A Flying Saucer? No... A Frisbee? hmmm..... A Giant Cookie?!?!?!

I made this giant cookie for a friend of mine a while back for a joke they had with someone else. This was THE largest cookie I have ever attempted to make. It was slightly oval but oh well... It was about 16 inches wide and about 1/4 inch thick. Check it out.

Plans for This Track Season

I know this blog is named "Summer" Cookings, but seeing as i didn't do much this summer with cooking I have new plans for it. Since i will not be going out for track this year I have decided I will use the time I have after school to run/bike some and try new recipes also. I have decided though, that because i have been gaining weight slowly over the time I haven't been running I will only be allowed to cook on days I run or bike. I can run or bike but not cook, but I won't be cooking and not running or biking. I plan to lose a smidge of my fluff weight, although not necessarily, while also keeping my cooking skills up to date. Also, if I need to have exercise of some sort everyday so I can have something to keep me persistent to keep going. Having myself do some exercise of some sort will also help me to not procrastinate and help me to stay away from the computer more easily. I have just recently decided to do this and I had baked some oatmeal raisin cookies a couple of days ago, and due to the fact of still being in basketball I did not however run on that day(It was also late and kinda cold out at the time)... I did bike quite a bit and then quit on account of the wind causing my ears to hurt and being tired. The pain in my ears was the main reason I stopped. My legs could have taken more. After about a 30 minute to half hour break I went out an ran for a while. I found out just how out of shape I really am. I had to cut my run short(3 decent paced minutes) so I wouldn't feel like I was going to lose a lung or my legs! Haha... well I hope this works out (pun!!! ha!) and I will post my progress on running and what new recipes I have tried. I won't be starting this until the basketball season is over so bear with me for a little while and then i will start!
♥♥♥Miranda♥♥♥

S'more Pie

Well, this sounded like a wonderful recipe to try... especially since i was kind of craving s'mores. This was a VERY time consuming pie, and I didn't even do everything in the right amount of time. (me and my impatience, again!) The crust was the simplest part of the whole thing. A homemade graham cracker crust, how hard is that to make anyway? I blame part of the taste of this pie because of how the pie crust turned out. You are supposed to cook the crust until it is golden (I thought graham crackers were golden, oh well) and then let it cool. I did the directed time and it made it taste like it had been burnt in the end. The chocolate part of the pie wasn't as great as I expected it to be either; the taste seemed too bitter and didn't really fit into the flavor I think of when I eat a s'more. The marshmallow top was just a failure in and of itself. By the time I got the sugar to read the tempurature it was to be, it was actually too hot. Old candy thermometers and a small, shallow amount of hot bubbling sugar does not make for accurate tempurates in a timely manner. Then, when I added the sugar to the rest of the marshmallow recipe, the sugar stuck to the bottom of the bowl and hardened.. this probably had a little to do with the fact that i poured the last little bit of the sugar in pretty quick. (because once again, I was impatient and wanted to eat it!) The amount of marshmallow "fluff" i ended up with wasn't much of a fluff, and it barely even covered the top of the pie. I was supposed to let that cool in the fridge for 3 hours and then take it back out to toast the top with my torch. I chose not to do that and just torch it then and there... :D that was fun! The marshmallow top was so runny that it took a little work getting the top to brown correctly.
In the end, this pie was NOT the greatest! I would give it about 1 star out of 5.... It was a nice effort at trying to recreate a s'more, but it wasn't very good to me... This pie is definitely not for a beginner and maybe not an intermediate. Only plan on making this if you have LOTS of time and patience! :)

Caramel Cake

A couple of days later i decided to make this recipe that i have had my eye on for a while. I quite like *love* caramel so this was a recipe I was looking forward to! The cake, as far as I remember, was fairly simple to make. It is just a fairly simple white "pound" cake, fairly dense and quite heavy. The caramel sauce takes a little work to make but it is delicious. A lot of the caramel sauce however, is lost when it is poured over the cake, I scooped it back up about 6 or 7 times before i actually got it all to stay ON the cake. The cake seemed to *eat* the caramel sauce which kind of scared me. The corners of the cake had just the right amount of caramel on them but the other pieces just seemed to lack the correct amount of sauce. It was kind of like eating a dry white cake that someone tried to fix with the caramel sauce. In the end the cake was good once it had set and soaked for a while, but I still feel it needs more of the caramel sauce. I would give this a rating of about a 4.

I would opt next time to either leave the cake in the pan and pour the caramel over it while it is in the pan, or double the recipe for the caramel sauce. Another idea would be to poke the cake with a fork to help the cake absorb the sauce. (This only makes an 8x8 cake.) Overall this was a good cake that would not serve so much as a dessert in and of itself, but maybe along side of something like berries, whipped cream, a mousse of sorts, etc.

Homemade Oreos

So, everyone seems to have tried these...I finally decided i would see what all the rage was about.. after having my cherry gelato "mishap" i decided to go back to baking things. The cookies didn't turn out too bad, if you like really small cookies. I would suggest taking them out a little early so the cookies are softer and easier to eat in the end. I don't know if I was having a bad baking day, the recipe wasn't the greatest, or what the problem was. The cookies turned out fairly hard and made them hard to eat in my opinion. My brother, who usually likes chocolate stuff didn't even finish the little one he ate. The frosting needs work, it just doesn't seem like an "Oreo frosting." It was a very "fluffy" frosting and just didn't seem like it should be on an Oreo. On the plus side, though, these were some of the easiest cookies i have ever made, they had no flour and didn't stick to the bowl when i was forming the cookies. If you want a calorie conscious cookie, (who in the world would want that anyway?!) these are definitely not the cookie for you, they are absolutely loaded with sugar and butter!

So, all in all I give this recipe a 4.5... the flavors all went well together, they just didn't turn out the way I would have wished they would. The ease of the cookie makes this a beginner cooking level. Just make sure you have the time and patience to assemble the cookies

Recipe #1 -- Cherry Gelato

So this is the first time i have ever tried to make gelato or even tried it for that matter. I don't know if i made this wrong or something, but it wasn't the greatest. It took about an hour and a half for it to get a consistency that was barely even the consistency of soft serve ice cream. I was getting tired of waiting for it to set up more in the maker so i went ahead and stopped churning it. So that may have been why I didn't enjoy it very much.
On the 5 star scale i would give the flavor about a 4.5 but the recipe/project overall receives a 3.
This rating was before I put the Gelato in the freezer to completely set up. When completely frozen this recipe now receives a 4 star rating, although the flavor would now have a rating of about 3. The flavors are at their strongest and most refreshing when they are fresh from the ice cream maker and the flavors seem to dull out a little once they are completely frozen and have set for a while. The consistency of how it should be was pretty accurate by my cousin Jennifer's description... "It's like pudding, but frosty pudding, and it's pretty thick."
The ease of making this was fairly simple, but VERY time consuming. I would give it an intermediate cooking level.

The "Run Down"

So, this blog isn't going to be much... I am just going to post all of the new recipes I try this summer, on here. I will then give each of them a rating on a 5 star scale. I am not going to post the actual recipes, there may be a picture of the results occasionally, but not often, and if you have any questions or comments feel free to post them! You may request a recipe that i have reviewed, but I might not be willing to share all of them.. sorry, gotta keep some of my recipes secret!