Join Dale and Cheryl for some delicious chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies, as well as a snack to take to a Labor Day party!
Ep.# 368 PSA Free!
WBCA Podcasts
Cooking In The Dark
It is more of the best of the cookie in the dark show. Welcome to Cooking in the Dark. The kitchen, I will go to the kitchen. And although some recipes I cannot breathe, Still I'm sure I can't do everything I need. This show cooking in the dark, it is the key. Here's my top-tiff Texan. You know Cheryl should tell himself, I know Dale Kimball would like to welcome you to this hair show. Cooking in the dark is a presentation of Blind Mites Megamole, and www.blindmitesmegamole.com. Welcome Molly! Welcome to Cooking in the Dark. Thanks for coming and I'm going to introduce to you, The man who prosed us every week that you don't need sight to cook dinner tonight, Dale Kimball. That's right, you don't need any sight to cook dinner tonight. Let's see here, I'm getting my little plastic doodad out. I'm getting my apron on here, the little sheet that we put out on the countertop here so we don't make a mess, getting some parchment paper out. We're going back to school, y'all, school's starting. Can you hear all the parents going, "Hooray, hooray!" And all the teachers going, "No, no!" But quietly, we don't want to give the kids a bad... Oh, you have to say, I'm so sad you're going back to school. I'm going to miss you. Every day, asking, "What are we doing today?" Yeah, yeah. It's like little boy goes back to school, summer vacation's over, and second day of school, his teacher's calling him, "Jack is misbehaving." And his mom says, "Look, I had him all summer long, and I never called you once to keep playing about him misbehaving." Don't be bothering me, man. Yeah, all the teachers are like, "Oh, God, here we go." I see as a kid, I never knew this until I married a school teacher. We were confident that they just loved and adored us. Yes, yes, and they were going to miss us so much. And they didn't ever want us to leave, and they wanted to teach forever. It doesn't work that way, man. It doesn't work that way. So today, for back to school, there was nothing better than coming home from school and having mom there to greet me with a glass of milk and a nice big old chocolate chip cookie. That made it worthwhile. Made that uphill walk all the way home. Same uphill walk I had to make to school. Amazing how that works, yes. What's crazy is when school started in September, man, it was snowing, it was horrible, yo. I had to walk three miles uphill in the snow every day. No, so we're going to make chocolate chip cookies today. And then we're also, in case you don't want to go all the way out on this chocolate chip cookie recipe, because I mean, it's not that bad. We've got some flour, some sugar, a little vanilla, some chocolate chips. We're going to sneak in a little surprise. We're going to put in some M&M's too. Make those good, you know, it's baking soda. Yeah, it's got a few ingredients that are not that hard. But then we're also going to do a peanut butter recipe that's so simple. One, two, three, four ingredients. Quick and simple, you know, and it's so easy. You just, boop, mix it all up and away you go with it too. So that's what's in store today. You know, for Labor Day, now I want to talk about something else you can do, which is so simple. And we've already got ours made here and cut up. In fact, Cheryl and I were joking about it. I'm like, this is the stuff we wouldn't eat when we were kids. But it's, it's jello. You just mix your jello up, a big box of jello. And to do that, it's what, a cup of boiling water, I believe. And then you, once it's boiling, you add your jello into it. And then you add a package of just regular gelatin also. And then you're the rest of your water. And pour it, let it set up. I recommend pouring it into a glass. I used a glass cake pan, a 9 by 13 glass cake pan. Pour it in, refrigerate it, let it chill. Once it sets up, you don't even have to put it in the refrigerator to chill. It just makes it faster. But once it sets up with that extra gelatin in there, it won't melt if you have it sitting out. So you can cut these into cubes. Some people use cookie cutters. You know, some, they have little heart cookie cutters or whatever. Make little shape, you know, whatever. But you can throw a couple of those in your kids' lunch or have them there for your, your child when they come home from school. Or just have to throw out on the dinner plate, you know. But they're great snacks, too. That you can leave out, cut them all up into cubes and then just scrape them out and put them in a bowl. And there they are, ready to go. But because of