For September 15

OK, trial and summer travel are over, so it is back to the oven for me!

This week two repeats (more or less):

Sweet and Salty Brownies, adapted from Baked: New Adventures In Baking, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Whole Wheat Sables with Hazelnuts, Currants and Cacao Nibs, from Chewy, Gooey, Crispy, Crunchy, Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies, by Alice Medrich

The brownies are adapted from an amazing recipe from the Brooklyn bakery called Baked, which was founded by two recovering advertising executives.  They have two cookbooks.  In the first, they have a great brownie recipe, which I made a few months ago.  In the second, they have a variation on that recipe in which they add a middle layer of salted caramel and then add salt and sugar on top, which I also made a few months ago.  For this week, I went half-way between the two - I omitted the salted caramel, but added the salt and sugar on top.  So these are the basic brownie, but finished like the salted caramel brownie.  Whatever.  These are really good.  There is a lot of chocolate, a good amount of butter, a lot of eggs, and it all adds up to yum!  The salt is a coarse sea salt, and the finishing sugar is a coarse sugar, so it is quite pretty, and the sweet and salty, along with the deep chocolate, are a really nice combination.

I made the sables back in March.  As with Alice Medrich's other sables recipes, they involve few ingredients, so quality is really important.  Here, there are more "add-ins" than usual, with roasted hazelnuts, currants and then cacao nibs.  They are called "whole wheat" but while there is whole wheat flour in the recipe, there is also the standard white flour as well.  Oh, well.  Anyway, even with the abundance of additions, these are a fairly adult cookie.  I suppose the brownies are "adult" also, given the salt, but it is hard to really think of brownies as adult, whatever form or variation they take.  Alice's sables, on the other hand, have an adult feel from beginning to end.  I am sure kids would like them, but there is some quality that is hard to pin down that says these are not a cookie parents are making with or for their kids.  Unless they live in, say, Berkeley.

Photos to follow!