Product Reveiw: Steviva and Fructevia

So when we first received our samples of Steviva and Fructevia we were less than impressed with the flavor when we tasted some on our fingertips.  It was overly sweet at first but left a bitter aftertaste that we didn’t think we could tolerate.

However, since that was not the way the product was meant to be consumed we remained open minded about it.  We have tried it several times since and have been pleased with the results.  It is a good substitute for refined sugar when you are NOT tasting it directly from the container! 

Can we say that we can’t tell a difference between Steviva or Fructevia and real sugar?  No.  If you compare a dish made with sugar then compare the same dish made with the substitute, you can tell a difference.  BUT, if you didn’t have the original sugar-filled food to compare with, you would probably never know what you were missing. 

When compared to other sugar substitutes, these products surpass them all.  It is a natural product with no artificial or chemical ingredients.  For some it may take a little getting used to, but its very much like switching from regular mayo to light mayo.  After a few times, you don’t feel you are missing anything.  You just enjoy it.

We tried Fructevia in one of our favorite cookies recipes — Apricot, Walnut and White Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies and enjoyed them very much.  We would definitely try it in more of our favorite recipes and help eliminate extra sugar from our diets.  Here is our cookie recipe for you to try for yourself! 

Apricot, Walnut and White Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies –
Made with All-Natural Sugar Substitute, Fructevia

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups old-fashioned oatmeal

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 cup brown sugar, packed

1/8 cup Fructevia Sugar Substitute (or use 1/4 cup granulated sugar)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 eggs, large

2 cups dried apricots, chopped into 1/4-inch pieces

1 cup walnuts, chopped

1 cup white chocolate chips

Preparation

Place oatmeal, flour and baking soda in a medium bowl and mix until well blended. Set aside. In a large mixing bowl or stand mixer, cream the butter, brown sugar and Fructevia (or granulated sugar) on medium speed until well blended and fluffy.  Reduce speed to low and add salt, vanilla and eggs, beating until combined.  Gradually add flour mixture, mixing until just combined.  Stir in the apricots, walnuts and chocolate chips. Refrigerate, covered, for 30 to 45 minutes, until cold.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Using a tablespoon, drop heaping spoons of the cookie dough, spaced apart 2-inches, onto baking sheets that are lined with parchment paper.  Bake for approximately 14 minutes, until cookies are golden brown around the edges, but still soft in the center.  Remove cookies from oven, but leave on the baking sheets for 3 minutes.  To cool, transfer cookies to a wire rack.  Enjoy!

It's Sugar and Cinnamon that MAKE a Snickerdoodle

When I was a child cookies were my favorite treat.  Mom would always keep the cookie jar filled with my favorites — I was her “cookie monster.”  Even now, as an adult, when we have recipes for many wonderful desserts, I will still choose a cookie for a treat or dessert if I have a choice.  One of my favorites to have this time of year (even though I suppose they are not technically a Christmas cookie), is a Snickerdoodle.  There is something festive about their sugar and cinnamon topping that seems to fit.

I can remember vividly singing Christmas carols with the lights of our Christmas
tree flickering in the background while we made these cookies.  After all
these years I think now that this memory has been one of the best Christmas
gifts my Mom has ever given me.  

This is such a wonderful memory for me that I felt I had to share her recipe with you.

Ingredients

1 cup butter flavor shortening

1 ¼  cups sugar

¼ cup light brown sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla

2 large eggs at room temperature

2 ¾ cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

1 teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon table salt

4 tablespoons sugar

4 teaspoons cinnamon

Preparation

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Cream together shortening, 1 ¼ cups sugar, brown sugar and vanilla.  Mix in the eggs.  In a separate bowl sift together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt.  Slowly incorporate all of the flour mixture into the egg mixture.  In a small bowl stir together the remaining sugar and the cinnamon.  Form cookie dough into 1” to 1 ½” balls.  Gently roll dough balls in sugar/cinnamon mixture to coat one half of the ball.  Place balls  sugar side up on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool slightly on the cookie sheet before moving to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Makes about 60 delicious mouth-watering cookies.