it being the gelatin, and that's to be something great that you could take to somebody's house on Labor Day. You know, make them, maybe make red ones, you know, and make some blueberry, make some cherry and blueberry ones. Mix them up together or layer it. Oh, that would be pretty. Put your, put your red in and even if you wanted to get really fancy, you could tilt the, the pan. Put a wooden spoon or something under the pan so that, you know, one side's higher than the other. With the first layer and when that sets up, then put the second layer in and put the pan flat. So that way they'll be diagonal. Oh, fancy, schmancy. Then cut them up or whatever you want to do with them. But yeah, they're great. Now, another thing you can do for the adults, if you're doing the Labor Day party, instead of putting gelatin in, instead of adding that second cup of water, add vodka and let it set up and make adult jello squares. Really? Now then, I might eat. Yeah. Ooh, squirrels will make the wee people a little bit differently today. So all kinds of cool stuff you can do, man. All kinds of cool stuff. So, Cheryl, first day of school, it's coming. Some kids are already in school. Others are just starting next week. Some are like us. They don't, you know, we never started until after Labor Day, back in the day. This is true. Jerry Lewis, bless his heart, passed away today. God bless him. No more, um, no more Labor Day telephones. That always with the signal of, it's appropriate, I guess, huh? That he passed away, like when school's starting, because that was always my signal that, "Ah, crap. Jerry's on. School starts." So, this teacher's teaching math, and she realizes that, "Oh, Daphne there's not paying attention." So she says, "Daphne." You know, and this is third grader. Daphne. What is 2 and 4 and 28 and 47? And Daphne goes, "Oh, that's ABC, CBS, HBO, and the Disney Channel." [laughter] Daphne's going on, y'all. All right. We'll be right back on cooking in the dark. We're going to start off with a chocolate chip cookie. Don't go anywhere. Bring your own milk. We'll be right back. [music] Now here's more of the show, with Dale Campbell and Cheryl Cummings. [music] There you go. School's back. The wheel's on the bus. Now, I know y'all are going to be cussing me, because you're going to be singing that for the rest of the day. The wheel's on the bus. Go round there. Oh, not nice. [laughter] The wipers on the bus go, "Swish, swish, swish, swish." Hey, at least we didn't play Barney, man. [laughter] Okay. So Cheryl, why don't you hit us up. Let us read us the ingredients in this here thing. Oh, the chocolate chip cookies. Yeah. Easy peasy. Easy peasy. Makes 80 cookies. Just a little heads up. Yeah. But it's back to school. You need 80 cookies. Yeah, and it may -- it'll vary. It depends on how big you make them. Oh, for sure. Okay. So here we go. We need a cup of butter softened, 3/4 cup of sugar, 3/4 cup of dark brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 1/4 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon of hot water, 2 cups walnut chopped, optional, 2 cups 12 ounces, semi-sweet chocolate chips, and that's all you need. Okay. Very good. Now the walnuts, of course. You can substitute cashews, almonds, of course, down here in the south. You know what? We do. We do pecans. Peacans, yes. Peacans. So I'm just getting the butter out. Now a cup of butter is two sticks of butter. Yeah. Only took me six years to learn that. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. But you got it now, girl. Maybe. No, you got it. You would amaze yourself here. I had a little bit of this. This butter was a little soft, so I was helping some of it off the, um, off the paper. Got a little butter on my hands. A little warm water. I'll take care of that. So we need to add now also, we need to cream our sugars. Okay. So that's what we're going to do first. We've got our butter in, our bowl. I'm going to be using the stand mixer. Okay. So we need three quarters of a cup of brown sugar. And y'all, I keep my brown sugar in the freezer. All right. Did you say three quarters cup of brown sugar? Is that what I supposed to have? Yes. Okay. And three quarters cup of granulated sugar. Perfect. As it turns out, that is just about how much sugar we're going to have of brown sugar. Time to put that on the shopping list. But by keeping it in the freezer, you won't end up with that brick, y'all. You'll normally be associated with that you're used to finding. Right. When you just open it up and then put it back in the box and put it into your cabinet. Yes. Now, sometimes you can microwave it and that'll help bring it back to life a little bit. It'll help melt it down. But most of the