For July 30

Bittersweet Brownies, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours

Raisin, Pine Nut and Fennel Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

Busy week, which means two relatively easy - but delicious - recipes. I am a big fan of Dorie Greenspan's; I don't think I have made one recipe of hers that has not turned out exceedingly well. This is a very straightforward brownie recipe. There are very few ingredients - no nuts! - so the flavor and texture are accentuated. These are made with Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate, with some espresso powder for an extra kick. While not cakey, they are not the ultra-dense, fudgy version of brownies that I generally prefer. But they are pretty close.

I wanted to do something different in contrast, and the biscotti fit the bill. These are chockablock with "stuff" - raisins, pine nuts and fennel seed. This flavor combination is based on an Italian sauce (except the sauce has anchovy, mercifully left out here). I am not a fan of the licorice type flavors such as fennel and anise, but I really like these biscotti. Certainly the large quantity of pine nuts helps - I was thinking last week that it has been a long time since I did a recipe with pine nuts, so I am happy to have come across this one while browsing through the King Arthur cookbook today. And unlike a number of my recent biscotti excursions, this one is not as long-baked, leaving it a more delicate set of flavors. So this week we have two good recipes that go in completely different directions.

For July 16

Two recipes from Alice Medrich this week:

Best Cocoa Brownies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

Whole Wheat Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert

This was a crazy week. I am blogging two days late! Work has been intense - I worked 10 hours a day last Saturday and Sunday, and pretty non-stop since. (Today, this crazy push came to an end when I got two briefs that I have been working on for weeks filed. Now I am going to collapse.)

Anyway, these were two really great recipes - they were great first, because the results tasted great and second, because they were pretty darn easy to make. The Whole Wheat Sables are from the Pure Dessert cookbook; in this book, Medrich cuts back the ingredients in recipes to allow purity of flavor to come through. There are like 5 or 6 ingredients total in the Whole Wheat Sables, which are a type of butter cookie. They have equal amounts of whole wheat and regular flour, and it gives a real nuttiness to the cookie, even though there are no nuts. I made the dough for these on Monday, and Andrew - bless him - sliced them and baked them for me on Wednesday before I got home. These are an exceedingly delicate cookie - they are almost ethereal, the edges just melt away. Medrich does a whole set of recipes that are variants of this cookie, and each is yummy. Not a kid's cookie, but wonderful.

The brownies, well, they ARE a kids cookie - they are brownies, after all. These are from Medrich's chocolate cookbook, Bittersweet. She has a series of brownie recipes. One that I did a few weeks ago relied on bittersweet chocolate; this one relies on cocoa powder. Very different results. These are an intense, fudgy, indulgent brownie. Not very difficult to make - which saved me this week - but a really good result. Alice Medrich is my hero!

OK, now I go collapse.

For July 9

This is another crazy week. Oof. Andy is back from Arizona, his mom's stuff has been moved (but unpacking is another thing). And work is crazy! Oy. But still, the cookies must go on. So this week....

Triple Chocolate Fudge Cookies, from Sherry Yard, The Secrets of Baking
Summer Berry Crumble Bars, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

After my small "oops" with the chocolate cookies last week, this week we make up for it with a lot of chocolate in the cookies. Sherry Yard is the pastry chef at Spago, and these are a very nice cookie, even if they have white chccolate in them. These are a chocolate cookie that has cocoa powder, dark chocolate chunks and white chocolate chunks included. I am not going to go on about the whole "white chocolate" thing, but will just say that these have enough "real" chocolate to permit me to overlook the indecency of the white chocolate. These are a crunchy cookie (I am told that Wolfgang likes his cookies crunchy, not chewy) with lots of flavor.

Speaking of flavor, the bars are full of flavor in a totally different way. These bars have a base of flours and oats (and a little sugar and flour, etc.) then a layer of blueberries and raspberries. This is topped by another layer of flour, oats and sunflower seeds (yeah, yeah, sugar, butter, etc.) then a very subtle glaze is applied after baking. They are a challenge to eat with all the fresh fruit and the crumbly top and bottom crusts, but they are a treat!

For July 2

Chocolate Sugar Cookies, from Sherry Yard, The Secrets of Baking

Our Favorite Pound Cake

This week, Andy is in Lake Havasu, Arizona, helping prepare his mom for her big move to Los Angeles. So I am handling both the cooking and clean up. Yuck!

Anyway, some fun stuff this week. The cookie is from Sherry Yard's book, the Secrets of Baking. Sherry is the pastry chef at Spago, and I think this is an excellent baking book. This cookie is a variation on her Master Sugar Cookie recipe - I have been planning to make a basic sugar cookie for a while. Well, not this week - I got sidetracked by my desire to have something chocolate, so I went with one of her variations rather than the basic recipe itself. Here, there is a very light addition of chocolate in the form of some melted bittersweet chocolate that is added at the beginning. Now, just as I am typing this, I realize I was supposed to add cocoa powder along with the flour, but, oops, I guess I forgot. So these are not an intense chocolate cookie, they are a lightly chocolated sugar cookie. So this is obviously "adapted from" Sherry Yard, rather than a recipe of hers. Anyway, the result is a very simple cookie. After a few weeks with some elaborations in the cookie department, this is a back to basics cookie.

And, speaking of back to basics, the pound cake is another recipe in that vein. I have been making this recipe for 20 years, and it is my favorite pound cake. For those that don't know, the name of the cake - pound cake - came from the fact that the basic recipe called for a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour. Here, that is basically what is in the cake, although it has a few other ingredients (vanilla, baking powder, and milk). Assuming the farmer's market cooperates tomorrow, my plan is to pick up some strawberries and blueberries and we can have berries and cream on pound cake. It seems a very July 4 kind of dessert to have.

Happy holiday!

D-J