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!