For June 10

Quick post, very tired. Two very different cookies this week:

Double Chocolate Cookies, from Milk

Orange Cashew Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

Milk is an amazing ice cream shop and bakery on Beverly Boulevard. While people go mostly for the ice cream, their baked goods are, IMHO, even better. This recipe for double chocolate cookies was printed about 18 months ago in the LA Times, and I am happy to finally be making it. It is a hedonist's cookie - a lot of chocolate with a bit of egg and flour to hold it all together. Very intense, very wonderful. Just be sure to use good chocolate!

The biscotti were a response to my "challenge" from Andrew, who asked me to make a recipe with orange. (I just mentioned this to him, and he had forgotten.) Anyway, I am not a huge fan of orange in cookies, but I thought that I would browse my biscotti variations, and I came across this recipe that involves both orange as well as salted, roasted cashews, one of Andrew's major food groups. Well, how could I resist? (A rhetorical question.) Anyway, the orange in these is from our tree - we have a Valencia orange tree in our front yard and it makes the sweetest and juciest oranges that we rarely take advantage of. So today I got to use zest and juice to make these biscotti. They are a nice, delicate flavor - the cashews are not nearly as strong a flavor as I expected them to be, and the orange is a predominant flavor. They are a nice cookie and a good contrast to the intensity of the chocolate cookies. We'll see as they cool and settle down how the flavor develops.

I should add that I was helped greatly by Andrew Bodhi-Heart this week. I made the dough for the double chocolate cookies on Tuesday night because it had to chill a bit before portioning out. He got home early on Wednesday and decided to surprise me by baking the cookies for me, so when I got home around 7:30, the chocolate cookies were all done and cooling on racks or already packed up for delivery. Hurray! It made the rest of the evening much more enjoyable. Thanks!

OK, night night!

For June3

OK, back on track, even if exhausted. This week, two rather experimental cookies - which is probably kinda silly, probably should have done only ONE experimental cookie in a week. But noooooo...... So here is the lineup:

Iced Multigrain Oatmeal Cookies, adapted from Kim Boyce, Good to the Grain

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Buckwheat Groats, from The Wednesday Chef blog

Two interesting cookies. Now, neither of them is going to come in as "healthy," believe me, but they are both whole grain based cookies. The oatmeal cookies are VERY whole grain. The recipe involved whole oats (which you grind into a coarse meal), whole wheat flour, oat flour, barley flour, millet flour and rye flour. Andrew was agog at all the little flour bags that were strewn over the counter at the end of this process; the only reason he forgave me was that we managed to reduce the rolled oat containers in our cupboard in making the recipe, and somehow the oats seem to be breeding in there in the dark or something, we have so many of them. Anyway, these are a very nice cookie - the cookie has all these amazing whole grains, and then most of the sweetener is the good, dark brown muscovado sugar that I have been using recently, which is so much better than the normal dark brown sugar (albeit a wee bit more expensive - or maybe a wee bit more than a wee bit). After they cool, they are iced to give them a little extra flavor (there is a boatload of cinnamon in the icing, which is why it is BROWN) and a kick of sweetness. I have to admit, I was a bit guarded about this "whole grain" recipe, but this one is really yummy. I am sure that the butter and the brown sugar may have something to do with that. But now, what do I do with 4 cups of millet flour?

The other recipe was one of those spur of the moment moves. I have never been to this woman's blog before, but I was browsing around looking for a different recipe and landed on her wonderful food blog - I recommend it highly, and it is quite entertaining and enjoyable. Anyway, looking at her index of cookie recipes, I saw this one for chocolate chip cookies with buckwheat groats. Huh??? Buckwheat groats? In chocolate chip cookies? What are buckwheat groats, anyway?

Well, Whole Foods being, well, Whole Foods, it had multiple choices of buckwheat groats. The recipe calls for "buckwheat groats (kasha)" but it seems clear after my Whole Foods shopping experience that buckwheat groats are not the same as kasha - kasha is a roasted version of buckwheat groats. (Some of the brands did not make this distinction, either, so I may be just making this all up, but it's just too late and I'm too tired to research this to a resolution.) So I was left with the question of buying the roasted version (kasha) or the raw version (groats). I went for the roasted version, thinking that it would give a nutty, richer flavor to the cookie. Anyway, the recipe is a pretty straightforward chocolate chip cookie recipe, except that instead of adding nuts or whatever with the chips, you add the buckwheat groats. (Oh, and it calls for whole wheat pastry flour instead of the usual white flour, so this was truly a whole grain cooking night.) And it does indeed give the cookies a very interesting, unusual twist - there is both an interesting texture from the crunchiness of the groats, and also an interesting flavor. The cookies came out on the crisp/crunch side to begin with, and the groats add further crunch, so not for those of you who like your cookies chewy or soft.

Anyway, my concerns about doing two experimental, whole grain cookies in one week seem to be allayed. We have survived another baking adventure!