"tollhouse" news and stories

Yesterday I mentioned some really unusual chocolate chip flavors from Vosges, but I neglected to mention that they are not the only ones making a foray into unusually flavored chips. Nestle has previously released several types of swirled chocolate chips, their Tollhouse Morsels, including white chocolate, caramel and peanut butter swirled with the classic semisweet chocolate. They have two new flavors out now: chocolate mint and chocolate raspberry.

Of the two, the chocolate mint is the better option. The green color isn't the most appealing thing to find in a cookie, but the mint flavor is great in a chocolate cookie and mint chips aren't something you see to often.

Raspberry chips aren't something you see too often either - and for good reason. They taste like stale chocolate with cherry flavoring, though they smell heavily of artificial raspberry. It's possible that the flavor will blend in better once the chips are baked into a cookie, but I am finding it difficult to bring myself to use the raspberry chips.

There is also a red-and-green swirled white chocolate holiday chip that Nestle has put out for the holiday season. The colors, again, look a bit odd in a cookie, but the overall effect is quite festive and as long as you like white chocolate chips, you'll like them.

The Seattle PI held an informal bakeoff that pitted three types of chocolate against each other in a recipe for chocolate decadence cookies, which are so rich, they're basically brownies in cookie form. They used Nestle's Tollhouse chocolate chips, Baker's Chocolate and expensive Sharffen Berger chocolate.

Both the Nestle Tollhouse cookie and the Baker's beat out the high-end chocolate cookie.

Unfortunately, the whole article is approached with what sounds like complete disdain for anything other than the Sharffen Berger chocolate, which is a shame. The fact that it didn't win doesn't mean that the palates of the taste testers weren't sophisticated enough to like expensive chocolates over less expensive chocolates; it means that the testers didn't think Sharffen Berger in particular stacked up. Many people who love chocolate, even very dark chocolates, don't like the unusually bitter notes that are found in the SB chocolates. And for a cookie that has decadence in the name, very few people are going to prefer something that actually tastes bitter (not just bittersweet) over something that tastes rich, chocolaty and sweet.

All in all, the Sharffen Berger cookies were probably still very good, but this little bakeoff just reaffirms the fact that it doesn't really matter what kind of chocolate you use for baking. Save your expensive chocolate for eating on its own.

The Decadence Cookie recipe can be found here.

Source

Who misses the McDLT? Ah, for those long lost days of oversized styrofoam packaging. Fortunately, I can relieve the glory days with this fantastic Jason Alexander commercial.

Cruising YouTube is a good way to pass a few minutes (or hours) when you have nothing better to do or simply can't be bothered to get on with your work. You can discover all kinds of interesting video clips - such as commercials from the 1980s. Granted, the commercials were irritating when they first aired, but they have a certain amount of appeal now. It's hard to say whether it's the fact that most of them have jingles/music or that they're simply hilarious. Here are a few more favorites, all worth reliving:

Over time, some of the dry goods in the pantry will expire, from Bisquick to canned cranberry jelly. Most of these things will still be safe to eat in the weeks immediately following their “best by” date, but it is best to try and use them up before reaching that point. Spring cleaning is a great time to sort through all those cans and mixes and figure out what to do with them. Soups and chili recipes are a good start for most pantry favorites.

Another prevalent pantry item is chocolate chips. The Tollhouse recipe is a classic and one of the best, most reliable recipes there is, so keeping a bag or two of chocolate morsels on hand is common. All of these chips have a “best by” date on them, after which point they will still be usable, but their flavor will begin to decrease. I happen to have a lot of seasonal chips around – red and green white chocolate chips for Christmas and red and pink white chocolate chips for Valentine’s day – in addition to the specialty Milk Chocolate and Caramel Swirl Chips pictured above. Just use them in place of the regular chips in the Tollhouse recipe, or one of the other recipe on the back of the bags. It sounds obvious to say it here, but would we ever have leftover chips if we just disregarded the holiday that they are “supposed” to be for and used them whenever we wanted a batch of cookies?