For October 19 (an extra cookie event this week!)

This week, Zen Center hosted Rev. Nakano from Japan, who was a Specially Dispatched Teacher from the Sotoshu on a tour of various Zen centers in the United States. Anyway, due to his schedule, he came and gave a talk on Tuesday night, which we followed with tea and cookies. This was an event that called for repeats, to wit:

Whole Wheat Sables with Cacao Nibs, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Midnight Crackles, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours

These are probably my two favorite cookbook authors, and they did not disappoint me. The sables are absolutely amazing, some of my favorite cookies ever. Along with the basic recipe, which is for plain, whole wheat sables, there are a number of variations, including this one that adds cacao nibs. I think that the nuttiness of the whole wheat flour and the elusive, earthy quality of the cacao nibs is a very good combination. Very straightforward to make, but so sophisticated a result! Highly recommended.

With the midnight crackles, they are a pretty simple chocolate variation cookie - there is a good amount of chocolate (between melted chocolate and cocoa powder) in the recipe, but it also has a number of spices to make it a bit more interesting than it otherwise appears to be. Dorie includes a variation, which I used, that has cinnamon, ground cloves, ginger, allspice and coriander (I wonder if she meant cardamom?). Oh, and salt. So it is an interesting cookie - unlike the sables, which emphasize a paring down of ingredients to highlight single notes, this is more a symphony, with a lot of different things going on, some in progression, others all at once. Not a world changing cookie (like the sables) but a very fun, kinda grown-up chocolate cookie.