Beevil the Evil Makes "S'mores"

Beevil the Evil disregarded the tortured screams of Bernie, his latest victim, as he stood on the graham cracker platform slowly crushing his purple cousin to death. Instead of feeling sympathy, Beevil found himself annoyed at Bernie’s cries as he waited impatiently for him to suffocate. "What is taking you so long to DIE?", he spat through gritted teeth.

As the last breath left the victim's body, Beevil’s only thoughts were, “Good riddance to your perfect face”. For you see, Beevil’s eyes and nose were recklessly stamped on his chin and neck, instead of on his sugary face. Thus, Beevil was teased and harassed by attractive Peeps like Bernie all through school, by ones with their cute faces placed on correctly, and he swore that one day he would take his revenge on those snotty perfect Peeps. It was retribution he craved.

After dropping out of sugar fluff school, Beevil and his two goons have been slowly snuffing out the lives of the “pretty ones”. Suffocating them between two graham crackers and microwaving them until their bodies blow up into balloons. “Ha! How do you like it now that you’re so ugly?” Beevil cackled. But the poor Peeps lay silent in death.

Beevil is still at large, as he’s quite successful at disposing of evidence. He long ago realized if he left his gooey kills near hungry humans they would quickly devour the platforms, the chocolate body stretchers, and the bodies themselves.

If you find one of these disturbing, but delicious “s'mores” on your plate, it’s possible Beevil the Evil has been up to his criminal activities again. And if you happen to spot Beevil in your Bunny Peep box, please eat him first and stop these horrific assassinations in the Peep community.

Update: Read about Beevil's latest escapade here!

Beevil's Death Platforms a.k.a. "Graham Crackers"
Printer Version

¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, almost room temperature.
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 Tablespoons honey
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup whole wheat flour or whole wheat graham flour
1 ¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

In a food processor, cream the butter and sugars together for about 30 seconds. Add everything except the flours and pulse until combined. Add the wheat and all purpose flour and pulse until just combined. Turn out onto a clean surface and knead a few times until combined. Wrap in wax paper and put in a container with a lid. Let rest in the fridge for about an hour.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

Lightly flour a clean cutting surface. Separate dough in half and kneed in your hand a few times. Place on surface and sprinkle with a little flour. Using a rolling pin roll out dough just under ¼ inch thick. Using a pizza cutter, slice off jagged edges, next slice the dough into squares. Place squares on baking sheet and repeat with remaining dough adding the scraps from the first rolling.

Bake for 9 to 11 minutes. Let rest on the baking sheet for a minute, and move to a cooling rack.

Notes
1. Freezing unbaked cookies on the baking sheets for 15 minutes will help them hold their square shapes better.

2. If you like traditional holes and lines in your graham crackers, score the center of the cut dough with a cookie cutter on each cracker, and deeply prick each side a few times with a salad fork. Bake as directed.

Graham cracker recipe & pictures by Laura Flowers.

Rolled Gingerbread Cookies, A Very Old Recipe.

My poor husband has had enough, again. Our library looks like a book vomitorium, and I’m the guilty party. Books are everywhere, floor to ceiling, as my cookbook collecting habit strangles the room. There are books old and new all over the floor, seeping out into the hallway. Jesse spent much of the weekend trying to organize the chaos, but with little luck.

I cannot help this though. Each book is a time stamp, holding history still while I absorb information, much of which has been lost to today’s cooks and bakers. Jesse will hopefully forgive me, as my collection grows into other rooms.

I purchased a 1948 copy of Brer Rabbit’s New Orleans Molasses Recipes this past weekend at an antique store, but instead of baking from it, I found a more appealing recipe online and used that instead! Yeah, I am in so much trouble.

Looking at the ingredients, I realized this recipe has very old roots. A good amount of vinegar is used to tenderize the dough, so that it can be rerolled quite a few times if needed. It may have been made with lard originally, because it needed an extra egg to get to gingerbread consistency with shortening. These cookies are real gingerbread, well ginger cookies really, leaving me to wonder why and when “bread” was eventually added.

The cookie stamp comes in a kit from Williams Sonoma. We had a lot of fun making up sayings and putting in the letters. Of course not all of our words where um, holiday appropriate, but they made me burst into evil giggles. We ate all these though, and only the happy cheerful ones remain in my freezer.

Rolled Gingerbread Cookies

1 cup shortening

1 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 cup molasses, warm in microwave if difficult to pour

2 Tablespoons white vinegar, (Don't worry there will be no taste of vinegar.)

1/2 teaspoons salt

2 to 3 teaspoons ground ginger, to taste

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

5 cups all purpose flour

In a stand mixer, cream shortening and sugar. Beat in eggs, molasses, and vinegar. Add the salt, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves and mix to combine. Add the baking soda and mix in. Add the flour about 1/3 at a time and mix until combined.

