For September 23

This week, Mark Shogen Bloodgood is giving a personal practice talk at the Zen Center. Shogen is a vegan, and in his honor this week's recipes are both vegan:

Toasted Almond Cookies
Chocolate Chip Brownies

both from Peter Berley, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen

Peter Berley is a prominent cookbook author and chef whose first book, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, was almost entirely vegan. It is somewhat challenging to find vegan cookie recipes, but he has several in his book, and they sounded delicious, so I decided to do both recipes this week from the same source.

Now, I am not a vegan-phobe, but I now realize that I am a lacto-ovo-phile. Many of my recipes have been made without eggs or without butter, but I can't remember any previous ones that have had neither. So I entered into this project with some trepidation, but I really wanted to support Shogen, who is coming down from Arroyo Grande to give his talk. Vegan cooking was interesting. It was unbelievably expensive - I thought that my normal recipes were expensive, but these recipes hand's-down win my "most expensive recipe" award. Both of them rely on fairly expensive ingredients (or at least the ingredients that I bought were expensive). So the almond cookies called for quite a lot of coconut oil as the fat, and then use maple syrup as the sweetener. The brownies call for a generous amount of maple syrup, a lot of cocoa powder, sucanat (a natural, less-processed sugar), and other stuff. Anyway, taking out the eggs and the butter doesn't mean no fat, it means different fat, and often different other things to act as binding agents.

Of the two recipes, I think the brownies worked out better, at least as of now. The brownies are a pretty close approximation of "regular" brownies - lots of sweetener, cocoa powder, fat (canola oil), nuts, flour. Most brownies reply on a substantial volume of eggs, and these obviously have none of that, and they are a bit more crumbly as a result - they are not dry, but they are a bit crumbly. The flavors are good - they should be, given the amount of coca powder and chocolate chips - and the texture is also good. Overall, while I am not a big fan of these, I could easily see making them for vegan company.

The flavor of the toasted almond cookies is wonderful - lots of toasted almonds, a little orange zest, the maple flavor peeking through - but the consistency says "yep, that's a vegan cookie, all right." These are not delicate cookies - they are almost the opposite. Little boulders or something similar - not because they are hard to bite (although I think they probably would fall in the "al dente" category if they were a pasta) but because the dough does not melt into a traditional cookie in the baking process. This was a fairly stiff dough, and you form it into walnut sized balls and place them on the cookie sheet, squash them a little, then bake. With most cookies, they bake into beautiful rounds. These were unchanged. So not too beautiful to look at, texture is not my style, flavor is good. A vegan cookie. Oy.

Next week is my birthday, so it is "baker's choice." Hmmmm.....what will it be?

For September 16

Two very different cookies this week:

Cinnamon sugar cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
Melting chocolate meringues, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

I think this is the first time I have made each of these cookies. The cinnamon sugar cookies seem pretty much to be snickerdoodles in all but name, but maybe at a restaurant like Spago they can't call them by their true name. Well, anyway, this is a wonderful recipe - they are basically cinnamon-vanilla sugar cookies (and these suckers use a LOT of vanilla) that have a very delicate texture, and are coated with cinnamon sugar. Like snickerdoodles, they use cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is an ancient leavening agent that was used before we invented baking soda and baking powder (both of which are quite recent additions to the baking scene). In my experience, if a recipe calls for cream of tartar, it is usually a sign that it is a recipe with some history behind it, since nowadays people mostly use baking powder or baking soda.

This is my second week making a cookie from Mary Bergin's Spago Desserts. Her cookie recipes are pretty uniformly great, and all rely on the same basic technique, which involves making the dough, letting it chill, then forming individual cookies. It is a long process, but yields good cookies.

Interestingly, Alice Medrich's Melting Chocolate Meringues also use baking powder, but I doubt they have the same provenance as the sugar cookies. These are another gluten free cookie. Here, the cream of tartar is added as you beat the egg whites to help provide some stabilizing to them. It is an interesting technique to this recipe - melt the chocolate; chop lots of walnuts; whip the egg whites with the cream of tartar and sugar; put in nuts; pour melted chocolate over; fold until uniform in color; scoop and bake.

These are not my favorite cookie, and not my favorite gluten free or meringue-style cookie. I think the recipe from Tartine that I made a few months ago wins that award, and I think I'll make it again soon using a different nut (hazelnut?) this time. We'll see. Which is not to say that these are bad cookies - I am sure they will be gobbled up and everyone will like them. But for me, eh. Of course, snickerdoodles are one of my most favorite cookie, so it may be that, with a different companion cookie, I would feel differently about them. Hmmm....

For September 9

The Center was closed for summer recess so there were no cookies on Sept. 2. For September 9, it was back to school, with two cookies:

Chocolate Sparkle Cookies, via the Los Angeles Times
Oatmeal Current Cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts

The chocolate sparkle cookies were a happy byproduct - I have an ancient, bulging folder of recipes I have printed out or cut out of newspapers, etc. over the years, and I was looking through it for my favorite chocolate cake recipe over Labor Day weekend, when I stumbled upon this recipe, which was first printed in the LA Times almost 10 years ago. The recipe itself is from a bakery in Victoria, British Columbia. I apparently printed this out years ago, threw it in the folder, and never made it. Well, now I have, and it is wonderful! This is a gluten-free recipe - there is no flour. Instead, it relies on almond meal. While the recipe calls for grinding almonds, I took the lazy way out and bought a bag of almond meal at Whole Foods. Almond meal has become fairly easy to find these days, so it is a nice timesaver over grinding the almonds, etc. Regardless, this recipe makes small but powerful cookies - there are only 5 ingredients (butter, sugar, eggs, almonds, chocolate). It looks a lot like the fairly common chocolate crackle cookie - the outside will crack during baking, particularly if you use a convection oven - but more intense. They are fairly straightforward to make, and the reward at the end is great. And, as I mentioned, they are gluten free, to boot!

The second cookie was a repeat of an old favorite. Mary Bergin was the original pastry chef at Spago when it was in West Hollywood, and then went to Las Vegas to help open the first Spago offshoot there in 1992. I received her cookbook, Spago Desserts, from my friend Chris Kennedy, a partner at Irell who recruited me out of law school and who was singularly responsible for me coming to Los Angeles. Chris had a lot of health issues and died far too young. The copy of the cookbook has both Mary's autograph as well as Chris', so it is a treasure. Anyway, this oatmeal currant cookie recipe is very good. If the chocolate sparkle cookies have only a few ingredients, this recipe makes up for it. While it is an oatmeal currant cookie, it has almost as many walnuts as currants, and lots of spices, particularly cinnamon and allspice. These are very flavorful, interesting cookies, and every time I make them I am reminded how much I like them. The recipes in this book all seem very good. (The peanut butter cookie recipe, which also has currants in it, is one of Andrew's signature recipes, and one of the only peanut butter cookies we will eat.)