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!