Hermit Bars
Chocolate Gingerbread Squares
both from Martha Stewart
A couple of weeks ago, I spotted a new, seasonal magazine in the grocery store - a Holiday Cookies magazine from Martha Stewart. While there was an older magazine of the same type - which eventually was turned into the Martha Stewart Cookies cookbook - this had lots of new recipes that I had not seen before. So I happily scooped it up, and this week we break it in with two recipes. (I now see that both are older recipes available on her Web site, but the magazine is very pretty and has all the great design elements that her print materials feature). There are a lot of other promising recipes in the magazine, so this is, I am sure, only the beginning....
Anyway, this also seems to be the week for molasses and ginger, since both recipes feature these ingredients. These ingredients are official harbingers of winter and holidays. Here, they are used in rather interesting ways.
The hermit bars are a variation on the usual hermits. Hermits are an old New England recipe that rely on a variety of spices (ginger, cinnamon, cloves), molasses, brown sugar and raisins. They are often made in a pan and then sliced into squares. Here, the technique is closer to that of biscotti, except they are only baked once, not twice. After the dough is made, you cool it a little to make it easier to handle, then it is formed into logs and baked. Once it is cooked, the logs are sliced. The resulting "bar" looks just like a biscotti, but is quite a bit softer. There is nothing elegant about this cookie, but it is very flavorful.
The chocolate gingerbread is another variation on a familiar favorite. I love gingerbread (at least if it is made well). Here, the gingerbread had cocoa powder and chocolate chips added, and the pan is dusted with cocoa powder. The chocoate-ginger combination is not a usual pairing, so it pulls your attention. It screams for whipped cream (or to be dunked in milk). A fun variation.
Next week is Thanksgiving, an d then the Center begins Rohatsu sesshin, which will extend over two Thursdays, so there are no formal cookie obligations again until December 16, a month from now. Until then, take good care!
Thursday, November 18, 2010
For November 11
This week, my niece and her daughter were arriving on Thursday, and I was really busy at work, so it was time to fall back on old friends. Well, more or less.
Chocolate Chip Cookies, from The Secrets of Baking by Sherry Yard
Honey Nut Brownies, from Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan
Sherry Yard's chocolate chip cookies are a welcome standby. One of the things I like about them is that you can make the dough and refrigerate it overnight, and then make the cookies. Actually, it seems that 24 hours of refrigeration is becoming the new favored technique for chocolate chip cookies, as it allows the fat in the butter to be absorbed better by the flour and leads to a better cookie. When you make the recipe in this way, you form it into logs and refrigerate it. But the dough never gets very solid, and you can't really just slice it and bake it; it is a bit of a messy process to form the cookies, but they are so good that it is worth the effort!
Although I made these brownies before, it was a long time ago. There is enough chocolate in them to justify the "brownie" in the name, but the overwhelming flavor comes from the honey - almost all of the sweetener is honey, and the recipe calls for using something more interesting than the normal clover honey. (I used sage.) The chocolate, honey, pecan combination (probably not in that order) is interesting. Honey is not my favorite flavor, so these are not my favorite brownies, but they are certainly an interesting and unusual variation on a favorite that can often become a bit too boring.
Chocolate Chip Cookies, from The Secrets of Baking by Sherry Yard
Honey Nut Brownies, from Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan
Sherry Yard's chocolate chip cookies are a welcome standby. One of the things I like about them is that you can make the dough and refrigerate it overnight, and then make the cookies. Actually, it seems that 24 hours of refrigeration is becoming the new favored technique for chocolate chip cookies, as it allows the fat in the butter to be absorbed better by the flour and leads to a better cookie. When you make the recipe in this way, you form it into logs and refrigerate it. But the dough never gets very solid, and you can't really just slice it and bake it; it is a bit of a messy process to form the cookies, but they are so good that it is worth the effort!
Although I made these brownies before, it was a long time ago. There is enough chocolate in them to justify the "brownie" in the name, but the overwhelming flavor comes from the honey - almost all of the sweetener is honey, and the recipe calls for using something more interesting than the normal clover honey. (I used sage.) The chocolate, honey, pecan combination (probably not in that order) is interesting. Honey is not my favorite flavor, so these are not my favorite brownies, but they are certainly an interesting and unusual variation on a favorite that can often become a bit too boring.
