Nuts

I baked these a long time ago (maybe three weeks?) and I'm just now getting around to blogging them.  It took me forever to find the recipe that I used - I forgot to bookmark it - but I finally found it:  Butter Pecan Cookies.

The cookies turned out great - they were very simple, but delicious.  I used my regular cookie sheets again (instead of air-bake) and they didn't spread out at all.  My wife said that these were the best cookies (or biscotti) I've made since starting this asinine project, and I think I agree.  Yum, yum, yum.  Oh, and...yum.

I'll give these a 9.5 on the totally arbitrary Clark scale of baked goodness.

I've been baking more cookies than biscotti lately...time for a change, maybe.

Cinnamon graham crackers

Originally, my ingredient for element 6 (Carbon) was cinnamon.  But when I started looking for cinnamon cookie recipes, I stumbled across this great recipe for Cinnamon Graham Crunchy Cookies.

I made these quite a while ago and I'm just now getting around to this blog post, so I don't remember much about baking them (memory is the second thing to go...I forget what the first thing is).  I do know that they turned out much better than the last few batches of cookies I'd tried.  I baked them on regular baking sheets instead of my air-bake sheets, and they didn't spread out very much at all.  The combination of the cinnamon-y crumbs, the chocolate chips, and the pecans was delightful.  I took three plates' worth to the Virginia Mennonite Relief Sale for their baked goods sale - hopefully whoever bought them thought they were yummy!

I'll give these a rating of 8 out of 10 - hopefully the next batch will be even better!

Brown sugar

I know, I just used a recipe with a ton of brown sugar in it for Heath toffee bits, but this is my blog, and I like brown sugar, okay?

The recipe I used comes from a blog called "Natalie's Killer Cuisine", and is called "Killer Brown Sugar Cookies".  It uses dark brown sugar, which I had to make a special trip to the grocery store to obtain.  The recipe also calls for a whopping 1 tablespoon of rum extract.

The recipe tells you to melt 10 tablespoons butter and heat it until it is light brown, then add 4 more tablespoons butter and whisk to melt.  A word of advice: DON"T DO THIS WITH A KITCHEN-AID MIXER.  Even at low speed, the mixer threw glops of melted butter out of the bowl and all over my shirt.  This was bad enough, but what made it even worse was that I was wearing my favorite St. Louis Cardinals shirt, which now has greasy stains on the front.  BAH!  (Maybe I should consider wearing an apron, but it just doesn't seem very manly...)

The cookies, like many I've baked recently, spread out a LOT and ended up very skinny.  I'm still experimenting with remedies for this problem - I'm going to try different cookie sheets next.  I've been using air-bake sheets, which may be part of the problem.  The cookies tasted okay, but they were pretty heavy on rum flavor.  They reminded me of Butter Rum Life Savers, which I remember eating by the truckload as a kid.

I may be old, but a roll of Life Savers was still more than 5 cents when I was a kid.

I'll give these a rating of 5 out of 10.  Seems like I've been making a lot of mediocre cookies since I started this blog!

Buckeyes

My original plan for element 4 (Be) was brownie.  However, when we were recently in Ohio, my 7-year-old daughter sampled a "buckeye" at a family gathering and wanted to make some, so...

"Buckeyes" are a candy which consists of peanut butter-y stuff dipped in chocolate.  Traditionally, you don't fully dip the peanut butter center, so that the candy ends up looking like a buckeye, which is a nut from a buckeye tree.

I had these all the time when I was living in Ohio, but I don't see them as much in Virginia.  However, I don't see many obnoxious Ohio State Buckeye fans here in Virginia, either, so I guess it's an even trade.

I tried to make buckeyes once in college, using a recipe which included paraffin wax melted in with the chocolate coating - I guess this was either to improve consistency or appearance of the coating.  I evidently used too much paraffin, though, because my "candy" ended up tasting like peanut butter-flavored crayons.

Here's the recipe I tried this time: Crunchy Buckeyes.  I liked the sound of these - the rice krispies would add a nice crunch.  I made them with my daughters' help.

However, I ran into a big problem: the chocolate chips refused to melt into a consistency which would allow for dipping of the peanut butter balls.  I tried heating it up hotter (afraid I'd burn the chocolate), and I tried adding a bit of milk, which just ended up making the chocolate seize.  We did manage to make a few pathetic-looking buckeyes, but I think that the chocolate chips needed something else to thin them out - maybe paraffin, maybe shortening, I don't know.

