Covid Cooking Continues

Hi everyone! I hope your quarantines are going okay. I have lots more cooking to tell you about, but first I have an exciting update!! Do you remember our sad tale of crunchy Kitchen Sink Cookies, that we wanted to be soft? You can read about it here if you forgot! But I have good news. We tried again, and figured out how to make them soft! First we did some research. What makes cookies soft is added moisture. So we added 2 tsp of cornstarch, which helps hold in moisture, and we also added 1 egg yolk to the recipe. The extra fat in the egg yolk also helps soften the cookies. Then we only cooked them for 11 minutes. And it worked! Yay! I think it's really cool how knowing how to change your ingredients a little bit can make a recipe more of what you want.

I should have taken a picture of us bending a cookie to show you how soft they were!

Since the day starts with breakfast, I am going to start this post talking about breakfast foods. One of the things we've made is mini dutch babies. Mini dutch babies is kind of a funny description because these are like baby babies! When we made them this time, we realized that mini dutch babies are almost exactly the same as popovers. Popovers are made with flour, eggs and milk blended and added to a hot muffin tin and these are made the exact same way with the exact same ingredients, plus sugar and vanilla. So basically, these are sweet popovers!

Our muffin tin got kind of messy, but these mini dutch babies were really good!

Our next breakfast sounds really weird, but please please trust me! We made chickpea blondies and I promise, they're really good! And the great thing about making healthy blondies is that then you can eat blondies for breakfast! These were especially good warm out of the oven, because the chocolate was all melty. I don't even know if they're good cool because we ate them all right away!

You would never ever know that there are chickpeas in these!

Another morning this week, my mom made something really special. Have you ever heard of Japanese Souffle Pancakes? Well if not, you're in for a treat! They're pancakes, but they're super puffy like a souffle. First you beat egg whites with a little bit of sugar into meringue. Did you know that if you make meringue properly, you can flip the bowl over without it falling out?

My mom was a little bit nervous to see if this trick really worked, but my brother said that we had to try it!

Then you mix the meringue in with the yolks and flour and other ingredients and pile scoops of it into your pan to make your pancakes.

An interesting thing about this recipe is that you add water between the pancakes and then cover the pan so that they steam.

We had ours with maple syrup and ice cream!

Don't these look puffy and delicious?

Now you're probably wondering why my mom let us have ice cream on pancakes for breakfast!! We have been having more treats during quarantine, but definitely not ice cream for breakfast!! Well there's actually a reason. My Grandma Linda sent my mom a recipe for ice cream that you make in a mason jar. She thought that it was the sort of thing that we would like to do, and she was right! This is a recipe that's really fun and easy for kids. And it's kind of like a work out too! First, you just put a few ingredients in a mason jar.

Ours looked like this.

And then you shake, shake, shake, shake, shake!!! You have to shake for about five minutes, so we all took turns.

And this is what you get!

Then you freeze it for a few hours and that's it! The truth is that what you end up with is more like frozen whipped cream than traditional ice cream. But it's delicious and we had it in our freezer from the day before and that's why my mom let us put ice cream on our pancakes!!

We've kept up with our new family tea time tradition. I've been to real tea in London and with my nanny Rachel, who is like a big sister and took me to tea here for my birthday once, but our quarantine tea time is more just afternoon baking. There actually isn't tea involved, although my dad sometimes has coffee. But it is very fun and we all like it. One of the things that we've made recently is healthy strawberry oat squares. This recipe is way more like the type of recipe that my mom usually makes. She was worried that after all of our quarantine baking, maybe this wouldn't seem sweet enough. But we actually all loved it, even my dad, who tends to be skeptical about healthy recipes!!

These are even healthy enough, that my mom let my brother have one for breakfast.

And they were awesome with our mason jar ice cream!

A different kind of bar that we made that was also very good was called a Nanaimo bar. Have you ever heard of a Nanaimo bar before? We hadn't and that's why we wanted to make them! But apparently they're one of the most popular desserts in Canada. They have a cookie base and then a layer of frosting and then chocolate on top. They are very sweet and very very VERY good. These were one of my brother's favorites. To make them, my mom had to buy a special ingredient called custard powder. She bought it online, but it had to come all the way from the UK. So these were perfect for tea!

You can see the three layers when you cut these.

