Cinder Cookies and Other Holiday Kitchen Adventures

We tried lots of new things in the kitchen over the 2007 holiday. The most fun and bizarre thing was the Batter Blaster from Whole Foods (of all places). It is a canister with a nozzle like the kind for whipping cream or Cheez Whiz, except that it contains prepared "organic" pancake batter. You just press the nozzle to release the battery contents into a hot skillet, and soon you have great-tasting pancakes. The can says you will get 28 4-inch pancakes. Most of the ones we actually made were 5- or 6-inches ones, so we got about one dozen so far.

Our VillaWare crepe maker, purchased in September or October, but not used till December, was our second experiment. We always enjoy buying crepes with Nutella at our favorite Saturday morning coffee place, so we were eager to try out making them at home. The home version has a heated surface with a black plastic cover. You take off the plastic skillet-shaped cover, pour the egg-heavy batter into it, heat the cooking surface, then turn the whole cooking surface upside down into the batter you poured in the cover. You turn it back over, and it cooks in seconds. You nudge the crepe off the surface with a dull knife edge onto a plate or paper towel. I enjoyed the homemade crepes, but W. still  prefers the kind we get from our favorite crepe place.

As for the cookies, it was a bit too cloudy over the holiday to use my sun oven to bake them. Soon after I set up the solar oven and the cookies outside today, high clouds floated in. The solar oven would not stay above 210 degrees. I moved the sheet to the indoor oven heated (I thought) to 350 degrees. Unfortunately, the electric oven does not have forgiving nature the solar oven has. The oven was either turned too high or I left the cookies in too long. The solar oven is slower, but much more forgiving.  All but about 12 out of 48 were edible, but only 12 were fit to give away as I'd hoped.

The lasagna I made to feed the homeless tomorrow night turned out better because I watched it carefully and consulted BOTH oven thermometers.

I hope my cookie-making mojo comes back tomorrow night. People will get 12th Night cookies rather than New Year's cookies and that's okay.