For November 4 (catching up)
Spicy Cherry Chocolate Brownies, from the LA Times
Mapledoodles, from the King Arthur Flour Recipe Site
Recently, the Los Angeles Times did an article on interesting cookie flavors involving combinations of sugar and spice. One of the recipes was for the spicy cherry chocolate brownies that I made this week. The recipe calls for a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. And the "spicy" in the name is not a case of overpromising - these are quite spicy. It is an interesting recipe, because the chocolate flavor is quite strong when you first bite into the brownie, but then over time it gives way to the spiciness of the cayenne. The dried sweet cherries add an extra, unusual flavor to the combination. This was an interesting and different take on brownies. While you have to like spicy food to enjoy it, it is very good!
Mapledoodles - well, the name says it all. Snickerdoodles, but with maple. Oh, autumn! This recipe uses a mixture of plain and maple sugar in making the dough, and then when you form balls of dough you roll them in a mixture of regular and maple sugar as well. Although the recipe calls for an icing in addition, I omitted it, and these were really nice - good maple flavor, but not overwhelming, and a nice texture as well. Recommended!
Mapledoodles, from the King Arthur Flour Recipe Site
Recently, the Los Angeles Times did an article on interesting cookie flavors involving combinations of sugar and spice. One of the recipes was for the spicy cherry chocolate brownies that I made this week. The recipe calls for a teaspoon of cayenne pepper. And the "spicy" in the name is not a case of overpromising - these are quite spicy. It is an interesting recipe, because the chocolate flavor is quite strong when you first bite into the brownie, but then over time it gives way to the spiciness of the cayenne. The dried sweet cherries add an extra, unusual flavor to the combination. This was an interesting and different take on brownies. While you have to like spicy food to enjoy it, it is very good!
Mapledoodles - well, the name says it all. Snickerdoodles, but with maple. Oh, autumn! This recipe uses a mixture of plain and maple sugar in making the dough, and then when you form balls of dough you roll them in a mixture of regular and maple sugar as well. Although the recipe calls for an icing in addition, I omitted it, and these were really nice - good maple flavor, but not overwhelming, and a nice texture as well. Recommended!
Thursday, October 21, 2010
For October 21
Next week, the Zen Center is in sesshin (a form of meditation retreat), so this is my last post for October. This marks the 5 year mark on this crazy cookie project - it was at the end of October 2005 that I received an email from Jotai in the office asking if anyone was willing to step forward and bring the cookies for the Thursday night tea and cookies. I volunteered and, being a bit self-important, decided to actually bake something from scratch that first week (brownies), rather than buy it at the store as we had done more or less all the time before then. That one time decision set the stage for what has come since then - five years of baking, almost every week, two recipes a week. This is really a crazy labor of love.
This week's cookies:
Pumpkin Cookies, from Martha Stewart's cookie-a-day site.
Brownies Cockaigne, from Joy of Cooking, All About Cookies
The pumpkin cookies are another reminder that it is October. Martha Stewart has a very cook web site that has a cookie recipe a day; it is very cook and seasonally oriented. Anyway, I was looking for an easy autumn recipe (busy week this week) and saw this and, given my love of pumpkin, decided to do a pumpkin recipe for the second week in a row. This makes a cakey pumpkin cookie which you then drizzle with melted bittersweet chocolate. The cookie is not that sweet, so the chocolate drizzle is definitely useful. There is a lot of pumpkin in these cookies, and they are quite low fat. I think they could use some additional spicing to give them a bit more flavor, and would definitely increase the spice accordingly if I make them again; pumpkin is, after all, a squash, and while it has a distinctive taste, the flavors we associate with pumpkin pie tend to be the cinnamon, ginger, and other spices more than the pumpkin. Here, I would pump up the spices a bit. But a nice cookie, with a lot of good stuff for you and not too much fat.
My friend Bob Gido Fisher, a professional pastry chef extraordinaire, gave me the Joy of Cooking All About Cookies cookbook for my birthday a few weeks ago. I have two different versions of the Joy of Cooking cookbook at home, but I never thing of going to them for cookie recipes. So it is great to get this book, which has a lot of illustrations, sidebars and other stuff the normal cookbook lacks, and this was my first recipe from it. In the Joy of Cooking books, if a recipe title includes the term "cockaigne" it means it is one of the authors' favorites. According to them, this brownie recipe has been in the Joy of Cooking since the 1st edition back in the 1930s. It is a good recipe, and makes a very middle-of-the-road brownie - not too fudgy, not too cakey. I made one variation on the recipe - when I was at the store looking through the chocolates for sale, I picked up a new item, Callebaut chocolate chips (they didn't call them "chocolate chips", of course, since that would be too pedestrian, but that is exactly what they are), and added a cup or so of them to the recipe. These chocolate chips are fantastic! The flavor is wonderful. Most chocolate chips are made using a lower quality chocolate, and you can taste it, but these are just incredibly smooth and flavorful. Anyway, so I added these along with some walnuts to the recipe, and the result is a very nice, fairly interesting, brownie. It is appropriate that, on the fifth anniversary of this venture, I should go back to its roots with a brownie recipe to celebrate.
