Part 1. Yes, I am not done baking yet.
A sweet friend mentioned not making her usual Christmas treats among which were peanut butter bites and Oreo bites. That sounded interesting and I asked her for her recipes. She got right back to me with them. Both recipes sounded like something I might tackle, although my track record with baking lately leaves something to be desired...or not. ("Eat it. It costs money for the ingredients.") This was soon turning out to be a comedy.
The Oreo bites require crushed Oreo cookies. What is the slickest way to crush them without microscopic crumbs floating all 30 feet along the family room/kitchen? (Maybe a separate kitchen with doors to close is a better way to build a house.) Mind you, it says crushed, not just broken apart. I did not want those crumbs sliding out the sides of wax paper layers. I have more than once used a zip lock bag for crushing corn flakes and know for a fact the the seams are likely to blow a gasket or get sneaky little leaks, and those flakey crumbs become air-born dust to infiltrate anything in a ten foot radius. No zip locks, only the zip parts really locks. And yes, I burp those babies before crushing.
So I decide to try Saran Wrap. Put a bunch of cookies on a long piece, fold it over so one side is closed and since it is cling wrap, the other three sides do their clinging act. Out comes the rolling pin. Gently get one batch crushed. Time to put them in the bowl and crunch another bunch. Oh,
the frosting makes most everything stick to the Saran Wrap. The wrinkled Saran Wrap. So I dump what will shake lose and layer another bunch on top of the clinging bits. Do that until all but two cookies are crunched. My teeth crunch those. Hey, it's Oreos, which I never buy to enjoy. Don doesn't like chocolate and if they enter the house I end up having to eat them all. Sacrifice. My slacks are stretchy. Oh, back to the crunched mess. Put the Saran and all in the bowl. Start at one end, with the rest in the bowl and gently scrap off cookie parts into the mess at the bottom of the bowl. Gently pull up the Saran a few inches and get the next part scraped. Continue until all sixteen miles of the Saran is mostly cleaned off. This recipe doesn’t take long to make. In another dimension.
I was able to rush the softening of the cream cheese. Of course I didn't remember to get it out earlier. First cut the big chunk of cream cheese into smaller pieces. Through trial (many trials) and error (more than a few errors) I know to set my micro on power 3 for one minute, and test the chunks for squishability. If needed, do it again for less time and keep testing. Stick with it. If I hadn't perfected this method, I’d be half done putting recipes together, waiting until that cheese softens at room temp and by then I’d be out of the mood, or I would get distracted and it would be 11:30 pm and that dang cheese is all dried out and half the crushed cookies are mysteriously missing. I know, Don doesn’t like chocolate and there are only the two of us and the Oreo thief in the house.
So the cream cheese is added to the Oreo stuff and I am ready to roll the dough into walnut sized pieces. Walnuts in the husk? Walnuts in a naked shell? What is the size? Walnut halves or pieces are the only way 99% of folks see them nowadays. How many people have ever seen an unbroken naked walnut shell, let alone even know they had been grown inside those walnut husks? The ones we used to put in the drive way a few days until they had dried and been run over enough to break off the husks. Then they have to be gathered and the rest of the husk pieces carefully removed. Wear gloves. That walnut stain is worse than Wilton food coloring to get off. your hands. (That’s another story! This season the learning curve is high…or low, if I’m honest.) About 1-1/2” diameter now that I am serious. Do I need flour on my hands. Butter. Powdered sugar. What kind of mess can I get into” Shhh.
I find out that I can actually roll one between my palms and “palm” it off onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet! I can even pull out a larger clump of dough, split it into two pieces and roll TWO at the same time. Those sweet little babies get smoothed out and fall right onto the paper. I’m so talented.
Now they are cooling off on the porch which is right at 30ยบ and they’ll soon be ready to dip. Which leaves me with lots more questions.
Part 2 Questions like what to do when the melted chocolate chips are too thick? The two sample attempts resulted in bites so enlarged that to be seen eating them with a big open mouth would make one look like a frenzied glutton. Let alone everyone seeing every silver cavity in your mouth. Everyone else would avoid making themselves look like that and the yummy bites would languish on the plate. At least I knew milk would turn them to solids. Google luck taught me the term for that is seizing. Oh yeah, I've seen those little particles that had seizures that held them in crystallized clumps. Experience curve from the past. Knew milk was no good. Guessed water was the same. Butter? Maybe. But Mr. Google recommended vegetable oil. That is what I tried. Before that solution I was sure the whole 12 oz. (No, not whole 12 oz. any more as they packages are smaller than when I learned to cook.) of chocolate chips would only cover about 8 peanut butter bites, walnut size, of course.
Questions like how do you get the dipped candy off the fork without leaving mushy tracks on them. Cover the tracks with more dip? Sort of works. But I don't like the wasted amount of dip as it puddles at the bottom of every bite; spreading out like a shelf. Looks dorky when you pick them up to eat them. Those little shelf pieces sliver off and drop all over ladies' front shelf when they fail to open wide enough. Or they land on the men's laps and scatter all over the carpet. Ladies can recover the pieces and eat them like delicacies. The top of the pieces look so professional when spooned onto a fork to drip, smooth without any breaks in design. Then I dump it on the wax paper and there is that place where the fork was last connected on the top. Splatltltltl. Solved the problem by using a toothpick to prod the pretty little bite off the fork with the pretty top side still smooth!
Questions like will vegetable oil added to the chocolate allow them to harden before I'm a great-grandmother? I haven't had the heart to check, hoping that by tomorrow I'll have an answer I like.
