Flantastico!

Flan may be the default dessert throughout Latin America, but I didn’t actually grow up eating it because my mother did not make it. Don’t get me wrong; Mom is a champion baker and made plenty of other desserts, including some ridiculously complicated ones I had the temerity to demand for certain birthdays. As she explained over Christmas dinner preparation this year, though, flan was her mother’s territory and therefore ground she feared to tread.

Since Grandma only visited once a year and never once made flan that I can recall, I didn’t have much interaction with flan until my teens, when we moved to Mexico. As it could be had in any restaurant there, I enthusiastically embraced its wobbly, burnt-caramel ubiquity as both a comfort food and a special indulgence. Ever since then, even if I suspect from the quality of the rest of the meal that it won’t be particularly good, I’ve had a hard time passing flan up when I see it on a restaurant’s menu.

Although some might consider them basically the same thing, I don’t feel the same way about creme brulee. I’ve always found creme brulee to be too rich, too pasty, too bland and boring under that crackly sugar. I regularly find that all that butterfat just throws the ratios out of whack and drowns out the vanilla bean or lavender or yuzu or whatever flavoring-du-jour the pastry chef tried to infuse into it. Flan, on the other hand, is the perfect balance of eggy and creamy. Even a meh flan is enjoyable.

This flan, the home version of the best flan I’ve ever had, is not remotely meh. I ate it twice while completing an internship in Washington DC over the summer; the first time at Jose Andres’s flagship restaurant, Jaleo, and the second time at the cafe of the National Gallery of Art, which he took over in conjunction with two exhibits of Spanish art. The Jaleo version was dolled up with foams and garnishes while the Cafe España one was served perfectly plain, but both times the custard was smooth, creamy, golden perfection accented by a smoky-topaz caramel so dark it was seriously flirting with danger. It was the complete opposite of all those profoundly disappointing brulees, and what every half-assed Mexican restaurant flan aspires to be.

In passionate love, I demanded that the waiter find me one of the last remaining printed recipe brochures (available here if you also want a fabulous gazpacho recipe and a chicken empanada I obviously can’t vouch for, but which is probably great). I then bided my time until the next big family gathering, and insisted on making this in addition to our non-negotiable Christmas dessert, a chocolate buche de noel we’ve had as long as we’ve been north of the equator. While I can’t claim to have executed it as flawlessly as Jose, I daresay I did Mama Andres, whose recipe it is, credit.  I also think Grandma would have approved.

If you’re at all a flanatic like me, you absolutely must try this. Apart from the bit involving molten sugar, which is always a little intimidating given the high burn potential, it’s a fabulously easy recipe. If the burnt sugar bit really freaks you out, you can and must make this anyway. It won’t be exactly the same, but you could just spoon some dulce de leche or store-bought caramel sauce in the bottom of the ramekins before pouring the custard over. You could also try jam, as Alton Brown suggests.

Flan al estilo de la madre de Jose Andres
(Adapted from Jose Andres, Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America)
Serves 4-6

For the caramel:

1 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup warm water

For the custard:

1/2 cup half-and-half
1/2 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 strip lemon zest
1 cinnamon stick
3 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Cook the cup of sugar for the caramel in a small saucepan over medium-low heat until it melts and begins to brown. Continue cooking until the sugar becomes dark brown, stirring constantly to avoid burning. Remove the pan from heat and carefully add the warm water, standing well back to avoid the sputtering. Return pan to the heat and continue cooking about 5 minutes, until dark and thick, like grade-B maple syrup.

Divide the caramel between four large or six small ramekins, swirling to coat the bottoms and halfway up the sides. Be extremely careful not to let the sugar touch your skin, because caramel will stick like napalm and cause scary third-degree damage in a very short time. (If you’re worried and/or clumsy like me, keep a bowl of ice water next to you and plunge any exposed bits in immediately to stop the burning.)

Line the bottom of a high-sided 9×13 baking pan with a clean kitchen towel and set the coated ramekins in the pan.

Preheat oven to 275 F.

Combine the half-and-half, heavy cream, lemon zest, cinnamon stick and 3/4 cup sugar in a medium-size saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, removing the pan from the heat just as contents reach a boil. (You could also do this in a liquid measuring cup in the microwave.)

