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!