Our two and a half year old daughter has never met a cookie she didn’t like, however she does draw the line at eating raisins in cookies.  She will eat the cookie all around the raisin, but will eave behind the raisin itself.

One of her favorite cookies to have us bake is this Sugar Cookie recipe.  This is mostly because she gets to cut out the cookies using the cutter shapes of her choice and assist with the decorating.

This is especially fun for us because we get to do something that we like to do and share the activity with her as well.  She gets a kick out of helping and of course we all have the added benefit of eating the sugar cookies later.

We bake these cookies all year long, but at Christmas we have them waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve along with a glass of ice-cold milk.  This recipe will stay softer than many sugar cookie recipes and the secret addition of orange makes them a special treat — one that will be different from all your neighbors Christmas cookies!

We think this is one cookie that every cookie monster should have in his or her cookie jar.

Ingredients
¼ cup butter
½ cup butter flavor shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon orange oil
1 teaspoon grated orange peel
2 ½ cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

Preparation
In a large mixing bowl cream together butter, shortening, sugar, eggs, vanilla, orange oil and orange peel.  Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in small amounts until blended well.  Refrigerate 1 hour or over night.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Roll dough to ¼ inch thick on a lightly floured board. Cut cookies with a 3” round cutter.  (Different cutter shapes can be used but baking time may need to be adjusted.) Baked on an ungreased cookie sheet for 7-10 minutes or until cookies a lightly brown on the edges.  When still hot from the oven, sprinkle the tops with additional granulated sugar, or when cool, top with your favorite vanilla frosting.  Makes approximately 24 cookies.

Fun Fact:

The tradition of leaving cookies for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve began in the United States in the 1930’s

Our retail shop just hosted its annual Holiday Open House.  We decorate several trees for Christmas and typically go all out on food, wine, etc., and invite the employees and clients alike to come celebrate with us.  While decorating for Christmas in mid-November can be tiring both physically and mentally, we have found that this year it has really gotten us into the spirit of the holidays early.  For us the holidays begin at Thanksgiving and end with New Years.  We found ourselves planning Thanksgiving dinner before Halloween, and in turn planning Christmas dinner this last week.  This last week also found us in the mood to bake cookies.  Since our open house was this week, we gave into the temptation to bake.  We rifled though our recipes and dusted off an old favorite that we hadn’t made for some time — Chocolate Crinkles!

One great thing that these cookies have going for them — besides being chocolate —  is that they also make a tasty gift, either for a hostess, or to someone far away as they survive the U.S. Mail system surprisingly well.

Ingredients

½ cup melted butter (not margarine)

4 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate, melted

3 teaspoons vanilla

2 cups granulated sugar

4 large eggs

2 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup confectioners’ sugar

Preparation

In the large mixing bowl, combine melted butter, melted chocolate, vanilla, and granulated sugar.  Add the eggs one at a time.  Sift together, flour, baking powder and salt.  Add flour mixture to the chocolate mixture one spoonful at a time, incorporating each one before adding the next.  Chill dough overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Drop teaspoonfuls of chocolate dough into the confectioners’ sugar.  Roll the dough in the sugar shaping into balls.  Place the balls 2-3 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake 9-11 minutes.  Be careful not to over bake.  Allow to rest on the cookie sheet for 2 minute before removing to a wire rack to cool.  Makes approximately 60 cookies.

Find other decadent chocolate recipes, or delicious dishes for the holidays in these recipe collections from Peppercorn Press:

Enjoy!

Well it seems that after recently publishing our recipe for Russian Tea Cakes, we felt the urge to make more cookies.  This time it was our version of the Chocolate Chip Cookie.   