In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs and yolks. Pour a bit of the hot cream gently into the eggs to temper them, whisking vigorously, then whisk in the rest of the cream. Strain the mixture into a large liquid measuring cup, stirring in the vanilla extract. Fill the caramel-lined ramekins with the custard.

Set the pan with the filled ramekins onto the middle rack of the oven. Carefully fill the pan with enough hot water to reach halfway up the sides of the ramekins, making sure not to drip any water into the custards.

Bake for 50-60 minutes, until the flans look set but the middles are still a bit jiggly. Remove from the oven and lift the flans out of the water bath to cool to room temperature. Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate until completely cold.

To serve, run a knife along the edges of the flans to loosen them. Place a dessert plate upside-down over the top of a ramekin, and invert. Shake gently but firmly until the flan drops onto the plate, and lift the ramekin up to let the caramel drizzle down onto the custard. Repeat with the remaining flans.

Notes:

The recipe as originally written was for six servings, but you should use quite small ramekins or custard cups if you want any height in your flan at that quantity. Dividing the custard six ways among regular-sized ramekins will result in rather flat, but still lovely, flans. If you want taller, more substantial ones, make just four flans. You could also make a single, bigger flan, but in my experience, it is much harder to tell when a bigger one is done, and it’s also harder to unmold without cracking the flan or spilling caramel sauce on your work surface or yourself.

His Lordship’s brother, who graciously hosted us as he does every Christmas, does not have ramekins, so I made these in small oven-safe soup bowls. It worked well, as you can see.

You can make a coconut variation by substituting coconut milk for some or all of the dairy and leaving out the cinnamon and lemon. I did this on Wednesday to use up the two leftover yolks from my birthday souffle, because that’s just the kind of crazy I am.

Cake and Happenstance

It’s not just His Lordship who doesn’t get cake for his birthday. Since His Lordship isn’t much for baking, unless we go out to dinner somewhere with a creditable pastry chef, I don’t get one on my birthday either. The fact of the matter is that Chez Disdain is a birthday cake-free zone.

That isn’t to say that you should pity me, because while His Lordship doesn’t bake cake, he does, in fact bake on occasion. And what he bakes on those occasions is this:

That is a chocolate souffle, and it’s part of a long-standing tradition which began with his deciding to surprise me back when we were in grad school. Being no fool, I’ve insisted on repeat performances every year since. At this point I can’t imagine celebrating my birthday any other way.

But. As much as I adore the souffles and would never give them up, every few years, I kind of miss cake. Since this year’s birthday not only fell on a weekday but the one on which His Lordship would be out all evening at an orchestra rehearsal, I decided to use the time alone to make my own damn cake. Specifically, almond cupcakes topped with a frosting of the quick Meyer lemon jam folded into creme fraiche.

The cupcakes were a quick and painless mix job, came out beautifully tender and cloud-light, and provided a nice neutral base for the brightly lemony cream. They would have had more almond flavor if I’d had almond extract and time to toast almonds instead of using pre-ground almond flour, but they were still quite birthday-worthy, and made me more than content enough to wait all the way to this weekend to get my souffle.

Almond Cupcakes with Meyer Lemon Creme Fraiche
(Adapted from Almond Cake in Rose Levy Berenbaum’s The Cake Bible and Lemon Jam from Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook)
Makes 12 cupcakes

For cake:
1 large egg
1/3 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon Amaretto liqueur
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
13 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon sifted cake flour
5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon ground almonds
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

For lemon cream:
1 recipe Quick Meyer Lemon Jam
8 ounces cold creme fraiche

Preheat the oven to 350 F and line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners.

In a liquid measuring cup, combine the egg, 2 tablespoons sour cream, the Amaretto, and the vanilla.

In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix the flour, almonds, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt on low speed briefly to blend. Add the butter and remaining sour cream and mix on low until the dry ingredients are moistened. Increase the speed to medium and beat for 90 seconds, then scrape down the sides. Add the egg mixture in three additions, blending for 20 seconds between additions and scraping down as needed.

Using an ice cream scoop, divide the batter evenly between the twelve lined cups. Bake for approximately 20 minutes, until the tops are firm and golden and a tester comes out clean.

While the cupcakes are baking, fold the jam into the creme fraiche until completely combined. Cover tightly and refrigerate until ready to use.

When the cupcakes have cooled sufficiently, top with the creme fraiche and, if desired, a twist of candied Meyer lemon.

