For October 16

It is late, it has been an intense day.  So here is the lineup for tomorrow night:

Nibby Pecan Cookies, Alice Medrich, Bittersweet - these are cookies with chopped pecans and cacao nibs, the precursor to chocolate.  

Pumpkin Cake Bars with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting, from the King Arthur Flour web site.  King Arthur Flour is the best mass-produced flour in the United States, and they are headquartered in Vermont.  I wanted an autumn item this week, and have been looking for a pumpkin bar to make.  Between the pumpkin bars and the maple frosting, this is about as much of an autumn cliche as you can get.  Bring it on!!!

For October 2

It is very late, so this is very short.

For this week, something old, something new:

Chocolate Hazelnut Biscotti, from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

Nutty, Chocolaty, Swirly Sour Cream Bundt Cake (yep, that's the recipe name) from Dorie Greenspan, Baking.

Chocolate hazelnut biscotti are one of my favorite flavor combinations.  I haven't made biscotti for a while, so it was nice to resume with this recipe.

As for the bundt cake, I have made many of the recipes from Dorie Greenspan's book, and all have been very good.  For this one, however, the cake stuck in the bundt pan and did not come out cleanly, so the cake is not very pretty.  Oh, well.  Luckily, we cover with confectioners sugar before serving, and so this one will have a LOT of sugar on top.  But from my tasting of the bits that stuck to the pan (professional obligation to taste it, you know) - YUM!

For September 25

Hi everyone,

wow, what a crazy week.  We were in Boulder over the weekend for a wedding; what a great town.  So beautiful!  I wish we had had an additional day to spend and just to check out the town, but this was a quick in and out, and it has been busy for me since getting back.  Andrew and I are getting married in, gulp, three and a half weeks and there is a lot left to do - a whole lot!  And work is busy busy.  Oy.  Anyway, two new recipes this week, including one from a new cookbook.  Here is the lineup:

Nut-Chocolate Bars "Unsurpassed," from Tassajara Cooking

Oatmeal Currant Cookies, from Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food

I can't believe I made oatmeal cookies with Roshi out of town.  They are her favorite.  Alas.  These are an interesting oatmeal cookie, because you take the oats and you basically grind them in the food processor into almost a flour.  So there is a definite taste of oats (there are 1 1/2 cups of oats to the 1/2 cup of flour in the recipe) but not the standard texture.  This recipe made a very soft cookie - a bit crisp around the edges, but definitely soft and chewy in the center.  They remind me of the big old oatmeal cookies that you could buy in the store when I was young, the texture is very similar.  Many of the recent cookies have been a crisp style, so this is a nice change of pace.  The nut-chocolate bars from Tassajara are quite good - I think they are basically chocolate chip cookie bars.  Yum.  A very different execution than what we had last week with Sherry Yard's chocolate chip cookies, but the ingredients are almost the same.

OK, it's late, and I have a court hearing at 8:30 tomorrow morning.  Take good care!

D-J

For September 18

This week, the recipes are from two new cookbooks, but the authors are two I admire greatly:

Hazelnut Shortbread Brownies, from Bittersweet, by Alice Medrich

Quintessential Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Desserts by the Yard, by Sherry Yard

Alice Medrich is also the author of Pure Dessert, which I have been baking from for the past few weeks.  This cookbook is an earlier one, devoted solely to chocolate recipes.  The recipe involves making a shortbread crust with lots of chopped hazelnuts as a bottom layer, and then baking the brownies on top of the shortbread.  OK, so it sounds a little decadent, I thought we could use a little variation on the usual brownies.

Sherry Yard is the pastry chef at Spago Beverly Hills, and also the author of The Secrets of Baking, which has been a very influential book for me in terms of technique.  The chocolate chip cookies are rather crisp - Sherry says that Wolfgang Puck likes his chocolate chip cookies crisp, so hers are crisp.  Not my favorite style, but they aren't going in the trash (certainly not with so much Scharffen Berger chocolate in them!)

For September 11

I will not be in town on Thursday night; instead, I will be at Tassajara again. This is the last weekend of guest season, and it has become something of a tradition for me to go this weekend. I think this is the 5th year I have been there for the ending weekend. Three of those years I have been in a workshop titled "Cooking with Big Mind" (sound familiar?) but this year they moved the workshop to June and I could not attend. The workshop participants take over the kitchen and make the last dinner of guest season. The last two years, I was assigned to make the dessert, which was a chocolate hazelnut cake. It is a lot of work, but actually pretty fun, to make 22 cakes to serve 88 people! (Well, rubbing the skins off of so many hazlenuts was not much fun, but that isn't even fun when it is for a cake that serves 4.) Any recipe that starts with melting 7 1/2 lbs of chocolate is just fun! This year, no class, just relaxing.

