We all love to binge on our favorites this time of year; the same movies, songs, and recipes, over and over again until we can’t stand it anymore. I decided to try an update on a very old favorite this year: holiday sugar cookies.  You know the kind — you cut them out and decorate them like Santa or snowmen or dreidels or gelt. I found the simple recipe (below) in my mother’s battered copy of the Joy of Cooking. The vibrant color of our Yame Matcha green tea powder seemed full of festive possibilities, so I decided to throw some in and this happy-looking dough was the result:

Just in case my experiment was a total flop, I made a batch the old-fashioned way. I couldn’t leave that alone either though, and I whipped up a batch of Matcha icing. My “recipe” was basically a cup of confectioner’s sugar, a few tablespoons of milk and Matcha powder until a screaming green color was achieved. I glazed both versions. The green icing on green cookies version was my favorite. The Matcha lends the cookies a delicate, slightly sweet green tea flavor. Next time I would nix or reduce the vanilla extract in the original recipe — the Matcha alone is flavor enough. I’m itching to make some witch fingers out of this stuff, or maybe some shamrocks in a few months. Here’s the recipe:

Cream Together: 1/2 C sugar and 1/2 C butter.

Beat in: 2 1/2 C sifted flour, 2 t baking powder, and 1/2 t salt.

Chill the dough 3-4 hours. Preheat the oven to 375 degree. Roll out and cut the dough, place on a greased cookie sheet and bake 7-12 minutes.

Once the cookies have cooled, add icing, sprinkles, etc.

Many of us at Coffee Bean Direct are foodies and pretty talented cooks — if you ask any of us we’d be happy to tell you just how talented. That’s why potlucks turn into cook-offs which turn into marathons of indigestion. Today’s chili cook-off is an especially happy occasion since Sandy put last year’s event on hold indefinitely and we all had to suffer through the storm bloat-free. The chili was delicious, of course.

Also noteworthy was the collection crockpots, some museum-worthy.

The winning chili belonged to this beauty.

The talent behind the winning dish is chef John, was kind enough to share his recipe using our Dark Sulawesi coffee. Here’s the quick and dirty version:

Cook 2lbs of chopped onions in bacon fat over low heat until translucent, remove from heat.

Brown 2lbs of meat (the winning batch was a ground pork and bison mix) and deglaze the pan with 1/2 pot of brewed Dark Sulawesi Kalossi.

Throw everything in a crock pot, add 2lbs of Anasazi beans (soaked overnight), 4 pints of dark beer, chili powder, molasses, salt, and sliced Szechuan chili peppers (feel free to get creative with the quantities).

Cook on high 4-6 hours.

Fall is official and our seasonal flavors are full of cinnamon, maple, pumpkin, and other things that are wonderful to cook with. My personal favorite is Pumpkin Chai, a beautiful blend of black, green, and herbal teas flavored with chai spices, caramel, and pumpkin. It smells so good I decided to find a way to eat it.

There are many ways to infuse foods with tea flavor, and I would like to try all of them. At the moment I’m too busy for a recipe that requires more than a few steps, so I decided to give a simple syrup recipe a try, inspired by the title. It is stupidly simple, and the end result is delicious and versatile. Here’s what you do:

1. Brew a cup of strong tea. I used three teaspoons of the Pumpkin Chai in one cup of boiling water and let it steep for about five minutes.
2. Strain the leaves and bring the tea to a boil in a small sauce pot.
3. While the tea is boiling, add a cup of sugar and stir constantly for about two minutes.
   
4. Let the mixture cool completely. Store in a container with a tight lid (a canning jar works great).

At room temperature the syrup will last about a week before it begins to crystallize. Refrigeration will extend the shelf life to about a month, probably longer, but chances are it won’t sit uneaten for that long.

What can you do with tea-infused simple syrup? Bake with it, poach with it, add it to an adult beverage, or drizzle it on whatever you want. I’m already planning a million variations on this theme.

Feeling under-challenged by simple syrup, I decided to keep going and make sundae sauce, adapting this recipe for wet walnuts, my favorite. I brought a half-and-half mixture of the simple syrup and maple syrup to a boil, along with the vanilla extract and pinch of salt. Then I stirred in chopped walnuts and let it cook for a few minutes. That’s all. Warm, on vanilla ice cream, it is mind-blowing. Warm, on pancakes, also mind-blowing. Cold, right out of the jar with a spoon, mind-blowing.

Have you tried cooking with tea? We’d love some recipe suggestions!

Since many of our employees at CBD are food obsessed we though what better way to celebrate that then a cook off! There was only 1 rule for this contest-the recipe had to have either coffee or tea in it. With $50 up for grabs in two categories, people went to work on creating recipes.
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I love Fall; the leaves are changing, the air is crisp and pumpkin rules supreme! Seriously, pumpkin takes over during the Fall… pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie and the list goes on and on! So, in the spirit of all things pumpkin, I decided to make pumpkin chocolate chunk cookies and give them a CBD twist with a pinch (I’m using that term lightly) of espresso.

This started out as a seemingly easy task, but it quickly turned into a night filled with epic fails and colorful swearing. This is how it went down…
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