Last week, Andrew and I left for Tassajara on Thursday morning, but I made cookies to leave behind before heading out. Both cookies were from one of my favorite cooks, Alice Medrich:
Nibby Pecan Sables
Real Chocolate Wafers
both from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet
The chocolate wafer cookie was a new recipe for me. The cookie is exactly what it says it is - a chocolate wafer. Probably quite good with milk, and as Alice says in her notes, crushed up they would make an excellent pie crust. Not my favorite cookie on its own, but it has very good flavor. (Mini ice-cream sandwiches would be amazing with this.)
The sables are an old favorite. I'll write more later.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
For June 24...
For June 24, I was just back in town from a week away. We had a guest baker this week, Bob Gido Fisher. He made two ridiculously good items:
Chocolate Crinkles, from Martha Stewart Cookies
Oatmeal Lace Cookies
The oatmeal lace cookies were amazing. Lucky for me, Gido even gave me the recipe, so I will get to try it after a suitable break.
Thanks, Gido!
Chocolate Crinkles, from Martha Stewart Cookies
Oatmeal Lace Cookies
The oatmeal lace cookies were amazing. Lucky for me, Gido even gave me the recipe, so I will get to try it after a suitable break.
Thanks, Gido!
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
For June 10
Quick post, very tired. Two very different cookies this week:
Double Chocolate Cookies, from Milk
Orange Cashew Biscotti, from The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion
Milk is an amazing ice cream shop and bakery on Beverly Boulevard. While people go mostly for the ice cream, their baked goods are, IMHO, even better. This recipe for double chocolate cookies was printed about 18 months ago in the LA Times, and I am happy to finally be making it. It is a hedonist's cookie - a lot of chocolate with a bit of egg and flour to hold it all together. Very intense, very wonderful. Just be sure to use good chocolate!
The biscotti were a response to my "challenge" from Andrew, who asked me to make a recipe with orange. (I just mentioned this to him, and he had forgotten.) Anyway, I am not a huge fan of orange in cookies, but I thought that I would browse my biscotti variations, and I came across this recipe that involves both orange as well as salted, roasted cashews, one of Andrew's major food groups. Well, how could I resist? (A rhetorical question.) Anyway, the orange in these is from our tree - we have a Valencia orange tree in our front yard and it makes the sweetest and juciest oranges that we rarely take advantage of. So today I got to use zest and juice to make these biscotti. They are a nice, delicate flavor - the cashews are not nearly as strong a flavor as I expected them to be, and the orange is a predominant flavor. They are a nice cookie and a good contrast to the intensity of the chocolate cookies. We'll see as they cool and settle down how the flavor develops.
I should add that I was helped greatly by Andrew Bodhi-Heart this week. I made the dough for the double chocolate cookies on Tuesday night because it had to chill a bit before portioning out. He got home early on Wednesday and decided to surprise me by baking the cookies for me, so when I got home around 7:30, the chocolate cookies were all done and cooling on racks or already packed up for delivery. Hurray! It made the rest of the evening much more enjoyable. Thanks!
OK, night night!
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
For June3
OK, back on track, even if exhausted. This week, two rather experimental cookies - which is probably kinda silly, probably should have done only ONE experimental cookie in a week. But noooooo...... So here is the lineup:
Iced Multigrain Oatmeal Cookies, adapted from Kim Boyce, Good to the Grain
Chocolate Chip Cookies with Buckwheat Groats, from The Wednesday Chef blog
Two interesting cookies. Now, neither of them is going to come in as "healthy," believe me, but they are both whole grain based cookies. The oatmeal cookies are VERY whole grain. The recipe involved whole oats (which you grind into a coarse meal), whole wheat flour, oat flour, barley flour, millet flour and rye flour. Andrew was agog at all the little flour bags that were strewn over the counter at the end of this process; the only reason he forgave me was that we managed to reduce the rolled oat containers in our cupboard in making the recipe, and somehow the oats seem to be breeding in there in the dark or something, we have so many of them. Anyway, these are a very nice cookie - the cookie has all these amazing whole grains, and then most of the sweetener is the good, dark brown muscovado sugar that I have been using recently, which is so much better than the normal dark brown sugar (albeit a wee bit more expensive - or maybe a wee bit more than a wee bit). After they cool, they are iced to give them a little extra flavor (there is a boatload of cinnamon in the icing, which is why it is BROWN) and a kick of sweetness. I have to admit, I was a bit guarded about this "whole grain" recipe, but this one is really yummy. I am sure that the butter and the brown sugar may have something to do with that. But now, what do I do with 4 cups of millet flour?
