Food and Wine Recipe - Horribly Wrong

In the 'Last Bite' section of Feb 2008 Food & Wine is what I thought was a lovely little recipe for 'Chocolate-Caramel Sandwich Cookies'. I've made a lot of recipes from my 3 year subscription of Food&Wine, and they have consistently needed tweaking. Not enough salt, leavening, flavor, they all seem to be not tested well, or just some misc. recipe that some chichi restaurant handed them and they went with it w/out even inspecting it for errors.

This has got to be the worst offender yet. I will not print the recipe as it needs too many fixes to warrant a rewrite. But I will list what went wrong.

They were suppose to be a 'reimagined oreo cookie' by Rachel Thebault, with a caramel filling instead of whipped lard. What it Was, was a mess.

The cookie dough-
- was so soft and gooey that it had to be frozen on the plastic wrap (that you had to roll it on to keep it from sticking to everything) every few minutes in order to peel off the cut out cookies.

- recipe called for 20 minute bake at 350. Any more than 12 and they burned.

- even baked properly, they were greasy and pretty flavorless. The entire batch of cookie dough had only 1/2 c. of cocoa powder, and you could barely taste it. They were visually deceptive, because they looked richly dark brown, but had little flavor.

The caramel
- a 9" square pan is too small to cut out enough caramel to fill the cookies. It had to be a much larger pan. The caramel came out very thick.

- evil evil recipe writers. You said to oil the pan, put wax paper in it, then pour the caramel in to cool. Didn't say to oil the proper side of the wax paper, and I trusted you. From previous shoddy recipes I should have known not to. I now have a big chunk of pretty flavorless oily caramel (there was absolutely no salt in the recipe) with wax paper glued to one side. I tried freezing it, reheating it, cutting out shapes and peeling it off, all to no avail. If only I had a horrible evil neighbor I could pawn these off on, and pretend I was an incompetent cook as I smiled while they ate the cookies with a delicate slice of wax paper sandwiched between flavorless caramel and bland cookie.

I'm canceling my subscription. I'm tired of tempting looking recipes that are flops over and over again. I paid a lot of money for those stupid magazines, and I've never once cut out a recipe and added it to my book of favorites.

Sure there are ideas in there that I use as a base, but I am not going to continue buying the magazine knowing that all the recipes are in need of tweaking and research. I have plenty of great books I can use for that purpose.

Punch up and tweak chocolate chip cookies

The standard recipe for Nestles chocolate chip cookies (the one on the back of every bag) is too greasy, sweet and bland for me. I find I'm always trying to adjust it. I have a more European than American palate, which means more flavors and less overpowering fat and sugar. Most american candy is just too slap in the face sugary for me. I need caramelization, salt, citrus, nuts or something else in the mix.

Brown Sugar
I never use brown sugar. It's 3 times the cost of regular sugar, and all it is is white sugar with a few drops of molasses added to it. I'm not talking about the fancy 7x more expensive specialty brown sugars (which I think is equally ridiculous), just C&H. How can you check? Put a pinch of brown sugar in your palm and rub your finger against it. In a few seconds your palm will have molasses on it, and there will be plain white sugar crystals on top of it. Rip Off!

Just add a teaspoon or 2 to to a recipe that calls for 'light' or 'dark' brown sugar. Molasses keeps forever (as opposed to brown sugar which goes rock hard after a couple months), and can be used to liven up the flavor on myriad recipes from sweet to savory.

My newest cookie recipe tweak.

Carribean Coffee Chocolate Chip Cookies

cream:
1.5 sticks butter
1.5 cups sugar
2 T molasses

Add:
2 eggs - 1 at a time
1 t vanilla
2 T espresso or coffee concentrate (I always have some coffee toddy in the fridge)

Mix together, then stir into liquid in 3 parts:
1 t fine sea salt
1 t baking soda
1/2 c cocoa powder
1 c whole wheat flour
1 c white unbleached flour

Stir in:
1-2 c chocolate chips ( lately I like Guittards bittersweet, the large flat chips are a nice change in texture) depending on your chocolate craving.

Dollop onto parchment and bake at 350 for 10-12 min until slightly firm to the touch. They are not radically different, but they don't leave a greasy slick in your milk when you dip them, and they have a nice depth from the interaction of the molasses, cocoa and coffee.

I like to freeze the dough in a long roll and wrap it in plastic wrap. Then I can take it out, cut as many cookies off of it as I want, and bake a single sheet of them. Fresh cookies whenever I want, and only as many as I need.