For June 9

One new and one old recipe this week:

Peanut Butter (and Currant) Cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
Girl Scout Thin Mint Brownies, from The Food Librarian

I have previously made the peanut butter cookie recipe.  Mary Bergin was the pastry chef at the original Spago in Hollywood.  She then went to Las Vegas to oversee the Spago there, and I don't know where she has ended up since then.  This cookbook was originally published in 1994, and my copy is signed by her, as well as by the friends who gave it to me.  One of those people, Chris Kennedy, was an attorney at Irell & Manella who recruited me from the University of Virginia Law School.  Chris was completely responsible for us ending up in Los Angeles, since Irell was the only firm in LA that I talked to.  At the time, we were much more interested in living in San Francisco or Seattle, but when I visited Los Angeles to interview at Irell, I was taken by the firm and by the city - the smell of black sage along the PCH in the spring is a magical thing - and ended up coming here, instead.  Sadly, Chris died four years ago, when he was only 57 years old.  Chris was a large personality and I owe him much gratitude, even if I left Irell only a year after arriving and our ties loosened over the intervening years.  From even our short time spent together, many great stories remain, most of which involve him, restaurants, and wine, lots of wine, all brought by him in shopping bags.  I will never forget the time, in Ojai, when he was told that, while the restaurant was happy to open wines he brought, they could not do it for wines that they had on their wine list.  He looked at the waiter, coolly, and said that, while they probably had the wine (it was Opus One), they certainly did not have the year (1983).  When the waiter saw the year on the label (and at the time of the story, it must have been 1996), he hurriedly agreed that they did not have a 1983 and that they would be happy to open the wine.

Anyway, while I don't normally like peanut butter cookies, which I generally find too sandy and dry, I love this version, which is neither.  They are great - moist, a bit soft, interesting flavor, and currants!  The title of the recipe doesn't mention it, but the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of currants, and the cookies are liberally studded with them.  They give a nice flavor complement to the peanut butter and probably help keep them moist.

This has become one of Andrew Bodhi-Heart's signature recipes - he makes them much more often than I do.  And I am indebted to him this week because, although I made the dough, which requires overnight refrigeration, he actually formed the balls (the recipe calls for each to be 1 ounce, and he tells me he weighed each one - OCD, anyone?) and baked them.  That is a long and tedious process.  I was very fortunate that he had cleared his schedule for that day in order to study for his licensing exam, and that he was home to bake them in a time-out from studying.  Thanks!

I also promised I would thank him for his generous contribution to the second recipe.  Andrew is a Girl Scout Thin Mint fanatic - each year he orders not a box, but a case, from some lucky Girl Scout somewhere.  This recipe required that I triple it to make the volume necessary to feed the Zen Center and the many others for whom we are baking these days, and that meant using 3 sleeves - a box and a half - of Girl Scout cookies.  He tried to convince me that doubling the recipe would be sufficient, but in the end he acceded.  So three sleeves it is - indeed, not only did he agree, but he even chopped them up.  (Actually, I didn't weigh them to confirm that it was, in fact, three sleeves of cookies that ended up in the bowl and not two.  In light of my comments in the next paragraph, well, hmmm......)

As for the finished result - meh.  The idea sounds so great - I mean, thin mints and brownies, right?  What could possibly be better?  The recipe is apparently an adaptation of a Martha Stewart brownie recipe, which replaces chocolate chips with chopped Thin Mint cookies.  But I found the brownies a bit too dry, and the Thin Mint flavor a bit too diluted.  And given the amount of very good chocolate and cocoa powder that went into these, this was quite a surprise.  Now, others seemed to think they were good, and they seemed to notice the Thin Mint flavor OK, but my expectations were not met.  If I were to do this again - which, given the above, will not be until another case of cookies arrives next year - I think I may use a different brownie recipe for my base.  Then again, David Lebovitz has a brownie recipe that use peppermint creme candy, and Dorie Greenspan has one that includes a middle layer of mini-peppermint patties, so there are lots of other ways to get my chocolate-peppermint fix if I can't wait a year.

In any event, happy baking and eating!

For June 2

A couple of new recipes this week:

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies, from Martha Stewart
Blondies, from Alice Medrich, Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt In Your Mouth Cookies

I first encountered the Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies in a Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies magazine that I picked up in the grocery store last fall.  There are a lot of good recipes in there, but somehow I didn't really make much out of that volume before my Christmas (and then my post-Christmas "buy what you wanted but didn't get") cookbook avalanche began.  But I have to say, from the first minute I read the title for this cookie, I knew I had to make it.  This is a very nice chocolate cookie that is quite nice but a bit boring and traditional up until the point you roll it in a cinnamon-sugar-chile powder mixture before placing each mound on the baking sheet.  The Martha Stewart link I have given you says that this chile powder is "optional" but go for it - it really isn't optional, and these would be very nice, but not very interesting, cookies if you omitted it.  The version that I have recommends using a chile powder that is not the usual blend (when you buy chile powder in the store, it is a blend) but instead to get a chile powder that shows that it is arbol, chipotle or pasilla chile powder.  We used the chipotle, because that was what we could find.  Smoky, yum. With different chile powders, your results will vary.

