Do I Repeat Myself?

Very well then, I repeat myself.

I just love the combination of rosemary and lemon so much that I never get sick of it. I’ve done it in shortbread, which is sublime; I’ve done it in flavored salt, which is handy; and now I’ve done it in these semolina cookies, which are humble and unassuming. They’re all different and they’re all good, so I don’t see a particular need to make apologies for a little bit of a recurring theme.

I bought the semolina some weeks back with the intention of using it in bread, since I’ve been doing more bread baking. Late last week, though, I had an urge to come up with a sweet application for semolina, and I specifically wanted a not-too-sweet, toothy cookie to make a change from the very sweet and decadent cookies I took to the office the past two Mondays. Surprisingly enough, there’s a dearth of semolina-based cookies in my ridiculous cookbook collection, and nothing I found online quite fit the bill, so I decided to adapt a recipe for a polenta-based cookie from Babbo instead.

Unlike my shortbread recipe, which has neon-bright lemon and rosemary flavor, these have just a charming hint, embedded in a tender cookie with just a bit of gritty edge. They’re perfect with an afternoon cup of tea, or if you want to be really Italian about it, with a glass of wine.

Semolina Cookies with Lemon and Rosemary
(Adapted from Polenta Shortbread in Mario Batali’s The Babbo Cookbook)
Makes approximately 4 dozen cookies

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup semolina
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
1 whole egg plus 1 yolk
Zest of one lemon
1 large sprig fresh rosemary, minced (around 2 teaspoons)

Additional granulated sugar for rolling

Combine the flour, semolina, sugar, baking powder and salt in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Run the mixer briefly to stir the dry ingredients together.

Sir the egg and yolk, lemon zest and rosemary into the butter. Pour the mixture over the dry ingredients and run the mixer until a crumbly dough forms. Spoon the dough into a zip-top bag and chill for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 325F and line multiple baking sheets with parchment paper. Pour a good amount of sugar into a shallow dish.

Scoop out tablespoons of the dough and roll into balls the size of unshelled hazelnuts. (You may have to squish and pinch a bit to get the dough to hold together.) Roll the balls of dough in the sugar until well-coated, place on the lined sheets, and use the bottom of a glass to press into cookies 1/4 inch thick. Sprinkle the tops with additional sugar.

Bake the cookies until firm and turning golden around the edges, approximately 12-15 minutes. Cool on the sheets briefly, then move to a rack to finish cooling. Store in airtight containers to maintain crispness.

Notes:

You could leave out either the lemon or the rosemary or both if they’re not to your liking. Lime or orange zest, or a combination of the two, would be quite nice. Crushed anise seeds would also be good.

If you don’t have semolina on hand, you could substitute quick-cooking polenta, as in the original recipe, or finely ground cornmeal.

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Fruity Oaty Bars

So yeah, summer happened.

Between my baby brother’s wedding, numerous trips, out-of-town visitors, weeks of ungodly and unrelenting heat, and general life, I blinked and it was September. It was an unusually busy summer, topped only by last year’s, with the graduation and internship and job hunt and cross-country move AGAIN, but even in an average year I seem to be prone to blogging lulls during these months. Not sure why, really. Maybe the sunshine scrambles my brain.

Anyway, to make up for the lapse, here are the best oatmeal bar cookies ever. No, really. Really and truly. I know I’ve made rhubarb and oat cookies before, but as good as those were, these are a mile beyond that, and I have about a dozen testimonials to back that claim up.

The underlying cookie recipe is from my second-favorite bakery in Seattle. There’s no shame in second-favorite status either, because as good as Macrina is, there’s no way it could hope to compete with the bakery of a pastry chef who won the Coupe du Monde de Boulangerie. If you’ve never considered that the words “croissant” and “orgasmic” could belong together, you’ve either never been to Paris or never been to Bakery Nouveau. Seriously, this place is so good that I’m actually a little glad I didn’t visit it until just weeks before we moved away, because there is no way my student budget could have sustained the number of trips I would have wanted to make there, and there would have been much heartbreak.

So my point is that the basic oat bar recipe is, if not Bakery Nouveau good, still really freaking good, because the Macrina people know what they’re doing. The bottom layer is a fantastically buttery and almondy shortbread, and the oat streusel on top is just generous and crumbly enough without being ridiculously chunky or going pasty. The watermelon-pink middle layer is all my doing, a tangy-perfumy blend of rhubarb and quince jam which — I realized when making it — ends up being almost tropical and rather reminiscent of guava.

