For May 20 (Final Catch Up)

OK, so I have been totally lame on blogging. Sue me. The big problem is that I really have absolutely no memory about what I made in the earlier weeks, making this an increasingly challenging exercise. Anyway, since I still have these hanging around my house, I am pretty sure about what I made last week. Here's the deal:

Raspberry Honey Financiers, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Cranberry Oatmeal Bars, from Nick Malgieri

OK, so something went very wrong last week - there was no chocolate involved in the baking! It was largely an accident - I was looking for the page in the Martha Stewart's Cookies book that has the chocolate-black pepper cookies, and passed the page with the financiers and they caught my eye and I decided a) the chocolate cookie recipe required a refrigeration time for the dough that I did not have available and b) the financiers looked soooooo cute! Although part of my motivation was to find a recipe that did not require such a time investment as many drop cookies, that did not turn out to be the case here - the recipe involves quite a few steps, so it was probably a wash in the end. There is not very much flour in the recipe; instead, you toast almonds and then grind them finely. It gives it great flavor and texture. It also requires you to brown the butter, which is always a bit of an anxiety-inducing exercise for me - cooking butter until it is brown (but not burned!) is definitely a mindfulness exercise. Finally, you take fresh raspberries and puree them. Ideally you pass them through a strainer to remove the seeds; if you are me, you try that until, in exasperation, you give up and just dump it all in and mutter something about seeds being good for the soul....
Anyway, these are a tiny (mini-cupcake pan) almond cake with a dollop of raspberry added on top. Now, in the oh-so-pretty cookbook version, you dab the raspberry on top, and then use a knife or some similar object to swirl the dab around to make it heart-shaped. Yeah, right - well, in my world everyone has broken hearts - very, very broken hearts. Anyway, they were yummy all the same.

The cranberry oatmeal bars were very nice. Oats, cranberries, pecans, brown sugar - yum. The cranberries were a nice flavor complement, replacing the usual, sweeter, raisins or currants. This was not very sweet - really, neither of these two items was overly sweet - and would probably also be a good breakfast or mid-morning item rather than simply a "dessert."