Enjoy, and I'll see you in November!
This week's cookies:
Pumpkin Cookies, from Martha Stewart's cookie-a-day site.
Brownies Cockaigne, from Joy of Cooking, All About Cookies
The pumpkin cookies are another reminder that it is October. Martha Stewart has a very cook web site that has a cookie recipe a day; it is very cook and seasonally oriented. Anyway, I was looking for an easy autumn recipe (busy week this week) and saw this and, given my love of pumpkin, decided to do a pumpkin recipe for the second week in a row. This makes a cakey pumpkin cookie which you then drizzle with melted bittersweet chocolate. The cookie is not that sweet, so the chocolate drizzle is definitely useful. There is a lot of pumpkin in these cookies, and they are quite low fat. I think they could use some additional spicing to give them a bit more flavor, and would definitely increase the spice accordingly if I make them again; pumpkin is, after all, a squash, and while it has a distinctive taste, the flavors we associate with pumpkin pie tend to be the cinnamon, ginger, and other spices more than the pumpkin. Here, I would pump up the spices a bit. But a nice cookie, with a lot of good stuff for you and not too much fat.
My friend Bob Gido Fisher, a professional pastry chef extraordinaire, gave me the Joy of Cooking All About Cookies cookbook for my birthday a few weeks ago. I have two different versions of the Joy of Cooking cookbook at home, but I never thing of going to them for cookie recipes. So it is great to get this book, which has a lot of illustrations, sidebars and other stuff the normal cookbook lacks, and this was my first recipe from it. In the Joy of Cooking books, if a recipe title includes the term "cockaigne" it means it is one of the authors' favorites. According to them, this brownie recipe has been in the Joy of Cooking since the 1st edition back in the 1930s. It is a good recipe, and makes a very middle-of-the-road brownie - not too fudgy, not too cakey. I made one variation on the recipe - when I was at the store looking through the chocolates for sale, I picked up a new item, Callebaut chocolate chips (they didn't call them "chocolate chips", of course, since that would be too pedestrian, but that is exactly what they are), and added a cup or so of them to the recipe. These chocolate chips are fantastic! The flavor is wonderful. Most chocolate chips are made using a lower quality chocolate, and you can taste it, but these are just incredibly smooth and flavorful. Anyway, so I added these along with some walnuts to the recipe, and the result is a very nice, fairly interesting, brownie. It is appropriate that, on the fifth anniversary of this venture, I should go back to its roots with a brownie recipe to celebrate.
Enjoy, and I'll see you in November!
For October 19 (an extra cookie event this week!)
This week, Zen Center hosted Rev. Nakano from Japan, who was a Specially Dispatched Teacher from the Sotoshu on a tour of various Zen centers in the United States. Anyway, due to his schedule, he came and gave a talk on Tuesday night, which we followed with tea and cookies. This was an event that called for repeats, to wit:
Whole Wheat Sables with Cacao Nibs, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Midnight Crackles, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours
These are probably my two favorite cookbook authors, and they did not disappoint me. The sables are absolutely amazing, some of my favorite cookies ever. Along with the basic recipe, which is for plain, whole wheat sables, there are a number of variations, including this one that adds cacao nibs. I think that the nuttiness of the whole wheat flour and the elusive, earthy quality of the cacao nibs is a very good combination. Very straightforward to make, but so sophisticated a result! Highly recommended.
With the midnight crackles, they are a pretty simple chocolate variation cookie - there is a good amount of chocolate (between melted chocolate and cocoa powder) in the recipe, but it also has a number of spices to make it a bit more interesting than it otherwise appears to be. Dorie includes a variation, which I used, that has cinnamon, ground cloves, ginger, allspice and coriander (I wonder if she meant cardamom?). Oh, and salt. So it is an interesting cookie - unlike the sables, which emphasize a paring down of ingredients to highlight single notes, this is more a symphony, with a lot of different things going on, some in progression, others all at once. Not a world changing cookie (like the sables) but a very fun, kinda grown-up chocolate cookie.
