Orange Candied Yams and Orange White Chocolate Cookies

Rob made candied yams today, with orange in it.  The recipe asks for a lot of sugar, which he cut, but the orange juice came from a large orange, that is apparenlty South African, since they are not in season here.  Please don't talk to me about food that is grown more than 100km away from home.  That is not a topic to discuss today.

The oranges were beautiful.  So utterly orange.  The zest and juice had an amazingly bright flavour.  The yams were cooked in orange sauce in the oven.  Delicious.

The other day, my daughter announced she had to bake cookies for a contest amongst her friends.  They were standing around, boasting about who made the best cookies, and she said to me, "I just had to get involved!"

So we were allowed to discuss it with her all weekend, but she made the final decision on ingredients, methodology and clean up!  She said she had to do it from start to finish, including cleaning up.  This made me very happy.

She chose to use the classic Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe, but instead of semi-sweet chips, she carefully cut a bunch of white chocolate chunks in half to make them the right size, and added the zest of one of those wonderful oranges.  She laboured long and hard.  She shaped them all herself and made 3 batches, each with slightly different baking times, so she could choose the ones with the best texture. 

Rob felt they were on the sweet side, but everyone else loved them.  I generally prefer softer, chewy cookies, but the crunchy ones were great.  A glass of milk made them taste even better.  The younger brother ate all the rejects - and there were quite a few, so he didn't feel so well later.

So what happened?  She won the contest, although in the end there was only one other contestant.  The teacher got to decide.  More cookies were shared out to the rest of the class so everyone was happy.  This may be the start of a number of bake-offs.  They seem to be a competitive bunch at school.  If that's the case, I will start charging for ingredients, just to keep this all under control.  We shall see.