If you happened to both have the foresight to freeze some rhubarb back when it was flooding the farmers markets and have a source for quince jam, you can make this recipe as-is. If one or both of those is not an option, don’t despair. This cookie can be made with any kind of good-quality jam, and it will still be well worth the effort.

Rhubarb-Quince Oat Bars
(Adapted from Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook)
Makes 24-32 bars

For the almond shortbread:
3 tablespoons ground almonds
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoons almond extract
3/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted

For the filling:
1/4 cup granulated sugar
4 cups (around 1 pound) rhubarb, in 1/2 inch slices
1 pinch salt
1 1/2 cups quince jam

For the streusel:
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rolled oats
1 pinch salt
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, in 1/4 inch pieces

Toast the ground almonds in a small nonstick pan until just starting to brown and give off a warm nutty aroma. Combine the toasted almonds with the sugar and flour in a large bowl. Stir the two extracts into the melted butter, then pour the mixture over the dry ingredients and mix to create a sandy dough.

Line a quarter sheet pan with foil or parchment paper, leaving enough overhang on all sides to be able to lift the finished bars out of the pan. With your fingertips, gently press the almond dough in an even layer covering the bottom and halfway up the sides of the pan. Chill for half an hour while preparing the filling.

In a medium saucepan, combine the rhubarb, sugar, and salt. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, then lower heat and cook until the rhubarb is soft and falling apart, 10 minutes or so. Remove from the heat and stir in the quince jam.

Preheat the oven to 325. Remove the bottom layer from the fridge, top with a sheet of parchment paper, weigh it down with pie weights or dried beans to prevent puffing, and bake until light gold all over and slightly brown at the edges. Remove the top layer of parchment and the weights, and let cool a bit on a wire rack.

In another bowl, mix together the brown sugar, flour, oats and salt. Using a pastry cutter or your fingers, work in the butter until a crumbly mixture forms. Spread the filling over the almond layer, then sprinkle the oat streusel over the top, completely covering the filling.

Bake the bars on the middle rack for 35 minutes or until the top is a dark golden brown and some of the filling is bubbling around the edges. Cool completely, then use the foil or parchment lining to lift the slab onto a flat surface. Using a large knife or a pizza cutter, slice into thin bars.

Notes:

Since they’re quite rich, I like to make eight vertical slices and four horizontal ones, for a total of 32 bars, but you can be more generous if you like.  If either amount ends up being too much for your needs, leftover bars freeze very well, wrapped tightly in plastic and foil or tucked into a freezer-safe bag.

If you want to make your life a little easier, albeit less interesting, just spread the almond layer with 2-3 cups of your favorite jam, perked up with the juice of half a lemon.

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Equal Parts Nostalgia and Obsession

In case anyone was curious about the delay since the last post, it wasn’t due to a crazy gazpacho-fueled lost-weekend bender. The unfortunately long gap is thanks to issues with the digital camera, which have now been resolved, so I should be back on track. That said, I’m taking next week off for an out-of-town event, and Sunday baking will be on hold until the following weekend.

But I’m here now, so let’s explain this violently red-and-white concoction, shall we?

I’ve mentioned before that I cannot pass up sour cherries when they show up for approximately three nanoseconds this time of year, no matter how insane the price. You don’t even want to know how loudly I squealed “Cherries!” when I saw one solitary quart at the mid-week farmers market, nor how much I paid for said quart, nor the elaborate protective structure I rigged up to get it home on the commuter train without squishing a single priceless cherry. Suffice it to say I put it in enough effort to give me every incentive to come up with a really special application for them.

I originally thought about making a pie, but since it’s also a bazillion degrees of late (see previous gazpacho post), I really didn’t want to use the oven if I didn’t have to. Then I opened the fridge and saw I had an open half-gallon of milk to use up and a good amount of basmati rice left over from dinner earlier in the week, and remembered that I’ve been meaning for a while to do a simple rice pudding in tribute to my grandmother. From there it was a short mental leap to the idea of layering the pudding in glasses with a sour cherry compote.

I’m fairly sure I’ve noted that Grandma was not a baker and she only had a handful of recipes in her repertoire. That’s not to say she didn’t have a sweet tooth. She loved desserts, and was the biggest ice cream fiend you’ve ever seen. Coming from a city with a bakery on practically every corner, though, she was used to buying desserts instead of making them, so the only ones I ever remember her making during her annual visits were fruit salads in the summer, and rice pudding in the winter. She never got sick of either, nor did I.

