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TCP Kitchen

Smart Cookies

Author and Pedernales Electric Cooperative member suggests a cookie a day, along with timely tidbits that are easy to digest

Longtime readers of Texas Co-op Power may recognize the name of Anna Ginsberg. The Pedernales Electric Cooperative member won the magazine’s 2005 Holiday Recipe Contest. She also later won the prestigious Pillsbury Bake-Off.

In the meantime, Ginsberg hasn’t rested on her laurels.

She has a food blog, Cookie Madness, which she updates regularly. And recently she wrote a cookbook, “The Daily Cookie” (Andrews McMeel, 2012).

The ambitious book provides 365 cookie recipes tied to a holiday or event for each day of the year: There’s a recipe for Mint Thins for March 12, the anniversary of the founding of the Girl Scouts; one for Root Beer Biscotti for Root Beer Float Day on August 6; and a Peach Bars recipe to honor the November 8 birthday of Margaret Mitchell, author of “Gone with the Wind,” which is set in Atlanta.

She tested and tasted each of the recipes in her home and saved them in a freezer for a three-day photography blitz that left her kitchen “covered in cookies.” Ginsberg said after the photo shoot was finished, she invited neighborhood children over with trays to load up the pastries and take them home.

She said that although her husband, Todd, and 11-year-old daughter, Emma, will eat dessert, she’s the one with the real sweet tooth. “I like sweets more than regular food,” said Ginsberg, who bakes every day.

For dessert in a lunch bag, she suggested several recipes in the book, including these Hard-Boiled Egg Chocolate Chip Cookies (April 3, an Easter tie-in), which she said should hold up well in a sack, plus they’re a way to use up some of those decorated eggs after the holiday. Boiled eggs are used by some European bakers in butter cookies, according to the cookbook.

Hard-Boiled Egg Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup cold butter
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
2 hard-boiled eggs, shells removed
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees and place baking rack in center. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or nonstick foil.
  • Combine the flour, salt and baking soda in a food processor and pulse to mix. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture appears coarse and crumbly. Add sugars and the hard-boiled eggs. Pulse again until the mixture is mealy-looking. Add the vanilla and pulse again until the mixture just begins to come together. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and stir in the chocolate chips—you may need to use your hands to knead it all together; the dough will be thick. You will see egg whites in the dough—they’ll disappear as the cookies bake.
  • Shape the dough into 16 large balls. Arrange about 4 inches apart on the baking sheets and press down so that the tops are even. Bake one sheet at a time for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the cookies are lightly browned around the edges. Let cool on the baking sheets for 5 minutes then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. The texture gets better as the cookies cool. It’s even better if you freeze the cooked cookies and then thaw them.

Servings: 16. Serving size: 1 cookie. Per serving: 259 calories, 3.4 g protein, 14.4 g fat, 28.5 g carbohydrates, 1.2 g dietary fiber, 197 mg sodium, 12.6 g sugars, 53 mg cholesterol

August 2013 Recipe Contest