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!

For September 22

Still catching up!  OK, this was what we had LAST week.

Bittersweet Decadence Cookies, from Alice Medrich, Chewy Gooey (you know the rest by now...)
Maple Crisps, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

A couple of highly divergent cookies this week.  First, chocolate.  I made the bittersweet decadence cookies - how about that for a name? - some time ago, but it was out of a different one of Alice Medrich's cookbooks, and I think some of the technique was different.  I haven't gone back to check, but while I was making them I had the distinct feeling that I had never before done a few of the things it requires as part of the recipe.  Anyway, the two major ingredients are chocolate and pecans (or walnuts).  This recipe involves a lot of chocolate - some as cocoa powder, a lot as melted chocolate, and then some as chocolate chunks stirred in at the end.  There is not a whole lot of flour holding these cookies together, and the quality of the chocolate you use is KEY, because that is ultimately just about all you taste.  While it also uses a large amount of pecans, I think they largely lend texture rather than much in the way of flavor to this recipe.  Somewhat surprisingly, the recipe doesn't call for roasting the pecans first, which would bring more flavor to the recipe, and if I make them again I think I might do that to see how it comes out.  But in the end, you get a higgledy-piggledy cookie that is dark dark dark.  It is quite an interesting cookie.  Of course, if you don't like chocolate, it is definitely not for you!

The maple crisps were, well, not my cup of tea (or cookie), although lots of other people seemed to like them.  Indeed, I was so unhappy with them that I almost threw them out and just made a different recipe.  But it was late, and Andrew dissuaded me, for better or worse.

We made these because it is autumn and time for maple!  Maple is a flavor that both Andrew and I love, and he asked for a maple cookie this week.  So I looked through some books and found this one, which is an adaptation of a "brandy crisp" recipe that takes out the brandy and adds in maple syrup instead.  This recipe is made on the stove, and then the mixture cools and is scooped into tiny (teaspoon) balls and placed on the cookie sheet.  Each teaspoon ball flattens out to a very thin, lacy cookie that is something like 3 inches in diameter.  (As a result, the first tray, which had my usual 13 cookies on it, ended up as a giant, undifferentiated blob.)  Anyway, these are closer to a candy than a cookie, and I was not in love with the texture or flavor.  So it was a disappointment.  On the other hand, a variety of people said they really liked them, so go figure.  As for me, these can be checked off the bucket list with no need to make them again.

This next week I am taking off because it is my birthday and also because I have been down in Orange County on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with no time to bake.  So we will continue our maple excursion next week, and hopefully our weather will make it seem more like fall than we are experiencing right now!

TTFN.

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!

For August 11

OK, well, how was YOUR July?  I just got my time records back, and it looks like I billed over 240 hours of time at work in July.  Which would explain why there were no cookies.  But now, things are settling down, and we are back to butter, flour, chocolate (LOTS of chocolate) and other good things.  Oh, and of course, a 400 degree oven during the summer.  Well, you can't win them all...

This week, one old and one new recipe, i.e.:

World Peace Cookies, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking:  From My Home To Yours
Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Matt Lewis & Renato Poliafito, Baked:  New Frontiers In Baking

Old:  I have made the World Peace Cookies before, and using the magic of the search function from Google I see that, strangely, I made them in both 2009 and 2010 at almost exactly the same time each year as I am making them this year.  Who knew that world peace was a season-specific thing!  Anyway, these are one of Andrew's favorite cookies and really one of mine, too.  They were originally developed by Paris baker Pierre Herme, and have been included in two of Dorie Greenspan's cookbooks over time.  While they had a different name when originally created, a friend of hers told her that, if the whole world could have these cookies, world peace would break out because of the happiness they engender, and hence the name they have now.  They are a relative of the sable, which is the sandy, shortbread-style cookie from France that I so love in the baking of Alice Medrich.  Here, however, they get a big dose of cocoa powder, so they are intensely dark.  And they get hand chopped chocolate (really good chocolate).  And then they get salt - not a tiny amount, but a good amount of a nice fleur de sel that is very discernible in the flavor profile of the cookie - to give them sweet, chocolate and salt.  The result is a dark and wondrous creation.  (Photos by the weekend, if any are left to photograph.)

New:  I have made a few recipes from the two cookbooks by the guys behind the Brooklyn bakery called Baked.  The brownies and then the salted caramel brownies were both nearly revelatory.  And I decided I wanted to do a chocolate chip cookie recipe this week as part of my baking return, a "back to basics" kind of approach.  So I decided to make the chocolate chip cookie recipe from their first cookbook.

Well, I am not sure how I feel about the result.  The cookie is good, don't get me wrong - I mean, with butter, high quality dark brown sugar, eggs and a whole lotta chocolate chips (Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet), you can't go TOO wrong, after all - but not what I was hoping for.  These use dark brown sugar, and a lot of it, which is quite unusual in chocolate chip cookies - most use light brown sugar - and it makes them quite dark.  The recipe called for scooping out 2 tablespoon-sized cookies, but that is too big for my purposes, so we used the 1 tablespoon scoop and reduced the cooking time a bit.  They turned out quite soft, and while I like a soft and chewy chocolate chip cookie, I prefer it to be as they described it in the recipe, which is a bit crispy at the edges and soft in the center.  I don't know if we undercooked them or if the change in portion size affected the texture, but these do not have the crispy edge.  Alas.  But they are still chocolate chip cookies, and I am sure that they will be happily eaten.  And now I know at least one recipe that I will be making next week as I start the hunt for the perfect chocolate chip cookie....

Back from the dead....

Hi everyone,
My trial is over, and I am back to baking this week:  Something old, something new.  More to follow later.

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?

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!