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.