time, once it becomes a brick, it's a brick. Be like Nick Anderson shooting free throws against the rockets back in the 90s. He threw up some bricks. Uh-oh. Yeah. Four of them in a row was awesome. We ended up winning the game in the finals against Shaq. Aquim the dream. Back in the good old days. Back when we had a championship in Houston. We might do that with baseball, but I don't know. We'll have to see. We got to get by them red socks. They're looking pretty good. Those Indians are looking pretty good. It's going to be a good September for baseball. Okay. So we've got our sugars and our butter in here. Right. So we're just going to cream all this together. Like the sound effects. Let me get my, I've got a little rubber spatula scraper thing here so that we can scrape down the sides of the bowl just a little bit. Just scraping it down. I stopped the mixer. Now if you're using a hand beater, hand mixer, just, you know, stop it and scrape it down in the middle. You just want to get it all mixed up, cream together, get a good nice little base going. You know us blind cooks, we got to get our hands and everything, check it all out. Okay. Do you want to do the drying ingredients or we're going to focus on these right now? Yeah, we can do the dry. Okay. So it's just the two and a quarter cups of flour and a teaspoon of salt. And a teaspoon of salt? Okay. Because I think they have you mix the one teaspoon baking soda with a teaspoon of hot water. Okay. With the hot water. Okay. And that's kept separate from the drying ingredients. Okay. So two and a half. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add the flour and the salt. How much salt? Just a little bit, huh? Yeah. Like a teaspoon. Okay. That I'm just going to measure in the palm of my hand, y'all. I know how much the about the teaspoon is. It's about it right there. So I just poured it into the palm of my hand. Okay. There's the salt. Now you can pour that in the palm of your hand and just use your teaspoon measure. You know, your little teaspoon and scoop it out and you're good too. So you're not trying to pour it into it from your salt dispenser. Okay. So now let's start adding our flour. That's one. I'm adding it a half a teaspoon, I mean a half a cup at a time. Okay. Using my half cup measuring cup here. So speaking of salt, it was very interesting. I was looking to buy salt and I found that they had kosher salt. They also had pink salt, which I didn't have that guts to purchase, but it was very interesting. I think pink salt is even a little bit better than regular salt. I don't think. I mean somebody out there listening might correct me on this, but I believe the pink salt is unbleached. Okay. Maybe. Okay. Now we're starting to get a little doughy here. There's our two and a half cups of flour. You can hear the mixer kind of rocking and rolling a little bit. Right. You lock the head down. Okay. Baking some water time. I would hold off, I mean you check the butter and sugar to see how cream that is because you want to add in your two eggs and your teaspoon of vanilla. Okay. And let it cream some more. Okay. All right. As it says, until it's light and fluffy. Light and fluffy. Okay. We're going to make it light and fluffy. There go our eggs and the vanilla. Two spoon of vanilla. I mean. Two spoon. Okay. Just a little bit. One teaspoon vanilla. And then we need to put our flour in. Yes. So, yeah. You put in half the flour and then you'll mix your baking soda and water together. Okay. And then you put that in and then you put the rest of the flour in. Interesting. I don't think we've ever had a recipe that had mixing the baking soda with. It broke it down like this. Yeah. And it's one teaspoon of hot water or tablespoon. Yeah. And a teaspoon of baking soda. Yeah. Yep. Teaspoon of baking soda and teaspoon of hot water. So, are you just taking, you're just taking water from the sink. Yes. I've got hot water rolling. Yeah. Coming out of the faucet. I'm going to get my baking soda first. We're going to need to put this on the list too. At the bottom of this box. I mean, baking soda is so great for everything. Okay. Now we'll get our water. Okay. Mix this up. Okay. And then this goes in. I just used a perfect bowl here. Nice. I like those a lot. Because as you said, it's got those, what do you call it, like the spout. Yeah. It's a little poor spout and then the gold wings on each side. So it really helps. You've really got to work to not to over pour. To make a mess using these things. Okay. So we're just mixing, mixing, mixing. Okay. I think I'm going to stop for a second here and do a little scrape down. Scrape down. Break down. It really helps cop. Sing an action for you there. And you appreciate