Ganache Dipped Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

Posted by Rick on in Recipe 0 Comment

Ganache Dipped Chocolate Chip Cookies, originally from Whats Gaby Cooking?

Ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter (at room temp)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cup AP flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
2 cups Chocolate Chips
1 cup heavy cream
8 oz bittersweet chocolate

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees

Cream together the butter and sugars in a mixer. Add the eggs and vanilla, making sure to scrape down the sides of the mixing bowl. Add the flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder and mix on low until everything is incorporated.

Chill the dough in the refrigerate for 2 hours. Scoop out a 1/4 cup size of dough and roll it into a ball. Roll it around in some Chocolate Chips and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Place 6 cookies on a sheet since they will spread due to their size. Bake for 12-14 minutes until just slightly golden around the edges. Remove from oven and let rest on the baking sheet. *Note* The might look a little under baked in the middle – but don’t fear!! They will continue to bake a bit once removed from the oven.

While the cookies are cooling, go ahead and make the ganache.

In a small pot, bring the cream to a low simmer. Remove from heat and stir in the bittersweet chocolate with a wooden spoon until fully incorporated. Dip half of each cookie into the ganache and set on parchment paper to dry

Comments

Absolutely love these cookies, even with the Ganache dip. I do tend to add about another quarter to half cup of chocolate chips with no ill results so far.

I’ll also replace the bittersweet chocolate with a nice dark chocolate. But be careful as dark chocolate tends to have a bit higher melting point.

Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe

Posted by Rick on in Recipe 0 Comment

Peanut Butter Cookie Recipe *
From the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook adapted by Smitten Kitchen

The brilliance of these cookies is that they have included two different formats for peanuts–three if you use chunky peanut butter. They’re crisp on the outside, and almost cakey on the inside.

Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 cup peanut butter at room temperature (I prefer chunky no sugar added peanut butters, but lots of people use regular smooth)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup peanut butter chips
1/2 cup chocolate chips

For sprinkling: 1 tablespoon sugar, regular or superfine

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, combine the flour, the baking soda, the baking powder, and the salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, beat the butter and the peanut butter together until fluffy. Add the sugars and beat until smooth. Add the egg and mix well. Add the milk and the vanilla extract. Add the flour mixture and beat thoroughly. Stir in the peanut butter and chocolate chips. Place sprinkling sugar — the remaining tablespoon — on a plate. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls into the sugar, then onto ungreased cookie sheets, leaving several inches between for expansion. Using a fork, lightly indent with a crisss-cross pattern (I used the back of a small offset spatula to keep it smooth on top), but do not overly flatten cookies. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Do not overbake. Cookies may appear to be underdone, but they are not.

Cool the cookies on the sheets for 1 minute, then remove to a rack to cool completely.

(Another) Top 100 Novels of All Time List

Posted by Rick on in Lists 2 Comments

(Another) Top 100 Novels of All Time List

Here is my own (Another) Top 100 Novels of All Time. In fact it’s actually much more because I couldn’t trim it far enough, plus there are entire series listed. The Wheel of Time Series is 13 books by itself.

1 – The Odyssey by Homer
2 – Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
3 – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
4 – American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
5 – A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
6 – The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
7 – The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
8 – Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
9 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
10 – Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
11 – The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
12 – On Basilisk Station, by David Weber
13 – Horatio Hornblower Series by C. S. Forester
14 – Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
15 – The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
16 – The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
17 – Ulysses, by James Joyce
18 – The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
19 – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce
20 – Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
21 – Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
22 – The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
23 – Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
24 – Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
25 – The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
26 – Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
27 – The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler
28 – Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
29 – I, Claudius, by Robert Graves
30 – To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf
31 – An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
32 – The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
33 – Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
34 – Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
35 – Native Son, by Richard Wright
36 – Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow
37 – U.S.A. (trilogy), by John Dos Passos
38 – Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
39 – A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster
40 – The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James
41 – The Ambassadors, by Henry James
42 – Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
43 – Studs Lonigan (trilogy), by James T. Farrell
44 – The Good Soldierby Ford Madox Ford
45 – Animal Farm, by George Orwell
46 – The Golden Bowl, by Henry James
47 – A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
48 – As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
49 – All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
50 – The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
51 – Howards End, by E. M. Forster
52 – Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
53 – The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene
54 – Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
55 – Deliverance, by James Dickey
56 – A Dance to the Music of Time (series), by Anthony Powell
57 – Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley
58 – The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
59 – The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
60 – Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad
61 – The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence
62 – Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence
63 – Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
64 – Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
65 – Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth
66 – Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov
67 – Light in August, by William Faulkner
68 – On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
69 – The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
70 – Parade’s End, by Ford Madox Ford
71 – The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton
72 – Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm
73 – The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
74 – Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather
75 – From Here to Eternity, by James Jones
76 – The Wapshot Chronicle, by John Cheever
77 – The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
78 – Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham
79 – Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
80 – Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis
81 – The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
82 – The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell
83 – Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
84 – A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
85 – A House for Mr Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul
86 – The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West
87 – A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
88 – Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
89 – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark
90 – Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
91 – A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster
92 – Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
93 – The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
94 – Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
95 – A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul
96 – The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen
97 – Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
98 – Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow
99 – The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
100 – The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
101 – Loving, by Henry Green
102 – Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
103 – Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell
104 – Ironweed, by William Kennedy
105 – The Magus, by John Fowles
106 – Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch
107 – Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
108 – The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
109 – The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
110 – The Ginger Man, by J. P. Donleavy
111 – The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington
112 – 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
113 = 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne

A good book is one that makes you think, makes you discover new worlds, and one that changes your life. All of these changed mine.

How To: Flush DNS Cache on OS X

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's 0 Comment

Most users don’t need to use this command, but it’s very helpful for web developers and network admins to troubleshoot issues with web sites.

This command is run via terminal.

On Leopard (10.6) and Snow Leopard (10.7):

(as root or admin user) dscacheutil -flushcache

On all other version (10.0 – 10.4):

(as root or admin user) lookupd -flushcache