Grandma did not use leftover rice for her pudding, but that was probably only because she didn’t make a big batch of rice at least once a week the way we do. Anyway, what made her rice pudding hers wasn’t the rice, but the generous splash of heavy cream that got stirred in after the rice and milk and sugar had reduced down. Grandma was a huge fan of butterfat way before it got trendy, and saw absolutely nothing wrong with gilding the lily. The half-cup I use here is in fact a dialing-down of her approach, which would have been to pour in the whole pint container’s worth. You can leave out the cream in the recipe below if you like, and you’d still have a perfectly servicable pudding, but it wouldn’t be Grandma’s.

Grandma never served her rice pudding with a fruit compote that I can recall, but she did love cherries, especially cherries mixed with booze, so I think she’d approve of this addition too. If she’d made this, she probably would have given us grandkids the job of pitting the cherries. I’m not going to sugar-coat the fact that it’s a pain in the ass to pit all these cherries, and splatter is inevitable so your counter and whatever top you’re wearing are going to end up looking like a crime scene. I think it’s worth it, though, especially if you can pull up a favorite relative and have a nice chat while you’re making the mess.

Even without the cherries, this rice pudding is a fantastic blank canvas for experimenting with flavors. You can use coconut milk and tangerine peel for a more Asian twist or a cinnamon stick and a bit of brown sugar for a more Mexican feel. You can serve it with anything from ripe mangoes to stewed apples, and you can even sprinkle with sugar and pull out the torch for a crispy bruleed-sugar top.

One of my favorite things to do is flavor with orange zest and stir in some softly-whipped meringue after it cools to room temperature, which sounds bizarre but gives you a cloud-light, glamorous dessert that’s about ten steps above ordinary pudding.  The only thing I personally don’t hold with at all is raisins, but if that’s your thing, you do what you have to do.

Rice Pudding with Sour Cherry Compote
(Compote adapted from Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook)
Serves 4-6

For the rice pudding:
4 cups cooked rice
6 cups milk
2/3 cup granulated sugar
Half a vanilla bean, split
1/2 cup heavy cream

For the sour cherry compote:
1 quart sour cherries, pitted
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup amaretto

In a large saucepan, combine the rice, milk, sugar and vanilla bean and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer uncovered until the milk has reduced and thickened and the rice has softened to your liking, approximately half an hour. Remove from the heat, pull out the vanilla bean, and stir in the cream. Let cool while preparing the compote.

Place the cherries, sugar and amaretto in a medium pan. Cook over medium heat until the cherries have softened and released their juice, 5 minutes or so. Continue cooking until the liquid is syrupy, 5-10 more minutes. Cool to room temperature.

To serve, layer the rice pudding and cherry compote in alternating layers in small glasses. If desired, whip additional cream and offer it on the side.

Notes:

How tender the rice pudding is will depend on which rice you use. Basmati rice is never going to get completely soft, while a medium-grain rice will break down much more and go really creamy. You can also use cracked rice for an even softer texture. My favorite rice for pudding is probably jasmine, which splits the difference and also adds a little bit of fragrance, but use whatever you have and like.

Temperature also makes a difference. If you serve the pudding straight from the fridge, the starches in the rice will have seized up from the cold and made the grains harder, so I think it’s best to reheat to at least room temperature before serving.

If you don’t want to use amaretto in the cherries, you can just use the same amount of water instead. Cherries do really like almonds, though, and I think that tiny hint of nuttiness really adds something to the end product. Either way, don’t discard any of the liquid left over after you’ve scooped the cherries onto the pudding.  This screaming red, intensely cherry syrup makes a fabulous soda when mixed with a fizzy water, and you can also use it to cherry-ize your cola.

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Seeing Red

So one of my coworkers requested I make red velvet cupcakes for my regular Monday-morning office treat, which posed a bit of a dilemma. While I’m not a food nazi, I do try to avoid the patently unnatural, and red velvet cake is defined by the glowing red produced by huge quantities of artificial food coloring.

What to do: compromise my principles, or settle for less-incendiary red from some more natural source?

As much as I like to please my coworkers, the idea of pouring two bottles of blood-red fluid straight from some Frankenfood plant on the New Jersey turnpike weirded me out too much, so I decided to go the natural route. Since research pointed to beets as an accepted coloring agent in the early history of the red velvet cake, and beets are one of my favorite vegetables, that’s what I chose to experiment with.