that. I know you do, see. No telling what you're going to do. I'm just scraping down the beater. I'm scraping down the sides of the bowl here. So we're going to let this mix up a little bit here, Cheryl. Okay. We've got our flour in now. We've got everything in. So where are we going from here? What do we do next? I think once it's all stirred together. All mixed up. Oh, you got to add in your chocolate chips? In your M&Ms. Okay. So in other ingredients, we don't have anything else to go in. No. You've got the flour mixed in. You've got the baking soda and water mixed in. Yes. We're good to go. Eggs are in. Futters in. Sugars in. Nellers in. Right. We're almost there. Oh, say this isn't that hard, y'all. Yeah. This isn't that bad. Let it mix up. Let it beat up a little bit here. Okay. Let's pull this head up. Because sometimes when you make the chocolate chip dough, you usually put it in the fridge and you let it sit. Yeah. We're going to get there. You're going to do it? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just by this is still really creamy and really sticky. Mm-hmm. Okay. This would be kind of hard, I think, to make, to form into cookie dough. I mean, it's, I mean, not, it's already cookie dough. Sorry. Yeah. To form into, like, cookies. Because it is very sticky. Mm-hmm. As I'm, I'm just kind of using my fingers to clean off the beater. Mm-hmm. Of our, of our, um, stand mixer. But once we let it chill, oh, yeah, the audience is all fired up on the chilling. Because I know what's next. When it chills, that means we're going to be out in the audience. Oh, this is true. Hanging. They like it, you know? Yeah. We've got some autographs. Talked to some people. See if I can find a sucker. I mean, a volunteer to clean the kitchen up for us after we're going. Okay. So now, two cups of chocolate chips. Mm-hmm. Let me get the ID mate fired up here. ID mate. We're using a special chocolate chip. Semi-sweet chocolate chips is what they recommend. Right. Let me tell you what we're going to use. A product special dark mildly sweet chocolate chips. Dark chocolate. Wow. Now, you can just regular semi-sweet chocolate chips. That's what's recommended in the recipe. Mm-hmm. But Dale likes dark chocolate. I bet you could do half and half, right? You could. Yeah. Absolutely. You could do peanut butter chips. You could do mint chips. I mean, you could do all M&Ms if you wanted to. This is true. You know, once you get this base dough made, you could do dark chocolate and white chocolate. Mm-hmm. You could do butterscotch. They've got it all, man. Okay. So here's one cup. This is a six ounce bag. It's going to be just about, but remember correctly, it's just a little more than two cups. Okay. So I'm going to use my scraper now. I'm just going to fold these in. I don't want to use the mixer. If you're using a hand mixer, you don't want to use that because it'll really tear up these chocolate chips. Yeah. I was thinking about the M&Ms. I'm like, oh my goodness. They'll just smash them all to pieces. This is the point where you just want to mix it using your spoon or whatever it is you using. Yeah. If you have a spatula, like I've got this rubber spatula thing, I'm just folding it all into the bottom, lifting up from the bottom, folding it over, just kind of mixing it all in. If you have a wooden spoon, that'd work great because, again, this stuff's pretty thick and doughy, but it's not to the point of being crazy doughy. You know, it's definitely not as thick as like when we made those faux brownies at time. That concrete. That takes a lot of energy. That takes a lot of, yeah. You've got to have some powerful forearms to serve that stuff up. Let me tell you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that stuff, y'all, it calls for a box of graham crackers. You crush all those up. You add two cans of sweetened condensed milk and then a bag, a 12 ounce bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips. It's just stirring that stuff up is so hard. It's so thick. Okay, so there's one cup. It's very, very tasty once it's made. What I did, y'all, I snipped off the corner of my bag of chocolate chips and I'm just holding my measuring cup over my bowl that I have the dough in and I'm just slowly pouring the chocolate chips out and a six ounce bag. I mean, if you wanted to put it all in there, it's just about two cups. So there's just a few little ones left. Yeah, you know. We'll go ahead and put them in there. We're going to make a cookie where you can't take a bite without biting a chip. Lovely. That makes everybody happy. I've got a regular sized bag of M&M. So we're not going to overdo the M&M's. But instead of putting nuts in, that's what we're