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!