My first attempt used a Cook’s Country recipe, since despite my continuing annoyance with Kimball for the polenta fiasco, a lot of bloggers had used it with good results. While I agreed that the taste and texture were good, the pretty magenta color of the batter baked out to an extremely generic tan. I got no complaints when I passed them off as Brown Suede cupcakes, but I still wanted to make genuinely red red velvet without resorting to food coloring.

A little more research turned up the cause of the color change and a potential solution. Rose Levy Berenbaum’s most recent cake book has a recipe for red velvet cake, which uses artificial color but includes a note about baking soda neutralizing the natural pigments in beet juice. Her batter, in contrast, is highly acidic, which should preserve the color.

And it did! Although there was a little fading from bright raspberry to dusky pink in the oven, the resulting cupcakes were definitely in the red end of the spectrum. Because it’s an egg-white-only chiffon batter, it was considerably drier than the conventional Cook’s Country one, but a thick coating of cream cheese frosting mostly took care of it.

I won’t call these the best cupcakes I’ve ever posted here, but they’re perfectly respectable and they are a legitimately non-toxic red. And no, they really don’t taste like beet, I swear. They taste mildly of cocoa and of the cream cheese frosting, which, besides the inflammatory color, is what I understand the whole point of red velvet to be.

Non-Radioactive Red Velvet Cupcakes
(Adapted from Rose Red Velvet Cake in Rose Levy Berenbaum’s Rose’s Heavenly Cakes)
Makes 24 cupcakes

For the cake:

1 large beet, peeled
3 large egg whites, at room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups minus 2 tablespoons cake flour
1 cup granulated sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons natural cocoa powder, sifted
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup grapeseed or canola oil
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup buttermilk

For the frosting:

8 ounces cream cheese, softened
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 tablespoon creme fraiche or sour cream
Pinch of salt
1 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Set the rack to the lower-third position and preheat the oven to 350 F. Line two muffin tins with paper liners.

Run the beet through a juicer. Skim off any foam, and measure out 2 tablespoons of the juice. Whisk the beet juice and vanilla into the egg whites just until the color is evenly distributed.

Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, cocoa and salt in a medium bowl.

Mix the oil and butter together in a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment for 1 minute on medium speed. Add the flour and buttermilk, and mix on low until the dry ingredients are moistened, then increase the speed to medium and beat 1 1/2 minutes longer. Scrape down the bowl and add the egg mixture in two parts, beating 30 seconds on medium speed after each addition.

Using an ice cream scoop, evenly divide the batter among the cups. Bake for 16-18 minutes, until the tops spring back when pressed lightly. Cool for a few minutes in the tins, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

While the cupcakes are cooling, combine the cream cheese, butter, creme fraiche and salt in a food processor and pulse until smooth. Add the sugar and vanilla and keep pulsing until evenly incorporated. Spread the cupcakes with this frosting once they’ve cooled.

Notes:

If you’re less gunshy about fake food coloring than I am, you can replace the beet juice with the same amount of liquid red food color to get a really bright red cake, but if you’re going to do that, I’d go with the moister, richer Cook’s Country version.

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Short and Sweet

In contrast to my big long rant about Cook’s Illustrated and crimes against polenta, this is going to be quick and painless, just like these cookies.

These little morsels, named for their crackly tops, are soft, fudgy, and deeply chocolatey, like individual brownies but much more sophisticated. They take almost no time to put together and can probably be made purely from the contents of your pantry right now, which makes them perfect for last-minute guests or quieting those day-before-grocery-run cookie cravings. If you need any more enabling, let me observe that summer is just around the corner, and these would make smashing ice cream sandwiches for your Memorial Day barbecue.

Chocolate Crackle Cookies
(Adapted from Chocolate Wonders in Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook)
Makes 4 dozen cookies

8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 large eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons brandy

Place the chocolate and butter in a 4-cup liquid measuring cup and microwave on half power, checking and stirring every thirty seconds, until both have melted. Set aside to cool to just above room temperature.

Whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

In a large bowl, whisk the eggs and sugar together energetically until pale and frothy. Stir in the chocolate mixture, then the brandy.  Add the flour mixture, stirring until just combined. Cover and chill the dough 20-30 minutes to firm it up a bit.

Preheat the oven to 325 and line several baking sheets with parchment.

Using a small scoop, drop the dough onto the pans and bake until cracked and set, 12-14 minutes. Cool on the sheet until warm and firm enough to hold together when moved. Remove them to cooling racks, and cool completely.