Whole Wheat Sables with Cacao Nibs, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert
Midnight Crackles, from Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home To Yours
These are probably my two favorite cookbook authors, and they did not disappoint me. The sables are absolutely amazing, some of my favorite cookies ever. Along with the basic recipe, which is for plain, whole wheat sables, there are a number of variations, including this one that adds cacao nibs. I think that the nuttiness of the whole wheat flour and the elusive, earthy quality of the cacao nibs is a very good combination. Very straightforward to make, but so sophisticated a result! Highly recommended.
With the midnight crackles, they are a pretty simple chocolate variation cookie - there is a good amount of chocolate (between melted chocolate and cocoa powder) in the recipe, but it also has a number of spices to make it a bit more interesting than it otherwise appears to be. Dorie includes a variation, which I used, that has cinnamon, ground cloves, ginger, allspice and coriander (I wonder if she meant cardamom?). Oh, and salt. So it is an interesting cookie - unlike the sables, which emphasize a paring down of ingredients to highlight single notes, this is more a symphony, with a lot of different things going on, some in progression, others all at once. Not a world changing cookie (like the sables) but a very fun, kinda grown-up chocolate cookie.
For October 14 (also a little late)
I am a little behind on my blogging! The worst part is that my memory for what I am making starts to slip pretty quickly, so I do need to get my laptop by my bed and start doing these entries when I am just finished baking.
Last week was a double Martha week; happily, most of her recipes are available online:
Pumpkin Cookies with Maple Brown Butter Icing, from Martha Stewart Cookies
Hazelnut Cookies, from Martha Stewart Living (October 2010).
The pumpkin cookie is one of my favorite cookies. I have made it a few times before and every time I make it I am happy. The combination of the soft, cakey cookie with the brown butter icing is really good. The cookie is relatively straightforward to make. Although the recipe calls for piping the cookie dough (a very soft, batter-like consistency) out using a pastry bag, I just use a tablespoon-sized ice cream scoop, which makes them much less uniform and round, but keeps me from making a fool of myself with a pastry bag. The most challenging element of this recipe is the icing, since it calls for browning the butter, which can be an anxious process for those doing it for the first time. Having done it before a few times, it seemed like a breeze this time - it went much more quickly, was much less anxiety-inducing, and was all around straightforward. Anyway, I ended up replacing about 1/4 of the confectioner's sugar called for in the icing recipe with maple sugar to give some maple flavor to the icing. These are a great cookie, and they are fall icons in my book. I highly recommend them!
The second recipe was out of the current Martha Stewart Living magazine. I have to admit, not my favorite, although many people seemed to like it. Very few ingredients, so it really focuses on the hazelnut. In making the dough, I found it didn't hold together as I had thought it would - it was a very loose, falling-apart dough, so it requires quite a lot of work to form individual 1" balls and then to press them down to flatten them and not have them just fall apart. I am happy to have made it, and ready to move on.
Last week was a double Martha week; happily, most of her recipes are available online:
Pumpkin Cookies with Maple Brown Butter Icing, from Martha Stewart Cookies
Hazelnut Cookies, from Martha Stewart Living (October 2010).
The pumpkin cookie is one of my favorite cookies. I have made it a few times before and every time I make it I am happy. The combination of the soft, cakey cookie with the brown butter icing is really good. The cookie is relatively straightforward to make. Although the recipe calls for piping the cookie dough (a very soft, batter-like consistency) out using a pastry bag, I just use a tablespoon-sized ice cream scoop, which makes them much less uniform and round, but keeps me from making a fool of myself with a pastry bag. The most challenging element of this recipe is the icing, since it calls for browning the butter, which can be an anxious process for those doing it for the first time. Having done it before a few times, it seemed like a breeze this time - it went much more quickly, was much less anxiety-inducing, and was all around straightforward. Anyway, I ended up replacing about 1/4 of the confectioner's sugar called for in the icing recipe with maple sugar to give some maple flavor to the icing. These are a great cookie, and they are fall icons in my book. I highly recommend them!
