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!