Notes:

The lemon creme fraiche will still be pretty fluid when freshly made, and will firm up to a softly spreadable frosting if refrigerated for a few hours. You could serve the barely-cooled cupcake atop a pool of the sauce-like cream, or cool them completely and top them with the chilled cream. Your call.

You can double the quantities for the cake and bake for 35-40 minutes in a buttered and floured 9-inch cake pan for a full-sized cake instead.

My Preciousss

We loves Meyerses. Yes, we do. We loves them so much that we sacrifice valuable checked-luggage space just so we can smuggle several pounds of them back from California, probably violating numerous state and federal agricultural regulations in the process. We piles the preciouses up on our kitchen island and stares at them for days, until they start showing signs of wrinkling, and then we panics and makes everything we can think of to save them from being wasted.

Ahem. OK, enough first-person Gollum plural. I believe I’ve made my point, which is that one of the best parts of spending the holidays in California is bringing as many lemons as possible back.

This year, thanks to the combined generosity of my brother, his fiance, and His Lordship’s parents, who made sure I was supplied with lemons despite having no opportunity to shop for them myself, I had enough to require last-minute rearranging of our luggage to avoid paying overweight baggage fees. And unlike my attitude toward persimmons, it physically pains me to let Meyer lemons go to waste, so pretty soon after our return to the East Coast, I had to make efforts to preserve them.

About a half-dozen of them were salted and are currently in the back of my fridge, turning into Moroccan-style preserved lemons. The remainder were used in two variations on jam: one a proper marmalade, and the other a fast and loose almost-instant jam. Both recipes make full use out of the whole fruit, wasting absolutely no part of my sunny beauties.

As Promised

Since I somehow seem to have stumbled into a tradition of posting a lentil recipe early in every new year, here is another of my favorites.

Although it’s called lentil hummus, all it really has in common with the chickpea-based original is that it’s a chunky puree of spiced and herbed legumes. Where conventional hummus can often be bland and pasty, this is deeply dark, meaty, and savory, more like a pate. While it’s perfectly good as a dip with pita wedges or chips, I like to use it as a spread on crackers and in sandwiches, and it also works very nicely as a filling for stuffed pastas like ravioli.

The recipe originally came from Todd English’s The Olives Table, but as this is one of the books I left in storage when we were on the other coast last year, I had to recreate it as best I could from memory. When I unpacked the book and looked at the original again, I noticed that I had changed the procedure quite a bit, although I had remembered most of the ingredients wth acceptable accuracy. On reflection, I think my procedure is a little bit more forgiving of wandering away from the stove, and the results are just as good.

The idea of seasoning lentils with this mixture of theoretically clashing spices and herbs may seem weird, but I assure you that they actually all play exceptionally well together. The cinnamon, rosemary, hot pepper and allspice all wrap around each other and lift up the low notes of the lentils, giving the whole the kind of intensity you’d never expect from such a humble base of plain brown legumes and vegetables.

The fact that lentils can metamorphose into something this scrumptiously good for you is one of the reasons I’m their biggest fan, and why, if I ever rebrand this blog, it would probably have to be called something like “Cookies and Lentils”. Incidentally, this is officially my hundredth post, so it’s a particularly auspicious lentil recipe!

Lentil Hummus
(Approximated from Lentil Hummus in Todd English’s The Olives Table)
Makes 2 cups

1 cup lentils, preferably brown
3 cups water
Half of a cinnamon stick
1 whole sprig fresh rosemary or 5-6 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
3 cloves garlic, peeled
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 cup minced carrots
1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper, or 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/2 cup white wine
1 tablespoon minced fresh rosemary or 4 tablespoons minced fresh parsley or cilantro
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for garnishing
Salt and pepper

Combine lentils, cinnamon, rosemary or thyme, bay and garlic in a medium saucepan and cover with the water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer the until water has nearly evaporated and lentils are very soft, approximately 30 minutes. Remove the cinnamon, rosemary sprig and bay leaf. (If you used thyme instead, it will have fallen apart and can stay with the lentils.)

Heat the olive oil in a large saute pan and add the onions and a generous pinch of salt. Cook until the onions have softened, then the add carrots, hot pepper and allspice and continue cooking until the vegetables have just begun to brown. Add the wine, cover the pan and lower the heat. When the vegetables are soft, remove the cover and cook until the remaining wine has evaporated.

