Popular Desserts 'Round Here

I got ambitious the other day and made a batch of cookies to take out to Altamont preps. They seemed to be a hit, so here's the recipe! These have been Clover and Cheyenne's favorite cookies for about a year now!

The great thing about these cookies is they don't spread much when you bake them. You can really cram them on the sheet-- as illustrated here.

Here they are while raw...

And here they are after baking (this is how much you will get if you make them fairly largeish-- minus the obligatory dough tasting.)

This recipe was originally published in our newspaper a few years back. I've tweaked a few things, mainly doubling the recipe while still only using one bag of the Peanut Butter Chocolate Swirled Chips. They still have lots of chips, and it's cheaper! The Swirled chips aren't carried at our Super Wal-Mart, I have to go to Wegmans to find them. Worth searching them out, though!

PB&Chocolate Oaties

• 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 1 cup peanut butter
• 2 cups brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 1 tsp. salt
• 3 cups uncooked oatmeal (I like using the Old Fashioned variety)
• 1 pkg. (11 oz.) Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Swirled Chips

Preheat oven to 350 °. Cream together butters and brown sugar. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well. Add flour, soda, cinnamon, salt and oatmeal, and beat until blended. Mix in chips. Place dollops (generous tablespoon) on cookie sheet, and bake for ten minutes. They don't brown much, so just use the timer and trust it! Let cool on cookie sheet.

I also got REAL ambitious last Wednesday and made a pie for my husband (and my brothers that were passing through) in addition to cleaning my house for meeting that night. This is Evan's favorite dessert. It's only this last year that I have successfully managed to roll out two-crust pies, so finally Evan doesn't have to depend solely on his mom for this pie!

I have two different pie crust recipes I like-- one from my Mom, for French Pie Crust, that uses butter, and Sylvia's Perfect Pie Crust from Pioneer Woman that uses Crisco. I like the taste of the butter crust better (duh!) but the other one is slightly easier to work with. Here's the French Pie Crust recipe.

French Pie Crust

• 2 cups sifted flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 10 1/2 T butter, diced and chilled
• 1 egg
• Pinch of salt
• 1 T of water

Mix flour and sugar in a very large bowl. Form a well and add butter, salt, and the egg mixed (but not beaten) with the water. Use a pastry cutter to gradually cut the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients. Roll out 1/2 dough and line a buttered pie pan. If you're doing a one crust pie and need to prebake the crust, prick it all over with a fork and bake at 375° for 10 minutes. Cool and fill. Otherwise, fill and cover with the rolled out top crust. Follow the recipe for the filling for baking directions in that case.

Speaking of fillings, I like Joy of Cooking's recipe for raspberry pie filling. I use frozen raspberries, and this recipe is for all frozen fruit and berries. It's one of the sweeter raspberry pies I've had, which is how I like it. I love fresh raspberries to eat out of hand, but if I want PIE, I want sweetness!

Raspberry Pie Filling

• 5 cups frozen berries, cherries or peaches, defrosted only until separates easily
• 3 T quick-cooking tapioca
• 1 1/4 cups sugar
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 2 T butter, melted

Mix all the ingredients together. Position the oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 450°. Turn the filling into the unbaked pie shell and cover with a pricked or latticed top. (Yeah, like I'm ambitious enough to have tried pie lattice!). From my experience, this crust burns easily at the edges, so it is essential to fold aluminum foil into fourths, cut the corner off, and open up to (ta-da!) a ring of foil with which to cover the edges. Bake at 450° for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350° and bake about 45 minutes more. The easiest way to tell when the pie filling has cooked sufficiently is when the kitchen fills with smoke because the raspberry filling has bubbled over and burned on the bottom of the oven!

My brothers tore into it, and poor Evan only got one (albiet ginormous) piece.