The second recipe was out of the current Martha Stewart Living magazine. I have to admit, not my favorite, although many people seemed to like it. Very few ingredients, so it really focuses on the hazelnut. In making the dough, I found it didn't hold together as I had thought it would - it was a very loose, falling-apart dough, so it requires quite a lot of work to form individual 1" balls and then to press them down to flatten them and not have them just fall apart. I am happy to have made it, and ready to move on.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
For October 7 (a little late)
Last week we went to NY and CT for a long weekend to celebrate my sister's birthday. But before going, I baked and left some treats behind for the Zen Center! Here were last week's items:
Toasted Walnut Cookies, from Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Pecan-Maple Shortbread
both from Melissa Clark - Food Writer
I am a big fan of Deborah Madison's, since she was the founding chef of Greens in San Francisco. I took a cooking and writing class with her a few years ago at Tassajara; it was a lot of fun and she is a wonderful woman. She is not a baker by nature, and her cookbooks tend to rely mostly on desserts that are fruit-based. As amazing a cookbook as it is, I don't think I had ever even looked through Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for cookie recipes, since I don't associate her with such things. But through the seamless web of the Web, I ended up last week on the blog of Melissa Clark, a food writer who contributes a lot to the New York Times, and I saw these two recipes there, one being the walnut cookie recipe of Deborah's, the other being a shortbread with lots and lots of variations. I decided to make them both.
The walnut cookie recipe is, well, good but not great. (It kinda confirmed what I had thought.) It is very straightforward to make, and the flavor is good. I suspect that the cookies would have been better had I cooked them a minute or two more; as it is, they are slightly toothy, when I think that a sandy/crisp texture would have worked better. But they are a nice, basic variation on the butter cookie with nuts.
The shortbread recipe is a "start with this and then add that or that or even that" kind of affair. So I ended up adding pulverized roasted pecans and maple sugar (and a wee bit of pure maple flavoring to kick it up a notch) to announce that autumn has arrived. While I know that maple is usually associated with walnuts, I am very fond of it with pecans, and having already made a walnut cookie I wanted to mix it up. Along the way, I had browsed the recipe for maple shortbread in the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion and made a few adaptations to my recipe based on their ideas (basically sprinkling some maple sugar on the bottom of the pan before pressing in the shortbread, and then sprinkling some on top of the shortbread, to give it a bit of extra crunch and flavor), so this is something of an amalgam recipe. In the end, Andrew raved about it, and I thought it was pretty good, too; I brought some with me to Connecticut and shared with family, and they all liked it, as well. So I recommend it. And some of the variations on Melissa Clark's web site look very intereating - particularly adding rosemary to it!
This week, I am planning on one of my favorite recipes, which is a hallmark of autumn - but the forecast is for weather in the 80s all week, so there is gonna be some cognitive dissonance going on...
Enjoy!
Toasted Walnut Cookies, from Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
Pecan-Maple Shortbread
both from Melissa Clark - Food Writer
I am a big fan of Deborah Madison's, since she was the founding chef of Greens in San Francisco. I took a cooking and writing class with her a few years ago at Tassajara; it was a lot of fun and she is a wonderful woman. She is not a baker by nature, and her cookbooks tend to rely mostly on desserts that are fruit-based. As amazing a cookbook as it is, I don't think I had ever even looked through Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone for cookie recipes, since I don't associate her with such things. But through the seamless web of the Web, I ended up last week on the blog of Melissa Clark, a food writer who contributes a lot to the New York Times, and I saw these two recipes there, one being the walnut cookie recipe of Deborah's, the other being a shortbread with lots and lots of variations. I decided to make them both.
The walnut cookie recipe is, well, good but not great. (It kinda confirmed what I had thought.) It is very straightforward to make, and the flavor is good. I suspect that the cookies would have been better had I cooked them a minute or two more; as it is, they are slightly toothy, when I think that a sandy/crisp texture would have worked better. But they are a nice, basic variation on the butter cookie with nuts.
The shortbread recipe is a "start with this and then add that or that or even that" kind of affair. So I ended up adding pulverized roasted pecans and maple sugar (and a wee bit of pure maple flavoring to kick it up a notch) to announce that autumn has arrived. While I know that maple is usually associated with walnuts, I am very fond of it with pecans, and having already made a walnut cookie I wanted to mix it up. Along the way, I had browsed the recipe for maple shortbread in the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion and made a few adaptations to my recipe based on their ideas (basically sprinkling some maple sugar on the bottom of the pan before pressing in the shortbread, and then sprinkling some on top of the shortbread, to give it a bit of extra crunch and flavor), so this is something of an amalgam recipe. In the end, Andrew raved about it, and I thought it was pretty good, too; I brought some with me to Connecticut and shared with family, and they all liked it, as well. So I recommend it. And some of the variations on Melissa Clark's web site look very intereating - particularly adding rosemary to it!
This week, I am planning on one of my favorite recipes, which is a hallmark of autumn - but the forecast is for weather in the 80s all week, so there is gonna be some cognitive dissonance going on...
Enjoy!