In a food processor or in a bowl with an immersion blender, combine the lentils and the vegetables and process until mostly smooth. Add the fresh herbs, olive oil, and additional salt and pepper and pulse again to combine. Taste and add more salt and pepper if needed.

Serve warm or at room temperature, garnished with additional olive oil. Leftovers will keep for about a week in the refrigerator, or can be frozen for later use as a pasta filling.

Notes:

This is one of those times when brown lentils are preferable to my usual-favorite green or Puy, because you actually want them to break down. I haven’t tried it yet, but red lentils should also work beautifully in this for the same reason. In that case, I’d shift the spices in a more Indian or perhaps Ethiopian direction.

The herbs and spices can be swapped around fairly liberally. For example, if you don’t have fresh rosemary, you can substitute half a teaspoon of dried rosemary in the lentil-boiling step. Similarly, if you don’t have cinnamon sticks, you can use 4 or 5 whole allspice berries in the lentil-boiling step, and add 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon to the vegetables later in place of the ground allspice. I have also thrown in lemongrass stalks or strips of lemon peel for a citrusy note in past iterations. As long as you maintain the basic idea of contrasting a sweet spice against an assertive herb, you’ll be fine.

Half a batch of this hummus can be used to turn approximately half a package of wonton wrappers into four dozen ravioli. Of course, if you have access to or can make your own fresh pasta, so much the better.

In Lieu of Sunday Baking

I think I’ve made clear my feelings about New Year’s rituals, particularly the odious habit of encouraging the making of doomed-to-failure resolutions. Without doing any such thing, I can still understand the impulse to consciously dial things back for the next couple of weeks, just to balance your system back out after all the holiday crapulence. That’s always how I feel come January 2nd, which is why our first homemade meal on coming home from our travels was a very simple, gentle and nurturing soup of mushrooms and barley.

His Lordship and I both come from food-loving families and cultural traditions, so you can well imagine the levels of excess that were reached during the ten days we were among them for the holidays. At several points, one or both of us swore we were going to fast for a week from the minute we got on the plane. On top of that, we came home to temperatures that can be described with sincerity as arctic. It was (and still is) painfully freezing, with the kind of windchill-enhanced lows that suck all the moisture from every inch of exposed skin the minute you step out the door and make your lungs hurt with the very first breath you take.

This soup is easy to pull together from a mostly-bare cupboard, and will do your overloaded digestive system and your chilled limbs good. It should also serve as a competent place-holder until I put up a new lentil recipe, in keeping with the one start-of-the-year tradition I seem to have established.

Mushroom Barley Soup
Serves 4 as a main course, or 6 as a first course

1/4 ounce dried porcini mushrooms, reconstituted in 1 cup boiling water
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 small yellow onion, diced
3 ribs celery, diced
2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced in thin half-moons
8 ounces button mushrooms, quartered and sliced
1 cup pearl barley
5 cups vegetable stock
1 rind from a smallish piece of parmesan cheese
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat and add the onion, celery and carrots, plus a pinch of salt, and cook until the vegetables begin to wilt. Lift the porcini out of their soaking liquid and roughly chop, reserving the liquid. Add the porcini and button mushrooms and continue cooking until everything begins to caramelize. Add the barley to the mixture and cook for several more minutes to toast it.

Deglaze the pan with the porcini soaking liquid, thoroughly scraping up the brown bits from the bottom. Add the stock, parmesan rind, thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, then cover the pot and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Cook until the barley is tender, 30-45 minutes.

Taste and correct for salt and pepper as needed. Discard the bay leaf and parmesan rind before serving the soup.

Notes:

The barley will continue soaking up liquid in the fridge, so you will probably have to add a bit of hot water to the leftovers before reheating the next day.

The cheese rind might seem a strange choice, but it adds depth of flavor and makes full use out of a pricey ingredient.

I Only Love You for Your Looks

I adore persimmons, although to be honest my passion for them is more for their aesthetics than their flavor. I love their bold orange color, their curvy shapes, and especially their swirly baroque calyxes so much that I once designed a whole bathroom decorating scheme around them. I have also been known to buy them just to let them sit in a bowl on my dining room table, with no serious intent of ever eating them.

