Dulce de Leche Brownies

I love caramel.  Or, as Hubby says, "you love carmel".  It's quite the debate in our house.  (I would like to note that Blogger has just placed a beautiful red underline below carmel - thus proving that caramel is correct!)  It has this amazing flavor that shifts between savory and sweet.  I love eating the individual little caramels in the plastic wrappers, and my husband thinks it's gross.  More for me!

Last week I saw that Jen at Beantown Baker made dulce de leche at home.  In her crockpot.  Then I saw that the recipe came from Stephanie at A Year of Slow Cooking.  These are my two primary cooking blogs and it was like my food worlds collided in deliciousness.  Now I'm trying to get back on the weight loss track, so it's hard to justify why it's a good idea to make an entire can of dulce de leche that I will probably just want to eat with a spoon.  I went in search of a recipe to incorporate it and found one for Dulce de Leche Brownies from David Lebovitz.  Granted this is no better than eating an entire can of caramel, but at least I can take these in to work and force them on other people.

I put a 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk in the crockpot at about 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night.  The milk cooked overnight for about 8.5 hours and I took the can out at about 7:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning.  It didn't cool enough for me to open it before I left for work, so I put the can in the fridge and had to wait until that night to open it.  I couldn't wait to get home!  As I turned the can opener around the lid I got a peak of the light brown caramel and it smelled incredible.  A small taste confirmed that it had worked and I now had 14 ounces of caramel.  I ran upstairs so that my husband could taste, and needless to say he was impressed.

I have another can of milk sitting on my counter, just daring me...



Dulce de Leche
from A Year of Slow Cooking and Beantown Baker
makes 14 ounces 

1 can (14-oz) sweetened condensed milk
Water


Remove the label from the can of sweetened condensed milk.  I made only one can, but feel free to throw in however many you need (or can fit!).

Place the unopened can in the crockpot and fill with water until the can is covered.

Cover and cook on low for 8-9 hours.

Remove can with tongs very carefully.  Open when can is cool enough to the touch.  Eat until sick to your stomach, and refrigerate leftovers in an airtight container.



Dulce de Leche Brownies
recipe from David Lebovitz 
makes ~ 12 brownies

8 Tbsp salted or unsalted butter, cut into pieces
6 ounces bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/4 cup cocoa
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup flour
1 cup dulce de leche

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  

Line an 8-inch square dish with aluminum foil that covers the bottom and reaches up the sides of the dish, hanging over the sides.  If one piece of foil doesn't do the job, use two and cross them.  Grease the bottom and sides of the foil with butter or non-stick cooking spray (I used Pam for Baking).

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan.  Add the chocolate pieces and stir constantly over very low heat until the chocolate is melted.  Remove from heat and whisk in the cocoa powder until smooth.  Add in the eggs, one at a time.  Then stir in the sugar, vanilla, and then the flour.

Scrape half of the batter into the prepared pan.  Drop 1/3 of the dulce de leche, evenly spaced in dollops, over the brownie batter, then use a knife to swirl through.  Spread the remaining brownie batter on top, then drop spoonfuls of the remaining dulce de leche over the top of the batter.  Use your knife again to swirl through.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes.  The brownies are done when the center feels just-slightly firm.  Remove from the oven and cool completely.

The brownies taste even better the second day.  They'll keep up to 3 days, covered or in an airtight container.  Ours didn't make it that long so I can't really vouch for the timeline.

Cranberry Sauce

So even though I made this cranberry sauce back in November for Thanksgiving, I still wanted to post it for two reasons: 1) this was the first time I'd ever made real cranberry sauce, and 2) I really liked the photos.  Even though I don't have photos of the end result, it was pretty.

Having never cooked with cranberries before, I had no idea that they'd start to split / pop as they heated.  I was a little nervous at first that I was about to cause some sort of explosion, but luckily the house we just bought is still standing.

