Valentine’s Day Recipes: Cookie Dough Truffles

I don’t want to alarm you, but are you aware that Valentine’s Day is upon us yet again?

If you’ve got a Valentine you’re looking to impress, might I suggest these sinfully rich chocolate-covered balls of cookie dough? They will scream your unending love and devotion with every bite and make this one of the most romantic and memorable Valentine’s Days you and your lovebird have ever had.

Or, you can just go with that Ziggy card you’ve got in the top drawer.  It’s your call.

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Five Things I Learned From the Hollywood Arsonist OR “Cornmeal Thyme Cookies”

Don’t be fooled by the two ingredients in the name, these babies cook up with a sweet, buttery flavor and just a hint of cornbread goodness. This is the perfect cookie to ween you off the daily sugar showers you took through the month of December.

Last weekend, a crazed arsonist terrorized the streets of Hollywood, igniting over 50 fires all over town in the span of three nights, and causing over 2 million dollars in damage.

Here are five things I learned from the experience, followed by a recipe for cookies.

1.) I probably am not the person to contact in case of emergency, especially if I don’t know you.

MG called me at 4 in the morning last Saturday to tell me he’d woken to the sounds of his neighbors screaming “Fire!” He looked out his bedroom window and saw the carport of the apartment building next to him engulfed in flames.

“Okay, what do you want me to do?” I asked — not in a snotty way, but because I actually did not know what I was supposed to do!  Thankfully, he didn’t know what I was supposed to do either.  Then there was about five seconds of awkward silence, like when you run out of pieces for your new IKEA credenza but there’s still a page and a half of assembly instructions left to go.  Finally, I managed to come up with, “You need to get out of there!”  Boy, the Red Cross really needs to put me on the payroll, don’t they?  My split-second thinking would be an asset to any life-threatening crisis.  Did MG actually need to hear this from me?  Was he sitting there thinking, “Aw really?  I was planning to just go back to bed.  The fire is like twenty feet away, and if I can’t jump twenty feet, will a fire really be able to?”

Despite what the stickers on the elevator wall ask of me, I do not stay calm in a crisis.  When I first heard the phone ring, I immediately panicked, the way one does when they hear the words, “I think we should run additional tests,” or “Now we’re going to go around and all say something interesting about ourselves.”    Before I even picked up the phone I had the thought, “Please please please don’t be a number I recognize,” because at least then I’d be off the hook.  If someone I actually know is calling me in the middle of the night, it’s probably going to require a level of cool-headedness I’ve never had to muster before.  No one ever calls you in the middle of the night with good news.  Even if your sister went into the delivery room and instead of giving birth to one baby, as the doctor had predicted, she gave birth to nine babies and a Cuisinart hand blender, everyone knows you wait until sunrise to spread the good word and invite people to omelettes.

If someone I don’t know is calling me at 4 am, while it’s true they may be in the process of getting mugged, going down in a plane, or choking on a chicken bone, what’s also true is that thankfully, it’s not my problem.  That’s why you should always make sure you’re dialing a phone correctly, especially if it’s the middle of the night and your life is in jeopardy. Grandma may hop into her Yugo and speed over to your house with a pamphlet on the Heimlich Maneuver, but once I get my six pillows into their proper sleepy-time configuration, if you call me by mistake, you’re pretty much fucked.

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Season of the Cookie: Peanut Butter Whoopie Pies – VIDEO

Also known as “gobs,” “bobs” “black-and-whites” and “BFO’S” (Big Fat Oreos), the whoopie pie is the official “state treat” of Maine.  These cakey cookies exploding with buttercream have never had their origins fully explained, though most attribute it to Pennsylvania Dutch country.

My sister Jodi and I recently had an all-day marathon cookie making session that included carrot cake cookies (see them here), chocolate mint sandwich cookies (here), and these peanut butter whoopie pies.  Working side by side, we quickly reverted to the traditional roles we held growing up within the structure of the Green family.  She transformed into the bossy taskmaster who knows better than everyone else, while I became the whiney “mistake child” who resorts to raising his voice and cutting other people off in an effort to have his opinion respected.  If you don’t believe me, check out the VIDEO PROOF below.

The combination of my sister’s and my family-fostered dysfunction and rampant insecurities appears to have worked wonders!  By the end of the day we had something along the lines of 300 cookies cooling on dishes and parchment paper slices all over my home.  And they all turned out pretty spectacular, plus we were still speaking to one another. There was a brief “missing acrylic fingernail” panic, but what kitchen experience is complete without one of those? Continue reading “Season of the Cookie: Peanut Butter Whoopie Pies – VIDEO” »

Season of the Cookie: Chocolate Mint Sandwich Cookies

Thin Mints are now relics of your past. THIS is the cookie recipe girl scouts will kill to keep out of your hands!

Forget what The Bossa Nova favorite, “Once I Loved” tells you.  I am here to testify that love is in fact not the saddest thing when it goes away.  A plate of these chocolate mint sandwiches disappearing is far far worse.  It’s enough to send me to the bottom of the swimming pool in my apartment courtyard, sucking my thumb and desperately holding on to a lead teddy bear.

Think “chocolate covered mint Oreos” and you’re pretty much on board.