Anyway, given a fairly hectic schedule this week, I started my cooking early, and will finish it tonight (thanks to the assistance of my partner Andrew, who will probably take care of slicing the dough and baking the cookies that are chilling right now).

Here's the Thursday night lineup:

Golden Kamut Pound Cake
Extra Bittersweet Chocolate Wafers

Both from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert.

This is my first time cooking with kamut. Kamut (pronounced like you were French Canadian, "ca-moot") is an ancient grain, apparently a precursor to modern wheat. The word kamut is from the ancient egyptian, and was their word for wheat. This is also the first time in decades that I have made a pound cake recipe other than my standard one. So we'll see how it goes.

For September 4

Chocolate Chews, from the Tassajara Cookbook

Sesame Coins, from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert

Here is the recipe for the chocolate chews.  These are really good.  The cookbook is frustrating, so this is my adaptation.

Chocolate Chews

(makes approx. 4 dozen cookies)

1/2 pound semisweet chocolate

3 oz. unsweetened chocolate

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

3/4 t instant espresso powder

3 eggs

1 cup brown sugar (I use dark brown to intensify the flavor, but light brown is OK, too)

1 cup unbleached white flour

1/2 t baking powder

1/4 t salt

2 t vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

(Note:  use the best chocolate you can find and afford.  It is the principal ingredient in this recipe.  If you can find real brown sugar, try to use that, too.  The quality shows.)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.  Place your oven racks in top and bottom third of oven.  Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.  Coarsely chop the semisweet and unsweetened chocolate and place them in a metal bowl or the top of a double boiler.  Add the butter, cut into 4 or 5 pieces,  and the espresso powder, and then place the bowl over a simmering pot of water (the water should not touch the bottom of the bowl) and heat until melted, stirring occasionally.  Once it is melted, remove it from the heat and let it cool slightly.

Meanwhile, beat the eggs and brown sugar together until light in color and thick.  This will take several minutes.  Be patient and you will see the change.  (If you use dark brown sugar, it will be "lighter" in color and thick.)  If you have a stand mixer, this is the time to use it, because it makes this part very easy.  Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl and whisk them together.

After the chocolate mixture has cooled slightly, mix it into the egg mixture and stir, scraping the sides to make sure it is well mixed.  Stir in the vanilla.  Gently fold the flour mixture in.  Stir in the chocolate chips.  If the mixture seems too wet, let it stand for a few minutes, and it will thicken.

Drop by tablespoonfuls onto the baking sheets.  Place one sheet on top rack, the other on bottom rack.  Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, rotating top to bottom, front to back, half-way through.  Remove and let cool briefly, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Back from Tassajara

The Center is on summer (fall?) recess, so there were no cookies last week.  In a stroke of completely lucky timing, Andrew and I were at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center for several days last week, so I didn't have to pass the cookie job off to anyone else.

Tassajara was a wonderful, hot, relaxing experience.  However, Tassajara was in the center of the forest fires that raged around Big Sur in July, and while Tassajara itself survived (mostly) intact, all of the hills and mountains around it are charred - truly charred.  There is one point on the drive in when you can just see for miles and miles, mountains on end, and all of them are gray and burned, with the skeletal remains of blackened trees looking like so many troops of the Angel of Death marching up the mountainsides, storming the ridges.  While Tassajara has survived the fire, in the end the rains and the mudslides this fall and winter will hold a much bigger danger - while Tassajara could fend off the fire, there is much less ability to control the outcome when you are looking up at a couple of thousand feet of mountainside with nothing but dirt and ash looming above you.  So this story is still going on.  Keep chanting...

Of course, at lunchtime at Tassajara they serve cookies every day, so it is always a treat to check it out from a "professional" perspective.  (This same line permits me to buy and eat any cookie I see; probably the best part of this whole gig.)  For the four days we were there, the cookies  included:  Cappuccino Coins, Chocolate Chews, Lemon Bars and Date Bars.  We have made the Chocolate Chews before - I made them sometime last year for a Thursday night talk, and they were one of the cookies that a crew at ZCLA made to give to families for the holidays last year.  The name is apt - there are three types of chocolate in these, and they are quite intense!  This time, they were quite different because they were served as bars instead of cookies.  (According to Ed Brown, the first tenzo at Tassajara in the SFZC era, he never used to make individual cookies because it required too much work; instead he always made bars and cut them.  Since they usually have 70-80 guests, I can certainly understand that logic.)  I am not sure if they were actually the Chocolate Chews recipe or a last minute brownie substitute, but either way they were rich and delicious.  (I think I am going to make the Chocolate Chews this week to compare.)  The lemon bars were also good, but quite unusual.  Having just made lemon bars for the first time in quite a while, I was quite interested to see Tassajara's take on these.  The lemon filling was quite voluminous - a lot thicker than the usual svelte (in size, if not caloric content) lemon bars most people know, and rather challenging to eat with your fingers.  (I managed, fear not; the things I do in the name of science.)  I have a recipe from Tassajara for lemon bars, and I am going to have to check it out (not this week) to see if it gives me results like what we had there.

