Cookies

So far, my only pregnancy craving is chewy homemade cookies. Which is basically a completely rational regular-person craving, so I'm not sure it counts.

I made the snickerdoodles pictured here today because Will likes snickerdoodles and I'd never made any. They're pretty good. I made some tasty, very classic lemon bars last weekend. I made some cornmeal-lemon cookies. But the best cookie I've made recently is a very simple chocolate chip cookie.

The New York Times Magazine ran a story back in 2006 with different recipes for three different styles of chocolate chip cookies: thin and crisp; flat and chewy; and thick and gooey. The flat and chewy recipe is pretty good -- with several modifications.

I'm not really a fan of the underbaked-cookie thing that's so popular recently -- I like cookies that are caramelized and tan and a tiny bit crispy on the bottoms. But I like them to be chewy at the same time. Never cakey. Not too chocolatey. This recipe hits all the right points. It also has kosher salt and lots of vanilla extract, both of which give it a fancy bakery edge. The whole wheat flour is optional, of course, but I like how it darkens the dough.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

1 and 3/4 cups all purpose flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 T kosher salt

8 ounces (2 sticks) butter
1 and 1/2 cups light brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 T vanilla extract

1 bag (2 scant cups) chocolate chunks

Whisk together dry ingredients. Cream butter and sugar in a mixer, then beat in egg and vanilla. Add dry ingredients until just combined, then chocolate.

Chill dough at least 1 hour. Drop onto cookie sheets. Bake at 325 for 15-ish minutes.

Note: this recipe makes a lot of cookies, especially if you make them pretty small, which I do. I froze half the dough and defrosted it the next week; tasted even better.

Chocolate Icebox Cookies

I had a vague image of this recipe from my childhood--Grandma Oty used to make them--and managed to find the right recipe on About.com. It was in the Southern food section, though I think of them as quintessentially mid-Western. They are so easy! I love the mildness of the chocolate, because you can taste everything else: the butter, the brown sugar, the walnuts.

Cocoa Icebox Cookies

· 1/2 cup butter

· 1 cup brown sugar

· 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

· 1 egg

· 1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

· 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

· 1/4 teaspoon salt

· 2 tablespoons cocoa

· 1/2 cup finely copped walnuts

In mixing bowl with electric mixer, cream butter, sugar, and vanilla. Beat in eggs, blending well. Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cocoa; stir into creamed mixture, blending thoroughly. Stir in walnuts. Shape into a roll about 2 inches in diameter. Wrap roll in waxed paper and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. Slice roll into 1/8-inch slices. Place on ungreased baking sheet and bake at 350° for 10 to 12 minutes.
Makes about 5 dozen cookies.

Note: I increased the cocoa by 1 tablespoon and reduced the flour the same amount.

Lemon-Chocolate Chip Pancakes

I had an idea this morning. I looked up recipes for chocolate chip pancakes and lemon pancakes and made up this combination of the two.

Lawson put syrup on his, but I think all they need is plain yogurt. Sliced bananas would also be good.

Bowl 1:
1 1/2 c self-rising flour (or all purpose flour + 1 t salt and 1 T baking powder)
2 T sugar
zest of one lemon

Bowl 2:
3 T melted butter
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 t or more lemon juice

Mix well separately, then briefly together.

Sprinkle 4-10 semisweet or bittersweet chocolate chips on each pancake as soon as you pour the batter.

German Chocolate Cupcakes

How long can the cupcake remain wildly fashionable? When I decided to make cupcakes rather than cake for my recital refreshments this weekend I looked on the web and found that there are whole cupcake blogs, and cupcake shops!

I used to make the time-consuming traditional German chocolate cake recipe found on the back of the package: separate egg whites folded in at the end, extended creaming of butter with sugar, and so forth. This time around I used a delicious one-bowl recipe which I found at Diana's Kitchen.

German Chocolate Cake

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter,
softened
1 cup sour cream
4 large eggs
4 ounces sweet baking
chocolate, melted
1/2 cup milk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Grease and flour two 8-inch square baking pans.
In a large bowl,
combine flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, butter, sour cream, eggs, chocolate,
milk, and vanilla. Beat with mixer at low speed until blended. Increase mixer to
high and beat 2 minutes longer. Spoon batter into prepared pans. Bake in a
preheated 350° oven for about 35 minutes, or until a wooden pick or cake tester inserted in center comes out clean.
Remove to
racks to cool completely.

(I filled cupcake liners 2/3 full and baked them 20 minutes. It yielded 32. I used the topping recipe from the back of the package.)

In a stroke of genius, I used a paring knife to make a big divot in each cupcake. This made room for more coconut-pecan topping, resulting in a better topping-to-cake ratio. I am saving the divots in the freezer to make a trifle or something.

Bûche de Noël

I'm not sure I'll ever do this again, but it sure looked cool.

