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.