Restart!

I've decided to re-start entering my bakes into this blog. I'm starting to get too lazy to actually physically write-down what I do for baking. And now, as I'm aging, I find that I cannot quite remember the results of certain recipes. And so, here, I will copy recipes from other sites, try them and see how they work, or don't work for me. Sometimes they don't work because I'm just an amateur. So, don't trust me, try it yourself!

So here goes.

Today, I tried out "Imitation OREO® (Chewy Chocolate-White Chocolate Chunk) Cookies" from browneyedbaker.com.

I kind of modified it because I can't eat white chocolate or butter. So, I used dark chocolate and Crisco instead.

Weighed the ingredients as well because I prefer to use the weighing machine as opposed to cups. Esp when it comes to things like flour and butter.


Ingredients: (adapted from browneyedbaker.com)
138g flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon sea-salt (this is a little habit of mine. I love sea-salt)
69g sifted dutch-process cocoa*
69g unsalted butter, cubed and room temp (oops I didn't cube it. Just mixed it up.)
110g white sugar (too sweet. To reduce!)
72g dark brown sugar (didn't have dark brown sugar)
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
80ml water
1-1/2 cups button dark chocolates (I got 80g per half cup. So that's 240g for me, I thought it was a tad bit too much, but turned out yummy.) (for Oreo tasting cookies, to try omitting the dark chocolates)

*Browneyedbaker mentioned that substituting with natural unprocessed cocoa is not recommended. The Oreo-like flavor comes from the richer dutch-processed cocoa. Got some from Shermay's.

Directions:
Preheat oven to 190C and line baking sheets with silicone baking mat or parchment paper.

Whisk together flour, salt, baking powder and cocoa, and set aside. Beat the butter on medium-high until light and add sugars, creaming well. Add the vanilla and beat until smooth. Add the flour mixture in 2 batches, alternately with the milk in one batch, mixing well. Using a spatula, mix in the chocolate. Chill dough for 15 minutes.

Scoop the dough onto a parchment- or silpat-lined cookie sheet, press down on them slightly, and bake (see note below). Let the cookies cool completely on the cookie sheet and store in an air-tight container.

Notes from BrownEyedBaker: Shawnda states that she uses a No 12 scoop to drop a well rounded scoop of chilled cookie dough (a little less than 1/2 cup of cookie dough) and bakes for 24 minutes. At this size she gets 8 or 9 cookies with a diameter of 6 inches using the No 12 scoop. If you scoop a more normal sized cookie, she estimates 12-16 minutes in the oven. I used a large cookie scoop from Pampered Chef, which is approximately 3 Tablespoons in size, and I got 13 cookies out of my batch, with 18-20 minutes in the oven seeming to do the trick.

My own notes: baked 15 minutes and it was nice and fudgy. I didn't bake it further because cyn jie and I kinda liked it this way. I can't see how it tastes like oreo cookies though. Might be because the choc chips covers up the taste of the dough.. Cyn jie said that the raw dough smelled like oreos before I added the choc chips. So, I guess I gotta try without the choc chips next time!