Inside-Out Carrot Cake Cookies

Look what we made at our last class! These Inside-Out Carrot Cake Cookies were actually a special request from one of my regular students and they really came out great. The grated carrot and raisins in the cookie makes them chewy and the baking powder in the recipe gives them a cake-like texture. Sandwiched with a sweet cream cheese frosting, the kids loved them.
I hope you try making them.

Inside-Out Carrot Cake Cookies

Ingredients:
Cookies:
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup sugar
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup (2 medium) carrots, peeled and grated
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped (optional)
1/2 cup raisins

Frosting:
4 oz cream cheese
2 tablespoons butter, softened
3/4 cups confectioners sugar

Directions:

1. Put oven racks in upper and lower thirds of oven and preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Spray 2 baking sheets with non-stick spray.
3. Whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt in a bowl.
4. In a large bowl, beat together butter, sugars, egg, and vanilla with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes.
5. Mix in carrots, nuts, raisins and flour mixture with a wooden spoon and beat until well combined.
6. Drop 1 heaped tablespoon batter per cookie 2 inches apart on baking sheets and bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until cookies are lightly browned and springy to the touch. Remember to switch position of sheets halfway through baking.
7. Cool cookies on sheets on racks 1 minute, then transfer cookies to racks to cool completely.
8. While cookies are baking, prepare frosting: With an electric mixer, blend the cream cheese, butter and confectioners sugar in a small bowl until smooth.
9. Sandwich flat sides of cookies together with a generous tablespoon of cream cheese filling in between.
   

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all my students and their families who have signed up for my classes this year. I'm continually suprised how interested and enthusiastic the kids are. I love to teach them how much fun cooking is and parents are often suprised that their children are eating different foods, especially fruits and vegetables!

Kid's recipes do not have to be just Mac N'Cheese, chicken nuggets and P and B sandwiches. Take a look at all the recipes I have made with kids, you don't have to make separate meals at dinner time. Teach your kids to eat like grown ups and you'll save yourself a lot of work! Happy Holidays to you all and I hope to see you all again next year!

Cooking parties

November has been a really busy month for cooking parties! Thanks to everyone who booked me, I've loved teaching you all how much fun it is to cook.

Here are some photos for you to look at....



Rolling Crispy Candy Sushi Snacks



Prepping crab and cucumber for California Sushi Rolls



Rolling California Rolls on bamboo mats.



Rolling our homemade pasta dough.

Making Cinnamon Tortilla chips for dessert nachos

Crispy Candy Sushi Snacks ready for packing up as party favors.

Chinese Food Week at LAC

Chicken and Pineapple Stir-fry


Baked Spring Roll and Sticky Maple Chicken Drumstick


Hot from the oven - Baked Spring Rolls!

What a busy day we had on Thursday! Our teens made a delicious meal of Chicken and pineapple stir-fry (see photo above) , fried rice, Baked spring rolls and Mini oreo cheesecakes. Our younger classes learned how to make a finger-licking Sticky Maple chicken drumsticks, fried rice and baked spring rolls. Take a look at the photos to see how much fun we had....

Making baked spring rolls

Soups and Scones

We are in the middle of our fall session and everyone is doing great!
Today in our Beginners I class, we learned how to make Corn and Potato chowder and Maple Scones. You can see from the photo above how well the scones came out, we used maple leaf cutters and brushed them with a delicious maple icing.



We read the recipe carefully and measure all our ingredients beforehand - mise en place.





Our maple scones ready for the oven.



Time to eat! We spread our icing on the scones with paint brushes.







Our teens cutting leeks for Leek and Potato Soup.



Cooking apples for Apple Turnovers.



Delicious apple turnovers fresh from the oven.

Halloween Workshop Photos

We had a really fun time last week teaching a Halloween cooking workshop at Groton library.

Thanks to Deborah for inviting "Let's All Cook"to come and share our recipes with a great group of teens. I'd like to share with you the photos we took of our evening.


Grilling the quesadillas


Cutting the quesadillas


Halloween Quesadillas with Sickly Salsa

Spooky Spider cookies


Graveyard Dirt Puddding


Making Vampire's Blood Punch

Devilled Eye Balls

Serving Ghoulish Gazpacho

Halloween Recipes for Kids

My Halloween workshop is coming up next week and I've come up with some really great recipes for "kid's to make themselves". I'd love to share them with you all, so that you can make treats for your family and friends or plan your holiday party. Have fun!