Thursday, September 23, 2010
For September 23
This week, Mark Shogen Bloodgood is giving a personal practice talk at the Zen Center. Shogen is a vegan, and in his honor this week's recipes are both vegan:
Toasted Almond Cookies
Chocolate Chip Brownies
both from Peter Berley, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen
Peter Berley is a prominent cookbook author and chef whose first book, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, was almost entirely vegan. It is somewhat challenging to find vegan cookie recipes, but he has several in his book, and they sounded delicious, so I decided to do both recipes this week from the same source.
Now, I am not a vegan-phobe, but I now realize that I am a lacto-ovo-phile. Many of my recipes have been made without eggs or without butter, but I can't remember any previous ones that have had neither. So I entered into this project with some trepidation, but I really wanted to support Shogen, who is coming down from Arroyo Grande to give his talk. Vegan cooking was interesting. It was unbelievably expensive - I thought that my normal recipes were expensive, but these recipes hand's-down win my "most expensive recipe" award. Both of them rely on fairly expensive ingredients (or at least the ingredients that I bought were expensive). So the almond cookies called for quite a lot of coconut oil as the fat, and then use maple syrup as the sweetener. The brownies call for a generous amount of maple syrup, a lot of cocoa powder, sucanat (a natural, less-processed sugar), and other stuff. Anyway, taking out the eggs and the butter doesn't mean no fat, it means different fat, and often different other things to act as binding agents.
Of the two recipes, I think the brownies worked out better, at least as of now. The brownies are a pretty close approximation of "regular" brownies - lots of sweetener, cocoa powder, fat (canola oil), nuts, flour. Most brownies reply on a substantial volume of eggs, and these obviously have none of that, and they are a bit more crumbly as a result - they are not dry, but they are a bit crumbly. The flavors are good - they should be, given the amount of coca powder and chocolate chips - and the texture is also good. Overall, while I am not a big fan of these, I could easily see making them for vegan company.
The flavor of the toasted almond cookies is wonderful - lots of toasted almonds, a little orange zest, the maple flavor peeking through - but the consistency says "yep, that's a vegan cookie, all right." These are not delicate cookies - they are almost the opposite. Little boulders or something similar - not because they are hard to bite (although I think they probably would fall in the "al dente" category if they were a pasta) but because the dough does not melt into a traditional cookie in the baking process. This was a fairly stiff dough, and you form it into walnut sized balls and place them on the cookie sheet, squash them a little, then bake. With most cookies, they bake into beautiful rounds. These were unchanged. So not too beautiful to look at, texture is not my style, flavor is good. A vegan cookie. Oy.
Next week is my birthday, so it is "baker's choice." Hmmmm.....what will it be?
Toasted Almond Cookies
Chocolate Chip Brownies
both from Peter Berley, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen
Peter Berley is a prominent cookbook author and chef whose first book, The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen, was almost entirely vegan. It is somewhat challenging to find vegan cookie recipes, but he has several in his book, and they sounded delicious, so I decided to do both recipes this week from the same source.
Now, I am not a vegan-phobe, but I now realize that I am a lacto-ovo-phile. Many of my recipes have been made without eggs or without butter, but I can't remember any previous ones that have had neither. So I entered into this project with some trepidation, but I really wanted to support Shogen, who is coming down from Arroyo Grande to give his talk. Vegan cooking was interesting. It was unbelievably expensive - I thought that my normal recipes were expensive, but these recipes hand's-down win my "most expensive recipe" award. Both of them rely on fairly expensive ingredients (or at least the ingredients that I bought were expensive). So the almond cookies called for quite a lot of coconut oil as the fat, and then use maple syrup as the sweetener. The brownies call for a generous amount of maple syrup, a lot of cocoa powder, sucanat (a natural, less-processed sugar), and other stuff. Anyway, taking out the eggs and the butter doesn't mean no fat, it means different fat, and often different other things to act as binding agents.
Of the two recipes, I think the brownies worked out better, at least as of now. The brownies are a pretty close approximation of "regular" brownies - lots of sweetener, cocoa powder, fat (canola oil), nuts, flour. Most brownies reply on a substantial volume of eggs, and these obviously have none of that, and they are a bit more crumbly as a result - they are not dry, but they are a bit crumbly. The flavors are good - they should be, given the amount of coca powder and chocolate chips - and the texture is also good. Overall, while I am not a big fan of these, I could easily see making them for vegan company.