This recipe was BEYOND easy.  Even though I came across it on Beantown Baker's site, it's the standard recipe from Ocean Spray.  I don't normally eat cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving because the canned gelatin stuff freaks me out.  But I love the flavor of cranberries and I really enjoyed this dish.  I was able to make it a day or two before the holiday and then just leave it in the fridge until we were ready to eat.  There's not much to say beyond this; when I say it's easy, I'm not kidding.


Cranberry Sauce
original recipe from Ocean Spray via Beantown Baker
makes ~ 2 cups

1 cup sugar
1 cup water
12 oz. fresh cranberries, rinsed and drained


Combine sugar and water in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil.  Add cranberries and return to a boil.

Reduce heat and boil gently for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Cover and cool completely until room temperature.  Refrigerate until serving time.

Orange-Frosted Cranberry Cookies

Please forgive my delay in posting!  I have been having trouble getting my font consistent among/throughout posts, so my OCD has won out over the past few months as I tried to fix it.  It may not be corrected yet but I wanted to get some posts up, so try not to remind me if they don't look as perfect as I think they have to. :-)
 

Happy New Year!  We're now 1.5 months into 2011 and I still think about these cookies.  This became my go-to recipe this season and I think I made more than 20 dozen during the month of December.  I participated in the cookie exchange at work and because I had two pounds of cranberries left over from Thanksgiving, I wanted a recipe that would let me use those.  

Why did I have two pounds of cranberries?  Well, instead of buying the standard 12-ounce bag for a batch of cranberry sauce, Hubby decided that we needed to buy the 3-pound bag at Sam's Club instead.  It's things like 3-pound bags of cranberries that I try to avoid sending him to the grocery store by himself.

Anyway, when I was searching for cookies with cranberries I came across this Betty Crocker recipe on the internet.  It's delicious!  I made 10 dozen for the cookie exchange and then continued to bake them (using a second giant bag of cranberries) throughout the season.  I altered my recipe a bit from Betty's version, and I've reflected those changes below.  I stored some of the cookies in airtight tins/containers and they stayed VERY soft, but even the ones I left out for a few days didn't really get stale.

Lastly, if you don't have a cookie scoop I highly recommend one!  I have a running list of items on Amazon that I throw into my cart when I need free shipping, and this Oxo Medium Cookie Scoop was about $10 and one of the best baking investments I've ever made.  You fly through the batches and each cookie comes out the same size and bakes evenly.

A few tips:

• Take your butter right from the fridge to the microwave and soften it until it's melting on the bottom and very soft (but intact) in the rest of the stick.
• Use your food processor to chop the cranberries instead of doing it by hand.
• Instead of dipping the cookies in the frosting, set the cookies up on a foil-lined baking sheet and use a silicone pastry brush to frost them.  Then put the baking sheets in the fridge for 10-15 minutes to help the icing set.  Leave the cookies out overnight to make sure they set the rest of the way.

Orange-Frosted Cranberry Cookies

original recipe from Betty Crocker's website

makes ~4 dozen

Cookies

3/4 cup granulated white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar (packed)

1 cup butter or margarine, softened-to-nearly-melted

1 tsp grated orange peel

2 tbsp orange juice

1 egg

2 1/2 cups AP flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups coarsely chopped cranberries 

Frosting

1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

2-3 tbsp orange juice

1/2 tsp grated orange peel

Heat oven to 375 degrees and spray cookie sheets with non-stick spray, or line with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, beat granulated sugar, brown sugar, butter, orange peel, orange juice, and egg on medium speed (or stir with a spoon).  Stir in flour, baking soda, and salt.  Stir in cranberries.

Drop by rounded tablespoons onto the cookie sheets.  (My cookie scoop held 1.5 tbsp of dough, so I got about half the predicted yield.)  

Bake 12-14 minutes or until edges and bottoms of cookies are light golden brown.  Transfer to cooling rack for 30 minutes.

In a small bowl, stir together frosting ingredients until combined.  Use a silicone pastry brush to frost cookies with a thin coat.