I don’t feel particularly guilty about such waste, because the truth about persimmons is that they are stunning to look at, but they’re considerably iffier to eat. An underripe persimmon is a nightmare of astringent, soapy tannins that will turn you off the fruit forever if you’re unlucky and uneducated enough to try one before its time. The acorn-shaped Hachiya variety, while more beautiful than the squat Fuyu, is particularly fraught with risk, because it must be alarmingly ripe before you even think of eating it. If it’s not as uniformly squishy as a water balloon –basically a pulpy gel barely held inside a thin membrane of waxy peel — you shouldn’t even bother with it.

While we were back on the West Coast for the holidays, though, His Lordship’s parents presented him with a huge bag of homegrown Fuyus, which then had to be used up before we went home. There was no time to let them sit and get fully ripe, which meant that I had to get a little bit creative. I was originally going to dice them up and stir them into a simple olive oil cake, until I remembered that I’ve salvaged many an underripe pear by poaching it, so why not these persimmons?

In keeping with their Asian origins, I spiced the syrup for the wedged persimmons with ginger, cinnamon, and tangerine peel and juice. I also added a little bit of honey to the poaching liquid for complexity. The poached slices were buttery soft and sweet, and went quite nicely over instead of inside the cake. I also think they’d be a gorgeous garnish for rice pudding, especially one made with jasmine rice and coconut milk.

I’m not going to promise to stop using them primarily as objets d’ art, but any persimmons I buy from now on will be more likely to go through an eating step between the dining table and the trash can.

Persimmons Poached with Ginger, Cinnamon and Tangerine Peel
Serves 6

3 cups water
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons honey
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and sliced
1 cinnamon stick
2 long strips tangerine peel
6 Fuyu persimmons
Juice of two tangerines

In a large saucepan, combine the water, sugar, honey, ginger, cinnamon and tangerine peel. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

While the syrup is simmering, remove the stems and, if necessary, the cores from the persimmons and slice into 4-8 wedges, depending on how ripe the fruit is. If they are underripe, err on the side of smaller wedges. Very ripe fruit should be quartered or even halved to prevent it falling apart once poached.

Add the persimmon wedges to the syrup, return to a simmer, and continue cooking just until the fruit is tender but still intact. Immediately transfer to a large serving bowl, and stir in the tangerine juice.

Let the persimmons cool to room temperature, then remove the ginger, cinnamon stick, and tangerine peel. Also fish out any of the persimmon wedges that are falling apart, and reserve for eating for breakfast with yogurt or oatmeal.

Serve the more-presentable intact persimmon wedges over a plain cake or spoon over rice pudding.

Notes:

Really, seriously, for the love of your tastebuds, do not think of trying this recipe with Hachiyas. If they’re ripe enough to eat, they’ll just turn into soup the minute they hit the poaching liquid, and if they’re not ripe, I shudder to think of the nasty, bitter mess you’ll get.

On a less cautionary note, I’m currently thinking that this syrup would also be a good match for underripe peaches, when they first start appearing in late spring.

A Slightly Different Take on Holiday Goodies

Every year, I participate in a Secret Santa exchange. Every year before this one, I have sent my giftee whichever cookies are in that year’s repertoire, but this year there was a hitch: I drew a giftee who can’t have sweets.

What to do? Simple enough: switch to crackers. I hadn’t made them before because I’ve always considered crackers to be a quick convenience, to be bought for having with cheese or butter and jam when a full meal isn’t called for. With cookie energy that needed repurposing, though, I went scavenging through my cookbooks for non-sugary equivalents that would demonstrate the same degree of care and cheer that I’d like to think my holiday cookies show. Knowing that the recipient likes cheese, I concentrated my search on cheese crackers, and got exceptionally lucky on the very first go.

Now, I will grant you that these cheddar crackers, spiked with chipotle and given extra depth with some whole wheat flour, don’t look all that exciting. The first one or two may not even seem very exciting. Tasty, crispy, and finally a little bit zippy, yes, but exciting? Except…

Except that you will rapidly find yourself compulsively popping one after another until half the batch is gone, because the heat is seductively cumulative and the crunch is thoroughly addictive. If you’re looking for snacks to go along with your New Year’s Eve cocktails, you can’t go wrong with this grown-up version of the goldfish crackers children devour with similarly insatiable greed.

I’m delighted the challenge could be met so easily. I think these crackers are every bit as special as a holiday cookie, and I’m pleased to report that my Secret Santa giftee thought so too!