Yesterday was a day for cooking, rather than baking - I went to the farmer's market on Sunday and then spent Monday cooking up all the goods.  The tomatoes right now are so wonderful, plentiful and varied, it is difficult to exercise restraint.  And getting an enormous bunch of basil for $1.50 (the equivalent at Whole Foods would cost at least $25), how can I say no?  So yesterday I spent a lot of time (with the help of my wonderful fiancee Andrew) making Fresh Tomato Sauce (Greens Cookbook), pesto (Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) and Tomato and White Bean Soup (Greens Cookbook again; Deborah Madison, I love you!).  I was going to make shortbread to have with the berries I bought, but we ended up not having anyone over for dinner and decided simply to thaw a pound cake I made and froze a while ago and had the fresh strawberries on that, drizzled with some milk.

Tonight I have a bit of planning and prep to do for this week's offerings.  I bought some lemon verbena at the farmer's market, with the thought of experimenting with it to make some sort of cookie (like the lavender cookies I have been making), but now I have my eye on something else that I may make instead.  The lemon verbena may wait.  Come on Thursday night and find out how I resolve this horrible conundrum...lemon verbena cookies or ??????

D-J

For August 21

Hazelnut Whole Wheat Sables

Very Tangy Lime Bars

Both from Alice Medrich, Pure Dessert.

Dreaming Lemons

Last week, one of the recipes was for some really wonderful toasted almond lemon bars. I have recently bought a few new baking books, and last week's recipes were from The Sweet Melissa Baking Book; both were very good, and I am looking forward to making more and sharing my results. (This week's recipes are coming from Alice Medrich's Pure Dessert, which conceptually has me totally jazzed.) While many people liked the brownie recipe (which was adapted from Julia Child, so come on...) the lemon bars were a big hit - they had toasted almonds in the crust and then a very tart lemon filling, so the complementary flavors of lemon and almond came through nicely. I usually don't like lemon bars because they are too much, the filling has a gummy texture, etc., but these had a focused intensity that really worked.

Anyway, on Monday night I had a dream in which I was composing poetry. I guess the lemon bars had an impact on me, because here is the poem that I composed in the dream:

Mouth filling with lemon-
Where did the thoughts go?
Thwack!

The first brownie recipe

Here is the brownie recipe I used for that first, eventful Thursday night back in October 2005.  I have modified it slightly, but the results should be much more reliable.  As you will see, brownies from scratch are very simple - one of the wonders of brownies is that the results can be so wonderful with so little effort required to get there.  It is a shame that people use a boxed mix so full of chemicals and preservatives when there is so little added work needed to make brownies from scratch.

Our Basic Brownie Recipe

1 cup (2 sticks) butter

4 oz. unsweetened chocolate (quality matters; if you are going to cook from scratch, don't get cheap with your core ingredient)

2 cups sugar

4 eggs (room temperature if you have planned in advance, but don't fret it)

1 cup all purpose flour

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup chopped nuts (walnuts or pecans, preferably toasted - see the note below)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease a 13x9x2 inch baking pan.

Put the butter and chocolate in a metal bowl, and place it over a pot of simmering water to melt.  Stir occasionally until the mixture is smooth.  Remove it from the heat.  Let cool slightly. Stir in the sugar, then add the eggs one at a time, making sure to fully incorporate each before adding the next.  Stir in the flour, vanilla and salt.  Add the nuts, if desired.

Spread the mixture into the prepared pan.  Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.  Do not overbake!  Remove from oven, and cool completely before cutting.  Brownies are MUCH easier to cut at room temperature than not - my impatience to test the results has taught me this repeatedly!

NOTE:  I am a strong advocate for toasting nuts.  It adds little to the overall time needed and the added benefit is well worth the effort.  For walnuts or pecans, place the nuts on a baking sheet, and place them in a preheated oven (important that it is preheated) on 325 degrees for 10-15 minutes.  Given the pan a shake mid-way through to allow them to toast evenly.  They should be highly fragrant when you remove them; if they aren't, have faith and let them go a little longer.  (Just make sure you have a timer going to remind you to take them out; burnt nuts have a distinctive (read:  unpleasant and permeating) taste.)