Notes:

You don’t have to make them from super-schmancy Scharffen Berger 72% like I did, but as with anything this simple, the better the ingredients, the better the result, so try to use a good, really dark chocolate.

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The Harbinger of Spring

After pie, the dessert His Lordship most often requests is pavlova. And, because I adore meringue in all its forms, from cookie to pie topping, the only time I say no is when the weather is so rainy or humid that working with egg whites is a recipe for failure.

Since yesterday was gorgeously sunny and mild, I readily agreed when he made the request yesterday during the weekly grocery run. My agreement was bolstered by the fact that we were in the produce section and I had spotted rhubarb, which finally convinced me that this ungodly winter is finally behind us. As we’ve established, I love all kinds of tart red fruit, but I have a special soft spot for rhubarb (technically not a fruit, but if it quacks like a duck…) because, like asparagus, it’s the earliest spring produce, bringing with it promises of berries, tomatoes, corn and peaches to come.

If you’ve never had one before, I suppose you could describe pavlova as the ultimate meringue. Unlike the cookie, pavlovas are not crisp all the way through, just on the outside. Underneath a thin, crackly exterior, the inside stays melting and soft, like a flourless angel food cake or the most delicate marshmallow. This already-lovely meringue base is then topped with whipped cream and whichever fresh fruit you fancy. It’s usually made as one giant cake-like disk that is served in wedges, but unless I’m making it for a big crowd of dinner guests, I prefer to make individual-sized ones.

These mini-pavlovas were topped with a compote of rhubarb stewed with a bit of orange peel and spiked with Triple Sec, then mixed with uncooked blackberries and strawberries. The berries were obviously not local, but after all those months of cold and snow and misery, I just really needed them. If you’re more virtuous than I am, you can just hang on to this recipe until they start coming up where you are.

Rhubarb-Berry Pavlovas
(Adapted from Mini-Pavlovas in Nigella Lawson’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess and Stewed Rhubarb in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone)
Makes 9 individual-sized pavlovas

For the meringues:

4 large egg whites
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon white wine or cider vinegar

For the fruit:

3/4 pound rhubarb, sliced in 1-inch pieces
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon dried orange peel or zest of one fresh orange
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons Triple Sec or other orange liqueur
1 pint each strawberries and blackberries

For the cream:

1 pint heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 F and line a baking sheet with parchment.

In a scrupulously clean mixer bowl and with an equally spotless whisk attachment, beat the egg whites and the pinch of salt until firm, but not stiff, peaks form. Continue beating, gradually adding the sugar by the spoonful, until you achieve a satiny meringue. Gently fold in the cornstarch, vanilla and vinegar until just combined.

Using an ice cream scoop or two large spoons, drop the meringue into nine equal mounds on the sheet. Use a spoon to smooth the mounds into round, flat-topped disks around four inches in diameter.

Put the meringues in the oven and immediately lower the heat to 300 F. Bake for 30 minutes, until they’re crisping on the outside but otherwise still pale and marshmallowy. Turn the oven off and leave them for another 30 minutes, then remove to a wire rack to cool.

While the meringues are baking and cooling, combine the rhubarb, 1/3 cup sugar, orange peel and water in a medium saucepan and simmer until the rhubarb is tender but still intact, approximately 10 minutes. When the rhubarb has cooled to room temperature, hull and quarter the strawberries and stir into the rhubarb with the Triple Sec and blackberries.

In a mixer or by hand with a whisk, beat the cream with the sugar until softly whipped.

To assemble the pavlovas, flip a meringue belly-up onto a plate, and dollop with the cream.  Top with the rhubarb compote and berries.  Serve immediately.

Notes:

Since pavlovas are so popular around here, I generally make enough of these mini ones to eat over the course of two or three days. Once baked, the meringues will keep quite well in an airtight container for that long, and if they do get soft, you can crisp them back up for about 30 minutes in an oven preheated to 300 F and then turned off.

If that’s still too much meringuey goodness for your needs, the recipe can easily be halved to make 4-5 individual pavlovas.

The color on my meringues is a sign that I am long overdue for getting a new oven thermometer. Like meringue cookies, pavlovas should really be snowy white, in homage to the tulle costumes of ballerina Anna Pavlova, for whom the dessert was invented. My oven is having issues in the mid range, because I’m finding it a little too slow from 350 and up, and now it’s clearly too high from 325 down. The browning doesn’t affect the taste, but it does throw the aesthetics off, at least until you pile the cream over it.