Spicy Cheddar Crackers
(Adapted from Cheddar Cheese Crackers in Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads)
Makes around four dozen teeny nibbles

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon chipotle chile powder
1 1/2 ounces very sharp Cheddar cheese, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons boiling water
1/2 teaspoon molasses
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Additional room-temperature water as needed

Whisk together all the dry ingredients until the chipotle is evenly distributed, then place in the bowl of a food processor. Add the cheese cubes and pulse until finely ground.

Stir the boiling water, molasses and butter together in a glass measuring cup until the butter has melted. With the processor running, pour the mixture through the feed tube. If the dough doesn’t come together, add more water, a tablespoon at a time. Once the dough forms a ball, process for an additional 20 seconds to knead. Tip the ball onto a sheet of plastic wrap, form into a flat disk, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 400F and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Divide dough into four equal pieces. Leaving the other three wrapped while you work, shape the first piece into a cylinder and then flatten it out on a work surface. Roll out to a rectangle 14-18 inches long and around 6 inches wide, and 1/16 inch thick. Fold into thirds, turn a quarter-turn, and roll back out to a rectangle 1/16 inch thick. Transfer to one-half of one of the prepared baking sheets, and repeat the process with a second piece of dough, setting it on the sheet beside the first.

Dock each sheet of dough thoroughly with a fork, then use a pizza cutter or sharp knife to trim any scraggly edges in order to get a neat rectangle. Cut each sheet lengthwise into quarters, then divide each crosswise into an even number of small inch-long squares or rectangles. Sprinkle with the additional salt.

Bake until well browned and crisp, 10-12 minutes depending on the thickness of the dough. Place the sheet on a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the final two pieces of dough.

The crackers will theoretically stay fresh for weeks in an airtight container, but I really wouldn’t plan on them lasting out a single week.

Notes:

It occurred to me as I was rolling out the third of the four pieces that this dough is more than resilient enough to stand up to the pasta machine, which would make the rolling out much, much faster.

Should you be so inspired, you could find tiny little fish-shaped cookie cutters and make your very own goldfish for grown-ups.

Psst! Wanna Know a Secret?

About a year ago, I finally cracked the elusive secret to His Lordship’s favorite cookies, the honey, apricot and pecan ones I blogged about a few years before that. At the time, I was celebrating the fact that I was just this-close to perfection, but frankly, that last little inch of close-but-no-cigar continued to drive me insane for quite some time after.

It turns out that I was just one tiny tweak away from the goal, one change so simple it was practically staring me in the face every time I opened the cupboard. The solution was so obvious yet so cunning that I felt both dense and smug when I tried it and it worked.

Ready? Here it is:

That’s right, bread flour. All the cookies needed were a tiny bit more structure, and using a slightly higher-protein flour was all it took to achieve it. No fiddling with the formula, no experiments with adding more flour in tiny increments, just one simple substitution. With that one change, I stopped the spreading and eliminated the need for all that guesswork about exactly when to take them out of the oven. I got all the puff, body and reliability I’d been after all along, and they received His Lordship’s full, effusive, grinning stamp of approval.

I know some might be looking at this recipe and thinking, “Yeah, sure, those sound yummy enough, but they can’t really be special enough for the holidays. And are they really THAT good?”

To that I say it may be difficult to believe given the absence of chocolate, but more than one person has informed me that these are the best cookies in the world. They’re intensely butterscotchy, sweetly multidimensional thanks to the honey, and simultaneously chewy, crispy, fruity and nutty. It’s all the kinds of decadence you’d expect from a holiday cookie, with the bonus of being low-effort enough to make throughout the whole year to come.

You’ll just have to make a batch to see whether you too think these are the best in the world, but even if you ultimately decide another cookie holds first place in your heart, I promise you won’t be sorry to have this one in your repertoire.

Honey Apricot Pecan Cookies, Perfected
Makes 5-6 dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1/4 cup honey
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups bread flour
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 cups pecans, coarsely chopped
2 cups dried apricots, coarsely chopped

Melt the butter and place it and the honey in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Allow the mixture to cool slightly. In the meantime, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt and set aside.

Once the butter is at room temperature, add the granulated sugar, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the dry ingredients and stir on low until barely blended, then mix in the pecans and apricots. Cover the bowl and chill thoroughly, preferably overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 F, and line several baking sheets with parchment paper.