Anyway, our experience of these was that they were really nice - the cookie has a bit of a crusty exterior, but a soft and wonderful interior.  A great texture, probably my favorite style of cookie.  And the chile powder was definitely a flavor, but a subtle one - you notice it more when you are done with the cookie than when you are eating it.  One person told me I could have upped the chile content for more of a kick.  On the other hand, this is a very individual issue, and I was taking the middle road.  But I think I probably would add a bit more, maybe to the cookie dough, next time....

As for the blondies, well, they were blondies.  This was a nice recipe from Alice Medrich (whose Chewy Gooey cookbook by the way, just won the baking cookbook of the year from the IACP), and I was looking for a bar cookie for this week.  These are good.  Again, ingredients are key - I used the best brown sugar I can get, and since, in a blondie, brown sugar is the major flavor ingredient, I encourage you to look for and use good quality brown sugar if you make these.  At the end, you sprinkle the top with chocolate chips and some reserved walnuts.  As regular readers know, I usually eschew chocolate chips in favor of hand cutting chocolate.  Here, though, I used chips.  The Cook's Illustrated magazine did a taste test a few years ago and pronounced the Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet chocolate chips the best (or among the best that are easily available) and that is what I used here.  Two people said they would like to try this recipe without any chocolate.  I looked at them sympathetically and nodded, but, well, really?  Actually, it would be good w/o the chocolate, so maybe next time I will try it that way.

For May 26

Best Cocoa Brownies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet
Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Sherry Yard, Desserts By The Yard

This week, as we near the unofficial beginning of summer with the Memorial Day weekend, it was time for two classic cookies.  Oh, and they don't taste too bad, either.  To accommodate my crazy schedule, each week I try to do one "bar" type cookie (which includes biscotti) and one more traditional drop cookie.  Since I was having a hankering for brownies, I went back to Alice Medrich's Bittersweet, an amazing cookbook of chocolate desserts.  She has a series of brownie recipes, one based on each type of chocolate.  As it turns out, the different type of chocolate will result in a different type of brownie, because as the cacao % increases, the amount of fat in the brownie that comes from butter will also increase, and this substantially affects the texture of the finished product.  Who really knew this stuff?  Alice Medrich did, and thanks to her, we all do now!  This is a tremendously informational book that I recommend hightly.

Anyway, I opted for the brownie made with 100% cocoa powder, which is to say that all of the fat in the cookies comes from butter, and not from the cacao itself.  Here, I used Valrhona 100% cocoa powder, and it makes a brownie that is so dark it is amazing!  It is almost like a little confectionary black hole - if only that was true about the fat not being able to escape, but alas...  Anyway, this is a delicious and simple brownie to make - really, all brownies are easy to make, and if you want to just stick your toe in the baking world, brownies are a great place to start, because the effort-reward ratio is so favorable.  The one interesting think about brownies is that the recipes tell you to let them cool before serving, and it is very good advice.  These came out of the oven fairly late, but we wanted to, uh, conduct come quality control on them, so we had a wee tiny sample the same evening, while still warm.  They were good, but were surprisingly cakey, and that was not how they were intended.  What was that about?  Well, by the next day, they had completely transformed - much more dense and intense, a bit fudgy, and not cakey at all.  So unless you are going to make them to put under a scoop of ice cream, I encourage you to practice patience and let them full set before cutting into them.

The chocolate chip cookie recipes are a favorite of mine.  Now, they make a cookie that is a bit more crisp and crunchy than I would usually choose, but they are quite easy to make and are delicious.  This recipe is from Sherry Yard, the pastry chef at Spago, and I have made this recipe quite a few times before.  One thing that I like is that one option with it - an option I use regularly - is that you can make the dough, form it into cylinders, then refrigerate it, then slice and bake it the next day.  For time management, this is a great boon, and since the current thinking on cookies - especially, for some reason, chocolate chip cookies - is to let the dough sit for 24 hours before baking, this works out doubly well.  Anyway, as the pictures show, for these I do not use chocolate chips, instead I hand cut my chocolate, which gives the cookies a beautiful and unusual look.  And most chocolate chips are made with a lower quality chocolate.  Here, I used a new chocolate that I was not familiar with, and I didn't keep the label, but it was a 70% chocolate, which is quite intense and made these cookies quite delicious.


