We have received over 4 inches of rain in the past few days. Many areas have flooded. The little "babbling brook" behind our house now sounds like Niagara Falls. Our gutters sometimes over-flow - they are simply unable to handle the volume of water Mother Nature is unleashing on the Pacific Northwest this week. I suppose there are still hoards of people hydroplaning driving around the local streets, attending holiday parties and shopping in the malls. I don't know, because I refuse to leave the house.
Which gives me plenty of time to organize ourselves for a winter on the road in our motorhome - we leave in a week for a several-month-long road trip! (Gee, suppose we will be stopping into Glendale, Arizona around the 10th of January?)
Which also gives me plenty of time to putter around the kitchen. My Dad loves Oreo cookies and I am always nagging him to not eat the sugar-and-chemical-laden sweets. This week Leite's Culinaria had a recipe for Homemade Oreos from Joanne Chang & Christie Matheson. I had all the ingredients in the house, so made the recipe to FedEx to my Dad in Arizona, i.e., World's Most Expensive Oreos.
The recipe is quite time-consuming. Butter is melted and cooled, chocolate is melted and cooled, dough is formed, shaped, turned, shaped, rolled, shaped, re-shaped, turned, rolled.
After the rolled, shaped, re-rolled and re-shaped dough is chilled, instructions call for slicing. The dough was very difficult to work with. I had to let it warm up a bit to stop it from crumbling when sliced. The word "Play-Doh" is used in the recipe - seriously - so I reached back to my inner-child and reshaped the dough a bit before baking.
After baking, the cookies looked just fine. Instructions call for cooling the cookies on the baking sheets. The frosting/stuffing was prepared while the cookies cooled.
The cookies were really pretty when finished. I was surprised how much the cookies taste like an Oreo too. The chocolate cookie had the familiar crumbly texture!Would I make the Oreos again?
Never.
First, the dough is so much trouble and so difficult to work-with. Second, the recipe made 18 cookies and used three sticks of butter.Three.
Sticks.
Of.
Butter.
I was able to use 100% organic ingredients in the cookies, but with all that fat, I think Dad is better off with the chemicals?
Until my next update, I remain, your "I'm shipping them to Dad anyway" correspondent.