The other recipe was one of those spur of the moment moves. I have never been to this woman's blog before, but I was browsing around looking for a different recipe and landed on her wonderful food blog - I recommend it highly, and it is quite entertaining and enjoyable. Anyway, looking at her index of cookie recipes, I saw this one for chocolate chip cookies with buckwheat groats. Huh??? Buckwheat groats? In chocolate chip cookies? What are buckwheat groats, anyway?
Well, Whole Foods being, well, Whole Foods, it had multiple choices of buckwheat groats. The recipe calls for "buckwheat groats (kasha)" but it seems clear after my Whole Foods shopping experience that buckwheat groats are not the same as kasha - kasha is a roasted version of buckwheat groats. (Some of the brands did not make this distinction, either, so I may be just making this all up, but it's just too late and I'm too tired to research this to a resolution.) So I was left with the question of buying the roasted version (kasha) or the raw version (groats). I went for the roasted version, thinking that it would give a nutty, richer flavor to the cookie. Anyway, the recipe is a pretty straightforward chocolate chip cookie recipe, except that instead of adding nuts or whatever with the chips, you add the buckwheat groats. (Oh, and it calls for whole wheat pastry flour instead of the usual white flour, so this was truly a whole grain cooking night.) And it does indeed give the cookies a very interesting, unusual twist - there is both an interesting texture from the crunchiness of the groats, and also an interesting flavor. The cookies came out on the crisp/crunch side to begin with, and the groats add further crunch, so not for those of you who like your cookies chewy or soft.
Anyway, my concerns about doing two experimental, whole grain cookies in one week seem to be allayed. We have survived another baking adventure!
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
For May 20 (Final Catch Up)
OK, so I have been totally lame on blogging. Sue me. The big problem is that I really have absolutely no memory about what I made in the earlier weeks, making this an increasingly challenging exercise. Anyway, since I still have these hanging around my house, I am pretty sure about what I made last week. Here's the deal:
Raspberry Honey Financiers, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Cranberry Oatmeal Bars, from Nick Malgieri
OK, so something went very wrong last week - there was no chocolate involved in the baking! It was largely an accident - I was looking for the page in the Martha Stewart's Cookies book that has the chocolate-black pepper cookies, and passed the page with the financiers and they caught my eye and I decided a) the chocolate cookie recipe required a refrigeration time for the dough that I did not have available and b) the financiers looked soooooo cute! Although part of my motivation was to find a recipe that did not require such a time investment as many drop cookies, that did not turn out to be the case here - the recipe involves quite a few steps, so it was probably a wash in the end. There is not very much flour in the recipe; instead, you toast almonds and then grind them finely. It gives it great flavor and texture. It also requires you to brown the butter, which is always a bit of an anxiety-inducing exercise for me - cooking butter until it is brown (but not burned!) is definitely a mindfulness exercise. Finally, you take fresh raspberries and puree them. Ideally you pass them through a strainer to remove the seeds; if you are me, you try that until, in exasperation, you give up and just dump it all in and mutter something about seeds being good for the soul....
Anyway, these are a tiny (mini-cupcake pan) almond cake with a dollop of raspberry added on top. Now, in the oh-so-pretty cookbook version, you dab the raspberry on top, and then use a knife or some similar object to swirl the dab around to make it heart-shaped. Yeah, right - well, in my world everyone has broken hearts - very, very broken hearts. Anyway, they were yummy all the same.
The cranberry oatmeal bars were very nice. Oats, cranberries, pecans, brown sugar - yum. The cranberries were a nice flavor complement, replacing the usual, sweeter, raisins or currants. This was not very sweet - really, neither of these two items was overly sweet - and would probably also be a good breakfast or mid-morning item rather than simply a "dessert."
