My loss, your gain

I’ve been dithering for years about entering the Scharffen Berger annual chocolate adventure contest, never quite pulling the trigger until finally, this winter, I got myself together enough to do some testing and submit something.  I have to admit I didn’t love this year’s theme of sandwich cookies, but I went for it anyway, never really expecting I had a chance.  And, of course, I didn’t, because I didn’t even get an honorable mention.

But my loss, as the title says, is your gain, because I already have the pictures taken and the recipe written up, and since Scharffen Berger has no further claim on it, you all can have it instead.  The point of the contest, besides using their chocolate, is to incorporate at least one “adventure ingredient”, which this year included coconut milk or coconut cream, sweet potato, tapioca or tapioca flour, tequila, banana, chili pepper, pine nuts, corn meal, Sumatra coffee, fresh ginger, yerba mate tea, and cacao nibs.

I ended up using coffee and coconut milk in a sandwich of coffee-flavored shortbread rounds, rolled in coconut and pressed around a coconut milk and milk chocolate ganache spiked with coconut rum.  They’re good, but apparently not good enough. Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Coconut Mocha Buttons
Makes approximately 3 dozen cookies

For coffee shortbread:

2 tablespoons coffee liqueur
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons finely ground Sumatra coffee
1 tablespoon instant coffee
8 ounces (16 tablespoons) cold, unsalted European-style butter, cut into tablespoon-sized cubes
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
6 tablespoons cornstarch
Unsweetened, finely shredded coconut for rolling

For coconut milk chocolate ganache:

8 ounces Scharffen Berger Extra Rich Milk Chocolate, finely chopped
4 ounces (1/2 cup) coconut milk (not low-fat)
1 tablespoon unsalted European-style butter
1/8 teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons coconut rum

Combine the coffee liqueur, vanilla extract, Sumatra coffee and instant coffee in a small bowl.  Allow to sit for 5 minutes.

In a food processor, blend the butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and salt until a fluffy paste forms.  Scrape down the bowl and add the coffee mixture, processing again until fully incorporated.  Whisk the flour and cornstarch together in a medium bowl and add to the creamed butter, pulsing just until a ball of dough begins to form around the blade.

Divide the dough in half and shape the first half into a roll 1 1/2 to 2 inches in diameter on a sheet of parchment paper.  Sprinkle several tablespoons of coconut along the edge of the cookie dough and roll it through the coconut until fully coated.  Tightly wrap the roll in the parchment paper, repeat the process with the second half of the dough, and chill the wrapped rolls until very firm, 2 hours to overnight.  (The dough can also be further wrapped in plastic or a zip-top freezer bag and frozen up to a month.)

While the dough is resting, prepare and chill the ganache filling.  Place the chopped chocolate in a medium mixing bowl.  Combine the coconut milk, butter and salt in a liquid measuring cup and microwave just until simmering.  Pour the hot coconut milk over the chocolate and whisk until the chocolate is fully melted and the ganache is glossy, then whisk in the coconut rum.  Allow to cool to room temperature, then cover and refrigerate until ready to assemble the cookies.

Preheat oven to 325 F and line several baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone baking mats.  Remove one roll from the refrigerator and, using a sharp knife, slice off rounds 1/8 inch thick, rotating the roll a quarter turn between slices to preserve its round shape.  Place cookies 2 inches apart on the baking sheets and bake until the coconut is golden and the bottoms of the cookies are just beginning to darken, 12-15 minutes.  Remove cookies to a wire rack to cool completely, and repeat with the second roll.

When the cookies have cooled and the ganache has firmed up, place 2 teaspoons of ganache on the bottom of one cookie and place a second cookie right-side up over the filling, gently pressing down just until the filling reaches the edges.  Repeat with remaining cookies.  If not serving immediately, store cookies in refrigerator for up to a week.  Leftover unfilled shortbread keeps very well in an airtight container at room temperature for several weeks.

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Resolved

Don’t worry, lentil fans. This year’s recipe will be along shortly, but in the meantime I wanted to put up this recipe, since I had it ready to go.