going to do. We're going to put M&M's in. Okay. So do you think because it called for, I think, two cups of chopped walnuts. So how much do you think? This is probably about a half a cup. Okay. In fact, let me get the measuring cup and all. This is the one cup measuring cup. Yeah, a half a cup of M&M's. Okay. I'm just still mixing, mixing. Just pushing down, lifting up, pushing down, lifting up with the dough. Just trying to incorporate all this. Get a good little mix in here. Okay. Just kind of going down to the bottom and pulling the dough up, going up and popping it back over. Just folding it in, y'all. That's what that's called. Just folding it in. You just want to fold it in. That way we don't break the M&M's. We don't break up the chocolate chips. We're just folding them in. Okay. Okay. Now, Cheryl, like we talked about, we're just going to toss this in the fridge and let it chill. What do we need to bake at? 350? Oh, 375. 7-5. Okay. We'll do that after break. But right now we're going to throw this in the fridge. Let it chill. If you want to let it chill overnight, that's great. Like we've talked about before, make your doughs up one day and then bake the next. You can do that. We'll be right back cooking in the dark. Don't go anywhere because the best part is you have to come. We're going to bake some cookies. Now, more of the show with your host, Dale Campbell and Cheryl Cummings. All right. So, my cookie sheet here, y'all. We're not going to, like I said, we're not going to oil or grease this thing. I'm just pulling off a piece of parchment paper. Put that on our cookie sheet. This will make it so easy when these are done to cool them. Because all you have to do is slide this parchment off right onto the cooling rack. The cookies won't stick, no fuss, no muss. It's awesome. So, I've got our cookie scoop here, Cheryl, which is really cool. It's a teaspoon and a half. And it's spring-loaded, kind of like a quick release, kind of like an ice cream scoop. It's got a little hand. Oh, nice. Okay. So, it pops your dough right out. What we do is scoop in our dough. Oh, yeah, our dough is excellent. Nice and firm, not too hard, not too soft. As Goldilocks would say, it's just right. So, you scoop into the dough. Find the place on your baking sheet. Squeeze the handle together. And look at that. Your cookie pops right out. Perfect one. There we go again. Just make sure it's a level scoop. Okay. Come back over here. You know where you want to position it at. Squeeze. And there's your next cooking. Just that easy. This makes it so quick and easy, y'all. So nice. And what I'll do with these next, after, this will be after the show. But, because of time, time, time, there's not enough time. So, there's my three fingers. There's where I want that cookie. Squeeze the handle. That cookie pops right out. Scoop in the dough. Make sure we've got a nice level measurement. There it is. Three fingers over from that last cookie. There it is. Squeeze the handle. And there's our cookie plop. So nice and easy. That's all there is to it. There's our cookies. There's four down. Eight to go. But what I'll do with this dough is after, well, after the show. I'm going to go ahead and make, I probably won't do these whole dozen. Are the rest of this batch? Listen to the moans out there. Golly. Y'all didn't eat lunch today or what? You did say you were making cookies. I know. Cookies are dessert. They should have ate. Yeah, this makes it so easy, this cookie scoop. And what's nice is all the cookies are going to be uniform. In size, pretty close. Just a squeeze of the handle. And the cookie falls right out, right onto the cookie sheet. And what's cool too is that when it's in here, if you don't squeeze it, like right now, it's upside down. Okay. But it doesn't come out until I squeeze it out. So I squeeze a little handle and it pops right out. I'm ready to be baked. Now, we need to do these, what, 375? Right. For like, I think 10 to 12 minutes. Beautiful. What I love about these is once they come out, there's no hassle of scraping them off the pan. You know, because some cookies, even if you're using a grease pan, man, if they sit there for too long, you got to, it's like scraping concrete or something, you know? They're hard to... Yeah, to crisp up so quickly that you're like, what happened? What the heck? Yes. Okay. Choose. Again, I'm using the three finger spacer method. Three of my fingers is about two inches or so. On my cookie sheet, I'm getting a dozen cookies per pan. Let me tell you what makes it so easy too is the fact that these things, since they're all in size, they're all going to cook the same thing. There's my cookies. Okay. Just checking to make sure I didn't