For June 30

This is the last day of June.  It is also the last day of baking for me for a month or so.  I have a trial coming up on July 19, as well as an appellate brief due next Thursday, and I need to pull back from various responsibilities for July in order to take care of my clients and their needs.  Lucky for the Zen Center, Bob Gido Fisher has agreed to step in for me for a month while my attention is elsewhere.  You are all very lucky!

The time demands did not just kick in as of July 1, so this was another week with limited baking time.  I was, again, incredibly lucky to have Andrew Bodhi-Heart available to help me with the baking.  The late nights would have been even later, otherwise.

This week:

Almond Rochers, from Tartine
Pecan Cocoa Sables, adapted from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet


The first recipe is a meringue variation that I have made before.  The recipe comes from Tartine, a bakery in San Francisco.  It is quite interesting and, like all things that rely on beaten egg whites as a key ingredient, rather scary.  That you have to heat the egg whites over boiling water until a certain temperature and then quickly remove them and whisk them only makes it even scarier!  But it all worked out OK in the end.  The base recipe has so few ingredients, including only two egg whites and a cup of sugar, yet it says it makes 30 cookies.  The magic of egg whites and air is truly amazing.  Anyway, this recipe has you toast sliced almonds and, when they are cooled, you then just crush them up in your hands to get a coarse almond meal.  After making the meringue base, you fold the almonds in and then spoon them out (or use a pastry bag if you want, which I do not) and bake them.  The result in a higgledy-piggledy "cookie" that is crusty on the outside, chewy on the inside, and redolent of almond.  Oh, and these have the advantage of being both fat free (except for the fat in the almonds, so I guess we should say "no added fat") and gluten free.  I love this recipe and when, as was the case this week, I know that someone who can't have cookies with gluten is coming to the Zen Center, I use this as my stand-by gluten-free recipe.  It is a good one to have at hand!

The second recipe is gluten-full to make up for the first.  Again, a sable variation from Alice Medrich.  This one is a variation of my own to two of her recipes.  She has a pecan sable recipe, and then a cocoa-cacao nib sable recipe.  Here, I kept the pecans and then added the cocoa powder to get a chocolate pecan cookie recipe.  These are full of butter and the nice flavor of Valrhona cocoa powder and roasted pecans.  They last a long time and they are easy to make.  A nice way to bow out for a little bit.

For June 23

These last two weeks were ones where time was extremely limited, and I was incredibly lucky to have Andrew Bodhi-Heart helping me out in the cookie-making department.  This week, it was two old favorites, both from Alice Medrich:

Buckwheat Cacao Nib Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Classic Unsweetened-Chocolate Brownies, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet

Sables are a French version of a shortbread - few ingredients other than flour and butter, but unlike the shortbread, here the ingredients are rolled into a cylinder, refrigerated, then sliced and baked.  These could not be easier to make, and it is easy to make a cylinder and freeze it so that you always have cookies available.  Anyway, this variation uses two interesting ingredients in the form of buckwheat flour in addition to the usual wheat flour, and also cacao nibs, which are a precursor to chocolate and a favorite baking ingredient of mine.  The buckwheat makes the cookies a bit gray, just like Soba noodles, which is certainly an unusual cookie color.  It also makes them quite delicate.  The cacao nibs, in contrast, are always earthy without being sweet.  I like this recipe a lot.  It is a bit of an adult cookie, overall, but it is easy to make and very flavorful and enjoyable.

In her book Bittersweet, which is all about chocolate, Alice Medrich gives a variety of brownie recipes that are all tailored to the type of chocolate you are using (i.e., there is a recipe for unsweetened chocolate, a different one for cocoa powder, etc. etc.)  The point is that different chocolates have different amounts of fat from different sources (fat from butter, fat from the cocoa butter, etc.) and that these, along with the type of sugar, result in very different flavor and texture profiles for your brownies.  It is a really interesting way to learn about different types of chocolate and their characteristics for baking, and I recommend it highly.  Last year I did around 4 or 5 of the brownie recipes in a row and it was very instructive to see how each recipe produced a different result.

Anyway, this week I made the recipe that uses unsweetened chocolate as the base.  You bake it at a high temperature for a short amount of time, and then cool it quickly in an ice bath.  It results in a brownie with a crusty top and gooey interior.  Because of that gooey interior, the baking process requires a certain leap of faith, since you can't stick a toothpick in and know they're done.  And for me, it is quite anxiety-inducing, because I multiply the recipe and use a 13x9 inch pan rather than the 8x8 called for in the recipe, and changing the pan size can alter the baking time quite significantly.  But the end result is a very good brownie (as long as you are not one of those people who likes cakey brownies, in which case you have come to the wrong blog).  These are not spectacular like some brownies, but they are, as the name indicates, a classic version of a brownie.

For June 16

This was a week with no chocolate.  I don't know how that happened, exactly, but it did.  We survived - luckily these non-chocolate cookies managed to suffice:

Cherry Pistachio Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

Cornmeal Thyme Cookies, from Martha Stewart Cookies

This is the first time I have made this particular biscotti recipe, and it was really great.  The recipe comes from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion, which has an entire chapter on biscotti.  The way they set the chapter up, there are two basic recipes, an Italian biscotti recipe, and then an American biscotti recipe.  They are similar, except the American recipe makes a biscotti that is not quite as, well, hard and demanding that it be dunked in order to be eaten.  (I always make my biscotti using the American base recipe, which I find much more enjoyable and, since we have them without milk, coffee or vin santo to dunk them in, it is good that they are easier to eat.)  After those two base recipes, there are lots of variations in the form of flavorings and ingredients that you can add to them.  For anyone interested in playing around with recipes, this is a great chapter, since it talks about variations using nut flours, nuts, flavorings, and all sorts of other things, each of which gives you a slightly different result but almost always delicious.

Anyway, as a general rule, I am not a huge fan of either pistachio or cherry as flavors, which explains why this is one of the last recipe variations that I have not made.  But it goes to show me that having a not-knowing mind can be a good thing, because it ended up being a wonderful flavor combination, and the actual texture of the biscotti was very nice.  In the end, I think this is one of my favorite biscotti recipes!  These are a perfect biscotti for eating on their own, but even better (like so many biscotti) dipped in milk or coffee.  And the red cherries and green pistachios give them some unusual visual appeal, as the photo may show.

The second recipe was one I have made before, but not for a while (a search of the blog tells me it was October 2009).  I originally found this recipe in a Martha Stewart holiday baking magazine that I picked up on the way to Yosemite for Thanksgiving the first year I started this baking thing - 2005.  They are an interesting cookie because these two main ingredients are so interesting.  The cornmeal gives the cookies an unusual texture, while the thyme gives them an unusual flavor.  There is not a huge amount of thyme in them, so it is a somewhat subtle flavor, but the savory is definitely there along with the sweet, so it is a cookie that asks you for some attention.

These cookies also have currants in them - quite a few, actually.  This is the second week in a row that I have made cookies that prominently include currants, but where the currants are not included in the cookie name.  Last week it was the peanut butter (and currant) cookies, this week it is the cornmeal thyme (and currant) cookies.  Obviously, currants do not have a good agent, the poor things.  In both of these recipes, they are a key ingredient, so it is funny that they don't get mentioned.  I think we need an "ode to the currant" to make things right.  Volunteers?