For March 31

Last week, Zen Center was in a short sesshin that began on Thursday evening, so there were no cookies.  That was OK, it was a busy, crazy work week for me, and I was working late every night, so adding cookie baking to the mix may have pushed me over the top!

Anyway, this week we have two new cookies, both from the new Alice Medrich book:

Whole Wheat Hazelnut Cookies With Currants And Cacao Nibs
Apricot Lemon Bars With Hazelnut Crust

both from Alice Medrich, Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies

Wow, a lot of hazelnuts this week!  That's OK, they are a great flavor and in these cookies they play a supporting role.

This week, the cacao nib cookies are dedicated to my friend Adam.  I met Adam through Frank, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him.  I learned to my great delight that he is extremely knowledgeable about chocolate; we went out to dinner recently and we had a bonding experience talking about cacao nibs.  He has had some amazing life experiences, is smart, funny, and really fun (oh, and did I mention how good-looking he is?).  Which is why he has a boyfriend; sorry!  Anyway, this week Frank delivered a care package to me at the gym from Adam that was filled with different and interesting chocolates, as well as a canister of cacao nibs.  Now, dear reader, if you have been following this blog for any time, you will know that I love cacao nibs - they are a precursor to chocolate, and they have a very earthy flavor but little of the sweetness of chocolate.  I love to add them to various recipes.  Fortunately for me, Alice Medrich is equally a fan, and has lots of recipes that use them.  So I used some of my gift to make these cookies, and the whole wheat cookies this week are thus dedicated to Adam, with thanks.

The whole wheat cookies are interesting - in a good way.  They are a variant on the sables recipes that I like so much.  When I first started making the sables (French for "sandy") it was from Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert book, in which she pares back the ingredients in each recipe to just have the few remaining ingredients shine intensely.  Here, the recipe goes the other way - there is a riot of flavors going on in this little cookie.  There is the basic cookie, which is that sandy, buttery cookie that is the classic sables.  Then we have a mixture of white and wheat flours, to give it some nuttiness.  Then there are the hazelnuts, which are roasted and finely chopped.  Finally we have both the currants and the cacao nibs - in the cookie, they cook very similar, both these small dark spots against the golden cookie.  This is a cookie where you can taste all of these different things - not a case where they all blend in to a single flavor, but instead in each bite you get just a variety of different things going on.  (And even better, they look exactly like the full-page picture in the cookbook - hurrah!)

The apricot lemon bars are a bounce back from the bar disaster of 2 weeks ago.  At that time, I tried to make lime bars, but I used some "sweet limes" I got at the Farmer's Market, and they had no flavor at all, and the bars were a total dud - I ended up throwing away 2 entire pans of them.  Sigh.  So this week, we seem to have recovered.  For these bars, you start with a hazelnut shortbread crust, which is baked until golden.  Then the "filling" is added, which is largely eggs, fresh lemon juice and apricot preserves, and baked again.  Here, the lemons are tart and tangy, and the apricot is sweet and tangy-smooth, so while they are still cooling and I have not tasted the end product, they seem a far cry from where we were 2 weeks ago.

OK, it is 12:30 and I have to do my workout tomorrow at 7:15, so time to go to bed.  Night night!