Spoon the dough about equally onto three pieces of wax paper. Wrap up, press into a 1 inch disk, and store in a gallon size bag. Chill dough for several hours or overnight.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and sit on the counter for about 30 minutes. Meanwhile preheat them oven to 375 degrees and cover cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Place a disk between two sheets of new wax paper. Roll 1/8 to ¼ inch thick. *If dough sticks to wax paper, flour lightly until it stops sticking* Cut out shapes and place on parchment 2 inches apart. Bake for 6 to 9 minutes depending on the size thickness of your cookies, or until no longer wet looking.

Cool on cookie sheets for a few minutes, then move to wire cooling racks. Once cooled, decorate as desired.

Royal Icing

Want to fancy up your gingerbread? This is a fantastic royal icing recipe. If you have a kitchen scale, use it. You’ll get much more accurate results.

2 3/8 cups (315 grams) powdered sugar

¼ cup (60 ML) All Whites 100% Liquid Egg Whites (The pasteurized stuff in a carton)

2 ¼ teaspoons cream of tartar

A very small dash of lemon, vanilla, almond, or other extract or oil of your choice.

In a stand mixer fluff up the powdered sugar to break up any clumps. Add the egg white, cream of tarter, and extract. Beat on low spend until mixed, then on high speed for 5 minutes.

Cover the extra icing with a damp towel while using, or store in an airtight container right away as the icing will harden immediately.

To thin the icing, add a half teaspoon of water at a time until desired constancy.

Ginger Cookie recipe adapted from COOKS.COM. Royal icing recipe adapted from “Gingerbread House Book” by Ella Harris. Book is in her Bake and Build Gingerbread House Book & Kit.

Rolled Sugar Cookies

Breathe. Are you ready for this? It’s time to prepare for Hanuxmasnyearkwanzavtines Day again. And no matter what you celebrate you need an irresistible rolled sugar cookie dough, and this is it!

At first this dough scared me. I thought it was too soft of a mess to ever work, but something magical happened upon refrigerating. It turned into the most wonderful to work with sugar cookie dough ever.

The best part about this dough is that you can roll it as thick or as thin as you want and it will bake beautifully, just keep and eye on them and adjust the time a bit. I enjoy these cookies plain and often choose not to frost them at all like this Scotty dog. My mother-in-law Diane gifted me with two antique Scotty dog cookie cutters a few years back and they’ve been my favorite ever since.

The Scotty dog’s leash is made with inexpensive craft cord. I cut the cords about nine inches long, tied a small loop around one end, and then tied the other end around the cookie to look like a collar. Then I trimmed off the extra ends, and melted them together with a lighter so they wouldn’t fray.

It was using this recipe I found that I could melt buttercream frosting in the microwave and it would turn into great cookie icing. If you have any lying around, try it out. Then of course there is always real cookie icing. Or none at all, as I enjoy biting the heads off my Scotty dogs just plain.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups butter, very softened and nearly melted

2 cups granulated sugar

1 teaspoon salt

4 eggs

2 teaspoons real vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon almond extract

2 teaspoons baking powder

5 cups all-purpose flour

Powdered sugar for rolling

Wax paper

Parchment paper

Instructions
1. In a mixer, beat together the butter, sugar, and salt. Add the eggs, vanilla extract, and almond extract and beat to combine. Add the baking powder and mix to incorporate. Then add the flour and mix just until the flour is mixed in. Be careful not to over mix the flour.

2. The dough will be very sticky, but spoon into about evenly onto three sections of wax paper the best you can. Wrap the wax paper around the dough sections and pat them to about an inch thick. Store all three of them in a gallon sized bag in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight.

3. After chilling, take the dough out of the refrigerator and preheat the oven to 400 degrees and line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

4. Dust a clean surface and the top of the dough with a good amount of powdered sugar. Roll to desired thickness, anywhere from 1/8 inch to almost ½ inch. Cut out with cutters, and reroll scraps. Try to cut close together to prevent too much rerolling.

5. Place cookies on the cookie sheets about an inch apart and bake for anywhere from 6 to 10 minutes depending on size and thickness. Cookies will be done with the edges just begin to turn golden.

6. Let the cookies rest on the sheets until they harden enough to transfer to a cooling rack to finish cooling.

By Laura Flowers

Uncle Will's Molasses Cookies

Uncle Will Caulkins is not my uncle, but Dishboy Scott’s great great uncle. He owned a bakery in the 1930s where these cookies were wildly popular in the Rosebush, Michigan area. I’ve listened to Scott talk about them time and time again, but words cannot convey how delicious these warmly spiced cookies are.

