Welcome back to Cooking with Bwog! After a learning sabbatical, Cooking has returned with a whole slew of new ideas to make your culinary experience at Columbia cheap, healthy, easy and/or really cute! This week, tasty and weird Valentine's Day gifts that are not bacon chocolate chip cookies. Also, if you're not in the mood for sweets this Valentine's, check out last year's recipes.

French Toast for the Morning After

1 loaf bread, sliced (Bwog recommends challah from Silver Moon)
6 eggs
½ cup whipping cream, unwhipped
Sprinkle of cinnamon
Sprinkle of nutmeg
1 orange, with 1 tsp. of the skin shredded (zest), then cut and juiced.

Supplies: veggie oil, pan, bowl

Crack eggs into a bowl and add the cream, cinnamon, nutmeg, orange juice and orange zest. Make sure it's all evenly mixed. Then heat the pan on medium heat on the burner and add a tablespoon of oil. When the pan is hot, immerse a slice of bread in the egg mix and then toss it into the pan to cook. Turn as needed, the toast should look slightly browned. Serve hot with caramel, jam, syrup, peanut butter, or anything else you like.

Whipped cream, twinkies and chocolate chip cookies after the jump.


Whipped Cream (to eat with berries)
Note: it's worth it to whip the cream yourself and not buy a bottle.

1 pint of whipping cream
2 tablespoons of sugar
Bowl and wire whisk
Second bowl and some ice (just in case it gets hot)

Pour the whipping cream into the bowl and add the sugar to taste. Use the whisk to beat the whipped cream until hard — you should be able to lift cream out of the bowl on the whisk. It should take around 5-20 minutes to whip the cream up depending on how warm it is in the room. If you're in a very warm space, try putting another bowl with ice in it underneath the bowl with the cream to make the cream colder.

Homemade Twinkies
Note: this is a pretty hard recipe.

Cake:
1 16-oz. box of golden pound cake mix (or any white cake mix)
4 egg whites (separate the yolks out)
2/3 cup water

Filling:
2 Tbsp. butter
1/3 cup veggie shortening
1 1/3 cups powdered sugar
1 Tbsp. granulated sugar (regular table sugar)
1/3 cup evaporated milk (this comes in a can and they should have it at the local grocery stores)
1 tsp. vanilla
2 drops lemon extract

Supplies: oven, sheet pan, aluminum foil, bottle with the diameter of a twinkie, a big Ziploc bag, and a toothpick, non-stick oil (must be spray).

Preheat oven to 325. Make pieces of aluminum foil that are around a foot long (or buy the kind that are pre-cut to that length) and fold each piece in half. Wrap the folded foil around your twinkie-sized bottle to create a mold. Fold one end over and leave the other open so you can get the batter and filling in. Make twelve molds and spray the insides with non-stick oil.

Ignore the directions on the cake mix box. Beat the whites of the eggs until stiff (if you don't know what this means, see here). Combine the stiff egg whites with cake mix and water and beat until thoroughly blended (2 min). Pour the batter into the molds, filling each about ¾ inch. Bake in the oven for around 30 minutes until the cake is golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

For the filling, blend the butter and shortening (use a mixer if possible). Add the sugars slowly while beating, then add the evaporated milk, vanilla, and lemon extract. Mix all of this until smooth and fluffy.

When the cakes have cooled off, use a toothpick to make three small holes in the bottom of each one. Move the toothpick around the inside of each cake to make room for the filling. Using the Ziploc bag, fill with filling and cut a hole in the corner of the bag so you can squirt the filling into the inside of the cakes.

Val Morris-Lent's Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies*

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 sticks butter
2 eggs
1 splash of vanilla extract
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 1/2 cups flour
3 cups oats
1 bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grab a fat mixing bowl, such as would be used to make the witches' brew in Act I of "Macbeth." Blender optional but invaluable for the more indolent among us. Otherwise, bludgeoning the ingredients together with a wooden spoon or wire-whisk is sufficient. Beat sugar and butter together into homogeneous pulp. Beat resulting mixture + eggs/vanilla/baking soda into homogeneous pulp. Be careful that when you add the flour it doesn't spray everywhere. Beat flour + mixture into pulp. Beat oats + mixture into pulp. Add chocolate chips and distribute equitably. Taste dough to ensure deliciousness. Dollop resulting dough onto cookie sheet, twelve cookies to one sheet. Shove into the oven for about 10 minutes; rotate to promote equal heat to each cookie. Bake until somewhat crispy but not sapped of doughy moisture. Serve. Avoid burning your tongue on renegade chocolate chips. Makes like 30-50 cookies.

*Recipe by CML.