Monthly Cooking Thread, January 2022

Tiger-striped shortbread cookies

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
orange food coloring gel (I use Americolor)
2 tablespoons cocoa powder (dark cocoa preferred)
black food coloring gel
1 cup dark or semi-sweet chocolate chips
orange sprinkles

Stir flour and salt together in a medium bowl.

Place the butter, powdered sugar, and granulated sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Beat on low speed until combined, then increase speed to medium-high and continue beating for a few minutes, until the mixture is light and fluffy.

Add the vanilla extract and a few drops of the orange food coloring gel and beat just until combined. Add more orange food coloring if necessary and beat to combine.

Add about a third of the flour mixture and beat on low speed just to combine, then add another third and beat on low again before adding the last third. Once all the flour is mixed in, dump the dough out onto a silicone pastry sheet or a very lightly floured surface (the dough isn’t very sticky so I didn’t need any flour for mine) and smoosh it/knead it a bit, just until the dough comes together in a ball.

Divide the dough into two parts, with one of the parts being a little bigger than the other. You’re shooting for one piece that’s 2/3 of the total dough and another that’s 1/3.

Put the smaller portion back in the mixer bowl and add the cocoa powder and a few drops of black food coloring gel. Beat until blended (you may need to add a bit more black food coloring, but don’t worry if the dough isn’t perfectly black. It will get darker as it sits and bakes.)

Separate the orange dough into thirds and the black dough into thirds, for a total of six pieces of dough. Roll/smoosh one of the orange pieces into a 15-inch long rope, then flatten it down slightly. Roll one of the black pieces into a rope about the same size, then put it on top of the orange one and flatten it out a bit. It won’t totally cover the orange, but that’s fine.

Continue rolling out the pieces of dough and stacking/flattening them until it’s all stacked up (the orange should spread out enough to cover the black layers but not vice versa), then (gently) roll the dough into a tube shape (you’ll need to press the ends together slightly as you’re doing this). Wrap in plastic wrap put in the fridge for at least two hours.

Once the dough is ready, reheat the oven to 350F and line two cookie sheets with silicone baking mats or parchment paper.

Put the dough on a cutting board and remove the plastic wrap. Use a sharp knife (I like using a serrated knife) to slice the dough log into ¼-inch thick cookies. Place the sliced cookies on the prepared cookie sheet, about an inch apart (they won’t spread much). If you aren’t able to bake all the cookies at once, put the plastic back on the remaining dough and return to the fridge until it’s ready to go in the oven.

Bake the cookies for about 13 minutes, or until they are set but just starting to get darker on the bottoms. You’ll want to swap the position of the baking sheets halfway through cooking to make sure they bake evenly.

Let the cookies cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheets and then move them to a wire rack to cool completely — but keep the cookie sheets with parchment handy. Put the chocolate chips in a microwave-safe bowl and heat for 30 seconds, stir, and continue to heat in 30-second intervals until chocolate is melted. Pour some of the sprinkles into a small bowl with a spoon.

Working one at a time, dip the side of each cookie in the melted chocolate (I used a spoon to remove the excess), then immediately top with sprinkles. Set the cookies on the parchment-lined cookie sheets to let the chocolate harden (this will take about a half hour). Store the cookies in an airtight container.

http://www.marshmallowsandmargaritas.com/2022/01/25/tiger-striped-shortbread-cookies/

Penzey’s Spices Called Republicans Racist Loses Massive Number of Customers
NewsTalk 1130AM ^ | January 28, 2022 | Dan O’Donnel
Posted on 1/28/2022, 2:46:34 PM by Diana in Wisconsin

Penzey’s Spices, the Milwaukee-based company that held “Republicans are Racist Weekend” sale on Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend earlier this month, is now dealing with a massive loss of customers and is now all but begging for new business.

“After starting the year with All Republicans are Republicans and following up with Republicans are Racists we’ve set a nice little Boycott Penzeys! surge in motion,” Penzey’s CEO Bill Penzey said in an email to customers Friday. “It certainly wasn’t unexpected, but if it’s within your means, you picking up a small stack of Gift Cards would help.”

Penzey admitted that the “Republicans are Racists” email cost his business 40,005 subscribers, roughly three percent of the total. As a result, Penzey’s is offering a gift card sale “with the hope this might make it a bit easier for you to share some and possibly get a few good new customers to replace the ones we’ve lost.”

While Penzey claims that news coverage of his anti-Republican rant brought in 30,000 new email subscribers, he adds that “we are still down about 10,000. Please help.”

His email then takes on a desperate tone, all but begging liberals to sign up for his email list as a way of virtue-signaling their politics.

“If you can’t even begin to fathom how to ‘compromise’ with January 6th, or the Republican vaccine lies needlessly killing 10,000 Americans every week, if you have no desire to become half-way racist, and if their intent to destroy our climate for one thousand years to come doesn’t have you asking: ‘What if we just destroyed it for five-hundred years instead?’ we would be better off with you on this Voice Of Cooking email list,” he wrote.

Two weeks ago, Penzey wrote in a shocking email that Republicans are so racist that they fantasize about killing African Americans.

“Remember how Republicans, going against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, once again lied and said BLM wasn’t a peaceful movement but instead terrorists inciting violence throughout the country and then raced out to buy a crapload of guns because maybe they were finally going to get their chance to shoot a Black person?” he said in his email to customers. “What a bunch of racists.”

Amid the firestorm over his that screed, Penzey bragged to the Daily Mail that we has not worried about a potential loss of customers because so many new ones would start buying his spices, saying “on one hand they wish we would tone down the racism thing but on the other hand we have really good spices and they are not going to sacrifice those.”

It turns out so many of them did that, Penzey has resorted to desperate measures to build back his business.

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