Halloween Recipes for Kids

Ghoulish Gazpacho or Vampire's Vomit is actually a delicious cold soup full of healthy veggies. It can be served as an appetizer in shot glasses or small cups.

Devilled Egg Eyeballs are hard boiled eggs stuffed with a spicy filling. Red gel is piped on for blood shot veins and then they're topped with olives for spooky eyeballs.

Halloween Quesadillas with Sickly Salsa - These quesadillas are filled with orange cheese and black beans, then served with a really sickly looking salsa!

Witches Fingers. Cookies or rice krispie treats are colored green and shaped like fingers. A red painted almond (fingernail) is then pressed into the tip to make a creepy treat.

Graveyard Dirt Pudding. Serve this ghostly dessert in individual cups and each of your guests can decorate their own with cookie gravestones, spiders and gummy worms.

Spooky Spiders. These haystack cookies are made with chocolate, raisins, nuts and crunchy chowmein noodles which stick out like spider's legs.

Vampire's Blood Punch. This icy blood red beverage is so spooky it has eyeballs floating in it!

Fall is Apple Season

"Let's All Cook" cooking classes are off to great start! Thanks to all the kids and parents for a really successful and "delicious" class today. Our recipes today were based on the new crop of apples now appearing in our New England orchards - Apple galettes ( a free form apple pie made with a cream cheese pie crust) and Homemade Pop Tarts (made with the same pie dough). If you've never made a cream cheese pie crust, please give this a try, especially if you've had problems rolling pie dough. The cream cheese makes the dough really malleable and forgiving and is quite fail safe. Always try to refrigerate the dough for at least 30 minutes, this gives the butter a chance to harden up and will make the crust more flaky.

If you're cooking with your kids, it's always a good idea to make individual portion recipes if you can. Kids really don't to wait for over one hour for their food to cook, so many of my recipes are for individual servings, such as pies or mini cheesecakes, which take less than one hour to prep and bake.

This recipe for Apple Galettes is great for kids, once the dough is made, each kid gets to roll out their own piece, fill it with apples, form the pie and then glaze it with egg white and sugar. It's their very own pie from start to finish and they are usually more likely to eat it!

Looking for great family day out? Try pick-your-own apple picking in one of our many orchards in Massachusetts. I've only lived here for 6 years and so this activity is still a novelty for my family and me. I have visited several in the Acton area, namely Carlson orchards and Westward orchards in Harvard, and Berlin orchards in Bolton, which even has a hayride and pony rides. For a more comprehensive list of orchards, see pickyourown.org and don't forget to visit the local pumpkin patches and corn mazes later in the month.

My mom Shirley at Carlson orchard.

Healthier Cooking classes this Fall

Summer is already over and the kids are back to school. So that means that my kid's cooking classes will be starting soon. I like to try new recipes as much as I can, so I have been searching around for ones that are quick, fun and tasty. I've heard that the Beginners 2 class is already full, so I'll wait and see how the other classes do.

I like to teach the kids about nutrition and healthy eating, but we still do our fair share of baking. I have, however, been cutting back on the sugar and butter in the recipes - the kids don't seem to notice. (Martha Stewart recipes have way too much sugar). I've also substituted wholewheat flour in some recipes and they still haven't complained. It's our job as parents to enrich our kid's diets - slip in extra veggies when you can, cut up fruit into fruit salad, reduce your trips to the fast food restaurant and cook with your kids instead. Break out of that rut and search for different recipes for your family. All of my kid's recipes can be made in approximately 3o minutes! That's quicker than having pizza delivered!

We will be celebrating 2 holidays this session - Halloween and Thanksgiving. I love Halloween, I get the chance to do really scary recipes (not really), but I do have a great recipe for "witches fingers" and "eyeball punch". That reminds me, I still have to come up with with some vampire themed recipes for Groton library. I'll probably have to do something with tomato sauce and garlic.... Does anyone have any ideas for me?

