Getting my bake on.

Ever since my success with scones last week, I have been itching to get back into the kitchen and do some baking.  Not very manly, I know, but it is what passes for a stress reducing activity for me...and the fact that when I DO turn out a nice product I get love, thanks and praise heaped on me is a pleasant by product.  I learned in my leadership class this last week that one of my personality traits is the desire and yearning to have affection given to me.  Creating tasty things in the kitchen gives people and excuse to give me that affection.

I do enjoy cooking also,and the hours I work for my new job don't always give me the time to do that during the week. At the Shipyard, I was getting home at 4:20ish...plenty of time to get dinner ready in a timely manner.  New job I can't expect to be home much before 5:15 normally.  If we wait until then to start dinner, we won't be eating until 7, which doesn't leave a lot of 'kick back' time after dinner.  So, on the weekends, I try to do most of the cooking. 

We were invited to dinner at my bosses house Saturday, and I was placed in charge of desert.  I suppose I could have hit the store and picked something up, but while I was at the store, I saw packages of lady fingers for sale.  Lady Fingers to me mean one thing: Tiramisu.  It being a few years since I made tiramisu at home, I had to once again go trolling online for my favorite recipe...luckily it's pretty easy to find, and in this case I recommend a neat website called Cooking for Engineers.com  I haven't looked at every possible recipe they have but the ones I have looked at are easy to understand and presented in easy to follow ways. 

Since tiramisu is a strong flavor, and I wasn't sure everyone would want it, I decided to make something more crowd friendly: Chocolate Chip Cookies.  Never made chocolate chip cookies at home before...so, once again, I threw myself on the alter of Alton Brown.  He has three different recipes for cookies...one for crispy, one for cakey, and one for chewy.  If I wanted crisp, I would buy Chips Ahoy...cakey, I would get chocolate chip muffins.  But ooowey, gooey, chewy cookies?  Those can only be made at home.  Mine came out pretty okay...in fact, my wife(who is legally required to lie to me to build up my ego) said they were the best she had had.  I can say this: putting them on a plate to bring them to my friends house was really, really tough. 

Dinner and games at my bosses house was a good time.  He went all out and made both elk AND deer back strap on the grill, with baked potatoes and salad.  As for desert, the cookies were more popular than the tiramisu.  I learned an important lesson for the next time I make the tiramisu...taste the coffee first.  In this case, I used a new type of coffee...Dunkin Donuts Turbo brew...and it was WAY too strong and nasty for my tiramisu. 

Oh well...lesson learned.