Pumpkin Baking #2: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Bonjour everyone!

And welcome to my second entry for the Great Harvest Holiday!

Remember how I said I'm not a good baker? Well, let's make that a "I can't bake" because this is not just the recipe, but I'll also show you how it's not done xD *facepalm*

Also, I probably shouldn't have done it today because there's a lot that went wrong today with that recipe (one ingredient especially) and I always kept forgetting making images. But to compensate that, I made a gif for one step :3 (Totally a compensation, I know)

But to defend myself, this is my first time with the recipe as well. I only saw my friend do it once before, so bear with me qwq

(Edit: I didn't do this "today", but somewhere around the 10th)

Recipe #2:

ᏢᏌᎷᏢKᏆN ᏟᎻᏆᏢ ᏟᎾᎾKᏆᎬᏚ

Just a heads up, this recipe will have several parts because it is way more detailed and complicated than the first and is overall just more that needs to be done.

Also, this is a 48-hour recipe.

Part One: The Toffee

Since this is a recipe that takes reaaally long, we're also doing more stuff on our own. For example, the toffee!

Toffee in itself should be easy because as the granola bars, it needs just 3 ingredients:

But there is a small catch already. The brown sugar I used was NOT the right one. I used demerara sugar/unrefined brown sugar (basically the first brown sugar I saw), but it's too coarse and it had way too few molasses.

The sugar you're looking for is one 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘴 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦. When you use a cup and put it into your bowl, pan, or whatever, it *has to keep the shape of the cup it was in*. That's the right sugar

Ahem, anyways-

Step 1:

You'll need a pan (any is fine). Put it in the stove and add butter, sugar, and the salt.

Then, heat it up until they all mixed and became one smooth paste. Make sure to give it a good stir. It should drop from your spoon once it's ready. Also - if you're having a baking thermometer, use it to keep track of the heat of the toffee because once it reaches 150°C (302°F), it's done.

My first attempt didn't work - the sugar didn't dissolve, it probably was also too hot, and the butter and sugar didn't mix at all. So I put it on a plate (without baking parchment) and started a second try.

Butter flakes are still visible, but they dissolved in the end.

Once your toffee is done, you take a baking sheet and put parchment paper in it. Then, you'll drop the toffee there and off it goes into the refrigerator.

It should cool down for at least 20 minutes.

Step 2:

Once those 20 minutes are over, you take it out of the refrigerator and make sure, you're not doing this on a Sunday becaaaauuuseeee...

You smash it!

Smash it into tiny little pieces. And that's going to be loud.

I don't have any pictures of that because...

Heheheeee...

I did say I was a bad baker, right?

Well.... the second attempt was still not hard, even though it wasn't just 20 minutes, but even 40 in the refrigerator, so I didn't use it.

And the first attempt was actually perfect! But because I am so clever and didn't use a parchment paper, it was stuck to the plate and it took me some time to get it off. (So, always use parchment paper!)

But it was too thick anyways and because of that, it couldn't be really smashed and eh.

So, I ended up not adding toffee to the dough at all. But the toffee tasted great in both attempts.

Part Two: Flavors

This is a really simple thing (and part of it is actually done later lol), but I wanted to add it here now. Since these are originally chocolate chip cookies, the other flavor/main ingredient is obviously chocolate, but these are pumpkin chip cookies, so these will contain pumpkin as well:

I used just one pumpkin, but you can use as many as you want.

Step 1:

You can actually start on this, while we wait for the toffee to harden.

Cut them into cubes. The size is up to you, but even bigger cubes are okay, since they soften up in the oven later on ^^

This is how I cut mine. They're medium-sized.

Also, stupid me cut the paring away, even though I didn't have to.

Step 2:

Next up is the chocolate.

In the original recipe, chocolate with at least 70% cacao is recommended, but that's totally up to you.

Because I don't have 170-gram-bars at the stores, I had to use 2 bars: one had 70%, the other 45% cacao.

Now, take out your bar (or bars), place them neatly on a tray and s̶m̶a̶s̶h̶ t̶h̶e̶m̶ x̶D̶, nah, you cut it into tiny pieces.

I recommend cutting it diagonally. That'll give you more unique pieces and it's also more fun lol

Once both are done, put them aside for now.

Part Three: Brown Butter

Okay, Imma be honest here now - I have no idea why it has to be brown butter, buuut... we're gonna follow the recipe. (An ironic thing for me to say xD)

Ahem, anyways, for making brown butter, can you guess what you'll need?

...

Margarine! XD

Though actually, butter isn't the only ingredient :0

While part 2 can be done somewhere during part 4, I actually recommend you do this before you start on the dough, so that the butter has more time to cool down.

Step 1:

Throw in butter and heat it up.

Crazy, right?

Step 2:

Once the butter is brown, you'll take it off the stove somewhere colder and add the 2 ice cubes. Because all the water evaporated from the butter and it needs it back.

(I still dont know why though.)

Anyways, I actually did a gif about how I made my butter "brown" and added the ice cubes:

This is not a gif I know. But Amino said the gif was too large. How dares it say that 15MB is too large for a gif?! Evil! :0 XD

Nah, it really is big and I knew that lol

Usually, if a gif is too large, Amino won't allow you to select that gif in your gallery, but if you select said gif via the preview option, you can get around that and that was what I was trying to do lol

By the way, just ignore that I poured something else in the butter. That was just some leftover butter from the first toffee attempt that didn't mix with the sugar.

And if you're curious - the gif is 8 seconds long; the original video was about 8 minutes.

Also - that butter isn't brown. Trust me, you'll see when it's brown.

So, apparently, butter becomes brown when it's heated too much. I didn't know it back then though.

I did this recipe a second time (cuz of my mom xD She was like "when u make new cookies? Me need cookies. COOOKIIIIIEES!" XDD) and that's when my mom told me that butter becomes brown when it's too hot for it.

So, heat the your pan as much as you can and then keep stirring until it's brown.

And here's why you should do this before making the dough: if you do this when you would have to add the butter to the dough, the butter is too hot when pouring in (or you'll be forced to take a break) and it will caramelize the sugar in the dough.