Raspberry Honey Financiers, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Cranberry Oatmeal Bars, from Nick Malgieri
OK, so something went very wrong last week - there was no chocolate involved in the baking! It was largely an accident - I was looking for the page in the Martha Stewart's Cookies book that has the chocolate-black pepper cookies, and passed the page with the financiers and they caught my eye and I decided a) the chocolate cookie recipe required a refrigeration time for the dough that I did not have available and b) the financiers looked soooooo cute! Although part of my motivation was to find a recipe that did not require such a time investment as many drop cookies, that did not turn out to be the case here - the recipe involves quite a few steps, so it was probably a wash in the end. There is not very much flour in the recipe; instead, you toast almonds and then grind them finely. It gives it great flavor and texture. It also requires you to brown the butter, which is always a bit of an anxiety-inducing exercise for me - cooking butter until it is brown (but not burned!) is definitely a mindfulness exercise. Finally, you take fresh raspberries and puree them. Ideally you pass them through a strainer to remove the seeds; if you are me, you try that until, in exasperation, you give up and just dump it all in and mutter something about seeds being good for the soul....
Anyway, these are a tiny (mini-cupcake pan) almond cake with a dollop of raspberry added on top. Now, in the oh-so-pretty cookbook version, you dab the raspberry on top, and then use a knife or some similar object to swirl the dab around to make it heart-shaped. Yeah, right - well, in my world everyone has broken hearts - very, very broken hearts. Anyway, they were yummy all the same.
The cranberry oatmeal bars were very nice. Oats, cranberries, pecans, brown sugar - yum. The cranberries were a nice flavor complement, replacing the usual, sweeter, raisins or currants. This was not very sweet - really, neither of these two items was overly sweet - and would probably also be a good breakfast or mid-morning item rather than simply a "dessert."
For May 13 (More Catch Up)
Need to enter this when I figure out what I made this week, too.
Brownie Bites
Spago Oatmeal Raisin Cookies?
Brownie Bites
Spago Oatmeal Raisin Cookies?
Thursday, April 22, 2010
For April 22
This week is "celebrity chef" week here at Joyful Mind Bakery. Or, at least, celebrity chef recipe week - no celebrity chefs were involved (0r harmed) in the baking of these confections! Anyway, here is the lineup:
Buttery Pecan Rounds, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Brownies, from Thomas Keller
OK, so the "Martha Stewart's Cookies" cookbook is a reminder of what great book design can be. Even if you don't buy it, even if you would not think of baking a cookie if your life depended on it, next time you are in a respectable bookstore it would be worth your while just to pop over to the cookbooks and look at this book and appreciate it as an example of function and design. It is a wonderful book. The book is organized by "type of cookie" - soft and chewy, sandy, etc. It is a wonderful organizing principle in itself, but even better, the table of contents has a picture of every cookie next to its name! How cool is that? Anyway, the book was just named by the James Beard Foundation as one of the 13 essential baking books to have in your library (along with a few of the others that I have and that readers here have heard about; as for the ones I don't yet own, that is what my Amazon Wish List is for, but I digress...). Anyway, before there was this book, there was a smaller holiday cookie magazine that followed the same organizing principle. I bought that magazine at the grocery store in Oakhurst, California, right outside the south entrance to Yosemite National Park, as we were going into Yosemite for our Thanksgiving celebration in 2005, just a few weeks after I began this baking odyssey, and I spent the entire four-day weekend reading it and becoming entranced. I baked a lot of the recipes out of that magazine early on - the chocolate black pepper cookies that were so popular, as well as the cornmeal thyme cookies, the pine nut cookies, the pumpkin cookies with brown butter icing, and many others. It eventually got expanded into a book, and it is a wonderful book with lots of really good recipes. With as many recipes under my belt as I have now, I would probably edit the text a bit to make some things clearer and revise a few techniques here and there based on things I have learned from other cookbooks, but it is a very good friend to have on hand.
Anyway, these butter pecan rounds are a first time recipe for me. They are a very simple recipe - the dough seems to be little more than dark brown sugar and butter, with some flour thrown in to hold them together. Oh, and there is also a good amount of pecan meal - toasted, chopped pecans that take the place of flour to amp up the flavor of the dough. After the dough is made, you scoop it out, then place a pecan half on each cookie. The good-quality brown sugar is a great foil for the pecans and the butter. It is a nice combination.