Here is a recipe I found on a blog recently that I'm thinking will be great for my cooking class. It's called "Zebra cake"



Zebra Cake
Ingredients:
4 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/8 tsp. almond extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tbsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
2 ½ tbsp. cocoa powder

Directions:

• Preheat the oven to 350°. Line a 9-inch round cake pan with a circle of parchment paper. Lightly grease the bottom and sides of the pan.
• In a large bowl, mix together the eggs and sugar until mixture is light and creamy and the sugar has been mostly dissolved. Stir in milk, vegetable oil, vanilla and almond extracts.
• In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Pour into wet ingredients and whisk to combine.
• Measure out just over two cups of vanilla batter and put it back into the medium bowl. Sift cocoa powder over the bowl and whisk until fully incorporated.
• Put 3 tablespoons of vanilla batter into the center of the pan and let it spread slightly on its own. Put 3 tablespoons of chocolate batter in the center of the vanilla. It will push out the other and, as it sits for a moment, will also spread itself. Alternating spoonfuls of the two batters, repeat the technique until all the batter has been used up.
• Bake for 38-42 minutes, until the cake is light gold and a tester inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
• Let the cake cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then turn out the cake and remove the parchment paper. Reinvert onto a wire rack and let cool completely. Frost if desired.
  Source: Baking Bites

Cooking tips for Kids

Last year, I had donated a Kid's cooking party to a local school auction. So, this week I got together with 6 teens to teach them how to make themselves dinner. They had chosen 3 recipes from my website and I arrived at the house with all the ingredients and equipment - ready to cook!

The chosen menu was Classic chicken pot pie, Pineapple fried rice and Chocolate lava cakes. They did everything, from poaching the chicken, chopping vegetables, melting chocolate and dinner was on the table in under 2 hours.

Here are some tips to make your next cooking adventure a success.

• Make sure you have the right equipment before you start.
• Print the recipe and place it in a plastic cover, so it doesn't get dirty or wet.
• Read the recipe first to make sure you have all the ingredients necessary, then start prepping the recipe which takes the longest to cook.
• Always, start with your "mise en place" or pre-measuring before you start any recipe. All professional chefs do this and ensures that we don't forget any essential ingredients, e.g., baking powder in a cake?
• Put away all the ingredients after measuring, so excess mess is at a minimum, you will look much more organised and efficient.
• Once, you've checked your list, then you're ready to start cooking!
  

• Don't be in a rush when cooking - follow the directions step by step, reading the recipe carefully.
• Preheat your oven if necessary and grease or prep your pans or cookie sheets ahead of time.
• Ask a grown up to help, especially if you are using sharp knives or using the stovetop or oven.
• Clean your work space as you go - food safety is really important.
• Wash your own dishes - your parents may let you cook again.
• AND most important of all - Have fun and enjoy all your hard work!

Let's all Cook coming to Groton library - Harry Potter recipes

I 've been asked to teach a Teen cooking program called "Books with Bite" for Groton library here in Massachusetts. The scheduled date is thursday, October 16 at 6pm.

I'm thinking of going with the witches/halloween/vampire theme - if you have a teenage girl in your family, you'll know about the "Twilight" book craze. Maybe you have some recipe suggestions for "recipes with bite", I'd love to hear them! So, if you live in the Groton area, visit your local library and ask about the program. Hope to see you there!

It reminded me of the Harry Potter cooking workshop for kids I did a couple of years ago. It was a lot of fun and I even asked the kids to come in fancy dress. Have you heard that the latest HP movie (The Half Blood Prince) is coming out in November? Why not host a party and serve Harry's favorite foods, such as Hagrid's Rock Cakes, Butterbeer and yummy English Treacle tart. Here is a recipe for Rock cakes - this is one of the first recipes I learned to make in Home Economic class!



Hagrid's Rock Cakes
These cakes are really tasty little scones, unlike Hagrid's cakes, which Harry thinks are as hard as rocks. They don't keep well, so eat them the same day or they will taste like rocks!
(Makes 12)

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour (wholewheat flour may be substituted for part of the 2 cups)
2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg, freshly grated if possible
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold butter, cut into small cubes
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup raisins
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons milk

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
   
2. Sift flour, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg into a large bowl.


3. Add the butter and with your finger tips, rub the butter into the flour mixture until crumbly.
4. Stir in the sugar and raisins.
   
5. Add the egg and just enough milk to make a stiff dough.


6. Grease a large baking sheet and drop tablespoons or 'craggy rocks' of dough 2 inches apart.


7. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

More recipes like this....

Quebec city

We visited the market today in the old port. These photos are for all you foodies, the colors were unbelievable! Of course, we had to buy something, so we found an olive loaf, some local triple creme brie, cherry tomatoes and raspberries for our lunch. It was delish!




Artisanal french bakery

Cherries, redcurrants, blueberries, raspberries

In case you didn't know, Quebec is celebrating their 400th Anniversary this year. Here are some sailors dressed in historic uniform