As the cookies began to bake my home filled with the most wonderful smells. I closed my eyes and stood beside my modern day cheaply built oven, imagining what it would have been like to walk into Uncle Will’s bakery so long ago. I surrounded myself with this potent perfume, nearly blowing over from its spicy sweetness. I hung in reverie of what it might have been like to walk up to a glass bakery counter in a different time, salivating in anticipation of one of these scrumptious cookies. Would Uncle Will have been at the counter? I imagine he would.

A few years later Uncle Will retired to a farm, but the recipe tagged along with him and he shared it with others. Around 1945 Scott’s dad, Jack, was about 5-years-old when he saw his uncle for the last time, but his memory lives on through this recipe.

Will’s sister, Jack’s grandmother, always kept these cookies on hand in a big covered crock in her basement. When Jack was a boy he would walk by his grandmother’s house, stopping by for a cookie after school. Jack recalls her having both an electric and a wood stove in her kitchen. I find myself wondering which one she baked these cookies with.

The years have passed by quickly, but these cookies are still a favorite of Jack’s. Only now he enjoys them with a pint of Guinness, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

We don’t know much else about Uncle Will, as there is no one left to talk about his life. Save for this one memory. Each time these cookies are prepared the story of Uncle Will is brought up for future generations. I feel privileged that Scott shared this recipe with me, and let me share it with you.

When you make these cookies I hope you’ll think about Uncle Will, the 1930s baker from Rosebush, Michigan.

Uncle Will’s Molasses Cookies
1 pound seedless raisins (3 cups)
Boiling water
3 cups granulated sugar
1 cup (1 stick) shortening, softened slightly
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
½ cup molasses
3 eggs
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon ground cloves
1 Tablespoon allspice
1 Tablespoon salt
1 Tablespoon baking soda
6 cups all purpose flour

1. Place the raisins in a bowl with enough boiling water to cover them by a couple inches. (See note #2 below before soaking). Let soak for 5 minutes. Then in a colander, strain out as much water as possible, pressing with the back of a spoon. Pat the raisins dry if needed. Next, puree the raisins in a food processer until smooth. Set aside.

2. In a stand mixer, cream together the sugar, shortening, and butter. Next, add the raisin puree and molasses and mix well on medium high speed. Then add the eggs and mix to combine.

3. Next, add the cinnamon, cloves, allspice, salt, and baking soda and mix to combine. Then add the flour in two parts mixing until just combined.

4. Wrap the dough in 4 or 5 individual rectangles in-between sheets of wax paper. Divide dough in half and store in two gallon sized plastic bags. Refrigerate the dough for several hours, or preferably for 24 hours to let the dough set and the flavors develop.

5. After chilling, set the dough on the counter and let warm to room temperature. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 350 degrees and cover cookie sheets with parchment paper. Parchment paper can be reused one time.

6. Heavily flour a clean surface, and sprinkle the top of the dough and a rolling pin with the flour. Roll out the dough to 1/8 inch thick. Cut out the dough with a 3 inch biscuit cutter. Place the rounds on the cookie sheets. Carefully reroll and use the scraps one time being careful not to overwork the dough, and then work those remaining scraps into the next round of scraps. Repeat with the remaining dough.

7. Bake for 10 minutes. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for a few minutes and then move to a cooling rack to finish cooling.

Makes about 72 cookies.

Notes
1. The original recipe was made with lard, but good lard is almost impossible to find today unless you have access to a Hispanic Grocery. If you want to make these cookies with lard, substitute both the butter and shortening with 1 1/2 cups of good quality lard.

2. If your raisins are soft and chewy skip the soaking step. Only soak if they are dry and hard.

3. There were few instructions in the original recipe. To clarify the instructions, I've modernized the wording, but left the ingredients and the ideas behind the instructions intact. Except for the lard of course.

4. These cookies freeze well after they're baked.

5. Instead of rolling them out, my friend Julie scoops this dough out with a cookie scoop and flattens them with the underside of a glass dipped in sugar.

Recipe by Uncle Will Caulkins. Picture by Laura Flowers.

WWII Caramel Refrigerator Cookies

I fumble around for a light switch as I walk softly in my skull printed Vans into the dark, cool reception room of a VFW Lodge. I find one, and suddenly spots of light float about the still dark room. Was this place alive once? It must have been, as old pictures of numerous past commanders run along the walls.

These men were once young, and grow older in visual records as time races forward. Fewer new faces come, and most of the old ones are gone now, giving the wispy ghost-like darkness a haunted feeling. I trail down the wall to the 1940s, my favorite era in time.

