For February 9

Light and dark, light and dark...

Blondies
Pecan and Cacao Nib Sables

both from Alice Medrich, Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-In-Your-Mouth Cookies

After last week's re-debut, it is back to the regular schedule now.  I had to start cooking on Monday night this week, a day early, which meant planning on Sunday night.  When I am feeling a bit time-stressed, I just reach for the familiar and reliable, which for me means any cookbook by (a) Dorie Greenspan or (b) Alice Medrich.  In this case, Alice's book, which is just hundreds of pages of cookie recipes, won out, so I grabbed it on the way to the office and figured out what I needed during the day, did my workout at the gym after work, shopped for ingredients and started making cookie dough.  (And, of course, tried to catch up on Downton Abbey after falling 2 weeks behind, but I digress....)

The blondies were new - I had made brownies last week, and I needed a "tray" cookie (i.e., yummy but not too time demanding to make them), so I was happy to try a new blondie recipe.  Blondies can be a bit tricky, because they don't have the chocolate, and in many ways the chocolate will cover many sins.  Blondies, on the other hand, use few ingredients, and if they are just so-so, it is starkly obvious.  These turned out pretty well.  One batch I made was a little overcooked, but the larger pan, the 13 x 9 inch pan I made for Zen Center, was better - a bit cooked at the center but the inside was chewy without being underdone, and the brown sugar component - the key to blondies, so use good brown sugar - came through nicely.  This particular recipe calls for a good amount of walnuts, half of which are added to the recipe and the other half are sprinkled on top along with lots of chocolate chips.  Nothing sophisticated about this recipe, and it would be great with a glass of milk.

The second item was another, favorite variant on sables, the French version of a shortbread.  The basic recipe is like a shortbread or sugar cookie, and then we add cacao nibs and chopped roasted pecans, which together give a very earthy, nutty flavor to the cookie.  These are a slice and bake cookie and require refrigeration; in this case, I made the dough on Monday and baked it on Wednesday, and they ended up being really nicely.  With a stand mixer, this is an incredibly easy recipe, and since the dough will keep just about forever in the freezer, it would be a perfect thing to make, freeze and have on hand when you need to make a few cookies.  Highly recommended!

OK, next week I have a big filing on Friday, so someone else will be baking for Zen Center while I stress out about details involving PVC pipe manufacturing and standards for tensile strength testing.  Woohoo!  See you in two!

Dharma-Joy

...and we're back!

For February 2, 2012

OK, well, I guess we fell off the blogging wagon there for a while.  I DID actually make cookies after mid-September, and I even took pictures of most of them!  But getting the pictures and the info on the cookies onto the blog, well...it didn't happen.  Alas.  I thought for a while that I would go back, organize the photos, use them to remind me of which recipes I made, and clean it all up.  It was a nice thought...

Anyway, new year, and time to get back up in the saddle and start blogging again.  So here are this week's recipes:

Sweet and Salty Brownies, adapted from Baked, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies, from Flour, by Joanne Chang

This week marks the resumption of our normal schedule at Zen Center after the Bare Bones January schedule in which we had no Thursday night talks and no accompanying tea and cookies.  I wanted to kick off the year with some good stuff that was also somewhat classic.  So oatmeal cookies and brownies.

A tray of sweet and salty brownies - don't think about the nutritional ingredients and all will be fine.

The brownies are a twist on the classic.  I made these a couple of times last year.  The original recipe is from Baked, a bakery in Brooklyn that was opened by two refugees from the advertising industry.  I hope to go there some time, because they seem like a very interesting and fun couple of guys.  Anyway, their first cookbook, Baked, included a recipe for brownies that was really great - rich, dense but not too fudgy, just overall good.  Their follow-up cookbook, Baked Explorations, included a variation on that brownie recipe.  It included the addition of a layer of homemade salted caramel between two layers of brownie batter, and then adds a sprinkling coarse sugar and sea salt on top of the cooked brownies.  This week, I made the brownie, omitted the salted caramel, but added the salt and sugar on top.  So sweet and salty.  Yum.

Oatmeal raisin cookies from Flour

For my second recipe this week, I used a new cookbook that I got for Christmas.  It is called Flour (what is it with one syllable titles?) and it is the cookbook from Boston bakery of the same name.  This came out a couple of years ago, but it made it to me just this year.  It is a nice cookbook with a lot of interesting side notes and good photos.  It also looks like a fun bakery that would be nice to visit!

I made these cookies because I know that oatmeal raisin cookies are Roshi's favorite.  Most of the cookie recipes in this book adopt the "make the dough and then let it rest for 12-24 hours in the refrigerator before baking" technique that has become popular recently (particularly with chocolate chip cookies).  Since I am trying to space out my baking across multiple nights to accommodate the rest of my so-called life, I was happy to oblige.  This is a pretty straightforward recipe, and it made a very nice cookie - a little crispy at the edges and chewy in the middle.  The recipe calls for spooning the dough out in 1/4 cup sized amounts, but that is way too big for my purposes, so I reduced it to 1 tablespoon (1/4 cup is 4 tablespoons) and reduced the baking time.  Oatmeal raisin cookies will never win awards for beauty, but they were quite good.  And I will note that while I took 52 to Zen Center for Thursday night, only 1 was left by the end of the evening - they proved more popular than the brownies, which really knocked me over.

OK, enough for now.  Welcome back!