For February 18

The curse of the chocolate cookie has been broken! Hurrah! This week's cookies:

My Favorite Chocolate Chip Cookies

Cafe Volcano Cookies

both from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours

While it is Dorie Greenspan who calls these her favorite chocolate chip cookie, they are awfully good. I like this cookie a lot - it tends to be very crispy/crunch at the edge, and a bit chewy at the center. As usual, I hand cut the chocolate instead of using store bought chocolate chips. This time I am using a mixture of Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet and Green & Black Organic 72% Bittersweet chocolate bars for my "chips." And while the recipe calls for walnuts, tonight I substituted pecans, because I am already using walnuts in the other cookies.

Ah, yes, the other...cookies. OK, I am very narrow minded, I admit it, but given that the Cafe Volcano cookies have no flour and no dairy in them, I have some trouble calling them cookies. But they are cookies, and they are both gluten- and dairy-free. Indeed, these have a very small number of ingredients but make a very interesting cookie that is basically an interesting variation on a meringue. The main ingredients is roasted nuts - almonds and walnuts. The only other significant ingredients are sugar, espresso powder, and some egg whites. They are all mixed together, and then plopped on the baking sheet to cook for 20 minutes. Then voila! Cookies. (Andy says the look like dog poop, but it didn't stop him from eating one.)

OK, time for sleep. Night night!

For February 11

I think we have to call it the curse of the chocolate chip cookie. Last week, I had planned to make Sherry Yard's chocolate chip cookie recipe, but I ended up getting home from work very late and ended up making a brownie recipe instead. This week, I planned to make Dorie Greenspan's chocolate chip cookie recipe, and I once again ended up getting home from work at 9 p.m., which is just too late at night to make two desserts with one of them being a drop cookie recipe. So, boys and girls, can you guess what I made in its place?

This week's entries:

Lemon Squares With Brown Butter Shortbread, from Prueitt & Robertson, Tartine

Best Cocoa Brownies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

Our friend Liz gave us a bag of Meyer lemons from her trees, so lemon squares are a natural outlet when you have a lot of lemons at hand. Tartine is a very well-known bakery in San Francisco, and my friend Seishin, who left LA to move to SF, emailed me this recipe and said they were the best lemon squares she has ever had. I got this cookbook around a year ago, but this is the first recipe that I have made from it. It looks like there are a number of nice recipes in it, so now that I have made something, perhaps I will try a few more out in the next few weeks. This is an interesting recipe; it calls for a lot of lemon juice, but also a good amount of sugar. The shortbread crust has pine nuts in it, so it will be interesting to try.

Tonight I walked Soba for his last walk of the day, and when we came back into the house, the air was just permeated with the smell of chocolate. Wow, yum. What a nice experience. This is another brownie recipe from Alice Medrich's chocolate book, Bittersweet. Last week I made a variant on the "best semisweet brownies" recipe. This week I am using the "best cocoa brownie" recipe. There are also a best unsweetened and a best bittersweet recipes. Each one produced a slightly different brownie, principally because there is a difference that comes about depending on the source of the fat - in the cocoa brownie recipe, for example, virtually all of the fat comes from butter, which results in a very different texture than in the semisweet recipe, where a significant amount of the fat comes from the cocoa mass. Anyway, these made a very dark, intense looking brownie. We'll see how they actually taste!

Or not...actually I am going to have to go to Las Vegas for work tomorrow, so I will not be at the Center; I will drop them off, instead, and hope that people enjoy them.

It is midnight now, so I am signing off. Ciao!

For February 4

Happy 2010!

January was bare bones month at the Zen Center - after a busy last 3 months of the year, we chill out in January, which means no talks on Thursday nights, which also means no cookies. But January is now history, and February is already upon us. Yikes!

Work has been very busy, and tonight I only got home at 9 p.m. to start baking. So one of the recipes that I intended to make (chocolate chip cookies) sailed right out the window, since it requires so much time to make the individual cookies. Here is what I finally ended up with:

More-or-less Classic Semisweet Brownies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

Oatmeal Raisin Biscotti, from Karen DeMasco, The Craft of Baking

The brownies are the pinch hitter here, with a pan of brownies replacing the chocolate chip cookies. In her cookbook, Alice Medrich offers a recipe using unsweetened chocolate, and then several variations using different chocolates (bittersweet, semisweet, etc.) Each varies the amount of chocolate, the butter and the sugar. She is really chocolate-smart. Anyway, I am calling these "more or less" classic because I threw in some cacao nibs at the end to give it a little interest (along with some walnuts). So they are "adapted from" Alice's classic semisweet brownies.

The biscotti are from a new cookbook that entered my library at Christmas. The Craft of Baking was written by the former pastry chef at Craft, a well-known Manhattan restaurant (actually there is a branch across from my office here in Los Angeles, too, but I think she was pretty much based in NY). It has some really nice looking recipes that I will be exploring this year - fewer cookies than I would like, but we'll see how it goes. I chose these biscotti as my inauguration because oatmeal raisin cookies are the favorite of the abbot at the Zen Center.

Speaking of the biscotti, they are due to come out of the oven from their second baking any minute now, and it is past midnight, so ta ta for now!