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Similar, but not the Same

This Sunday baking entry is not exactly unexplored territory, since I’ve already used the same base to make a mocha-flavored cookie — appropriately enough during the last round of being stuck indoors thanks to my winter curse.

Still, I wanted to share it given that my current crop of co-workers dubbed these “the best you’ve made yet”, and because, while the basic inspiration might be the same, they’re actually quite different. The other one is more snappy, with a very strong mocha flavor, while this one is a proper crumbly shortbread, dominated by butter and just kissed with coffee and chocolate. It’s an interesting example of how you can manipulate the underlying mechanics to get distinct, but equally good, results.

These cookies are also a good lesson on how one ingredient can make a huge difference in the outcome. I had my usual rush of impulsiveness during our last visit to the Asian market, and among the items I picked up was a box of rice flour.

Being gluten-free, rice flour gives baked goods a velvet tenderness that you could never get otherwise, no matter how gently you treat the dough and how carefully you avoid over-mixing.

While leaving the shortbread plain lets you focus like a laser beam on the perfection of its texture, I couldn’t resist adding a chopped-up Scharffen Berger Mocha bar, picked up during my annual crazed shopping spree at the San Francisco Ferry Terminal market. The slightly bitter edge of the coffee, coupled with the buttery plushness of the shortbread, makes for a very not-for-kids cookie.

If you don’t have easy access to the full Scharffen Berger line (as I stupidly don’t, despite being in driving distance of the corporate candy overlords that bought them out) you could use any kind of good-quality dark chocolate bar, flavored or not. I suspect an orange-flavored one would work particularly well.

Mocha Chip Shortbread
(Adapted from Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies in Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook)
Makes 48 1 x 2 inch fingers

1 cup (2 sticks) cold top-quality unsalted butter
1/3 cup packed light brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons rice flour
1 3-ounce Scharffen Berger mocha bar, chopped

Line a quarter sheet pan with aluminum foil.

Dice the butter into the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add the brown and granulated sugars and the salt, and beat on medium until light and fluffy. Beat in the vanilla.

Whisk together the flours and add to the creamed butter. Mix on medium-low speed just until combined, then stir in the chocolate bits.

Turn the dough out onto the foil-lined pan, and cover with a second piece of foil. Press down on the foil with your palms and fingertips to squish the dough into an even layer. (If you have a second sheet pan, you can place it over the foil and use it to get a really uniform result.) Using two forks or, better yet, a chipper, thoroughly dock the dough at even intervals.

Remove the top layer of foil and place the pan in the freezer while the oven is preheating to 325 F.

Bake until the edges are turning golden and the center looks firm, approximately 30-35 minutes. Cool the pan for 5 minutes, then carefully use the edges of the foil to lift out the shortbread. Using a serrated knife, slice the shortbread into 48 fingers 2 inches long and 1 inch wide. Set the cookies on a rack to cool completely.

The cookies will keep for weeks in an airtight container, although they’re best within a day or two of baking.

Notes:

As with all shortbread, the quality of the butter is key because there is so little to compete with it. Buy the freshest, highest-quality you can.

If you can’t find rice flour, substitute an equal amount of cornstarch, which will give a slightly different but still wonderfully delicate result. You could also just use all-purpose flour, but you’ll end up with a less satiny texture.

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There is Never Room for JELL-O

Pace Bill Cosby, there is no excuse for using a boxed mix to make chocolate pudding. No, there isn’t. Seriously.

I don’t care how frazzled and spaced-out you are. The homemade stuff takes almost no time or coherent thought and can be made even when your pantry is next to bare. I made this in twenty minutes at 10:00 at night because the overpriced Marjolaine cake I bought from a patisserie in our most yuppified neighborhood was an utter disappointment. The layers were as dense as polyurethane foam, the ganache was spackle-esque, the mousse was gummy, and the whole thing had such a terminal flavor deficit that I actually left half of it in the beribboned box. Disgruntled and still needing chocolate, I whipped up this pudding and staved off a theobromine-deprived tantrum.

The beauty of this pudding recipe is that it’s versatile on top of being stupidly easy. You can create flavor variations with spices, extracts, or liqueurs. You can play around with the dairy component, using soy or rice milk to make it vegan, or coconut milk for a tropical undertone. You can use every gradient of chocolate, from milk to ultra-super-mega-dark, according to your preference.

Although you must use the good stuff.

