For November 19

OK, a lot going on. Andrew received jukai last Saturday, and now has the name Bodhi-Heart. Very beautiful ceremony, and a gorgeous rakusu! As for me, Roshi gave me the OK this week to go ahead and begin gathering fabric for my okesa (priest robe), which means that I am going to be ordained as a Zen priest sometime in 2010. Wow. Overwhelming. More on that later.

This weekend is also the Zen Center's annual Day of Dana, as part of which the Zen Center buys and assembles baskets of food for needy local families. As part of that process, Bob Fisher, another Zen Center member who is also a professional pastry chef, and I are making homemade cookies to add to the baskets. We are each making 15 dozen cookies of two different varieties, so we will end up with around 60 dozen cookies. Since we are making 29 baskets, each family will receive 2 dozen cookies. I am glad it is Thanksgiving, so people at the supermarket don't look quite so askance when I buy 4 pounds of butter, 4 bags of chocolate chips, etc. etc. LA is so full of thin people, and they all seem to surround me in the checkout line on the days I am buying large quantities of butter and eggs. Sigh....

But I digress. In the midst of this, we still have a Thursday night talk, and Thursday night tea and cookies afterwards. For the cookies, there is nothing new, holiday-ish or particularly difficult this week, given the time I am devoting to other matters, but it is not to say that these are not worth, uh, sampling... And so:

Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Sherry Yard, The Secrets of Baking
Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

These are both repeats, and I realized a bit into the whole thing that this is really just two different versions of ch0colate chip cookies. Well, who doesn't love chocolate chips? Sherry Yard is the pastry chef at Spago, and this is the chocolate chip cookie recipe they serve there. (Although as someone recently pointed out to me, there they are warm from the oven and soft. If you pay me $150 for dinner, I will give you warm and soft, too.) These are a very thin, crisp cookie. Using a variation in the recipe, I added an extra egg to try to make them a bit cakier, but the dough seems to have just sneered at the extra egg. So thin and crisp it is.

The biscotti are one of my favorites. These involve lots of roasted, chopped hazelnuts and also chocolate. (For both the biscotti and chocolate chip cookies, I ended up hand cutting some Ghirardelli Semisweet Chocolate Bars. Hand cut chocolate is usually much better quality and more interesting than using store bought chips, which are usually made using a lower quality chocolate.) While, as with all biscotti, these would do better dipped in milk, hot cocoa or even (gasp) coffee than in the tea we serve at the Center, the chocolate and hazelnut combination is a very nice flavor. That is why the Italians came up with a special name for it: Gianduja.

Oh, and tomorrow I will be doing my baking for the Dana baskets. I am making this same chocolate chip cookie recipe from Sherry Yard (although I am using Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet Chocolate Chips - which received the highest rating from Cook's Illustrated for chocolate chips - instead of hand cutting 42 oz. of chocolate, oof), and then the Nibby Pecan Butter Cookies, which have pecans and cacao nibs, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet.

Take care,
D-J

For November 12

Last week was a week with no cookies at all, just cakes large and diminutive. And no chocolate! After my car got keyed and my house tagged with demands for chocolate, I got the idea - please, I give up! No, really, just kidding.

Anyway, this week we return to traditional values by embracing our inner cookie-ness. To wit:

Pumpkin Cookies with Brown Butter Icing, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Bittersweet Decadence Cookies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

I made the pumpkin cookies two years ago for the Honsaku Gyocha for Faith-Mind. I had planned to make them this year, and bought all the ingredients, but then changed my mind and made the Vermont Maple Cookies instead. But I really like these cookies, and with all the ingredients...it was time. The cookie here is closer to a little cake-let (oh, boy, already straying from my fundamentalist cookie path) - the cookbook refers to them as pillowy. (Is that a word? Well, it is making it past Google's spell checker.) Anyway, it is a soft, cake-like cookie redolent of pumpkin and spices, not very sweet. And then we throw on some icing to give it some excitement. Yin and Yang, you know? The icing here is a brown butter icing - you start it by cooking butter in a pot until the butter solids start to brown and it all turns a golden brown (not burned) and then pour it into the confectioners sugar, add a little more liquid and then STIR! Here, I was supposed to add condensed milk, but I didn't have as much as I thought I did, so it got an assist from some maple syrup. So these are a Maple Brown Butter Icing. The brown butter flavor really shines through.

OK, so the other cookies are being renamed the Enduring Chocolate Vow Special. Because, well, Oh My God. These come from a book that is nothing but chocolate recipes (called Bittersweet) and they still get called Bittersweet Decadence Cookies. And the name fits. The basic ingredients in this cookie are as follows: flour (1/4 cup), chopped pecans (2 cups), butter (6 T), bittersweet chocolate #1 (8 oz. Sharffen Berger 70% bittersweet, melted into the butter to form the basic batter), bittersweet chocolate #2 (6 oz. Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate, cut into chunks). That's about it. So for those who missed it, there is 1 oz. of flour, 2 cups of pecans and 14 oz of chocolate in these cookies. Oh, and 2 eggs, to hold the whole crazy thing together. Alice Medrich describes these as "richer than sin" and she aint kidding. They are funny looking as anything - little bumpy mounds that are gooey inside and dry outside. They are yummy - but they make keep the entire Zen Center awake for the entire night, if Enduring-Vow doesn't get to them first.

For November 5

This week, we are taking a break from cookies and spending a week with their friends, the cakes. Two very different types of cakes, in fact:

All-In-One Holiday Bundt Cake, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours
Visitandines de Lorraine, Little "Visitation" Cakes from Lorraine, from Nick Malgieri

I believe I made the Bundt cake last year. It is chockablock full of stuff - pumpkin puree, diced apples, chopped fresh cranberries, chopped pecans, and loads of spices - with a maple icing. One of the reasons I made cakes this week was to try to cut down on the sheer labor involved, but my plan went awry - this cake has quite a bit of prep involved, and with Andrew working I did it all myself. It called for 2 cups of fresh cranberries, "sliced in half or coarsely chopped." Well, I don't know if you have ever worked with fresh cranberries, but those suckers really know how to roll! Anyway, the coarse chopping was not an option, so I ended up individually cutting each cranberry in half. I guess it is good practice - I saw my brain wandering around and developing a LOT of opinions during this process! Anyway, the cake seems quite good - it has so much moisture from the pumpkin puree that I am concerned it is undercooked, but as Andrew corrected me this morning, that just means it is "moist." Right, moist.

In contrast to the big Bundt cake, the other cakes are small and delicate, as you can expect for a recipe invented by nuns in France. Nick Malgieri has a funny history about these on his blog (click on the link to go there). This is a recipe that he has adapted from two old French cookbooks based on a small cake originally made by the Nuns of the Visitation in Lorraine. For some reason I was taken by the recipe (well, it is a cake and involves almonds, which probably explains it) so voila! as they say in France. The recipe includes a small amount (3T) of dark rum, so I am a bit nervous about how they will go over at the Center - they bake for quite a while at 375 degrees, so I am sure the alcohol bakes off, but there is an interesting flavor that the rum imparts.