For March 5

It is an act of pure faith that I am writing this now, before noon, on March 4. I made my batter and dough last night - both had to chill before baking - so, if everything goes right, and my oven complies (it has a malfunctioning control board that we are in the process of replacing, but it is not yet completed), here is the plan for tomorrow:

Madeleines (both plain and chocolate) from American Boulangerie by Rigo Pascal
Chocolate Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies from Spago Desserts by Mary Bergin

I am continuing my search for a madeleine recipe I am happy with. (Everyone else has seemed happy with the recipes so far, but I have been unhappy, except with the one from Sherry Yard's Secrets of Baking.) Pascal's recipe has all the same basic ingredients as the others, but uses a very different technique in making the batter, so I am very interested to see how it turns out. One of his variations called for taking a portion of the basic batter out and combining it with some cocoa (oh, and just a teeny more butter), giving you some chocolate and some plain madeleines as a result. Needless to say, I have opted for this approach. I may add some hazelnuts to the plain ones, we will have to see how I am feeling by the time we get to the baking. This recipe also uses European-style (organic) butter rather than American-style butter, so it will be interesting to see if the extra $3 was worth it.

Mary Bergin's cookbook, from her days as the pastry chef at Spago in Hollywood (before she left to become the chef at Spago in Las Vegas and Sherry Yard took over as pastry chef at Spago) has a series of wonderful cookie recipes. Her peanut butter cookie recipe is our hand's-down favorite. Unfortunately, for almost all of her cookie recipes, she calls for the dough to chill for several hours or overnight before baking, and my schedule does not really allow me to do this usually. (This week, a cancellation gave me a free Tuesday night I otherwise wouldn't have.) As a general rule, from what I have been reading recently, allowing a cookie dough to sit overnight results in much better cookies. It allows the fat in the butter to emulsify with the flour more thoroughly (or something like that). Anyway, bottom line, her recipes are great, I wish I could make them more often. This week, we've got one with three types of chocolate (cocoa powder, melted bittersweet chocolate in the batter, and then dark chocolate chips) and two types of peanuts (peanut butter in the batter plus 2 cups of roasted peanuts). Luckily for us, this cookbook has no nutritional information.

My copy of Mary Bergin's Spago Desserts is signed. It was given to me in December 1994 by a dear friend, Chris Kennedy, who was a partner at Irell & Manella, and the person who recruited me out of law school and managed to charm me into coming to LA when it was not on my radar. Chris died around 18 months ago, at only 57. I was thinking fondly of him while I was making the dough last night.