You can leave it after-school plain or go elegant by folding it into whipped cream for an instant mousse. You can challenge your guests with chiles or flirt with twee by adding coffee or black tea and spooning it into demitasse cups with a spoon-shaped cookie on the side.

For those who would protest that they need the mix to make Great-Aunt Rosalie’s Chocolate Fluff Pie or whatever, I still say no. You should use this and a pint of whipped real cream instead of a box full of powdered wrong and a tub of hydrogenated trans-fats. Trust me, your taste buds, your arteries, and even Rosalie’s spirit will thank you.

If this is still just too much work for you, you might as well buy the premade stuff that comes in tubs, allegedly from a “shack” of some kind, because you’ve already abandoned all standards and let yourself go. I’m just saying.

No Excuses Chocolate Pudding
(Adapted from Bionic Chocolate Pudding in Didi Emmon’s Entertaining for a Vegetarian Planet)
Serves 4

1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-processed
1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
Pinch of sea salt
1 1/2 cups milk, preferably whole but lowfat will work fine
2 ounces high-quality bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
2 teaspoons Amaretto or 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/3 cup heavy cream, whipped with 1 tablespoon sugar
3-4 amaretti cookies, crushed

Whisk together the sugar, cocoa powder, cornstarch and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in 1/4 cup of milk, continuing to whisk until smooth.

Bring the remainder of the milk to a simmer in a medium saucepan. Pour about a third of the hot milk into the cocoa, whisking briskly to distribute, then stir in the rest of the milk. Return the mixture to the pan and bring back up to a boil, stirring frequently. Continuing cooking for several more minutes, still stirring, until the pudding thickens.

Remove from the heat and add the chocolate and Amaretto or vanilla, stirring until the chocolate has melted. Pour the pudding into a shallow bowl or into individual glasses. Cover with plastic wrap, pushing the wrap down to the surface to prevent a skin from forming (unless you like that sort of thing), and refrigerate until cool.

When ready to serve, top with whipped cream and the crushed cookie dust.

Notes:

The cooling step is not absolutely mandatory. If it’s a chocolate emergency, you can let it sit in a shallow dish for about ten minutes, just to get it down to room temperature. You could also put it in the freezer, either just to cool it enough to eat or as a deliberate choice. Frozen chocolate pudding has the consistency of a fudgesicle, which is no bad thing, I can assure you.

Small edit to add a bit of advice for vegans: Since non-dairy milks can be a little more sensitive and prone to curdling at higher temperatures, you may want to be conservative and only bring the soy, almond, or rice milk just up to scalding, but not a boil, before adding it to the cocoa mixture.  Once you mix the milk with the cornstarch, the starch should stabilize it and you should be fine to proceed as directed.

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How I Spent the Snowpocalypse

Thanks to the copious and rapid descent of white stuff from the sky, I, along with much of the Mid-Atlantic region, was the beneficiary of an unexpected weekend in the middle of the week. I did mention before that there is an unhappy coincidental tendency for there to be the worst winter in decades shortly after I move somewhere, didn’t I? Yeah, sorry about that, population of the greater East Coast. No promises, but it’s usually a one-shot and the curse lifts the following year.

So anyway, what did I do with my snow days, you ask? Well, like a good little bee, I actually did some work that could be done from home, and which needed doing lest deadlines back up unpleasantly when I got back to the office. I also — I won’t lie — did plenty of slothing around on the couch, with my laptop, a warm blanket, and a huge cup of tea.

Since we have recently killed off the cable TV, thanks to the largely craptacular state of programming nowadays and with the cheering encouragement of a certain family member, I have been catching up on a lot of older material via Netflix, Hulu and DVDs, and getting re-acquainted with some old favorites. High up on that list is a tragic casualty of the writer’s strike and the generally out-of-step-with-mine tastes of the American viewing public, a delightful little confection called Pushing Daisies, which, if you aren’t familiar with it, you must go out and rent right now. It had everything I love: whimsy, intelligence, cute dogs, fantastic art design, random musical numbers, a soupcon of darkness, a whole lot of snark, and, last but decidedly not least, yummy-looking desserts.

The lead character being the owner of a shop irreverently named The Pie Hole, there was a whole lot of pie on the show. When I watched it the first go-around, I was too busy and harried to indulge the pie cravings it always engendered. It’s a different story on re-watching, since my acquisition of the entire series on DVD has coincided with a lot of stuck-indoors time. There was one particular pie that I had most wanted to try re-creating, and it occurred to me as I was lounging around, watching snow fall faster and faster, that I had everything I needed to finally try it, including the time. So I got off the couch and did it, and I had a lot of fun in the process.

