Caramel Surprises

Today I'll be sharing a recipe for Caramel Suprises. After making those cookies filled with peanut butter cups last time, I got the urge to make more stuffed cookies. I seem to be getting fond of this type of cookie that has a little something unexpected hidden inside.



Caramel, chocolate, and shortbread just work. The slightly melted chocolate, the perfectly gooey caramel, and the buttery sandy shortbread: three very different textures and tastes that turn each bite of the seemingly simple cookie into an exciting experience for the taste buds. Plus, they're pretty darn cute with the slight dusting of cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

Next time you have a bag of chocolate covered caramels, definitely try these out. They aren't difficult to make; the dough ended up pretty easy to shape around the candies. And the chocolate around the caramel adds another element of surprise to the cookies with no extra work on your part. Rather than just shortbread and caramel, it becomes shortbread surrounding caramel surrounding chocolate.

Jack Sparrow's Tricorne

The weather is sunny once again, so I'll be continuing with last posts's pirate theme. I realized that I didn't make a single reference to Pirates of the Caribbean in my last post, which is odd because when I think "pirates," Disney's POTC always comes to mind. Well, I'll make up for that today since I made Tricorne Cookies.

[map of Piri Reis in background found on Google Images]

What's a tricorne? It's a three cornered hat that was popular back in the early 18th century. An example of this style of headwear is of course Jack Sparrow's hat. I had a bag of peanut butter cups lying around and I thought it would be cute to make little chocolate pirate hat cookies stuffed with PB cups, like nuggets of hidden treasure in each hat. On another note, did you know that there's going to be a fourth movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (May 2011)? I just found out today as I was Wikipedia-ing info on Jack's hat. Enjoy!

[ballpoint pen on a large index card, referenced from Disney movie poster]

APPLE PIE-rate ship

It's starting to get warm out, which means that summer's just around the corner. First, let me go off on a bit of a tangent here. Two things I associate with summer are apple pie and the beach. Apple pie because I like having it on the 4th of July. And the beach because the idea of just lying out in the sand enjoying the sun just screams summer to me. The beach also makes me think of the ocean also known as the sea, which then makes me think of pirates...

...Which finally gets me to the point of my post: an APPLE PIE-rate ship (yes, I love puns). As I was trying to decide on what to bake for Ms. Humble's Not So Humble Pie Contest, I thought about how I always see interestingly shaped cakes out there, but rarely do I see pies that look like anything but pies. (By the way, the pie above was not burnt, just weird lighting when I took the picture :P).

Thus, I decided that I'd bake a pie that wasn't the typical circular pie. Apple Pie...Pie... 3.1415... Pi... Pirate! I would make a pirate ship shaped apple pie. I went to the store to search for an appropriate baking vessel for my plan and settled on a pair of mini loaf pans. I modified my pans with a bit of foil and I baked my pies. After the pies cooled, I had a little arts and crafts moment as I constructed the sails out of chopsticks, bamboo skewers, and a piece of paper. Once the masts were inserted, my pirate ship pies were complete.

Super Smash Bros!!!

Crossovers are pretty awesome. By crossovers I mean everything from fictional crossovers to designer collaborations, like The Jetsons Meet The Flinstones, Girl Scout Cookies in Dreyer's Ice Cream, Justice League, Alice in Wonderland for Paul & Joe, and Christian Louboutin meets Ladurée, just to name a few. One of the best crossovers had to be Super Smash Bros, the video game of my childhood. It had a wide cast of characters from a variety of different video games, from Mario to Captain Falcon, Pikachu to Link.

Continuing from the last post on Controller Cookies, with my mind geared toward video game baking, I forged on and made Super Smash sugar cookies in the shape of all the characters from the original N64 version of the game, modifying the characters to fit my cookie style. I considered making cookies for the newer versions of the game, SSB Melee and Brawl, just because there are so many more characters to choose from, but I find my heart still lies with the original. Making these cookies definitely had me reminiscing of those halcyon afternoons spent hanging out friends, playing this very game.