For February 26

Peanuttiest Blondies

Chocolate Oatmeal Drops

Both from Dorie Greenspan, Baking:  From My Home To Yours

Last week, I made an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.  This week, I am using most of the same ingredients, but in a different way, in the Chocolate Oatmeal Drops.  Here, instead of keeping the chocolate as chips stirred into the oatmeal cookie batter, it is melted with the chocolate and brown sugar to form the base batter, making these a very dark chocolaty cookie with light-colored oats peeking out here and there.  The blondies give a visual contrast, but they are also studded with chocolate, so in a way the two recipes are visual inverses.  The blondies are filled with salted peanuts and also with chunky peanut butter.  A bit rich, but it just means smaller squares.

I have made both of these recipes before.  They are not my personal favorites, but Andy reminds me that others are of a different opinion.

For February 19

Busy week at work.  My oven is broken.  Baking is crazy.

Anyway, in my prior life I must have been a postal carrier or something - neither rain, nor sleet, etc. etc. etc.

OK, so for this week:

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies

Chocolate Almond Espresso Biscotti

The biscotti are from Dorie Greenspan's Baking:  From my home to yours.

The cookies are a recipe given to me by Brenda Marsh.  Brenda is one of the kick-ass accountants that my firm uses to do its accounting work.  She is awesome.  She makes me laugh.  She says this is the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever.  Well, we'll see.  With a claim like that, we certainly have to check it out!

Here's a shout out to Betsy, who can't be with us this week, having gone back to see her ailing dad in Kansas.  And one to Moon-Wheel, who is in my thoughts and prayers as she enters hospice.  Morning mind is Kanzeon!  Evening mind is Kanzeon! Nen nen arises from mind.  Nen nen is not separate from mind.

For February 12

Vanilla-Scented Madeleines, from the King Arthur Flour Web site

Olive Oil Cookies with Rosemary and Cacao Nibs, adapted from the New York Times food blog Bitten

The madeleines are a different recipe than last week's - not quite as delicate, but still quite good - and they are coming out a lot better this time!  This time the butter did not separate and sink to the bottom of the bowl, only to be discovered half-way through the baking.

The second cookie is a bit of an adventure.  The recipe on Mark Bittman's blog (I recommend this blog highly - he has lots of recipes, all designed for everyday cooking, so they are simple and yummy) is for sugar cookies with olive oil and rosemary.  When I was musing about them, I thought I would experiment and add cacao nibs, which I thought would complement some of the flavors in the olive oil.  They are still being made, so the jury is still out, but let's hope that my instincts point me in the right direction!

For February 5

We're baaaaaaack!

After a long hiatus during the gray days of January (actually, here in SoCal January was pretty fabulous, warm, blue skies, etc.), we resume the normal schedule and that means talks, tea and cookies!

Here is this week's lineup, selected specially for Gemmon and Betsy:

Traditional Madeleines

Dorie Greenspan's Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

Both from Dorie Greenspan, Baking:  From My Home to Yours

OK, so this madeleine recipe is the first recipe of Dorie's that I don't adore.  But that is because I think I messed it up.  These are not pretty madeleines, folks.  For the first batch, I overfilled the molds, so they are ugly.  In the second batch, the butter in the recipe had dropped to the bottom of the bowl and not fully incorporated into the dough, so these had too much butter and ended up looking funny, with pockets of butter amid the batter.  I think I am going to have to do madeleines again next week just to do a better job.  They don't taste too bad, but they aren't going to win any beauty contests!

But the chocolate chip cookies are awesome!