Scoop out the dough with a tablespoon-sized scoop and place two inches apart on the sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes, until golden brown in the middle and a bit darker at the edges. Cool the cookies on their sheets until they’ve firmed up, then slide them onto a rack with their parchment to finish cooling.

Notes:

I made twice this amount this time, because I was snowed into the house and had nothing better to do all day, so I’ll be mailing some out as well as taking them into the office. Apart from losing a few bits of pecan and apricot out the top of the nearly-too-full mixing bowl, it worked perfectly, so feel free to scale up.

Don’t be tempted to skip the refrigeration step, though. The resting period is important for hydrating the flour and developing the full magnificence of the dough, as I’ve pointed out before. You can also scoop out the dough, pop it into bags, and freeze it to have cookies on demand.

The bread flour does an excellent job of firming up the cookie dough, but the dough should still not be allowed to get too warm.  It wouldn’t hurt to put the mixing bowl back in the fridge while waiting for a tray to come out of the oven.

The now-defunct bakery that inspired this cookie also had a variation with dried cranberries and walnuts instead of apricot and pecan. I imagine you could split the batch in half just after mixing in the dry ingredients, and get twice the festive punch out of one dough.

Easter Pie for Christmas

In keeping with my not-quite-there-yet attitude toward the holidays this year, there is one food that I’ve been craving since my little outburst of decorating two weekends ago. As it happens, it’s a holiday food, yes — but the wrong holiday.

This savory pie filled with spinach, ricotta and parmesan and seasoned with nutmeg is not traditionally a Christmas food. It’s an Easter food, which is why the Italian name for it, Torta Pasqualina, means “Easter Pie”. When I was growing up, we did have it for Easter, but I loved it so much that my mother could be persuaded to make it at other times of the year, and now that I’m a grown-up, I can make it for myself at Christmastime if I want to.

The catch is that it had been so long since I’d watched Mom make it that I pretty much forgot how, and would you believe that scouring through every single Italian cookbook I have, including the supposed bible of Italian cooking, did not turn up a recipe quite like what I was looking for? Oh, there were plenty of pies made with ricotta and greens, but either the dough was wrong (puff pastry? I don’t think so. Sweet pastafrolla? Even worse!) or the filling wasn’t right (prosciutto is definitely out and chard is nice but not what I was looking for here).

In the end, I had to do a lot of remixing, combining of elements, and filling in my own blanks to come up with a recipe closer to what I remembered. It’s not quite 100% there, and I will probably have to consult with Mom to figure out where the ratios were a little off, but it’s really darn close.

If you’ve never had this pie, imagine something a little like Greek spanikopita, except milder and eggier and denser. At least for me, it’s an incredibly comforting flavor, plus it’s green! Green is Christmassy, right? It’s also better cold than fresh out of the oven and will keep for days in the fridge, which makes it an excellent option if you want to make it ahead and devote most of your holiday cooking energy to fussy rolled-out cookies or wassail or what have you.

Torta Pasqualina, or Italian Spinach and Ricotta Pie
Serves 8-10

For pastry:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) salted butter, cut into 32 pieces
4 tablespoons non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening
3 large eggs
1 tablespoon water

For filling:
2 12-ounce bags frozen spinach
1 16-ounce container part-skim ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Parmigiano Reggiano
2 teaspoons each salt and freshly ground pepper
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
4 large eggs, beaten

Place the butter and shortening in the freezer for 10-15 minutes to chill thoroughly.

Place dry ingredients in the food processor bowl and pulse several times to combine. Add the butter and shortening and pulse again until sandy, 12-15 times. Beat the water into the eggs and add to the processor, and process until the dough starts to form a ball around the blade. Divide the dough into two pieces, one comprising two-thirds of the dough. Form each piece into a flat disk, wrap tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Defrost the spinach in the microwave, then squeeze bone-dry in a colander or a dish towel. Place in a large bowl and stir in the cheeses, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Taste the filling and correct the seasonings as necessary; it should be slightly over-seasoned since it will be eaten cold. Stir in the eggs. Set aside.

Set the rack at the lower-middle position and heat oven to 350F.

Roll the larger piece of dough into a circle large enough to line a 9-inch springform pan. Tuck the pastry into the pan, letting the excess hang over the sides. Spread the filling onto the pastry, leveling and smoothing the top. Roll out the second piece of dough and set over the filling. Trim the excess, tuck the edges under, and crimp. Cut an X in the center and pull back the corners to leave a vent for the filling as it cooks.