Here is that phenomenal cookie that will keep you up at night, as it quietly calls your name from that easily infiltrated plastic dessert container on your kitchen counter.  You know… the one you have every intention of taking with you to work the next day because you truly mean to share these sinfully rich cookies – gooey on the outside, crispy on the inside, and a rich chocolaty peppermint center – with your co-workers.

But really, is that actually going to happen?  What have your lousy co-workers really done for you?  A sheet cake with your name misspelled for your birthday and a Darth Vader Get Well card when you were sick (“I sense a disturbance in the force!”).

Fuck ‘em.

Share these with nobody.  And I guarantee that at least one of these cookies you end up eating while your pajamas are on.

Season of the Cookie, 2011 is now officially open here at Tv Food and Drink!  Stop back now through the end of the year for lots and lots of new cookie suggestions, pics and recipes to enjoy!

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Season of the Cookie: Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies

Through these cookies, you will come to understand why it is necessary for me to keep all my toilet paper in the trunk of my car.

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Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes

That 72-ounce bag of Nestle chocolate morsels sounded like a great ingredient to have handy a month ago when I tossed it into my cart at Costco. But that’s back when I was still a producer at GSN Live.  I could have baked up a recipe that served the entire Salinas Valley State Prison and within an hour of busting the results out for the staff and crew, there wouldn’t have been a crumb left standing.

But GSN Live has gone to that great “interstitial-game-talk show heaven” in the sky along with… well, maybe it’s the first to qualify for that particular branch of heaven, but that’s not the point.  There’s just suddenly no need to be making recipes that large anymore, and the chocolate chips stuffed to the seams of that gargantuan bag have becomes less of a valuable component in my baking needs, and more of a nightly snack, gobbled down by the handful while I’m clearing out the 12 episodes of Charlie Rose that have accumulated on my DVR.

So whether or not I was going to be able to find enough people to help take these 24 sinfully satisfying muffins off my hands or not, they simply needed to be made.

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Sour Cream Chocolate Cake

I have made less than ten cakes in my entire life.  The first ever was just a little over two years ago, when I foolishly made a casual offer to bake one for my fellow control room members at GSN Live.  I didn’t think at the time I would actually have to go through with it, or that they would remind me of my promise every day from that point forward.  I definitely didn’t expect a sign reading “Countdown to Gary’s Cake” to end up on the wall, forever reminding me that, among other things, I have a very big mouth.

But when you make a promise to your cohorts in the control room, you’d be stupid not to come through.  You spend hours a day, five days a week, in a darkened room with these people, in close proximity, with zero windows and only one exit.  It’s a foxhole environment. You’re acutely aware of all sneezes, sniffles and congestion levels detectable in a cough. You discuss current headlines, wedding plans, the previous night’s dinner, sporting rivalries (I just listen), family frustrations, pet situations, in-laws, dental emergencies, broken bones, broken relationships, and on the rare occasion, politics.

It makes sense, considering the tight quarters, that you all do your best to get along with one another.  First of all, it makes the day go by faster.  But there’s also that annoying little thing called live television… and when things start to go wrong in front of the camera, you need to make sure you’re all on the same side of the situation. And even if there’s very little you can do to save it, you hope you at least have some people around you you’ll want to laugh about it with, even two years later (The “oh shit” moment happens at 4:34).

I didn’t know how to make a cake in 2009.  And I don’t mean a cake from scratch… even pre-made box mixes confounded me.  I didn’t own cake pans.  I certainly didn’t have things like flour, sugar and oil just sitting around my kitchen.  And if I did somehow manage to successfully pull a cake off, I had no idea how one moved it from its place of origin to a second destination without leaving half its frosting behind on the passenger seat of a car.

But you can’t let down your control room.  So I recruited MG who helped me purchase not only the necessities, but also suggested some candy lettering, because come on…  gay men are experts at snappy little messages.  Witness our Facebook updates.  They’re legendary! And if we can do the same thing across the top of a cake using colorful little letters made of sugar, saying no isn’t even an option.

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Lemon Cinnamon Icing… or “When I Confused the Salt and the Sugar”

I may be fast approaching middle-age, and on my way to senility, but I’m still entitled to make the mistakes of a rookie now and again.

I suppose it was going to happen sooner or later. Instead of one tablespoon of salt and two cups of sugar, I accidentally used one tablespoon of sugar and two cups of salt in the blackberry buttermilk cake batter I was making.

As you might have guessed, it did not taste delicious.

I suppose I’m no longer allowed to permit my “inside-head” voice to re-assure me I’m smart enough to tell the difference between salt and sugar based on looks alone.

I suppose I’m also no longer allowed to keep the two in identical canisters, sitting right next to one another, unmarked and usually filled to nearly the exact same levels.

I suppose I’ll have to buy one of those label-makers now… the ones that near-sighted great-gradmas have to use so they can tell the difference between the jar of gumdrops and the jar of buttons.

I suppose it could have been worse.  I could have posted it to Facebook.

See right in the middle of the comments, where Gloria says she has no comment?

I suppose that could have been worse too.

She could have decided she did, in fact, have a comment, and call me at home as I was dumping batter into the garbage can and weeping over my ineptitude.

Click on the link below to listen.

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