Ginger cookies

My very favorite ginger cookies are Trader Joes Triple Ginger Cookies. I like them because they are very small and loaded with ginger flavor. I like to trick myself with small cookies. Because they are small, I can eat, say, 20 of them. They are small, right? A container of Triple Ginger Cookies is devoured pretty quickly in my household. Unfortunately, I eat most of them.
Maida's favorite ginger cookies -- the ones that she and her mother used to make all the time and send home with all of the people who came through their house when she was growing up -- are very much like TJ's Triple Ginger Cookies. Except they are quite large. Extraordinarily large. So large, that I could only eat TWO at one sitting (really, two is too many).
I had high hopes of making these cookies for our GS camping trip, so we would have cookies and Big Daddy's Cake. The problem with these cookies is that the dough is very difficult to work with. It is easy to make (except for the tedious task of dicing the candied ginger). I find that with candied ginger, I always end up with less than I am supposed to have, because Maddy and I keep eating it while I'm cutting it up. I was worried when I finished dicing my 5 ounces of candied ginger that I had only really diced about 3 ounces and the cookies were not going to be gingery enough. This was not a legitimate concern.
The problem is that this dough is VERY soft. Even though I refrigerated the dough overnight, as Maida strongly recommended, the dough was extremely soft the next morning, and I really didn't feel like fooling around with it while I should be packing for a camping trip. So I left it to chill for another few days.
Once you pull the dough out of the refrigerator, you have to work very quickly to roll and cut the dough. And use lots of flour. You do not have time to go find your cookie cutters once the dough is rolled out. I used my huge Roul Pat for rolling this out, and still believe this is the best investment in cooking ever. I used a drinking glass to cut the cookies, and was tempted to crowed them onto the cookie sheet, but yielded to Maida's warning about how the cookies spread.
Man do they ever. The 3 inches cookies I cut with the glass ended up being 5 inch cookies. They are very flat, and crisp and perfect looking. And perfect tasting. Really, one cookie is enough. Pete says that half a cookie is enough. This would be my favorite cookie recipe too, if it were not for the fact that it is so difficult to roll out, and that TJ's Triple Gingers taste so similar.
And now I've made two of the 3 ginger cookies. These were my favorite so far.

American Chocolate Layer Cake: Part One

Maida describes this cake as "the most stupendous of all chocolate layer cakes. . . . enough for a very large party or a small army." Well gosh, I don't have any large parties planned, and certainly don't have a small army to feed. But I can't wait to finish this cake. This is a project. And since I'm doing it during the week -- the week filled with work and taking Natalie to the driving range -- I've gotta make this cake in parts.

So last night I made the cake layers themselves. There are FOUR cake layers. I only had two pans -- so I had to run to Michael's to pick up more pans. To take the cake layers out of the pans, I needed 5 racks. I only have 2. Next purchase -- 3 more cake racks. These four layers have one stick of butter a piece -- you do the math. My poor stand mixer could barely get through the mass of butter . . . I mean batter . . . in the bowl. Per Maida's option, I threw walnuts into half of the batter, so that when the cake is done, the nut-filled layers will alternate with the buttery-plain layers.

The beautiful cake layers are now sitting patiently on the dining room table waiting for me to frost them. I'm hoping Kitty doesn't get to them. Or Pete -- who offered graciously to finish the cake for me. I couldn't tell whether he meant that he would eat it or frost it. He is, however, going to buy me a cake plate solid enough to handle this monstrosity.

Apple Pie U.S.A.: The PERFECT Apple Pie -- with NO changes

Ok fine. You got to post first. But I was busy. I didn't even get to take my pie out of the oven! And since I was relying on Natalie to take the pix, and she was with me when it did come out of the oven, I didn't get the magnificence of the pie when it first came out. But man, we had NO trouble getting rid of this pie. It's gone. Sorry girls. It's gone. Maddy and Natalie each ate two pieces last night, with Cassandra, Pete and I each at one slice, and Pete and I devoured the rest when we got home from whale watching. I didn't feel guilty one bit, because I had thrown up every single thing I ate at least four times during the day, so the apple pie is the only thing that will be sticking to my ribs.Yes,Maria, I look at Maida's recipes, think to myself: "Wow, that's a lot of butter. That's a lot of steps, That's a 3 page recipe. I can change this and it will be the same." But I didn't change it. That's not completely true. I changed it a little. I didn't have enough regular sugar, so I had to use half raw sugar. And for the same reason, I had no sugar to dust over the top, so I used cinnamon sugar -- which was a magnificent substitution. But other than those two changes, I did everthing . . . exactly . . like . . . Maida.

Warm day. I froze the bowl. I froze the bowl with flour in it. I froze the Crisco. Crisco. Not some awful trans-fat free Crisco substitute. I used a pastry blender. But then, I love using pastry blenders. I used ice water. I sprinkled and tossed, sprinkled and tossed, sprinkled and tossed. I made TWO crusts. Cassandra meticulously measured my circles to ensure they were exactly 12" in diameter. I laboriously cored and sliced the apples and THEN peeled them, because I find that is the only way to get every speck of peel off the apple. I did use super cheap crappy Granny Smith apples and wished every second I had good apples (apple pie in August probably wasn't a good choice for first recipe.) And I put butter all over those apples. But that second crust just wouldn't fit over the apples. I channeled Julia and talked in a squeaky voice about how it didn't matter what it looked like in the kitchen. Then pulled crust off of places and put it in other places and made some semblance of a decent looking pie. So this is what my pie looked like before it went into the oven:



Pretty ugly. No fluting at all.

Then I used the foil screen for the baking -- which I left Pete in charge of, because I had to go out to the mall to try to find Natalie "cute" golf clothes. Ha! To dream the impossible dream.

When we got back, this is what we found:



BE-A-utiful! Yes, it had sunken a bit. But it was still a spectacular pie, the entire house smelled like apples and cinnamon (and was about 90 degrees because we don't have AC), and I also kept the oven clean by remembering, at the last second, to shove a cookie sheet in under the pie. Thank god!

Pete and I had to immediately leave for a party, and I was so sad to leave that pie. Natalie took care of the first slice photography.



Only thing I would have changed is I would have put the pie on the Blue Minton china . .

When Pete and I got back from the party, less than half of the pie was left. And now, despite the fact that we were gone from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., the pie is GONE!

Pete wants Boysenberry Pie next. Maida doesn't do Boysenberry. But her Blackberry Pie is the most stained, disgusting cookbook page in any cookbook I own.

200 recipes -- two per week. One down. My family was able to dispose of it nicely, despite our obsession with weight.

I think this works great. I'll make the recipe EXACTLY LIKE MAIDA. I can comment on what I would change. You just feel free to change away.

What I would change about this recipe? Absolutely nothing. It was the most perfect apple pie I have ever eaten. And I've eaten a lot of apple pie.