Inside:
a "hot milk sponge cake" from Joy baked in a jelly roll pan
Kahlua-flavored buttercream

Outside:
chocolate buttercream
meringue mushrooms
powdered sugar
a rock from the yard
a pine branch with pinecones that I found in the street

The meringue mushrooms got gooey pretty quickly in the humidity.

These shots make it look a little campy, but indoors, in person, it looked quite pretty and log-like.

It tasted merely okay -- the cake was a little bland, and the Kahlua buttercream not quite perfect. The lemon meringue pie I also made for Christmas Eve dinner was much tastier.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake

The ex-girlfriend of an old friend of mine used to make chocolate zucchini cakes a lot. She would sit in front of the oven on a stool watching them bake through the oven door.

I don't have her recipe. But Clotilde's version is about perfect with just one addition: 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon sifted in with the dry ingredients. I used a springform pan.

I made one a few weeks ago when I found a giant zucchini hidden under a leaf in the garden. Lawson ate the entire cake within about three days and politely requested I make another one immediately. Unfortunately, that was the week the local food challenge started...and because there is no local cacao source, I didn't make another one until late last week. It's almost gone, too.

Grandma's Birthday Party

We had a birthday party for Grandma yesterday. First we had a recital of two-piano music by Donizetti, J. C. Bach, Schumann, and Mozart. Then I served a lunch of gazpacho and blueberry muffins, followed by a roast beef and blue cheese salad. The piece de resistance was this chocolate and raspberry mousse cake brought by GJ from Le Delice French bakery. It was the best purchased dessert I've ever had. And we had champagne.

Brownies

I made our favorite brownies this week. I also had a gall bladder attack, but perhaps it's a stretch to link them.

This recipe is so useful because it uses plain old Hershey's cocoa, in fact it came from the back of a cocoa tin. The brownies are rich and, if you don't overbake them, gooey.

Fudge Brownies

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 cup flour
1/3 cup cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Mix eggs, sugar, and melted butter in food processor. Add flour, cocoa, and salt. Process lightly until mixed. Add vanilla and nuts, and process a few seconds.

Scrape into an old Marie Callendar's pie tin, greased (or and 8x8 baking pan) and bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes.

My favorite ways to serve these are with coffee ice cream, or with fresh raspberries and raspberry sorbet.

Dark Chocolate & Orange Cake

This cake is among the most fun foods I've ever made. It ranks with the peanut butter/raisin/powdered milk logs I made all by myself at age 10. It is that fun.

Lawson's cousin was up from Florida for Thanksgiving and gave us a bunch of wonderful citrus, all of which are threatening to rot at once because, try as we might, we have been unable to eat 40 tangerines in two weeks. So I have been looking for good ways to use them, especially the many, many oranges.

I started thinking about oranges and chocolate and how I like the flavors together and would like to make a cake consisting of the two. Not a single one of my cookbooks had a recipe. But when I looked online I found hordes...and they were all British. Apparently Jaffa cakes, which I had heard of, are chocolate-and-orange flavored, so the taste combination is well established over there. And every British cook from Claudia Roden to Nigella Lawson has a recipe for a chocolate orange cake. I read many recipes, a task made difficult by all the volume and weight and temperature conversions, and eventually narrowed down what I was looking for.

I mostly used this one, with narrative encouragement provided here and further ganache research in the Joy of Cooking. My converted and revised version is posted below so you can avoid all the math yourself.

Here's why the recipe is so fun: you boil WHOLE ORANGES until they are soft, then chuck the entire orange in the food processor. The boiling tones down the bitterness of the pith, just like when you make marmalade. And, in fact, Nigella Lawson's recipe calls for a high quality marmalade instead of an orange. But that would be both expensive and no fun at all.

The ganache is also fun, because it's so easy and looks so fancy.

Dark Chocolate & Orange Cake

- 1 large or two small oranges
Pierce and cook in a covered pan with a few inches of boiling water for 30 minutes. Remove to a food processor and pick out the seeds before processing the whole thing until broken down but still coarse.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 8 or 9 inch round cake tin or springform pan.

- 3 eggs
- 1 and 1/4 cups sugar
- 1 cup good canola oil (recipe calls for sunflower, which isn't common or cheap here)
- 4 oz bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into small pieces and melted

Lightly beat the eggs, sugar, and oil. Gradually beat in the pureed orange and melted chocolate.

- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
- 250g/9oz plain flour
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Sift in the cocoa, flour and baking powder. Mix and pour into the buttered pan. Bake for 55-60 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes, then turn out on to a wire rack.

For the ganache:

- 8 oz good bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, broken into pieces
- 3 fl oz or 1/3 cup cream...or half and half, which is what I had around, which worked beautifully.

Put the chocolate into a heatproof bowl. Bring the cream to a boil in a pan, pour over the chocolate, and stir until melted, then whisk until glossy and totally smooth. Let cool to about 90 degrees F and pour over the cooled cake (which I inverted because it was a bit cracked and domed on the top).