miss a hole. Make sure I got a dozen because I will be counting cookies on people. And I'm just joking. We'll make more once we get done. Once we get off the air, we'll make some more. I'm messing with y'all. Okay, y'all. Into a 375 oven. Mr. Producer, Magic Man, if you'll get the time machine fired up, we'll throw these into a little quick time machine, and we'll be out on the other side before you can say, "Look at these splits." So listen, y'all. While the time machine is in motion, keep your hands and feet into yourself. Don't breathe, don't cough, and definitely don't take a drink of anything. All right. Here we go. How long? 10 to 12 minutes? Yep. Beautiful. All right. Good. Everybody here? Are you kidding? Cookies? Yeah. Everybody. We probably picked up a few people on the way. All right. Well, they're done. Let's get them out. Beautiful. Now, being that these are on the parchment paper, we're just going to let them sit here and cool just for a minute or two on the pan, okay? And then we'll transfer them to our cooling rack. Smell good. I got a touch one. You know, see if it's done. We're just lucky. I was going to say, we're just lucky you're not trying to sneak one off the pan right now. Yeah. You know what? I got a hot, hot, hot. Very good. Very good. Okay. I got my cooling rack here. Let me get it ready to go so we can get those transferred in just a second. Very good. I like it when a plan comes together almost as much as I like a chocolate chip cookie. Cool. Okay. Very good. Now, with the parchment paper, y'all, there's going to be no scooping or slipping or any of that stuff. All you got to do is just slide the parchment paper off right onto the cooling rack and you're good to go. And by the time, if you're baking multiple batches, by the time your next batch of cookies comes out, they will be done. Nice, nice, nice. Okay. So we're good to go here, Cheryl. I'll be hooking you up with a cookie in just a minute. Let's go ahead and take a little break. We'll take a little breaky break and we'll come back and we will make some peanut butter cookies. How about that? Easy peasy. Peanut butter cookies. We'll be right back, cooking in the dark. Now with more of the show, here's Cheryl Cummings and Dale Campbell. Welcome back to more cooking in the dark. Cooking in the dark. All right, y'all. Peanut butter cookies are next and they're quick and easy. They're not as difficult, not as many as ingredients while those chocolate chip cookies weren't that difficult, but they sure are good. Mm-hmm. That's kind of test, so we've gone through about a gallon and a half of milk already. People munching on those, so let's make some of these peanut butter cookies. This one's so easy. We're going to need one egg beaten, slightly beaten. We're going to need a cup of peanut butter. So here's what we're going to do with peanut butter first. I'm going to take my one cup measuring cup and I'm going to spray it down with some vegetable spray. Okay, so what that will do is allow us, when we put the peanut butter in here, because my peanut butter jar is a little too small, to allow this peanut, my measuring cup to go in there. Gosh, we're going to need peanut butter too. Oh my goodness, we're just finishing on. I'll tell you what. And ready for the season, that's just craziness. So what I'm doing is just spooning out the peanut butter and packing it in my measuring cup, my one cup measuring cup here. I think one more will do us. I don't know about y'all, but I love peanut butter as a snack on crackers. Yes. In celery. Yes. Mm-hmm. Okay, so I've got my one cup of peanut butter. Mm-hmm. Let me make sure my egg is slightly beaten. Okay. So in goes the peanut butter. Well and the fact that you sprayed that cup means that it just plops right out. Plops right out. That stick. Yup. There's it. I got a little bit on my hands, let me wash that off, because I was making sure it all came out, but it did. Right. Oh, there's a little bit, but not like it would have been if you didn't pack it down. One cup of sugar, plop. I'd pre-measured that in the two cup perfect mixing bowl so it just plopped right out. You need a teaspoon of vanilla, that's it, that's all you need. Now it's time to get crazy, let's get all this mixed up. Now if you're using electric mixers, I'm just using a big old spoon, I'm using a regular old tablespoon. Mm-hmm. I'm using my eight cup perfect mixing bowl, just holding it with the convenient handle over here, which is nice, because you put your hand right up under the bowl, put your thumb on top, you can really grip the bowl, you're going to need that, because this is really becoming a sticky mess. Now the bowls have got that rubber feet on them, so they won't