The brownies are from Thomas Keller, chef at the French Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon, etc. This recipe is from his new cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, and I found it on the NPR web site. Actually, I had no plan to make brownies this week; I was browsing on my computer trying to find a work-related file in my "My Documents" folder and I found a file called "Thomas Keller Brownies." Huh? It was a MS Word file that I had obviously created, but I had no distinct memory of it, and it didn't indicate where it had come from. (Eventually I googled it and found it in various places, but I now remember that NPR did an interview with him and had a few recipes from the new cookbook on the site. We love you, Google!) I saw the recipe and thought that it would be good to make, since I have been doing a series of brownie recipes recently exploring different variations on the theme. These basically fall into the "I see you and I raise you ten times" or whatever a poker player would say. These are intense. There is a lot of just about everything in them: these brownies are cocoa based, but then there is a substantial amount of bittersweet chocolate that I hand cut and add so that there are little chocolate surprises buried within the brownie. Making two trays of these brownies required - hold on, kids - nine sticks of butter, 3 cups of Valrhona cocoa powder, 18 oz. of Scharffen Berger chocolate, nine eggs, sugar, butter, salt and vanilla. The grocery store bill for these suckers was astounding - so eat up! They are an incredibly midnight black brownie, deeply intense with all the butter, and then the small pockets of chocolate here and there are like little taste bud land mines. Eating these and the pecan cookies together, these have to be eaten second, because your taste buds are just blown out by the intensity of it all.
Anyway, enjoy!
Buttery Pecan Rounds, from Martha Stewart's Cookies
Brownies, from Thomas Keller
OK, so the "Martha Stewart's Cookies" cookbook is a reminder of what great book design can be. Even if you don't buy it, even if you would not think of baking a cookie if your life depended on it, next time you are in a respectable bookstore it would be worth your while just to pop over to the cookbooks and look at this book and appreciate it as an example of function and design. It is a wonderful book. The book is organized by "type of cookie" - soft and chewy, sandy, etc. It is a wonderful organizing principle in itself, but even better, the table of contents has a picture of every cookie next to its name! How cool is that? Anyway, the book was just named by the James Beard Foundation as one of the 13 essential baking books to have in your library (along with a few of the others that I have and that readers here have heard about; as for the ones I don't yet own, that is what my Amazon Wish List is for, but I digress...). Anyway, before there was this book, there was a smaller holiday cookie magazine that followed the same organizing principle. I bought that magazine at the grocery store in Oakhurst, California, right outside the south entrance to Yosemite National Park, as we were going into Yosemite for our Thanksgiving celebration in 2005, just a few weeks after I began this baking odyssey, and I spent the entire four-day weekend reading it and becoming entranced. I baked a lot of the recipes out of that magazine early on - the chocolate black pepper cookies that were so popular, as well as the cornmeal thyme cookies, the pine nut cookies, the pumpkin cookies with brown butter icing, and many others. It eventually got expanded into a book, and it is a wonderful book with lots of really good recipes. With as many recipes under my belt as I have now, I would probably edit the text a bit to make some things clearer and revise a few techniques here and there based on things I have learned from other cookbooks, but it is a very good friend to have on hand.
Anyway, these butter pecan rounds are a first time recipe for me. They are a very simple recipe - the dough seems to be little more than dark brown sugar and butter, with some flour thrown in to hold them together. Oh, and there is also a good amount of pecan meal - toasted, chopped pecans that take the place of flour to amp up the flavor of the dough. After the dough is made, you scoop it out, then place a pecan half on each cookie. The good-quality brown sugar is a great foil for the pecans and the butter. It is a nice combination.