Young men, and many just home from the war, but I want to slide back just a bit further than these old photographs. I want to visit the time when these men were off fighting in foreign countries, and their wives, girlfriends, mothers, grandmothers, sisters and neighbors were taking responsibility for daily living. They did all this, all the while worrying about how they were going to make it, and how and if their loved ones would return home. Between newly acquired production line jobs and food rationing, women had to simplify their baking. Everyone was united in this war effort, either begrudgingly or wholeheartedly, but united nonetheless.

During this time, “Betty Crocker” printed a recipe for Caramel Refrigerator Cookies, which soon became an American favorite. These cookies were easy enough, stored quite well in the refrigerator until you needed them, and used brown sugar instead of precious rationed granulated sugar. They were also straightforward and not too sweet. Just the way I like my cookies.

I am in awe of the women who made it through this difficult time. They truly lived, good and bad, for better and worse. And after, they coped, celebrated, and had children. They moved forward, promoted service and veterans organizations, and changed the world. What an amazing time to be alive.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Caramel Refrigerator Cookies
½ cup shortening. (part butter or shortening)
1 cup brown sugar (packed)
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 ¾ cups Gold Medal Flour
½ teaspoon soda
¼ teaspoon salt

Mix shortening, sugar, egg, and vanilla thoroughly. Measure flour by dipping method or by sifting. Stir flour, soda, and salt together; stir in. Form in roll 2 ½” across. Wrap in wax paper. Chill until firm.

Heat oven to 400° (mod. hot). Cut in 1/8th” slices. Place slices a little apart on ungreased baking sheet. Bake 8 to 10 min., or until lightly browned. Makes about 5 dozen cookies.


My Notes
1. Lay a piece of wax paper on top of the cookies and place a piece of bread on the paper. This will keep the cookies fresh longer.

2. I doubled the recipe, and used half shortening and half unsalted butter.

3. I changed the vanilla to 1 Tablespoon for the double batch.

4. I froze the cookie logs for easier slicing.

5. I baked the cookies on parchment paper lined cookie sheets.

6. Soda in this recipe means baking soda.


Recipe in its original form from “Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book”. Write-up and pictures by Laura Flowers.

Mojito Butterfly Cookies

Last summer, my friend Miriam and I sat around on a warmly lit porch and enjoyed refreshing mojito drinks once a week. These cookies were inspired by those beautiful nights and fun conversations. I used a stencil cookie cutter to cut out the butterflies. Of course you can use any shape cutter you prefer.

This dough requires some chilling.

Ingredients
1/4th cup mint leaves, not packed
Zest of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 lime
1 teaspoon lemon extract
1 teaspoon lime extract
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4th teaspoon salt
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour

1. In a food processor blend until fluffy mint leaves, zest of lemon and limes, lemon and lime extracts, butter, sugar, and salt.

2. Next pulse together egg, baking powder, and baking soda. Then add the flour and pulse until just mixed, be careful not to over mix.

3. Store in a covered container in the refrigerator for one hour or more.

4. Set the oven rack in the middle and preheat to 350 degrees. Cover two cookie sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

5. Roll out the dough in small batches to 1/8th inch thick. Cut out with a cookie cutter and place on the parchment.

6. Bake for 11 to 13 minutes or until light golden brown around the edges.

7. Let rest on the baking sheet for 2 minutes and transfer to a cooling rack.Makes about 23 cookies depending on size.

Notes:
1. Cooking time may need to be adjusted for smaller or bigger cookies. These cookies are 3 inches long and wide.

2. If you don't have lime extract, try adding the zest of an additional lime.

Recipe by Laura Flowers.

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Graham Crackers

These are way too easy not to make your own!

¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) unsalted butter, almost room temperature.
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 Tablespoons honey
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon cinnamon (optional)
1 cup whole wheat flour or whole wheat graham flour
1 ¼ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

In a food processer, cream the butter and sugars together for about 30 seconds. Add everything except the flours and pulse until combined. Add the wheat and all purpose flour and pulse until just combined. Turn out onto a clean surface and knead a few times until combined. Wrap in wax paper and put in a container with a lid. Let rest in the fridge for about an hour.

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

Lightly flour a clean cutting surface. Separate dough in half and kneed in your hand a few times. Place on surface and sprinkle with a little flour. Using a rolling pin roll out dough just under ¼ inch thick. Using a pizza cutter, slice off jagged edges, next slice the dough into squares. Place squares on baking sheet and repeat with remaining dough adding the scraps from the first rolling.

Bake for 9 to 11 minutes. Let rest on the baking sheet for a minute, and move to a cooling rack.

Notes: Freezing unbaked cookies on the baking sheets for 15 minutes will help them hold their square shapes better.

Recipe & picture by Laura Flowers.