For April 22

This week is "celebrity chef" week here at Joyful Mind Bakery. Or, at least, celebrity chef recipe week - no celebrity chefs were involved (0r harmed) in the baking of these confections! Anyway, here is the lineup:

Buttery Pecan Rounds, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Brownies, from Thomas Keller

OK, so the "Martha Stewart's Cookies" cookbook is a reminder of what great book design can be. Even if you don't buy it, even if you would not think of baking a cookie if your life depended on it, next time you are in a respectable bookstore it would be worth your while just to pop over to the cookbooks and look at this book and appreciate it as an example of function and design. It is a wonderful book. The book is organized by "type of cookie" - soft and chewy, sandy, etc. It is a wonderful organizing principle in itself, but even better, the table of contents has a picture of every cookie next to its name! How cool is that? Anyway, the book was just named by the James Beard Foundation as one of the 13 essential baking books to have in your library (along with a few of the others that I have and that readers here have heard about; as for the ones I don't yet own, that is what my Amazon Wish List is for, but I digress...). Anyway, before there was this book, there was a smaller holiday cookie magazine that followed the same organizing principle. I bought that magazine at the grocery store in Oakhurst, California, right outside the south entrance to Yosemite National Park, as we were going into Yosemite for our Thanksgiving celebration in 2005, just a few weeks after I began this baking odyssey, and I spent the entire four-day weekend reading it and becoming entranced. I baked a lot of the recipes out of that magazine early on - the chocolate black pepper cookies that were so popular, as well as the cornmeal thyme cookies, the pine nut cookies, the pumpkin cookies with brown butter icing, and many others. It eventually got expanded into a book, and it is a wonderful book with lots of really good recipes. With as many recipes under my belt as I have now, I would probably edit the text a bit to make some things clearer and revise a few techniques here and there based on things I have learned from other cookbooks, but it is a very good friend to have on hand.

Anyway, these butter pecan rounds are a first time recipe for me. They are a very simple recipe - the dough seems to be little more than dark brown sugar and butter, with some flour thrown in to hold them together. Oh, and there is also a good amount of pecan meal - toasted, chopped pecans that take the place of flour to amp up the flavor of the dough. After the dough is made, you scoop it out, then place a pecan half on each cookie. The good-quality brown sugar is a great foil for the pecans and the butter. It is a nice combination.

The brownies are from Thomas Keller, chef at the French Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon, etc. This recipe is from his new cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, and I found it on the NPR web site. Actually, I had no plan to make brownies this week; I was browsing on my computer trying to find a work-related file in my "My Documents" folder and I found a file called "Thomas Keller Brownies." Huh? It was a MS Word file that I had obviously created, but I had no distinct memory of it, and it didn't indicate where it had come from. (Eventually I googled it and found it in various places, but I now remember that NPR did an interview with him and had a few recipes from the new cookbook on the site. We love you, Google!) I saw the recipe and thought that it would be good to make, since I have been doing a series of brownie recipes recently exploring different variations on the theme. These basically fall into the "I see you and I raise you ten times" or whatever a poker player would say. These are intense. There is a lot of just about everything in them: these brownies are cocoa based, but then there is a substantial amount of bittersweet chocolate that I hand cut and add so that there are little chocolate surprises buried within the brownie. Making two trays of these brownies required - hold on, kids - nine sticks of butter, 3 cups of Valrhona cocoa powder, 18 oz. of Scharffen Berger chocolate, nine eggs, sugar, butter, salt and vanilla. The grocery store bill for these suckers was astounding - so eat up! They are an incredibly midnight black brownie, deeply intense with all the butter, and then the small pockets of chocolate here and there are like little taste bud land mines. Eating these and the pecan cookies together, these have to be eaten second, because your taste buds are just blown out by the intensity of it all.

Anyway, enjoy!

For April 15

Tax Day. It calls for cookies!

Last night, Andrew Bodhi-Heart was working, so I was on my own. Luckily, I planned ahead and made one of my doughs the night before, so all I had to do was slice and bake on Wednesday ... and make the whole other set of cookies. Amazingly, all worked out OK, as I was pretty much done fairly early (as these things go). I am not quite sure how it happened.

Here's the lineup:

Hempseed Whole Wheat Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies, from....Nestle?