slide, not rubber feet, but a rubber bottom, so we just get this all mixed up together. There we go. Now on an ungreased cookie sheet, right? Yep, ungreased, yep. And we need little balls. About an inch, but don't panic if they are not perfect, just, you know. Don't panic, it's okay. Now this stuff comes out, it'll be, it ends up being like a pretty thick cookie dough. Cool. Nice. Okay. Up and at three and a quarter, y'all. Sort of low, yep. Up and at three and a quarter, eight to ten minutes, do not over bake these. Not that your kids have let you, if they're in the house when you're making them. That's true, they'll monitor for you. They're done. I never did. Grandma, Grandma. I hear the alarm, I think they're done. So here's what I'm doing. I'm pulling off just some dough here, and I'm going to make some one inch balls, or there abouts. You want to put these about two inches apart on your cookie sheet, that's a little too much there, okay. So to do that, I use the old three finger method. So I want to come two fingers off from the edge, three fingers apart between the cookies. And the recipe says this would make about two dozen cookies. It'll depend. It'll depend on how big you make your cookies. This is true. Okay. And then once you've got it on the pan, you could use a fork to sort of push the top down a little. Oh yeah, because peanut butter cookies, y'all. They've always got the criss crosses on top. That was one of the first things I learned about cookies. Criss crosses means peanut butter. Okay, so we've got half a dozen made here, Cheryl. Put that there, okay. These won't expand much when they cook. Just because there's no flour, there's no baking powder or baking soda in there to expand. I need it just a few more here. Peel a little bit off of that when he's a little bit too big, then we'll get to our criss crossing. So again, using the three finger method, three fingers there, three fingers there, like I need four more to make a dozen, and I've still got plenty of dough. And again, the dough you can refrigerate. So what I like doing, like I talked about with the chocolate chip cookies, yeah, these make delicious little cookies. Very tasty with milk. Okay, we're good to go. Now, like I talked about, you could take the rest of the dough and just go ahead and make your balls, and then refrigerate them or freeze them if you only want to make a dozen of these. If you want to bake them all, go ahead and make your balls and we'll get another batch going. We're only going to make this single batch right now. Did you hear the crowd? Whoa, that's been the ban. Everyone say what? What? So we're using this regular fork. Get a little water running here. So here's what we're going to do with our cookies. It's a little press perpendicular, I mean left to right, and a little press up and down, just to flatten them. Left to right, up and down, go back under the water. By putting a little water on the fork, it's going to keep the cookie from sticking to it. Okay, left to right, and then up and down. You want to flatten them out to about a quarter of an inch thick or so, left and right, up and down. Plus that water on them is going to help your tine marks from the fork stay in the cookies, which will make them look really attractive. And you know that comment they made after they come out of the oven, you can put some sprinkles on them, chocolate chips, I'm like, oh, I never thought about that. They have got all kinds of cool little additions for cookies, sprinkles and things, faces and different flavors. Not just the traditional, what we would consider, you know, what I remember as being sprinkles. You know, the little sugar, colored sugar or the, remember those little silver balls, those little balls that were hard as heck. They look more like BBs, I thought, you know. Is that supposed to be just sugar? I don't know what they were, wonder they didn't break our damn teeth. But then again, they let us play with toys with mercury in them and all kinds of stuff. That's true. Okay, there we are, squished in an oven eight to 10 minutes, 325. We will be right back on cooking in the dark. It'll be eight to 10 minutes on our end. It'll be just a short short on your end. Don't go away. Back bring your own milk, we're going to have peanut butter cookies, cook it in the dark. Now here's more of the shell with Dale Campbell and Cheryl Cummings. All right, y'all, cookies back to school. Remember, the wheels on the bus go round and round, all that cool stuff. So today we made chocolate chip cookies and we also made peanut butter, quickie cookies. I guess you could call them, they're awesome, huh? Delicious, too. So once you read some recipes real quick, Cheryl, let's do