New Chocolate Chip Cookies

Time to get back to some cooking business. My son seconds the thought. He is presently in the middle of his X Board Exams. Two down, three to go. And I had promised to bake his favourite chocolate chip cookies during his preparatory holidays. He reminded that if I continued like this his exams would soon be over, with no cookies whatsoever.

Tomorrow is his Sanskrit paper and I could see it was getting harder to make him stay in his room. So we made a deal: I’ll bake the cookies, and he’ll try to keep his butt in his room. Moms are allowed to bribe a little when they think prudent. It is more like an incentive. And he has been good (he just might have aced the Math paper!! Yay! He got a hug for that! ).

I started the preparation just before lunch time. Bad idea. The lunch needed to be fixed as well. In my rush, I didn’t look at the recipe carefully enough. It called for rolled oats which I never have. So I had to resort to the recipe on the Nestle semi-sweet morsel package. I was still not paying close attention. That called for oats too! Before I knew it I had a huge batch of dough and a new recipe. Less fat. I wasn’t about to dump my month’s ration of butter into the cookies, no way. So I replaced it partly with vegetable oil. These turned out really great. And I wrote down the ingredients right away before I could forget.

Ginger Cookies

I’m on a roll. I’ve had a great day today.

I also had a great Tuesday. My students excelled–way above expectations. Felt truly good and I wanted to show them. But then things got really rushed this morning and I almost didn’t make the cookies. I had wanted to make peanut butter cookies initially but it required freezing the dough and I definitely did not have that kind of time.

So it fell on these ginger cookies, that seemed a snap, to deliver. It also gave me an opportunity to use the ginger (and the pic!) I bought on the road-side at one of our many tea-stops during the recent trip. And who doesn’t like spicy ginger cookies? (Though, I must add, I prefer ginger snaps) And these are full of spices: pepper, cardamom, and cinnamon as well. Perfect with tea.

I shared it with my happy students today and they have promised to work even harder!

Coffee and Chocolate…mmm

Nandita’s lovely breadstick’s reminded me of the other recipe, in addition to the wheat and white breads, I tried from Bakingsheet a couple of weeks back. Son is studying (hardly) for his X Boards, and I try to do whatever helps. Coffee and chocolate are his all time favorite flavours. He introduced us to the coffee-toffee that our friendly neighbourhood Classic Ice Cream place offers. It is absolute yummylicious.

But I digress. While hunting the blogosphere for recipes that included both coffee and chocolate I came across Nic’s Mocha Rounds. I had tried making similar cookies earlier, but had obviously forgotten the lessons. I made no changes to Nic’s recipe other than (my usual) replacing half of the flour with wholewheat atta. Also, given the temperatures in Delhi at this time of year, I did not attempt the finishing bit about dipping in chocolate. It is kind of difficult to hold yourself together in Delhi’s heat and dust, so unless you live in the Himalayas, do as I did.

These are good with tea or coffee. Got milk?

My notes:

1. If you would like your ‘biscuits’ to be nice and round and live below the Himalayan foothills, do not attempt this recipe, unless you have an air-conditioned kitchen. By the time you roll your logs and refrigerate them, they are still going to be oblong. But, it only makes them look more ‘homey’, so go ahead and make ‘em.
2. I used Nestle’s semi-sweet morsels for my chocolate, and Bru instant coffee powder. The coffee flavour was very weak in my cookies. I would go ahead and double the coffee powder.
3. As noted earlier, I also reduce the sugar by 1/4th when using American recipes. I believe Indian sugar is sweeter.

Banana Nut Muffins

Teens are strange animals. Ani has stayed away from bananas for the last couple of years, but his favourite muffin is still the Banana Nut. So, while I coax and cajole him to pay more attention to his studies, I also bribe him with his favourite eats and snacks.

This morning we had them muffins for breakfast. This is unusual, since sugar at breakfast is very rare, perhaps all over the country. Doodh-jalebi (hot milk and jalebis) being one such breakfast, popular in parts of UP, that comes to mind.

On the other hand, sugar is big at breakfast-time (and other times) in the West. All the donuts, muffins, and cookies, not to mention the ’sugar bombs’ that Calvin (of the Calvin and Hobbes fame) starts off his day with. Americans consume a mind-boggling 170lbs per capita! Impresssive for a people who were introduced to sugar only in the 15th C! Sugar cane, the only source of Indian sugar, was growing here as far back as 325 BC. Today India is the second largest producer of sugar, after Brazil, but thankfully, despite the long tradition, our per capita consumption is amongst the lowest at 14kg (30lbs approx.). In my own house it is half of that! Part of that may be because I am from Kashmir which does not have much of a tradition of things sweet (compared to just about any other state of the country!).

Of course, white sugar is not the only form of sugar consumed in the country. More than a third of the sugar cane produce is diverted towards the making of gur (jaggery) and other less refined sugars which are an integral part of many regional cuisines. The Bengalis also use the sap from the date palm to derive the delicious, subtly flavoured, patali gur (palm sugar).