Tag: cookies

Recipes · Uncategorized

WW2 Recipe: Baby Ruth Cookies

amandastiver2 Comments

Flipping through the June 1942 issue of The American Home is like walking into a World War Two time capsule. Featuring the “On Guard the Home Front: Cooperating for Victory” label, it offered suggestions for how to use rationed items frugally, how to save items that would otherwise go to waste, and how to save money on family vacations by camping and other home-made fun (see the PDF link at the end to explore the pages of this issue).  

Sugar was rationed early on in America and chocolate was prioritized for use for military rations, so it was difficult to find. As a result, recipes like the one on page 26 of the June issue, featured a colorfully advertised Baby Ruth candy bar as the main ingredient in a cookie. Eating a Baby Ruth bar on its own wouldn’t take long. However, chop it into pieces and incorporate it into a cookie recipe (think chocolate chip cookies), and you have a treat that will go much further and be enjoyed by the maximum number of people.

Otherwise, the recipe is a basic, tasty cookie that goes well with a tea or coffee break. Pair a couple of cookies with a cheese stick or beef stick if you want to avoid a woozy-doozy blood sugar spike. The cookie itself uses a bit less sugar than modern cookie recipes, and this you can adjust even more to reduce the sugar profile. Most of the sweetness comes from the Baby Ruth bar. You could experiment with other candy bar flavors in the same manner, a Snickers cookie, a Skor bar cookie (toffee and chocolate), etc. Some candy bars may work better than others, I’m thinking Three Musketeers would melt in a messy fashion.

There is a small drawback to using a candy bar as your “chocolate chip” substitute since Baby Ruth features a milk chocolate exterior, peanuts, caramel, and a nougat filling. The caramel is the challenge; it really melts and will ooze in strange and wonderful ways as the cookies bake. It’s relatively easy to fix, just smoosh the goo back into the cookie while the cookie is still warm. Possibly the 1942 version of the Baby Ruth bar was made from a different recipe and didn’t have this problem (I’m not brave enough to see if a 1942 bar has survived that I can try), but nonetheless, in our modern-day version you have to mind your caramel.

Dubiously, the Baby Ruth bar from the magazine is featured thus: “As nutritious as it is delicious, Baby Ruth Candy is a first line food for defense against fatigue.” Hmm, if you’re a hungry soldier fresh from basic training then I can buy that (and they were back during 1942), but for our sedentary world today, probably going easy on the candy bars is a better bet.

I won’t keep you in too much suspense, here’s the recipe. I’ve adapted it to my taste, but you can follow the original in the images above.

Baby Ruth Cookies

  • Print

Adapted by Amanda Stiver from the June 1942 issue of The American Home magazine.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 small eggs
  • 8 mini-Baby Ruth bars, cut in small pieces
  • 1 1/3 cups flour (I used Wheat Montana: Prairie Gold)
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

  1. Cream butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs.
  2. Stir in other ingredients (chopped Baby Ruth bars, flour, baking soda, salt and vanilla).
  3. Chill for easy handling. Gently form half teaspoonful balls, roll them slightly, and place on a parchment paper covered cookie sheet. Avoid over-handling or the dough can become tough. The cookies spread out, space them well apart.
  4. Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 to 12 minutes. Let sit for one minute, if caramel has bubbled and spread, gently smoosh it back into the cookie. Place on cooling rock. Makes about 60 small cookies.

Sources:

Recipes

Ahoy there! — Almond Flour Chocolate Chip Cookies

amandastiverLeave a comment

Gluten-free has become a health-protocol for a lot of people. Some because they have serious digestive issues and/or celiac, and others because they want to take a break from the onslaught of gluten in their diet to see if various health issues will improve along with immune system function. This cookie would qualify as gluten-free, but not dairy or egg free.

However, I think (and this is coming from someone who must exclude a lot of things from her diet due to a histamine malfunction called Mast Cell Activation Syndrome—so I know whereof I speak) we can focus on what is not included in a recipe or dish, rather than what is included. And what is there is much more fun than what isn’t there. Abundance mentality vs. deprivation mentality.

This recipe, which I will link here < Almond Flour Chocolate Chip COOKIE RECIPE > and below, is on the All Recipes website, which is where I found it seven years ago. At our house, we affectionately call it the ‘Chips Ahoy!’ cookie because it has a similar texture and flavor to that well-known cookie product.

Almond flour works well in certain recipes and not so in others. This can be said of most non-gluten flours. They all have their best uses. It’s worth a little investigation and typing up a little cheat-sheet to remind you which ones are best for what purpose.

Almond flour, in this recipe, is a good substitute and produces a nice sturdy, chewy texture that sets off the flavor of the chocolate delightfully.

Now, I’m an inveterate recipe tweaker, so I never could leave this one alone and I’ve tried this and that, as you can see in the photo of my much-marked up copy of the recipe. However, using the directions straight from the original produces a fantastic cookie, so start there and then tweak as you like.

If you want to tweak right away, I’d suggest using (in place of the chocolate chips) 4 oz. of good quality bittersweet chocolate bar that you chop up with a sharp chef’s knife into little pieces. That way you get bits of chocolate spread out into more of the cookie dough.

Reminder: when you begin to scoop the dough onto a cookie sheet, gently flatten the cookies, as it says in the recipe, otherwise you get almond flour haystacks and the final product won’t have as even a texture.

Even if you don’t need to avoid gluten, this makes a fun cookie to rotate with wheat-flour variations. Almond flour has a long history as a confection and ingredient in candies, cookies and cakes, so as you enjoy each bite, take a moment to imagine all the other historical cookie snackers over time who have indulged in the delights of almond flour! And smile at your budget as it thanks you for making a recipe from scratch that can taste just as good as the store-bought, commercially processed varieties!

Sources: Gluten-Free Almond Flour Chocolate Chip Cookies, at AllRecipes.com by King Arthur Flour, Jan. 20, 2022. Gluten-Free Almond Flour Chocolate Chip Cookies (allrecipes.com)