In keeping with my custom of not sabotaging my coworker’s New Year’s resolutions no matter how fervently I personally reject the practice, my Sunday baking in January always focuses on whole grains, less sugar, and lower fat than the other 10 months of the year. (I repeat the process in May in case of pre-summer beach dieting.). These digestive biscuits are my first such offering for 2013, but they’re also one of my favorites year-round, thanks to their lovely crunchy-crumbly texture and not-too-sweet full-bodied wheatiness, to say nothing of how hard they ping my lifelong Anglophilia.

In addition to being perfect both for healthier eating plans and Doctor Who marathons, these are wonderfully low-effort, since the dough comes together beautifully in the food processor and is so easy to work with that the rolling and cutting process is quick and painless. If you want to be a bit more indulgent, you have the option of spreading them with a very thin coating of melted chocolate, but they’re pretty addictive plain with a cup of tea. Since they’re technically a cookie but really fall somewhere between a cookie and a whole wheat cracker, they also work quite well on a cheese plate, if you want to be a bit more sophisticated.

Digestive Biscuits
(Adapted from King Arthur Flour, The Baking Sheet Newsletter, Dec 1991)
Makes 4-5 dozen cookies

½ cup old fashioned rolled oats
1 cup white whole wheat flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon sea salt
¾ cup confectioner’s sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature but not soft, in half-tablespoon-sized pieces
¼ cup low-fat milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4-6 ounces milk or semi-sweet chocolate, chopped and melted (optional)

In a food processor, grind the oats until fine but not completely powdered, leaving some small bits of oat. Add the flours, baking powder, salt and sugar, and pulse a few times to combine. Scatter the butter pieces over the dry ingredients and pulse again until the mixture resembles rough cornmeal, with no large bits of butter visible. Mix the milk and vanilla together and pour through the processor’s feed tube while pulsing again, continuing to process until a homogenous dough forms and starts clumping around the blade.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured silicone mat or piece of parchment and roll to a thickness of approximately 1/8 inch, but no less (thinner cookies will burn too easily). Chill the dough for about 10 minutes to firm it back up before cutting.

Preheat oven to 350F and line 2-3 baking sheets with parchment paper.

Cut the rolled dough with 1 ½ to 2 inch round cookie cutters, transferring the rounds to the lined sheets. Re-roll as many times as necessary to use up the dough, chilling the dough again between rollings if the cookies become too soft to pick up easily.

Prick the cookies well with a fork and bake until pale gold all over but not too dark around the edges, 15-20 minutes. Cool completely on racks. If desired, the bottom of the cooled cookies can be spread with a thin layer of melted chocolate and marked decoratively, then left until the chocolate sets back up.

Unfrosted biscuits keep very well in airtight containers for a couple of weeks, while chocolate-covered cookies should be eaten within a few days, before the chocolate blooms.

Notes:

There’s no reason you couldn’t make these vegan with the use of vegan margarine or vegetarian shortening and a non-dairy milk, although in that case you’ll probably need to chill longer and more often, since the dough will be quicker to soften too much.

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This Year’s Birthday Pie

I think, as of this year, I can safely say I’ve covered the whole universe of apple pie. I’ve done all manner of tarts, tatins, single-crust pies, and traditional double-crust pies, and now I can add fried pies, which was His Lordship’s birthday request this time around.

Because no fried apple pie recipe had every quality I was looking for, I mashed together and made further changes to this recipe for the pastry and Shirley Corriher’s recipe in Cookwise for an apple pie in which the filling, top and bottom crusts are all cooked separately and assembled at the last minute to keep the pastry from going soggy. I mixed the apples (Stayman, Cortland, York and Honeycrisp) for a nice balance of sweetness and tartness, and a blend of firm pieces and almost-melting ones. To further bump up the apple flavor, I used a blend of apple cider and Calvados in the filling.

The resulting pies are really good, blisteringly crisp outside and oozy-apple-y inside, although I’m not going to kid you; they’re a fair amount of work and not remotely speedy to prepare. Still, once a year, you might as well really do it up right, right?