The brownies are from Thomas Keller, chef at the French Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon, etc. This recipe is from his new cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, and I found it on the NPR web site. Actually, I had no plan to make brownies this week; I was browsing on my computer trying to find a work-related file in my "My Documents" folder and I found a file called "Thomas Keller Brownies." Huh? It was a MS Word file that I had obviously created, but I had no distinct memory of it, and it didn't indicate where it had come from. (Eventually I googled it and found it in various places, but I now remember that NPR did an interview with him and had a few recipes from the new cookbook on the site. We love you, Google!) I saw the recipe and thought that it would be good to make, since I have been doing a series of brownie recipes recently exploring different variations on the theme. These basically fall into the "I see you and I raise you ten times" or whatever a poker player would say. These are intense. There is a lot of just about everything in them: these brownies are cocoa based, but then there is a substantial amount of bittersweet chocolate that I hand cut and add so that there are little chocolate surprises buried within the brownie. Making two trays of these brownies required - hold on, kids - nine sticks of butter, 3 cups of Valrhona cocoa powder, 18 oz. of Scharffen Berger chocolate, nine eggs, sugar, butter, salt and vanilla. The grocery store bill for these suckers was astounding - so eat up! They are an incredibly midnight black brownie, deeply intense with all the butter, and then the small pockets of chocolate here and there are like little taste bud land mines. Eating these and the pecan cookies together, these have to be eaten second, because your taste buds are just blown out by the intensity of it all.
Anyway, enjoy!
Thursday, April 15, 2010
For April 15
Tax Day. It calls for cookies!
Last night, Andrew Bodhi-Heart was working, so I was on my own. Luckily, I planned ahead and made one of my doughs the night before, so all I had to do was slice and bake on Wednesday ... and make the whole other set of cookies. Amazingly, all worked out OK, as I was pretty much done fairly early (as these things go). I am not quite sure how it happened.
Here's the lineup:
Hempseed Whole Wheat Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies, from....Nestle?
I have raved about Alice Medrich's sables before, and I am happy to have another chance to do so. These french butter cookies are really amazing. Her cookbook, Pure Dessert, tries to pare back ingredient lists to the bare minimum to let the intensity of the few remaining ingredients shine through. Here, the two "showcase" ingredients are whole wheat flour and hempseed. Yes, boys and girls, hempseed. Hempseed is a relatively obscure ingredient, but delicious. She likens it to a delicate version of a sunflower seed. Whatever the proper analogy, they are quite good. (At bld restaurant, here in Los Angeles, they have a hempseed-crusted tofu entree that Bodhi-Heart is a big fan of.) Anyway, sorry to disappoint you but there is no psychoactive ingredient in hempseed, so don't get too excited. The hempseeds not only give this a very delicate texture, but also an interesting visual appeal. Highly recommended!
I have also been hankering for good old fashioned chocolate chip cookies. So I grabbed the Toll House recipe off the web and went home and made them! Of course, I used Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate chips instead of the usual Nestle semi-sweets, but otherwise I hewed to the recipe. These turned out very nicely, so my craving is satisfied...for now.
Come enjoy!
Last night, Andrew Bodhi-Heart was working, so I was on my own. Luckily, I planned ahead and made one of my doughs the night before, so all I had to do was slice and bake on Wednesday ... and make the whole other set of cookies. Amazingly, all worked out OK, as I was pretty much done fairly early (as these things go). I am not quite sure how it happened.
Here's the lineup:
Hempseed Whole Wheat Sables, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies, from....Nestle?
I have raved about Alice Medrich's sables before, and I am happy to have another chance to do so. These french butter cookies are really amazing. Her cookbook, Pure Dessert, tries to pare back ingredient lists to the bare minimum to let the intensity of the few remaining ingredients shine through. Here, the two "showcase" ingredients are whole wheat flour and hempseed. Yes, boys and girls, hempseed. Hempseed is a relatively obscure ingredient, but delicious. She likens it to a delicate version of a sunflower seed. Whatever the proper analogy, they are quite good. (At bld restaurant, here in Los Angeles, they have a hempseed-crusted tofu entree that Bodhi-Heart is a big fan of.) Anyway, sorry to disappoint you but there is no psychoactive ingredient in hempseed, so don't get too excited. The hempseeds not only give this a very delicate texture, but also an interesting visual appeal. Highly recommended!
I have also been hankering for good old fashioned chocolate chip cookies. So I grabbed the Toll House recipe off the web and went home and made them! Of course, I used Ghirardelli 60% bittersweet chocolate chips instead of the usual Nestle semi-sweets, but otherwise I hewed to the recipe. These turned out very nicely, so my craving is satisfied...for now.
Come enjoy!
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