For May 5

Back from our "spring break," which means it's time to get baking.  This week, we had two more Alice Medrich creations:

Brown Sugar Butter Cookies
Black Bottomed Pecan Praline Bars

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

Brown Sugar Butter Cookies

Another yin and yang kind of week -  a simple, understated cookie and one that's well, not so much.  First, I have been looking for a while for a really good butter cookie/sugar cookie recipe, and so far I have not quite found it.  This week, I continued my quest in that direction and, well, I'm still looking.  I guess this is what they call dukkha. 

Black Bottom Pecan Praline Bars

So the butter cookies are a very simple recipe with a bunch of variations.  I took one of the variations which called for replacing all the regular sugar with brown sugar.  I used mostly light brown sugar, but added a little dark brown as well.  They are good but, well, a bit boring.  I don't know if they needed a little more time in the oven, to be sliced a little more thinly or what, but they didn't have the right texture that I am looking for.  They were pretty good, but the search continues....

A couple of weeks ago, I made a brownie that had a macadamia nut shortbread bottom, then a brownie layer on top.  This week, I kinda flipped it around - these bars have a brownie layer on the bottom, and then a pecan praline (is that redundant?  can you have praline without pecans?  I hope not, it would be like pesto without basil, but don't get me started...) layer on top.  Which, in this case, means a lot of pecans mixed with brown sugar and butter and a few eggs to hold it all together.  Except for the omission of chocolate, it is really the perfect food combination, and the brownie layer adds the chocolate - Yum!  Anyway, I really enjoyed these.  There is nothing particularly challenging about them, and they emphasize flavor, not subtlety, but they are fun and really good tasting.  I recommend these.  And Bodhi-Heart has placed them on his list of "top" baked goods, which is a rarefied assembly.  So go forth and bake!

Since Roshi wanted to see a photo of the baker, well, here he is!

For April 21

OK, this is a rather late, but since I want to get back on schedule, I have to clean out the backlog first!
April 21 was the last Thursday night before Zen Center went on "spring break"; we have a more official name, but you get the idea.  I don't think anyone went to Key West or Lake Havasu, though, or if they did, they certainly weren't saying.

Here are the cookies from that week:

Macadamia Shortbread Brownies
Melting Chocolate Meringues

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

Are we getting tired of this Alice Medrich book?   I hope not, since there are probably 300 more recipes to go!

OK, first the brownies.  These are a two-layer brownie.  First, you make a macadamia shortbread dough, which you put on the bottom of your pan, and pre-bake it like a tart crust.  Then, you remove it, put the brownie batter on top while the shortbread is still warm, return it to the oven and then bake until done.

There were some scheduling challenges this week, so I ended up baking these on Wednesday morning, rather than Wednesday evening.  The recipe calls for you to bake them until the top cracks.  Unfortunately, the top never cracked, and they baked a bit longer than they should have, resulting in a, uh, well-done shortbread on the bottom.  My friend and amazing pastry chef Bob Gido Fisher tells me that he always places baking sheets under pans of bars and that this helps to keep them from burning.  I know that Dorie Greenspan recommends the same, and in the future I am going to have to adopt that smart technique.  Anyway, these were still quite good, with the rich buttery shortbread and then the dense fudginess of the brownie.





And then there are the meringues.  My friend Frank really enjoyed the meringues I made a few weeks ago, and I had seen this recipe in Alice's book and have been planning on making it for a bit.  With a name like Melting Chocolate Meringues, can you resist?  I didn't think so.  Now, until very recently I have not made meringues, because I am hard-wired to believe that something that does not include either flour or butter cannot be thought of as a cookie - or, for that matter, edible.  But being a good Zen student (or something like that) I have decided to expand my horizons and take a bigger view, and thus I have begun making thinks like meringues.


Now, if you, like me, gentle reader, have such prejudices enslaving you, I encourage you to make these meringues as a step into the light.  Because they are in taste and texture a lot closer to a fluffy truffle than they are to a dessert based largely on air beaten into egg whites until they can hold a little sweetener as well.  Like many of my baking projects these days, this recipe calls for very little in the way of ingredients, so it is important to use the best you can, and in this case that means using really good chocolate.  Here, the recipe is fairly straightforward.  The only "trick" is with folding a lot of melted chocolate into the whipped egg whites.  But it is something I do very badly, and I can assure you, it all works out OK in the end, so don't let it hold you back.  After making the batter, you scoop it out in small scoops onto the pans and bake and let cool.  You are left with, well, what you see above - little higgeldy-piggeldy (amazing, the Blogger dictionary doesn't have suggestions for that one) mounds filled with nuts and lots of chocolate.  And since the base is fat free, well....these are positively healthy!  At least in comparison to the macadamia shortbread brownies!

P.S.  Thanks to Andrew Bodhi-Heart for the pictures this week!