with a, which one you got up? Chocolate chip. I have the chocolate chip one, right? That's my favorite. That's my favorite. Okay, here we go. One cup of butter softened. Three quarters cup of sugar. Okay, regular white sugar. Granulated. Yep. Two cup brown sugar, dark brown sugar, two eggs, two eggs, one teaspoon vanilla, teaspoon of vanilla, two and a quarter cup of flour, two and one quarter cups of flour, one teaspoon salt, how much salt, one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon, one teaspoon baking soda, teaspoon baking soda, one teaspoon hot water, and a teaspoon of hot water, two cups walnuts optional or as we used, what would you say like a cup and a half or half a cup of, you use about a half a cup of M&M's or you can, or you can use pecans, cashews, you can omit the walnuts or the nuts all together, sunflower seeds, whatever blueberries, whatever floats your boat, man. But you should have two cups of chocolate chip. Yeah, because if you don't have two cups of chocolate chips, you can call it chocolate chip cookies. Yeah, you'd use, you want to use semi-sweet, we use the dark chocolate semi-sweet or medium sweet or whatever they call them or you could use some dark chocolate and semi-sweet milk chocolate you probably don't want to use because it'd be real sweet. Yeah. That'd be some real, but you could mix, you could mix in a little, you know, you could mix them up too. If you want to use some white chocolate and the dark chocolate or you want to use the semi-sweet and white chocolate or the butter scotch, whatever, you know, about two cups of chips basically is what we need to toss in there. And that's it, man. You cream together your eggs with your sugar or well your butter in your sugar and then you add your eggs and your vanilla, cream all that together and then your baking soda, you want to get that prepared, you want to combine your baking soda with your hot water. Mix that up. I just use that little one cup perfect mixing bowl to do that and had that sit in there. Really add in, I added the flour in a half a cup at a time instead of, you know, half and half, but just slowly add it in so it mixes in there. And then once you get all your ingredients in and mixes up, then pull your mixer out and you want to fold in your chocolate chips and nuts or chocolate chips and M&Ms or whatever you're putting in there. Because if you use the mixer on it, boy, it's going to break them up. You don't want that. You want to keep them all nice and neat. Then you want to make your balls about, like we did, make the balls about an inch or so in diameter. We use the cookie scoop. The cookie scoop is a tablespoon and a half cookie scoop. So that's how big our cookies were. Oh my goodness. Wow. Which is perfect. So that means they all come out about the same size. You don't have any big ones. They bake evenly, all that good stuff. Okay. Now, if you don't have a cookie scoop, what I've done before is rolled them in the balls and then put them down and just kind of just lightly flatten them. You don't have to flatten them off because they're going to flatten out as they bake. But I just, you know, use the bottom of a water glass, basically, you know, any glass with a flat bottom. And you want to put a little water on it, you know, keep it so the cookie won't stick to it. But just so you can just flatten them down. And remember, use parchment paper, parchment paper is so awesome, so easy to use. Once you start using it, you'll never go back. I swear. Okay. Let's talk about them peanut butter cookies. So these were simple. These are easy peasy. All you need is one cup of peanut butter. One cup of sugar. One cup of sugar, white sugar, granulated sugar. One egg slightly beaten. Yeah. And beat it after you take it out of the shell. And one teaspoon of vanilla extract. One teaspoon of vanilla extract. Mix all that up together. It's going to form a nice little dough. Again, pull off your balls about one inch balls, right? Yep. Put them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Flatten them with the fork. Do cross and cross. So you get your little time marks on there and bake them at three and a quarter, three and twenty-five Fahrenheit for about eight to ten minutes. Let them cool for about a minute. If you want to add sprinkles or anything like that to them, do it after you take them out of the oven immediately. Then pull off off on a wire rack and let them cool. All right. For Cheryl Cummings, I'm Dale Campbell. The Magic Man. We're out. This is Cooking in the Dark. See you next week. Cooking in the Dark is a presentation of Blind Mice Megamall by www.blindmarnicemegamall.com. Cooking in the Dark was produced by THC Productions. [MUSIC PLAYING]