Both of these were delicious recipes from tremendously talented pastry chefs.  Bon appetit!

For May 19

 Slowly catching up....

This week, a new recipe and an old one.  Very different, both delicious:

Linzer Cookie Bars

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

The Linzer Cookie Bars are, well, bars that are an adaptation of Linzer cookies (which, I guess, are themselves an adaptation of Linzertorte).  Anyway, a shortbread style crust, a raspberry-lemon layer, and then some crumbled topping.  Good stuff!  I have never made anything in the linzer family before, so this was a fun recipe to make.  They ended up looking quite pretty, and the flavors are quite nice - almond (quite a bit of almond meal in the crust), raspberry and lemon (quite a bit of zest in the raspberry layer).  A nice change of pace.

The second recipe this week was an old friend.  I am very fond of the combination of chocolate and hazelnut, that addiction of the Europeans.  Maybe it is genetically coded?  I don't know, but I do know that these are a standout biscotti - Andrew says that they are, along with a gingerbread biscotti recipe I made years ago and have not been able to replicate ever since, the best biscotti I have ever made.  I may have to agree with him on this one - I really liked these a lot - good thing I tripled the recipe!

This recipe comes out of the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, a wonderful and enormous cookie baking book.  In the book, they have two different basic biscotti recipes, one for "European" style biscotti (read:  hardtack) and one for "American" style biscotti (read:  this is the one I use).  The American one is less dense and includes some butter.  While most commercial American biscotti are largely nasty, overly sweet monstrosities, this recipe is great.  After the base recipes, there are pages and pages of variations, as well as important and useful tips to make your biscotti even better.  One tip:  replace some portion of your flour with nut flours or meals.  That is what I did with this recipe, replacing 1/3 of the flour with hazelnut meal.  It adds tremendous richness of flavor to the biscotti.  According to the King Arthur Flour folks, you can replace up to about 50% of your flour with nut flour.  While they tend to be pricey (and you need to store them in the refrigerator if you have extra), they are great at adding flavor to your biscotti.  I recommend them highly.  Oh, and it always helps to use good quality chocolate - preferably, hand cut your chocolate from blocks, instead of using chocolate chips.  Chocolate chips tend to be made with low quality chocolate.  I much prefer to hand cut my chocolate, which leads to lots of shards and uneven sizes, which gives the finished biscotti (as well as chocolate chip cookies, for which I do the same thing) a lot of visual interest.  Try it!

And one final note about making biscotti - biscotti means "twice baked", and describes how they are made.  First, you make the dough, and then spread it as a log on your cookie sheet and bake it for aroune 25 minutes.  Then you remove it, let it cool, slice the log into 1" slices or so, separate them to the heat can reach the sliced surfaces, then bake them again.  In making the initial logs, you basically dump spoonfuls of dough onto the cookie sheet, and then you need to form it into a log.  Here is my tip to you:  if you run your hands under cold water, you can then easily form the log using your hands directly.  Otherwise, it is a terrible mess.  But through the miracle of cold, wet hands, it is easy!

Now that you have my secrets "in hand," so to speak, go forth and bake!

For May 12

I am so behind!  Yuck.  OK, well, even though I am posting this 3 weeks late, we did take pictures of the cookies at the time (see, no green spots anywhere) so I can report, to the best of my memory, on what we did:

Almond Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Pleyels, from Nick Malgieri

This was the week of the failed recipe.  On Tuesday night, I made ginger macadamia nut biscotti.   Seven dozen of them.  When we tried them on Wednesday night - at 11:30 p.m.! - we realized that the macadamia nuts had gone bad and that the entire output had to be tossed.  So the almond sables were a late addition based on the fact that I had the needed ingredients (butter and almonds) and that they are quite simple to make (and delicious to boot).  So I made the dough at midnight, and then Andrew sliced and baked them the next day.  As I have said, I love Alice Medrich's sables recipes, and this one is one of my favorites - particularly since it got me out of a tough spot!

I am pretty sure I made the Pleyels before, but I can't find them in a search of the blog, so maybe it was a lot longer ago than I remembered it being.  Anyway, the recipe is at the link, and I encourage you to check it out.  Pleyels are a small, french-pedigree chocolate cake.  Nick Malgieri calls for them to be baked in muffin pans, but I used mini-muffin pans for my purposes.  You have to really watch them in such small pans to make sure they don't dry out too quickly.  These are like little brownie bites, except the chocolate flavor is a bit more refined (these are really exquisite) and the texture is a little bit lighter.  All in all, these are a very nice item.  At some point, I should try them in the full muffin tins; I am sure that they are exceedingly moist when made that way.