cookie d'oh!

It's round, pink, has a hole in the middle, and is covered with sprinkles.

Apparently to my coworkers, that means something dirty. And telling them it was Homer's doughnut didn't help.

A little while ago one of my coworkers offered to bring me some sprinkles that were taking up space in her cupboard.  I'm never one to turn down offers of ingredients, even sprinkles, so I accepted. I had no idea exactly how much space was being taken up by sprinkles. 

The next day I found one of those large "gallon" sized zip bags on my desk.

A large zip bag can hold a lot of sprinkles.

And since I was still kinda feeling like making other desserts into cookies, I decided to do doughnuts. Homer's doughnuts. Round, pink, with a hole in the middle, covered in sprinkles.

Also, it just so happens that "National Doughnut Day" just passed. Once again, we at Authors Kitchen are totally on top of all the important holidays.

Plain old sugar cookies are perfect for doing silly things to. (perv)

Sugar Cookies

What you need:

• 1 c butter
• 1 c sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp milk
• 3 c flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

(this is a double batch which makes about 4 dozen cookies, and easily cut in half if you are looking to eat them all in one night)

What you gotta do:

In a large bowl, cream the room temperature butter with the sugar until it's all soft and fluffy. You'll start to lose the gritty feeling from the sugar if you do it long enough.

Add the eggs, vanilla, and milk.

Beat this again with your Popeye arms, or your fancy schmancy mixer that has its own speshul place on the counter, until it's shiney and kinda looks like cake frosting. (Really, it kinda is cake frosting).

Normally, I'd just dump the flour, baking powder and salt into the bowl and stir, but I had a minion with me, and so I employed him to sift the dry ingredients together in a small bowl.

I also had him crack the eggs into the creamed butter. No shells this time!

Add the sifted flour to the creamed butter and egg mixture in two batches.

After the second one, you'll have a soft, but not quite sticky dough. In order to handle it and roll it, you'll need to chill it a bit first.

Divide it in half, wrap it in plastic, and let is sit around in the fridge for at least half an hour. I don't like to leave dough in the fridge too long because it becomes too stiff to handle. It should be pliable, and not too cold to the touch.

Liberally flour your counter, your rolling pin, and the dough. At first, you're going to want to move it around and reflour everything regularly so it doesn't stick to the counter. If your dough is stuck to the counter, there will be no saving the shapes you cut, and you'll have to do it all over again.

Roll the dough to just under a quarter inch thick.

If you don't have cookie cutters, a wine glass works nicely to make round cookies.

I'd finally found a doughnut cutter so I cut doughnuts and holes. Either save up and reroll the holes to make more doughnuts, or bake them all separately so they don't get overdone.

You want the cookies to lose their gloss, and be just barely golden on the bottom.

7-8 minutes at 350 will do that. I know you already preheated your oven. You're smart like that. Just like me.

"I am so smart. S-M-R-T."

To make the pink glaze you need:

• Icing (powdered) sugar
• Milk
• Red Dye
• Some kind of flavourant (vanilla is best, but I'd managed to run out, so I used peppermint)

One of these days I'll actually measure how much icing sugar and milk I use to do this kind of thing. Really, just dump a bunch of sugar in a bowl. Add milk a tiny splash at a time, a few drops of flavourant, and keep stirring until you have something the consistency of really thick laundry detergent.

It should blob off the end of a spoon at first, but then turn into something ribbon like.

Two bloody drops was all I needed

to make Pepto-Bismol Pink!

Lay the cookies out on parchment paper as close together as you can. Dribble and blob the glaze all over the cookies. Then add sprinkles by the handful.

If you don't have a gallon of sprinkles, you might want to work on accuracy in your application. It also might help your cookies not look like they were made by a five year old.

I'm okay with my cookies looking like they were made by a five year old.

Let these set on the counter for about 20 minutes. The glaze will harden just enough that it holds onto the sprinkles and looks solid, but it will still be soft and gooey when you bite it.

 Did you know there was a National Doughnut Day??

liquid lunch

It's exam time. Finals. Two down and two to go. Really not looking forward to three hours of calculus on Saturday night.

I need energy here. Lots of it, in a fast, easy to make, and quick to consume form.

And for that, we break out the blender.

No, it's not margarita time yet. Though, wow, I could totally do with a tall frosty glass of slushy booze.

Gah! Exams! Must. Study. Must. Eat.

Berry Berry Smoothie

What you need:

• 1/4 cantaloupe
• 1 mango
• 1 c frozen blueberries
• 1 1/2 c frozen raspberries
• 1 c vanilla yogurt
• 1/2 c pear juice

What you gotta do:

If you've got one of those little single serving blenders, I totally suggest it. You won't have to wash an extra cup.

My berries were picked over the summer by a coworker and frozen on a cookie sheet before bagging. I really think frozen fruit is the way to go with smoothies. It removes all temptation to use ice cubes in them. The smoothie will be perfectly chilled, and not watered down at all. It also won't separate if it sits for a few minutes.

Chopping a mango is something most people need to learn how to do. It's not an intuitive process, and it does take a bit of practice to maximize the mango recovery, but it's fairly simple once you know what to do. 

The pit is wide and flat and runs lengthwise down the middle of the fruit. Stand the mango up and align it so that it's long side is pointing away from you.

Don't slice down the middle of a mango. Ever. Offset the knife by about 3/4 of an inch.

Slice straight down. Do the same to the other side.

You can trim the last little bits off the middle, but what you have here is the bulk of the flesh.

Score it just to the skin, lengthwise and then crosswise.

Then, with your thumbs on the edges and your fingers on the bottom, flip it inside out.

Perfect bite-sized chunks just waiting to be bitten.

Or sliced off and put in a smoothie.

You can do something similar with the canteloupe. My dad always did this when I was a kid; they're called canteloupe caterpillars.

Both the mangos and the canteloupe go into the blender on top of the berries.

You can use any flavour of yogurt that you want in your smoothie, but I had a good quality, high fat (8.5%, which is insanely high for yogurt, but really not bad compared to most dairy products) vanilla. 

Pour in your pear juice. Again, the kind of juice is flexible. More what you need here is some lubricant to keep the mixture moving in the blender. Yes, vodka would work just fine.

This starts looking smooth so fast I barely had time for a picture. I did have to poke at it once to get everyone moving around (I'm not going to warn you to turn the blender off before you stick a spoon in it. If you can't figure out not to stick metal objects into fast moving and sharp blades, I expect to see you on the Darwin Awards).

It will look totally done after only a few seconds on high, but this is deceiving. There are still chunks.

Once you've got it whizzing around on high speed, give the smoothie a full minute in there. You'll need it, but you'll still likely end up with the odd blueberry that manages to escape unscathed.

Pour your delicious dinner into a tall glass and add a bendy straw!

That's your average 10-12 ounce glass. I was able to fill it up twice. 

And while I was slurping down the first one, the stuff in the blender didn't separate at all.

Smoothies store in the fridge just fine for a couple days and are totally portable. They make great grab-and-go breakfasts if you make them the night before and keep them in the fridge, or awesome afternoon snacks if you need a boost at work.

And if you get yourself some bags of prechopped frozen fruit, they take less than 3 minutes to make.

What's your favourite blender drink?