Chocolate Chip Cookies are one of America’s favorites, and certainly we are no exception.  We each grew up on the Nestle recipe (see the history of chocolate chip cookies below), but as we got older we both found that there were some things about it that frustrated us.  For starters even though we loved them, we realized how sweet they were if you weren’t dunking them in milk — which of course everyone knows that you have to dunk them, but sometimes you just want the cookie without the milk.  Then we also realized that in general, our families were not as fond of crispy cookies as of soft ones; and the Nestle cookie is definitely crispy.  These personal discoveries led us to play with the famous recipe from the Toll House Inn until it suited our tastes.

This variation, suits our tastes very well.  It makes a soft chewy cookie that is great with milk, coffee or by itself.  It is satisfyingly sweet, but not too sweet.  Over the years we have had many complements on these cookies and several requests for the recipe, which until now we have kept all to ourselves.  We hope that you will try our treasured recipe and that you and your friends and family will enjoy it as much as we have with ours.

Ingredients

4 ½ cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons table salt

1 cup butter at room temperature

1 cup butter flavor shortening

¾ cup sugar

1 ½ cup light brown sugar, firmly packed

4 teaspoons vanilla

4 large eggs at room temperature

4 cups milk chocolate chips

Preparation

Sift together flour, soda and salt in a mixing bowl.  Set aside.  Cream together butter, shortening, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla. Add eggs beating until fluffy.  Add the flour mixture one spoon at a time, incorporating each spoonful before adding the next.  When all of the flour mixture is incorporated, stir in the chocolate chips.

Refrigerate the dough for one hour. 

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Form dough into 1 ½” balls and place on an un-greased baking sheet, approximately 3″ apart.  Bake for 9-12 minutes.  The secret to this recipe here is to look at the finish on the cookies.  If the surface is still shiny, they need to bake a little longer.  Once they loose their doughy sheen, its time to take them out of the oven.  Cool on the pan only for a couple of minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

Makes approximately 48 cookies.

“When was the chocolate chip cookie invented?”

Most people know that the Nestle Toll House Cookie was invented in 1933 at the Toll House Inn, however, how the actual invention came about seems to be in dispute.  There are several places where you can read about the official Nestle version of the events that led to the famous cookie, but according to Wikipedia, the story may not be true:

“There are conflicting stories about the origin of the chocolate chip cookie and the acquisition of the recipe by Nestlé. The commonality between the two stories is that the chocolate chip cookie was accidentally developed by Ruth Wakefield in 1933. Mrs. Wakefield owned the Toll House Inn, in Whitman, Massachusetts, a very popular restaurant in the 1930s. The restaurant’s popularity was not just due to its home-cooked style meals; Mrs. Wakefield’s policy was to give diners a whole extra helping of their entrées to take home with them and a serving of her homemade cookies for dessert. Mrs. Wakefield’s cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, was published in 1936 by M. Barrows & Company, New York. Included is the recipe for the Toll House Cookie, originally called the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.

 

Nestlé version

Mrs. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular baker’s chocolate, so she substituted it with broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate, thinking that it would melt and mix into the batter. It clearly did not, and the chocolate chip cookie was born. Wakefield sold the recipe to Nestlé in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Every bag of Nestlé chocolate chips in North America has a variation of her original recipe printed on the back (butter and margarine are now both included as variants).

During WWII, GIs from Massachusetts who were stationed overseas shared the cookies they received in care packages from back home, with soldiers from other parts of the U.S. Soon, hundreds of GIs were writing home asking their families to send them some Toll House Cookies, and Mrs. Wakefield was soon inundated with letters from around the country asking for her recipe. Thus, began the nation-wide craze for the chocolate chip cookie.

