ingredients. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

My favorite chewy version:

Decrease hard white wheat flour to 1 cup, spelt flour to 2 cups, and chocolate chips to 1 cup. Add 3 cups oats and 1 cup chopped nuts.


Did you know that the chocolate chip cookie has only been around since about 1934? According to Wikipedia, there are two conflicting stories about how the cookie came about. Both involve Ruth Wakefield the owner of Toll House Inn, a popular restaurant in Massachusetts at the time. One version states that she put chunks of chocolate in a batch of sugar cookies hoping for it to melt as it baked, and the other states the chocolate accidentally fell into the dough while she was mixing and because of frugality on the part of the head chef at the time, he encouraged her to bake the cookies instead of tossing the dough as she had planned. Regardless of the origins of their discovery, chocolate chip cookies are fantastically delicious.

Whole Wheat Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

I love it when the first time you try to adapt a recipe that it turns out perfect. My life has been so incredibly crazy the past month that I was so grateful that when I found the time to make these cookies that they weren't a flop. My daughter Hollie had requested some chocolate crinkle cookies, and I decided to surprise her with them when she got home on a day she had to stay late at school. It made 36 cookies, and they were gone in 2 days.

CHOCOLATE CRINKLE COOKIES
1/2 cups vegetable oil
4 Tbls melted butter
12 Tbls cocoa
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
2 1/2 cups hard white wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup powdered sugar

1. Mix oil, butter, cocoa, sugar; blend in eggs.
2. Add vanilla, salt, baking powder, and flour.
3. Cover and chill several hours or overnight.
4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease cookie sheets.
5. Roll 1 Tbsp dough into a ball and roll around in powdered sugar to coat.
6. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 10 to 12 minutes.
7. Remove from baking sheet and cool.
8. Have plenty of milk on hand to enjoy with cookies.

You can hide almost anything in these applesauce oatmeal cookies.

One time I made these cookies with white bean flour and nobody was the wiser. My children ate them up, but after my husband told them what was in them, they were leery to eat anything I baked for months. For some reason they thought cookies made with bean flour was just plain sick. They acted as if they had been tricked into eating dog food or even worse. I promised them I would not put bean flour in cookies again, but I think I might have had my fingers crossed behind my back.

These are actually my husband’s favorite cookie. His mother used to make them when he was little. I have experimented with various grains and beans to make them healthy. Tonight when they were warm out of the oven, my husband ate almost a whole dozen.

This is the basic recipe:

2 cups sugar
1 cup shortening
2 eggs
2 cups applesauce
2 tsp soda
2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
4 cups flour - you can be creative :)
3 cups oatmeal

Cream sugar and shortening. Add eggs and applesauce. Mix well. Combine dry ingredients and add to creamed mixture. Stir in oatmeal. Drop about 2T for each cookie on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

Tonight I put in 1/2 cup wheat bran and 3 1/2 cups hard white wheat flour. I have tried various combinations of wheat, grain, and bean flours. If you want to sneak something healthy into your children’s diet, these will do the trick.