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!