The facts were these: a pear pie, with Gruyere cheese baked into the crust. As I love both pears and cheese, this sounded like nothing but win. Fortuitously, I had a bit of Gruyere left from my last visit to my delightfully surly favorite cheese monger, who gives major discounts on a rotating variety of cheeses if you buy more than a pound at a time. I had also recently tried out a recipe from Rick Bayless for freeform tarts, which had just the kind of sturdy dough that would stand up to this kind of wild experimentation. The only compromise I had to make was mixing apples in with the pears, because I didn’t have quite enough to keep it pure.

Are the results refined and elegant? Heck no. Just take a good look:

They are rustic to the extreme, the way they spread and flatten and get speckled with gold from the toasted cheese. Absolutely no beauty contests are going to be won by these tarts. However, and much more importantly, they are both tasty and intriguing, with juicy, lightly spiced fruit surrounded by a crumbly, melting, rich dough that would, with a bit more salt and a much heftier hand with the Gruyere, make a really good cheese straw.

These tarts are basically a re-engineered cheese and fruit course, which makes them ideal for those who only grudgingly accept dessert. There is no sugar in the crust, and very little sweetener in the filling. While the baking tarts filled the house with the scent of fondue, they’re not aggressively cheesy in flavor, especially after they’ve cooled to room temperature, at which point they just hint at cheese.

I think it would be very interesting to play some more with this idea — maybe rosemary and parmesan with just apple or cheddar with cranberries. I might even get really daring with the chemistry and see what goat cheese or brie would do in place of the cream cheese, maybe with sour cherries.

First, though, I intend to test out this idea of individual “cup pies” made in muffin tins, with honey baked into the crust. Yum!

Pear and Apple Tarts with Gruyere Crust
(Extremely loosely adapted from Rustic Cajeta Apple Tarts in Rick Bayless’s Mexico: One Plate at a Time)
Makes 6 tarts

For the pastry:

1 1/3 cups (6 ounces) all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 1/2 ounces cream cheese
1 1/2 ounces Gruyere, grated
1 1/2 teaspoons cider vinegar
2 tablespoons ice water

For the filling:

3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 Honeycrisp or other crisp-tangy apples
3 ripe but still firm Comice or Anjou pears
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
Juice of half a lemon

Cut the butter and cream cheese into small cubes and place in the freezer for 15 minutes.

Combine the flour, baking powder and salt for the pastry in a food processor and pulse several times to mix. Add the very cold butter, cream cheese and Gruyere and pulse a few more times, until no pieces of butter larger than a pea remain. Sprinkle the vinegar and ice water over the mixture and pulse briefly until the dough just starts to come together in moist-looking large crumbs that hold together when pressed between your fingers. Tilt the dough out onto a large piece of plastic wrap or a quart-sized zip top bag, seal tightly, and refrigerate at least 1 hour.

Peel and core the apples and pears, and slice into sixteen wedges each. Melt the 3 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat and add the apple wedges. Cook, stirring frequently, until all the apples are browning at the edges. Add the pears, maple syrup and cinnamon and continue cooking until the fruit are tender but still holding together. Turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice. Cool the filling to room temperature.

Once the dough has chilled and the filling has cooled, divide the pastry into six equal pieces and squish each section into a ball. On a floured work surface, roll out each ball to a rough circle around the six inches in diameter.

Set the first circle of pastry onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Pile one sixth of the fruit in the center of the circle, leaving behind the juice. Make sure at least an inch of dough is left clear around the fruit. Fold the pastry over the filling, pleating as you go, and leaving some fruit exposed in the middle. Repeat the process for the remaining circles, leaving 2 inches of space between each tart. Put the sheet into the freezer for 15-20 minutes, while the oven is heating.

Heat the oven to 400 F.

Bake the tarts, straight from the freezer, 25-30 minutes, until golden brown. Serve warm or just at room temperature.

Notes:

Although they’ll keep for about a day, I think these are best when recently made. If they’ve been sitting overnight, try reheating them in the oven to crisp the dough back up.

I think the dough is just a tiny bit too rich, so next time, I’ll cut back the butter in the pastry by four tablespoons and up the Gruyere to three ounces, plus extra for sprinkling on top, as they did on the show. This time, I was necessarily limited to the 1 1/2 ounces I had left after we made a frittata for breakfast, and obviously I wasn’t able to pop out and buy more!

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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.

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