I have raved about Alice Medrich's sables before, and I am happy to have another chance to do so. These french butter cookies are really amazing. Her cookbook, Pure Dessert, tries to pare back ingredient lists to the bare minimum to let the intensity of the few remaining ingredients shine through. Here, the two "showcase" ingredients are whole wheat flour and hempseed. Yes, boys and girls, hempseed. Hempseed is a relatively obscure ingredient, but delicious. She likens it to a delicate version of a sunflower seed. Whatever the proper analogy, they are quite good. (At bld restaurant, here in Los Angeles, they have a hempseed-crusted tofu entree that Bodhi-Heart is a big fan of.) Anyway, sorry to disappoint you but there is no psychoactive ingredient in hempseed, so don't get too excited. The hempseeds not only give this a very delicate texture, but also an interesting visual appeal. Highly recommended!

I have also been hankering for good old fashioned chocolate chip cookies. So I grabbed the Toll House recipe off the web and went home and made them! Of course, I used Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate chips instead of the usual Nestle semi-sweets, but otherwise I hewed to the recipe. These turned out very nicely, so my craving is satisfied...for now.

Come enjoy!

Catching Up (Again): For April 8

Last week I didn't end up putting up a post on the cookies, so I will do a quick "make-up" post now. Andrew Bodhi-Heart was not working on Wednesday night, and we once again shared baking duties - this time, each of us made one of the two items. It is nice to only have to be responsible for one item - it is like a mini-holiday! Anyway, here was the lineup:

From Bodhi-Heart: Butterscotch Cookies, from Sherry Yard, The Secrets of Baking
From Dharma-Joy: Brownies, from Elisabeth Prueitt & Chad Robertson, Tartine

Bodhi-Heart decided he wanted to make a butterscotch something, and so we went browsing cookbooks to find a something that was butterscotch. "Butterscotch" as a confectionery is based on the combination of brown sugar and butter that are cooked together to that that familiar (and to me, nasty) butterscotch flavor. But in baking the same term is used for items that rely heavily on brown sugar and butter, and so it is with the recipe Bodhi-Heart ended up making. The recipe is fairly straightforward, and relies on the quality of the ingredients to really work well; there is a lot of subtlety to them. The flavors in this recipe definitely developed after a day or so, and Bodhi-Heart says that they were best when dipped in coffee. Hmmm...I thought they were yummy on their own.

The brownies continued my long-term effort in looking for exquisite brownies, and my short-term effort in cooking my way through portions of the "Tartine" cookbook. This is the cookbook from a noted bakery in San Francisco, and the recipes have all been really great. These brownies did not disappoint! The proportions guarantee a hyper-dense, fudgy brownie, so if you like the cake-like versions, look elsewhere. There was a lot of chocolate and eggs, and not much flour in these puppies. I think the flavors on these also developed over time. Highly recommended.

For April 1

Last week the Zen Center began a retreat on Thursday night, so there were no cookies. Since we were in the midst of moving my offices, it was quite OK!

This week, we ended up making two different recipes that originated in Paris bakeries. Here they are:

French Butter Cookies/Les Punitions from Lionel Poilane by way of Dorie Greenspan
Pleyels (French Chocolate Almond Cakes) from La Maison du Chocolat by way of Nick Malgieri

I got home late (again) on Wednesday so Bodhi-Heart (aka Andrew) helped me out by making the butter cookies. I don't know why, but cookies that are rolled out and cut just scare me. So he handled these - thanks! Unfortunately, they are not our favorite cookie. They are a very simple butter cookie - two people mistook them for a shortbread, and they are quite close. They are not as tender as I was hoping for, and need just a little pizazz. I have not made many simple butter cookies, and I think I am going to have to pay some attention to finding a recipe I like.

The second recipe went in a completely different direction. It was also a bit experimental. The recipe is for mini chocolate almond cakes. The recipe reminds me quite a bit of the chocolate hazelnut torte that is one of my favorite recipes, and that I made at Tassajara to serve 100 people. Anyway, I ended up making two adjustments to the recipe (aside from doubling it). First, I roasted the slivered almonds before grinding them - the recipe does not call for roasting them, but I am a big believer in roasted nuts as a flavor booster in recipes. Second, the recipe called for using regular cupcake tins to make these, but they would be wildly oversized for my purposes, so I downsized into mini-cupcake tins. (As a result, the recipe that, when doubled, was supposed to make 24 regular cupcakes ended up making 68 mini-cupcakes.) This requires careful monitoring to make sure they didn't overbake, since they are substantially smaller than in the recipe. I ended up serving them topped with a shake of powdered sugar to give some visual contrast between the deep black of the cupcake and the stark white of the sugar. I am a fan of these types of "cakes," and this one was very yummy. I think that the little chocolate cakes I made a couple of weeks ago were probably higher up my list, but those were completely different - those were airy and light, while these have a more substantial texture.