The flavor of the toasted almond cookies is wonderful - lots of toasted almonds, a little orange zest, the maple flavor peeking through - but the consistency says "yep, that's a vegan cookie, all right." These are not delicate cookies - they are almost the opposite. Little boulders or something similar - not because they are hard to bite (although I think they probably would fall in the "al dente" category if they were a pasta) but because the dough does not melt into a traditional cookie in the baking process. This was a fairly stiff dough, and you form it into walnut sized balls and place them on the cookie sheet, squash them a little, then bake. With most cookies, they bake into beautiful rounds. These were unchanged. So not too beautiful to look at, texture is not my style, flavor is good. A vegan cookie. Oy.
Next week is my birthday, so it is "baker's choice." Hmmmm.....what will it be?
Thursday, September 16, 2010
For September 16
Two very different cookies this week:
Cinnamon sugar cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
Melting chocolate meringues, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet
I think this is the first time I have made each of these cookies. The cinnamon sugar cookies seem pretty much to be snickerdoodles in all but name, but maybe at a restaurant like Spago they can't call them by their true name. Well, anyway, this is a wonderful recipe - they are basically cinnamon-vanilla sugar cookies (and these suckers use a LOT of vanilla) that have a very delicate texture, and are coated with cinnamon sugar. Like snickerdoodles, they use cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is an ancient leavening agent that was used before we invented baking soda and baking powder (both of which are quite recent additions to the baking scene). In my experience, if a recipe calls for cream of tartar, it is usually a sign that it is a recipe with some history behind it, since nowadays people mostly use baking powder or baking soda.
This is my second week making a cookie from Mary Bergin's Spago Desserts. Her cookie recipes are pretty uniformly great, and all rely on the same basic technique, which involves making the dough, letting it chill, then forming individual cookies. It is a long process, but yields good cookies.
Interestingly, Alice Medrich's Melting Chocolate Meringues also use baking powder, but I doubt they have the same provenance as the sugar cookies. These are another gluten free cookie. Here, the cream of tartar is added as you beat the egg whites to help provide some stabilizing to them. It is an interesting technique to this recipe - melt the chocolate; chop lots of walnuts; whip the egg whites with the cream of tartar and sugar; put in nuts; pour melted chocolate over; fold until uniform in color; scoop and bake.
These are not my favorite cookie, and not my favorite gluten free or meringue-style cookie. I think the recipe from Tartine that I made a few months ago wins that award, and I think I'll make it again soon using a different nut (hazelnut?) this time. We'll see. Which is not to say that these are bad cookies - I am sure they will be gobbled up and everyone will like them. But for me, eh. Of course, snickerdoodles are one of my most favorite cookie, so it may be that, with a different companion cookie, I would feel differently about them. Hmmm....
Cinnamon sugar cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
Melting chocolate meringues, from Alice Medrich, Bittersweet
I think this is the first time I have made each of these cookies. The cinnamon sugar cookies seem pretty much to be snickerdoodles in all but name, but maybe at a restaurant like Spago they can't call them by their true name. Well, anyway, this is a wonderful recipe - they are basically cinnamon-vanilla sugar cookies (and these suckers use a LOT of vanilla) that have a very delicate texture, and are coated with cinnamon sugar. Like snickerdoodles, they use cream of tartar. Cream of tartar is an ancient leavening agent that was used before we invented baking soda and baking powder (both of which are quite recent additions to the baking scene). In my experience, if a recipe calls for cream of tartar, it is usually a sign that it is a recipe with some history behind it, since nowadays people mostly use baking powder or baking soda.
This is my second week making a cookie from Mary Bergin's Spago Desserts. Her cookie recipes are pretty uniformly great, and all rely on the same basic technique, which involves making the dough, letting it chill, then forming individual cookies. It is a long process, but yields good cookies.
Interestingly, Alice Medrich's Melting Chocolate Meringues also use baking powder, but I doubt they have the same provenance as the sugar cookies. These are another gluten free cookie. Here, the cream of tartar is added as you beat the egg whites to help provide some stabilizing to them. It is an interesting technique to this recipe - melt the chocolate; chop lots of walnuts; whip the egg whites with the cream of tartar and sugar; put in nuts; pour melted chocolate over; fold until uniform in color; scoop and bake.
These are not my favorite cookie, and not my favorite gluten free or meringue-style cookie. I think the recipe from Tartine that I made a few months ago wins that award, and I think I'll make it again soon using a different nut (hazelnut?) this time. We'll see. Which is not to say that these are bad cookies - I am sure they will be gobbled up and everyone will like them. But for me, eh. Of course, snickerdoodles are one of my most favorite cookie, so it may be that, with a different companion cookie, I would feel differently about them. Hmmm....
