Maple Syrup and Walnut Cookies Recipe

2 1/4 c flour

1 t baking soda

1 t salt

1 c butter, soft

3/4 c sugar

3/4 c brown sugar

1 t vanilla

2 eggs

1 1/2 c walnuts

1 c maple syrup

Preheat oven to 375. In one bowl cream butter, white sugar, and brown sugar. Add vanilla, eggs and maple syrup. In separate bowl mix dry ingredients and add slowly to wet mixture. Form into teaspoon-sized balls on cookie sheet and bake 9-11 minutes.

Notes:

• As always, DON'T overmix! Your batter will be the consistency of concrete and you'll emulsify everything. This will affect the texture of your resulting cookie and make them hard.
• If you keep your butter in the fridge and don't want to wait a hundred years for it to come to room temperature, simply but what you need on a dish in the microwave and set for 20-25 seconds (go with less time first). This will make the butter soft but not melt it.

Maple Syrup and Walnut Cookies

I was a little tired from making so many chocolates and pies and more time-consuming things that I decided I just wanted to make a simple cookie. That's it. However, I thought that I'd stretch myself mentally a bit by making up a cookie! Or the specific recipe. I wanted a maple syrup-based cookie with walnuts in it, so I adapted a chocolate chip cookie recipe to accommodate me! It was pretty easy: mix dry, mix wet, add dry to wet, bake. However, there were a few points that you might need to take note of.

So here are my ingredients: pretty basic. As I said this is a very easy recipe to follow; if you can make chocolate chip cookies you can make these!

The only concern really is creaming. Creaming is when you mix soft butter and sugar together to form a moist mixture. If a recipe calls for creaming you can NOT melt the butter and add to the sugar! This will completely change the texture of your resulting cookie. This is what properly creamed sugar looks like:

As you can see it's flaky and slightly clumpy with bits of butter. This is correct!

Next will simply be some pictures of the process: batter, ready to go in oven, and done.

Mmm! These are chewy, light and mild in flavor. Soooo you could end up eating them all at once before you know it. :) Try not to though! I'll post the recipe in a day or so.

Banana Cream Pie Recipe

CRUST

1/2 c walnuts, finely chopped

3/4 c all-purpose flour

1 t sugar

1/4 t salt

2 T cold diced butter

1 egg, beaten

Mix walnuts, flour, sugar and salt in a bowl. Add egg, then cut in butter. Shape into a dough ball, wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Press into greased pie pan and bake at 300 for 30 minutes or until lightly browned.

PUDDING (3 c)

2 c whole milk

1/2 t vanilla

1 c sugar

pinch salt

6 egg yolks

1/4 c cornstarch

1/2 stick cold diced butter

Combine milk, 1/2 c sugar, vanilla and salt in a saucepan. In a separate bowl mix yolks, remaining 1/2 c sugar and cornstarch. Heat the saucepan mixture over medium heat until bubbles begin to form around the edges, whisking constantly. When bubbles appear remove from heat. Ladle/spoon a thin stream of the hot mix into the egg mixture, whisking constantly. Repeat a few times. Add eggs to saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat whisking, waiting for large bubbles to surface from bottom and pop on the top. When this happens, pause stirring every few minutes, then add butter. When custardy remove from heat and cool to room temperature. Put in a bowl, cover, and refrigerate 4 hours.

CANDIED NUT TOPPING (1 c)

1/8 c honey

1 t vanilla

1/4 t cinnamon

1/4 t salt

1 c walnuts, chopped

1/2 T butter, melted

Preheat oven to 300. Combine all ingredients in bowl. Spread on greased sheet and bake 20 minutes, stirring/scraping every 5 minutes. When browned, remove and cool.

COMPLETED BANANA CREAM PIE

walnut crust

3 c pudding

4-5 bananas

1 1/2 t lemon juice

1/4-1/2 c sour cream

candied nuts

Slice bananas in half width-wise, then into four long slices length-wise (8 pieces per banana total). Toss in lemon juice and mix with sour cream. Layer in pie crust with pudding. Top with nuts, cover and chill 2 hours.

Notes:

• Grease the dish way more than you think. This is good because 1) there's no way anything will stick, especially in the corners, and 2) you'll get that lovely buttery crust!
• When making tart pastry, if butter is starting to melt put it in the freezer until you need more. You want it to stay as cold as possible.
• When placing tart pastry into pie pan, grab chunks and press until flat. Don't spend too much time on one part, or the heat from your fingers will start to melt the butter! You want to still see chunks of butter, as this will make the crust lovely and flaky.
• Make sure to maintain MEDIUM heat for the pudding. If you go higher you will burn the milk/eggs.If your pudding isn't thickening, you may have forgotten the cornstarch (like me)! If you added everything correctly you could be stirring too much. In a pinch add flour, which is a thickening agent. It won't really affect the taste unless you add a ton.

