Have you tried those salted caramel squares at Starbucks yet? Whenever I get a Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate or a Caramel Apple Cider, I always buy a salted caramel square, too. They’re tiny little pieces of joy. And I love them.

It’s quite often that I want one, but I’m not near a Starbucks. I do live in Utah, after all.

One Sunday afternoon last fall, my next door neighbor gave us a jar of caramel. I knew that was the day I would figure out how to make those caramel squares. Though I’m no stranger to eating homemade caramel out of a jar with a spoon, I restrained myself to use the caramel for the greater good. I remembered a tiny bag of pretzels was still swimming around in one of my kids’ Halloween bags, so I bartered him for it, and got to work.

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With all this moving, I got a little overwhelmed and decided to tack some of the bake sale recipes onto this week. You don’t mind, do you?

On Sunday, my daughter asked me to make a cookie that was lemony, chewy, and had no eggs in it (so she could eat the dough, of course). I told her it was a tall order, and probably couldn’t be done. As I went back in my archives, I found a lemon cookie ice cream sandwich. All I did was adapt the recipe a squeak, and we had our cookie. We thought we’d coat them in powdered sugar to make them extra special.

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Okay, I gave these a different name, but I have to be honest: they’re practically the same dessert as the raspberry jam bars and the peach cobbler bars. I got the basic recipe from a friend a few years ago, who, when she makes it, dots the top of the batter with cherry pie filling, which is also great. It has become my ultimate go-to recipe whenever I am in a pinch and have to bring a dessert for a lot of people.

Since I was in a hurry doing family history research today, and didn’t have a lot of time, I fell back on this new standby. To change it up a bit, I just added a bunch of locally grown apricots, and I have to say, this may just be the best version yet.

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Honestly, I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out that the name of the bakery might just be the secret to the recipe. And I speak French, or did at one time, so I should have realized that the bakery is called Levain Bakery for a reason. “Levain” is the word the French use to describe a sourdough starter. Now, maybe it’s just a cool name they came up with for their bakery, and don’t actually put sourdough starter in any of their cookies. I don’t know for sure. But I think I may be on to something.

Before I go on, if any of you aren’t familiar with Levain Bakery, it is a little walk-down located in Manhattan, and sells huge warm cookies for four bucks each. Oooh, and they’re so worth it. The oatmeal raisin is like heaven.

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This morning, my five-year-old was screaming in a panic as we were in the car on the way to drop the older kids at school.

“I don’t want to get pinched by a leprechaun! I’m not wearing any green!”

It sounds cute in writing. But it wasn’t very cute at the time. I felt a lot like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character at the beginning of Nanny McPhee Returns.

These were the cookies I made for my kids for their after school snack today, which they then frosted by themselves. They’re an extremely simple shortbread, with an even simpler buttercream frosting.

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For some reason, I was craving this on Saturday. Nothing else would do. All I wanted was a warm, gooey, chocolate chip cookie, straight out of an iron skillet. With just a little ice cream.

I flipped through a cookbook or two, and discovered you could make chocolate chip cookies with melted butter. One recipe (from The Weekend Baker by Abigail Dodge) even had you mix the entire dough in the saucepan where you melted the butter, and then scoop out the cookies from there. Since I was going to use the skillet to bake the cookie, I took their idea further and mixed the entire dough in the skillet and baked it just like that.

As this was a lazy Saturday, and my intent was only to satisfy my craving (not a den of Cub Scouts’ or a mob of preschoolers’), I exercised no financial caution and dumped an entire cup of chopped Valrhona chocolate into the mix. What resulted after baking was a cookie with a crispy outer shell on the top and bottom, and a soft center saturated with mini pools of flowing chocolate.
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So how come nobody told me I can’t count? I accidentally wrote “the eighth day” twice in a row. I’d fix it, but I’m too tired. Hence my lateness in posting this 10th day recipe.

I heard of cloudberries a long time ago, and only recently tried them. They sound dreamy, don’t they? They look much like raspberries, but grow in northern climates, such as in Scandinavia and Canada. They’re often made into jam, which is really the only way the rest of us can get them. I found the jam in the picture at IKEA, but you can also buy it on amazon.

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I think I tried palmiers from a bakery once a long time ago. Apparently, it was a terrible bakery, because I have never wanted to eat them since, let alone make them myself.

But this week, after the puff pastry post, I had a lot of it lying around in my fridge. I didn’t want to do a complicated recipe today, and so I thought maybe I should try making palmiers. Nothing could be simpler than palmiers. Traditional palmiers are just a sheet of puff pastry, coated in sugar, and rolled up so that they look like the capital of an ionic pillar. As they bake, the sugar caramelizes and the layers of dough puff up and get crisp.

But last time I tried them, I thought they were horrible.

Then I thought maybe it was just the bakery I bought them from, or maybe they were simply made with cheap puff pastry. That’s one of the things about cooking: Simple recipes are great, but only as great as the ingredients. If you use crappy ingredients, then the finished product will be crappy. And there’s no way around it.

So today, I gave them a try. I was right. The ones I had before must have been made with cheap, store-bought, non-butter puff pastry. Because the ones I made today were crisp, buttery, sweet, and exactly how they should have been before.

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Well, here I am, up late getting our second day of Christmas going.

Coincidentally, someone VERY nice in our neighborhood has made our family the recipient of a Twelve Days of Christmas. This morning, on our way to school, we found a bag full of goodies that someone had left on our door last night. Tonight, they left us another bag. My kids can’t stop talking about it, and we are thrilled.

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Or, if you don’t want to donate these to a school bake sale, might I suggest a new title: Valrhona Chunk Cookies. Oh yeah, that’s right. When I made these today, I made half of the dough with regular chocolate chips for the culinarily uninformed, and the other half of the dough with chunks and slivers of Valrhona chocolate. Lucky for the kids, I’m on a diet, so there may actually be some left after school.

Speaking of diets, bakes sale week always kills me. And as if these recipes aren’t enough, I made these cute little lemon bundt cakes on babble.com today (yesterday? two days ago? It’s late). So be sure to click over and check them out.

But I digress. I need to confess something to the Sophistimom readers before I go any further:

I am chocolate chip cookie challenged.

Remember those chocolate chip cookies I did ages and ages ago? Well, I used to make them all the time, and they always worked out perfectly. Then, out of nowhere, they started baking up flat as pancakes. I don’t know what I did, other than I may have switched from superfine sugar back then, to regular granulated now. I have no idea, though.

Anyway, I don’t like my chocolate chip cookies as flat as pancakes. I know some people do, but I’m not one of them.

But then a few months ago, I was babysitting my friend’s kids. While I was there, she left out a big bag of chocolate chip cookies (that was probably a big mistake on her part—I didn’t leave many behind). They were little, round, and chewy. They weren’t even crispy on the outside. They were so good, that I have been meaning to get the recipe from her since that day back in February.

Today, she gave it to me. And, since I am chocolate chip cookie challenged, I regret to say this is not my own recipe. I didn’t even tweak it. Not one bit. (Okay, maybe a bit, but only to let you know to use pure vanilla instead of the crappy kind, or to tell you how many chocolate chips to put in.)

And now I have the most delicious chocolate chip cookies I could ever want.

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