I'll give this recipe a 3 out of 10.  I just couldn't make it work.  It was possibly a problem on my end, but a good scientist always blames the experimental procedure.

The peanut butter filling, though, was delicious!

Lime

Li - what else could it be but lime?  (Well, lilac, I suppose...)

One of my favorite desserts is key lime pie.  I made some "key lime" cookies a few years ago, and was disappointed with the results, so I thought I'd try something different for this project: Guyanese Lime Cookies.  They had mostly rave reviews on allrecipes.com, and they sounded yummy.

Well, I baked these about a week and a half ago, and I'm just now getting around to writing about them (I've been busy, all right?).  I don't have any pictures, but these cookies (like my Heath Bits cookies) spread out fairly thin.  My wife thinks it might be because I've been using real butter instead of margarine in my recipes (hey, what's a few more calories?).

The taste was very different - you could definitely taste the lime, but the nutmeg and cinnamon came through even stronger.  My wife thought they had a bit too much cinnamon, but my in-laws and I thought they were very yummy, and they disappeared all too soon (the cookies, that is...not my in-laws).  (Just kidding...my in-laws are great!)

These were pretty good...I'll give them an 8 out of 10.

Heath toffee bits

My first recipe of my periodic baking project is a cookie recipe.  I was going to start with biscotti, but my 7-year-old daughter informed me that I make too much biscotti - she likes cookies better.  Element 1 is hydrogen (symbol H), so I decided that Ingredient 1 would be Heath (toffee) bits.

Here is the recipe I tried - Brown Butter Heath Bit Cookies.  The recipe uses a lot of butter (2 sticks), and a lot of brown sugar (2 1/4 cups).  My cookies spread a lot on the baking sheets, and I ended up with large, flat, crisp cookies.  I tried refrigerating the cookie sheets and the cookie dough, but the cookies still spread.  I think that I probably should have added some flour to stiffen the dough a bit.

However, the cookies taste fantastic.  They are very butterscotch-y (is that a word?) and would probably go great with a cup of coffee (although, really, everything goes well with a cup of coffee).  My kids even liked them, although my 5-year-old said that they needed chocolate chips.

The cookies are done when they are the approximate color of our cat, Mobius.

All told, I'm going to give these cookies a 7 out of 10.  Since I just made up this rating, and this is my first batch of cookies for this totally nonsensical project, I don't yet know if that's really good or not!

I love chemistry.  I fell in love with chemistry in Mr. Rydarowicz's class at Leetonia High School, twenty years ago.  (I also discovered another life-long love in that class...one of my lab partners was a cute brunette who, six years later, became my wife.  Back then, though, she was dating someone else...but that's a different story.)

Anyway.  Chemistry.  I majored in chemistry at Eastern Mennonite College, and later obtained my master's degree in chemistry from Lehigh University.  I've worked as an analytical chemist for fourteen years.  I've always enjoyed the mathematical simplicity of chemical equations - one molecule of something, plus one molecule of something else, equals a totally different compound!

For my 35th birthday this past January, I received a wonderful book - "The Elements", by Theodore Gray.  It contains beautiful pictures of each element of the periodic table, in order by atomic number.  This book re-ignited a desire which I've long had, to collect a sample of each element of the periodic table.  Since many elements, in their pure state, are dangerous - either extremely reactive, toxic, or radioactive - my wife (tolerant, but practical) told me that I wasn't about to store my collection at home.  I still have aspirations of compiling an element collection, or at least the elements I can keep safely.

I also love to bake.  The act of combining simple ingredients - butter, sugar, eggs, flour - to create a sweet, delicious goodie contains a magic similar to the wonders of a good chemical experiment.  In fact, a lot of baking is chemistry - the emulsifying properties of eggs, the browning of sugar cookies when they are "done", and the leavening action of baking soda are all due to the chemistry of the molecules involved.  I'm always trying out new cookie and biscotti recipes, with varying degrees of success.

Since I also love to create totally unnecessary tables and spreadsheets, I decided to combine chemistry with baking and create a periodic table of cookies.  Each element on the periodic table has a symbol - one or two letters which are usually (but not always) an abbreviation of the element's name.  For each symbol, I tried to come up with an ingredient.  For example, H (for Hydrogen) can also stand for Heath Bits.  Every week (more or less), I'm going to bake a cookie or biscotti recipe which uses an ingredient on my table, and write up my findings on this blog.  Since there are over 100 elements, this totally pointless project will take some time.  But hey, it's safer than bringing home samples of arsenic and uranium!