 

Toll House Inn version

Mrs. Carol Cavanagh, of Brockton, Massachusetts and a former employee of the Inn, and her father, George Boucher of South Dennis, MA and the former head chef at the Toll House Inn during the years of its operation, offer a different history of the cookie. Contradicting Nestlé’s claim that Mrs. Wakefield put chunks of chocolate into cookie dough hoping they would melt, Mrs. Cavanagh states that Mrs. Wakefield was already an accomplished chef and author of a cookbook, and knew enough about the properties of chocolate that it would not melt and mix into the batter while baking. Mr. Boucher states that Mrs. Wakefield was known for her sugar cookies, which came free with every meal, and were for sale in the inn’s lobby. One day, while mixing a batch of the sugar cookie dough, the vibrations from a large Hobart electric mixer caused bars of Nestlé’s chocolate stored on the shelf above the mixer to fall into the mixing bowl, where it was broken up and incorporated into the dough. Mrs. Wakefield believed the dough was ruined and was about to discard it, when Mr. Boucher stopped her and talked her into saving the batch. His reasoning was out of frugality rather than a prediction of the cookie’s future popularity.

Mrs. Cavanagh states that Mrs. Wakefield did not sell the ownership of the recipe to Nestlé, but she only gave them rights to print her recipe on the packages of their chocolate morsels. Later, Nestlé’s lawyers found loopholes in the initial agreement that ceded the rights to the recipe from Mrs. Wakefield, and began mass-producing the cookies.”

 

Russian Tea Cakes

Russian Tea Cakes

(or Mexican Wedding Cakes)

It may be premature to start posting holiday recipes, but with Thanksgiving coming closer, we are already starting to plan Christmas activities.  Last year was the first year our daughter was old enough to help with making sugar cookies for Santa.  The delight on her face as she cut out shapes will forever be one of our fondest memories of the year.

Since we have already been thinking about Christmas, it is only natural that we
should start to crave holiday treats.  This sweet daydreaming is what brought us to
make Russian Teacakes. 

When we were both single this was the cookie that we both baked most often; the reason being that it takes very few ingredients, so even the barest of cupboards will almost always have ingredients on hand. With this cookie there are no midnight runs to the market desperately hoping to find the missing ingredient for the recipe you suddenly started craving an hour ago. After finally giving in to the urge for fresh baked goods, you start mixing things together only to realize you are missing key ingredients.  This is a recipe so simple and basic that everyone should have it.

Around the holidays, we will sometimes make a batch of the teacakes and deliver
them to the young singles in our network of family and friends and include the recipe. 
They are always a hit, and we usually hear back later that the recipes were appreciated too!  It’s a great gift for beginners or anyone who wants a simple and easy cookie for the holidays (or any time!).

Russian Tea Cakes

Ingredients:

1 cup room temperature butter (not margarine or butter-flavored shortening)

½ cup sifted confectioners’ sugar + extra sugar for coating finished cookies

1 ½ teaspoon vanilla

2 ¼ cup all purpose flour

¼ teaspoon table salt

¾ cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preparation:

On lowest speed, cream together the butter and sugar until creamy.  (I use a stand
mixer, but this can be done by hand or with a hand mixer. ) With mixer still on low speed,  add vanilla.

Measure the flour and salt and sift together into a bowl.  With the mixer again running on the lowest speed, add the flour/salt mixture to the butter mixture on spoonful at a time allowing each spoonful to be incorporated before adding the next.

When all the flour is mixed in, and the dough is crumbly, add the chopped nuts
and mix well.

Roll dough into 1” balls and place on a cookie sheet.  These cookies barely expand during baking so they can be placed fairly close together on the cookie sheet.  Refrigerate the balls on the sheet for approximately 15 minutes or until very firm.  While the balls are chilling, preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Bake 8-10 minutes or until set but not brown.  Allow cookies to cool for a minute or two on the cookie sheet.

Gently roll warm cookies in the  extra sugar to coat.  Cool cookies on wire rack until completely cool.  Roll in sugar again.  Enjoy with hot tea or ice cold milk.

Makes approximately 40 cookies.

Find other great cookie and holiday recipes in our Holiday Recipe Collection!