Monday, September 13, 2010
For September 9
The Center was closed for summer recess so there were no cookies on Sept. 2. For September 9, it was back to school, with two cookies:
Chocolate Sparkle Cookies, via the Los Angeles Times
Oatmeal Current Cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
The chocolate sparkle cookies were a happy byproduct - I have an ancient, bulging folder of recipes I have printed out or cut out of newspapers, etc. over the years, and I was looking through it for my favorite chocolate cake recipe over Labor Day weekend, when I stumbled upon this recipe, which was first printed in the LA Times almost 10 years ago. The recipe itself is from a bakery in Victoria, British Columbia. I apparently printed this out years ago, threw it in the folder, and never made it. Well, now I have, and it is wonderful! This is a gluten-free recipe - there is no flour. Instead, it relies on almond meal. While the recipe calls for grinding almonds, I took the lazy way out and bought a bag of almond meal at Whole Foods. Almond meal has become fairly easy to find these days, so it is a nice timesaver over grinding the almonds, etc. Regardless, this recipe makes small but powerful cookies - there are only 5 ingredients (butter, sugar, eggs, almonds, chocolate). It looks a lot like the fairly common chocolate crackle cookie - the outside will crack during baking, particularly if you use a convection oven - but more intense. They are fairly straightforward to make, and the reward at the end is great. And, as I mentioned, they are gluten free, to boot!
The second cookie was a repeat of an old favorite. Mary Bergin was the original pastry chef at Spago when it was in West Hollywood, and then went to Las Vegas to help open the first Spago offshoot there in 1992. I received her cookbook, Spago Desserts, from my friend Chris Kennedy, a partner at Irell who recruited me out of law school and who was singularly responsible for me coming to Los Angeles. Chris had a lot of health issues and died far too young. The copy of the cookbook has both Mary's autograph as well as Chris', so it is a treasure. Anyway, this oatmeal currant cookie recipe is very good. If the chocolate sparkle cookies have only a few ingredients, this recipe makes up for it. While it is an oatmeal currant cookie, it has almost as many walnuts as currants, and lots of spices, particularly cinnamon and allspice. These are very flavorful, interesting cookies, and every time I make them I am reminded how much I like them. The recipes in this book all seem very good. (The peanut butter cookie recipe, which also has currants in it, is one of Andrew's signature recipes, and one of the only peanut butter cookies we will eat.)
Chocolate Sparkle Cookies, via the Los Angeles Times
Oatmeal Current Cookies, from Mary Bergin, Spago Desserts
The chocolate sparkle cookies were a happy byproduct - I have an ancient, bulging folder of recipes I have printed out or cut out of newspapers, etc. over the years, and I was looking through it for my favorite chocolate cake recipe over Labor Day weekend, when I stumbled upon this recipe, which was first printed in the LA Times almost 10 years ago. The recipe itself is from a bakery in Victoria, British Columbia. I apparently printed this out years ago, threw it in the folder, and never made it. Well, now I have, and it is wonderful! This is a gluten-free recipe - there is no flour. Instead, it relies on almond meal. While the recipe calls for grinding almonds, I took the lazy way out and bought a bag of almond meal at Whole Foods. Almond meal has become fairly easy to find these days, so it is a nice timesaver over grinding the almonds, etc. Regardless, this recipe makes small but powerful cookies - there are only 5 ingredients (butter, sugar, eggs, almonds, chocolate). It looks a lot like the fairly common chocolate crackle cookie - the outside will crack during baking, particularly if you use a convection oven - but more intense. They are fairly straightforward to make, and the reward at the end is great. And, as I mentioned, they are gluten free, to boot!
The second cookie was a repeat of an old favorite. Mary Bergin was the original pastry chef at Spago when it was in West Hollywood, and then went to Las Vegas to help open the first Spago offshoot there in 1992. I received her cookbook, Spago Desserts, from my friend Chris Kennedy, a partner at Irell who recruited me out of law school and who was singularly responsible for me coming to Los Angeles. Chris had a lot of health issues and died far too young. The copy of the cookbook has both Mary's autograph as well as Chris', so it is a treasure. Anyway, this oatmeal currant cookie recipe is very good. If the chocolate sparkle cookies have only a few ingredients, this recipe makes up for it. While it is an oatmeal currant cookie, it has almost as many walnuts as currants, and lots of spices, particularly cinnamon and allspice. These are very flavorful, interesting cookies, and every time I make them I am reminded how much I like them. The recipes in this book all seem very good. (The peanut butter cookie recipe, which also has currants in it, is one of Andrew's signature recipes, and one of the only peanut butter cookies we will eat.)
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