One of my mom's favorites that we've made was chocolate chip cookie bars. These were exactly like they sound; they were a bar version of chocolate chip cookies. They were thick and soft and delicious! If you like eating chocolate chip cookie dough, then you'll love these.

So it turns out that Japanese souffle pancakes aren't the only Japanese thing that we have made recently. We also made mochi cake. Mochi cake is cake made with mochi flour. Mochi flour is a glutinous rice flour. It makes this cake very chewy. It has an unusual texture and I learned the word "gelatinous" when I was trying to figure out how to describe it!

Here the cake looks like a pan of cornbread, but it is not crumbly once you cut it.

It's hard to tell the texture from a picture, but this cake is chewy and not like traditional cake at all!

We also made a Japanese dinner. My dad found a seafood purveyor and ordered half of a buri. Buri is yellowtail. It is the same species as hamachi, but the fish are named based on how old and large they are when they are caught. The fish is named buri once it grows to be longer than 80cm. We made Buri no Teriyaki, which is buri in teriyaki sauce. It is a confusing name. I would call it Buri yes Teriyaki if I were naming it!!! But I'm guessing it translates differently in Japanese.

This was a very big piece of fish that my dad had to break down! I thought it was a little bit gross.

Before we cooked the buri, my dad sliced off some raw pieces and we just poured hot sesame oil over them. Do you remember how we ate new style sashimi at Matsuhisa? That's what gave my dad the idea! It was very good. I ate five pieces!

This would have looked prettier with chives on it!

We also had a very special spring ingredient to cook with our fish: ramps! Ramps are wild leeks and they're only available for a short time in the spring. All the chefs rush to get them. They taste like a cross between garlic and onions.

We ended up separating the white parts from the greens and grilling them separately.

The Buri no Teriyaki was SPECTACULAR. My brother and sister and I all had seconds and thirds. It doesn't happen very often that we all love something, so my mom was very happy. The ramps were also really good. But I think they're only so popular because they're only available for a short time. If you could always get them, I don't think people would care so much.

I think that our plates looked beautiful.

And the left over fish was really good on a salad for lunch the next day.

But now we should go back to baking. And if you're looking for an easy quarantine project, this is the easiest bread you can make. You don't even have to knead it. You just stir a few ingredients together and bake it in a heavy pot. It has a very nice crust.

I like it fresh out of the oven with melty butter.

But of course, we've also been baking cookies. Sometimes our kitchen looks like it should be called Cookie Land. A new kind of cookie that we made were called Oatmeal Scotchies. They are oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips. These were my brother's favorite cookies that we have made. And we gave some to our friend Spencer who loved them too!

Fortunately these came out soft without changing the recipe!

My family had also never made snickerdoodles before! So quarantine seemed like the perfect time to try. These were fun to make because we liked forming the balls and rolling them in cinnamon sugar.

Snickerdoodles are made with cream of tartar, which is a very interesting ingredient. Do you know the difference between baking powder and baking soda? Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate, which needs to be mixed with an acid to be activated and work to make baked goods rise. Baking powder is also sodium bicarbonate, but it is already mixed with acid, so it works on its own. Can you guess what the acid that it is mixed with is? If you guessed cream of tartar, you are right!!!! But cream of tartar is also what gives snickerdoodles a tangy flavor.

My brother thought that these were too simple, but the rest of us really liked them.

But I'm especially excited to tell you about the next thing that we made. It is my second favorite thing that we have baked in all of quarantine! We made frosted sugar cookie bars and they were soooooooooo spectacular!!! If you don't like frosting, then you probably will not like this recipe. But if you do like frosting (which you definitely should!), then you'll love it! They are a soft sugar cookie bar, with sprinkles in them, to make them like funfetti. And then they have lots of frosting on top.

You could always make these with less frosting, but I think that would be a BIG mistake!

But my very very favorite thing that we have made in quarantine was this coconut cake! I loved this cake because the cake itself is very fluffy with great coconut flavor. And it has a cream cheese coconut frosting which is also very very good.

It was fun, but a little bit tricky getting the coconut to stick to the sides of the cake.

Guess whose idea it was to make some of the frosting pink?!

If you end up making any of these recipes, definitely tell me what you think! And if you have read this entire post, please tell me which recipe interests you the most in the comments or what you think we should make next!!