Bake the pie for 60-70 minutes, until the pastry is golden-brown and the filling that peeks through the opening in the crust looks dry and set. Cool completely before eating, and refrigerate any leftovers.

Notes:

I used salted butter because I’m hoarding the unsalted for holiday cookie baking, but if you only have unsalted around, add 1 teaspoon salt to the dry ingredients.

Using lower-fat ricotta is not only fine but even preferable here, since the full-fat kind can make this unpleasantly rich in combination with the eggy pastry.

Many versions of this pie crack additional whole eggs into the filling, which bake to a hard-boiled consistency and make for a pretty presentation when the pie is cut open. If you want to try this, use a big soup spoon to create 4-5 evenly-spaced deep indentations in the filling once you’ve spread it inside the pastry, and carefully crack an egg into each well. Cover the pie with the second layer of pastry and proceed as instructed.

The Holiday Madness is Upon Us

For a variety of reasons too personal and too mundane to relate, I have had a harder time this year summoning up any holiday spirit. I’m not quite bah-humbugging, but I’ve been decidedly meh about the post-Halloween happenings, and I’m actively participating this time in His Lordship’s annual anti-giftgiving and no-carols grinchery.

That said, something, however limited, did finally awaken over the weekend, because I stayed up on Saturday night turning the overpriced and underwhelming quinces I bought at Thanksgiving into jam, complete with sterilized jars and heat-sealing. I also brought our one box of holiday decorations up from the basement and threw together a minimalist arrangement of blue, silver and white ornaments in our front window, and filled a few vases and bowls full of the remaining ornaments and scattered them around the house.

I can probably attribute it to the fact that we had our first snowfall on Saturday — to be more precise, it was our first encounter with the evil and invasive form of precipitation known as “wintry mix”. The finger-numbing cold and the dusting of white on the ground, however momentary, were enough to flip the switch. I’m also not discounting the effects of peer pressure, since a third of the residents of our very small block had already gone Full Metal Christmas by the time we left the house on Black Friday to catch a noon matinee, and we’re at over half the block lit up and garlanded a week later.

Whatever combination of factors it was, I can’t deny that it’s really and truly happened, because I followed the jam-making and decorating spurt by getting up Sunday morning and kicking off the cookie baking, and I didn’t do it by halves, either. I came up with the most insanely ambitious use I possibly could for the leftover egg whites that had been sitting in my fridge for a week, making my first-ever attempt at a cookie that came out of nowhere a few years back and rapidly become so common on food blogs that it’s practically played out. I speak, of course, of the macaron.

I imagine at least a few people will be shocked to learn that I had never had a macaron before. It is, in fact, possible for me to miss a food fad, although I smugly pride myself on having been-there-done-that with quite a number of things years and even decades ago that people are now acting like they invented, like dulce de leche, Mexican Coca-Cola, Peking duck, panettone, and salads made of fresh fennel, whole milk mozzarella, and/or roasted beets. (Along with the exponentially amplified teen angst and the unrelieved sense of never quite belonging anywhere, there are some advantages to growing up in a peripatetic immigrant household.)

This fad, though, I let totally pass me by. In part this is because my obsession with madeleines has always been too all-consuming to permit any French cookie rivals. The love affair began in Proustian manner when I chose one in a mid-afternoon cafe stop during my first visit to Paris when I was 14, and no tuile or sable has ever been able to turn my head since. I still mourn the loss of the one bakery I ever found in the U.S. that could produce a truly acceptable madeleine, which His Lordship used to bring me during my grad school exams, making regular expeditions for these much-needed fortifications in beribboned cellophane bags. Besides my madeleine monogamy, I also disdained macarons because they seemed like too much bother for not enough payoff, and since I never had one during any of my visits to France, I would have no baseline to tell whether I had succeeded or not.

However. I had this bowlful of egg whites that had been sitting in the fridge since their corresponding yolks had gone into Thanksgiving leftovers quiches, and I had an unexpected burst of energy. I could have wussed out and made plain old macaroons, or even my beloved cacao nib amaretti, but instead my crazy holiday brain said, “Hey, why not finally try macarons?” There was no one to act as the voice of reason, so I charged forward.