Key Lime Pie Recipe

CRUST

1 1/4 c graham cracker crumbs

5-6 T butter, melted

2 T sugar

FILLING

14 oz sweetened condensed milk

3 egg yolks

2 t grated lime zest

1/2 c lime juice

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a pie pan. Mix crust ingredients together and press into bottom of pan. Cover and chill. Beat yolks until pale and fluffy, then add condensed milk and mix. Add lime zest and juice. Pour filling into crust and bake 10 min or until filling is set. Cool then chill until ready to serve.

Notes:

• Grease the dish way more than you think. This is good because 1) there's no way anything will stick, especially in the corners, and 2) you'll get that lovely buttery crust!
• When it says "until filling is set," that means that when you shake the pan the filling appears more gelatinous rather than liquid-y.
• Feel free to add more/less lime flavoring as you see fit!

Banana Cream Pie

Time to make something new. Since I was pretty worn out from the espresso truffles I wanted to make something relatively easy, like a pie or cookies or something. I asked James what he wanted, but he didn't have something right offhand, so I kinda let my mind wander. Last week we'd gotten a bunch of bananas, and we still had 3 left, so I thought, "Banana cream pie!" Everyone loves banana cream pie, right? I asked my boy and he said that sounded good, so I started perusing the internet for some tasty recipes. I found one that was pretty highly rated, and had everything made from scratch: crust, pudding, creamy bit and candied topping! I was pretty excited to try it, and with a tag like "he modestly decreed it was the best banana cream pie ever" I just couldn't pass it up!

PS--Sorry, but because this was a pretty involved undertaking I sorta didn't take a lot of pics. Sorry! :(

Because there were 4 different processes (crust, pudding, candied nuts, creamy bananas), I took different pictures of the different ingredient sets for each. First, I made the crust. Usually I make a butter tart crust for my pies, but this one had a special walnut crust I wanted to try:

Pretty simple: mince nuts, mix with dry ingredients, cut in cold cubed butter, add egg. Refrigerate. Nothing new, obviously. I chilled it and then put in a pie dish and baked. Here is the crispy result:

Next I made the pudding. If you're doing this from scratch, you're going to use a lot of egg yolks, which apparently they don't sell at the store (although they do egg whites...what the hell?). So if you're going to do this, you need to figure out what you're going to do with your whites. You can keep 'em or dump 'em, but be aware that you're going to have a lot left over. Here is the preparation for my pudding:

As you can see, I used both heavy cream and skim milk. This is because the recipe called for 2 cups whole milk, which we don't drink...and you can't buy milk in smaller than 1/2 gallon. At least at the store we go to you can't. So I figured I could recreate it by doing half cream, half skim milk. I mean, essentially they're all milk but with different levels of fat in them, with cream obviously having the highest amount. By mixing a high fat and low fat product I got a medium fat one: whole milk!

First you heat everything but the eggs and butter in a saucepan. One thing you need to do to the eggs before you add them to the hot mix is to temper them...aka bring them to the temperature of the hot mixture slowly. To do this you take small spoonfuls of the hot mixture and slowly add them to the eggs, stirring constantly. After about 5 or so your eggs should be fine. Then you can add them to the pudding and bring it to a boil. You're looking for big bubbles that "pop" on the surface, almost violently, at which point you add the butter. NOTE: you can't really leave this alone. You have to stir pretty much constantly until you get that nice custardy texture, and you have to maintain medium heat the whole time or you'll burn either the milk or the eggs. Here's a picture of when the bubbles were popping on the surface:

As I was heating this I was really confused as to why it wasn't thickening. I'd done everything right as far as heating and whisking and tempering was concerned....hm. THEN I went back to the other counter to check to see if I'd forgotten anything. Sitting there was the box of cornstarch, unopened. *sigh* I added it in after the mixture was already boiling, which did instantly create the pudding texture I was looking for, but because it didn't have as much time to dissolve slowly it made the pudding look grainy. This doesn't do anything really except perhaps make your end result pudding have little chunks of chewy cornstarch in them. No worries if you do this! Besides, there's a way to remedy this after it's cooled--you just mix it really hard after it's set. Here's a pic of the pudding after added cornstarch:

See? A little grainy. Ah well.

Crust done, pudding done....or at least setting in the fridge. Now it was time to candy some walnuts! For this I used a pretty simple concoction, minus the whisky (not that I didn't want it, but we didn't have any):

Just coat and bake a bit. Really self-explanatory.

Finally, the last bit: creamy bananas! Since I didn't take a picture I'll simply explain: I just cut the bananas in half short-ways, then sliced long-ways into four pieces or so. This means you end up with 8 thin slices per banana. Simply toss in sour cream, layer in the pie with the pudding and top with your candied walnuts! Delicious!