Fried Apple Pies
Makes 7-8 individual pies

For the dough:

2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon sea salt
3 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, in ½ inch cubes
3 tablespoons very cold non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening, in lumps the same size as the butter
1 egg, lightly beaten
Ice water

For the filling:

5 medium apples, preferably a mix of pie varieties
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup apple cider
2 tablespoons Calvados
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 tablespoons granulated sugar
6 tablespoons light brown sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoon sea salt
2 tablespoons cornstarch dissolved in 3 tablespoons apple cider

Oil for frying
Confectioner’s sugar for dusting

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the butter and shortening and work with a pastry blender until the mixture resembles a coarse meal. Whisk the egg with ¼ cup of the ice water, sprinkle over the dry ingredients, and stir gently until fully incorporated. Add more water as necessary until the dough holds together, kneading a few times in the bowl to be sure. Divide the pastry in half, press into disks, and wrap tightly in plastic wrap or in zip-top bags. Chill at least one hour.

Peel the apples and divide into segments with an apple corer/slicer. Further chop each segment into ½ inch chunks.

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat and sauté the apples 2-3 minutes, stirring gently with a heatproof spatula. Add the ¼ cup cider, Calvados and vanilla and cook 1 minute longer before adding in the sugars, spices and salt. Simmer the apples until starting to become tender but not mushy, 5 or so minutes more. Add the cornstarch mixture and continue simmering until the juices have thickened. Cool the filling completely and refrigerate until ready to assemble the pies.

Roll a disk of the pastry on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of about a quarter inch. Cut six-inch circles from the dough, laying the circles in a single layer onto parchment-lined baking sheets. Refrigerate until firmed up again.

Place two heaping spoonfuls of the apple filling in the center of a pastry circle. Brush the edges with water, fold in half, and pinch to seal closed, pushing out any air as you go along. Place the filled pie back on the parchment-lined sheet and crimp the edges with a fork. Repeat with remaining circles. Chill again, until the pastry is cold and the pies are easily picked up.

Heat 2 inches of oil in a heavy, high-sided pot to 360 F. Fry two to three pies at a time, turning once, until well browned. Drain on a rack set over a baking sheet until cool enough to handle. Dust with confectioner’s sugar before serving.

Notes:

Don’t be tempted to skip the re-chilling steps with the pastry, because the non-hydrogenated shortening really needs to be kept as cold as possible or it will be too floppy to handle easily.

There will be both extra filling and dough scraps. You can re-roll the scraps for more pies, although the second batch will be tougher so I don’t bother. The leftover filling is a nice topping for waffles or pancakes, or can be served as a compote with yogurt.

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How To Never Burn Microwave Popcorn Again

It’s November, which means I’m doing the novel thing again, thus the seasonal blogging silence.  Things will pick back up again for the holidays, but for now I’m throwing out a very quick post about this year’s writing fuel, which is more a technique than a recipe.

Since the pre-fab microwave popcorn bags are overpriced, unnatural, and tend to burn as soon as you turn your back anyway, I’ve been making microwave popcorn basically using Alton Brown’s recipe forever. Unfortunately, while Alton’s recipe is definitely an improvement over the commercial stuff, the popcorn still has a nasty tendency to scorch if you don’t watch it like a hawk, and you also have to accept that at a quarter to a third is going to be unpopped waste.  Some indeterminate amount of time ago, I stumbled on an improvement that eliminates both the scorching and the waste problems.

The first part of the improvement is to use a very long, skinny paper bag, the kind that’s wrapped around your baguette or your wine bottle, rather than the standard brown paper lunch bag.  This type of bag works better for two reasons: first, because the narrower shape does a better job spreading out the kernels and funneling the popped away from the unpopped, reducing some of the scorching risk.  Second, because the fact that you can just fold over the top multiple times rather than having to staple it shut means you can keep re-opening the bag, removing the popped kernels, and putting the unpopped ones back for another round in the microwave.  This cyclical re-cooking process is the second part of the improvement.

Is the process fiddly?  Well, sure, because you’re going to be babysitting the microwave, stopping repeatedly to pour out and separate the contents, but this method also produces perfect popcorn in under ten minutes with no nose-punishing acrid fog that immediately permeates your whole house and lingers for hours.  And if you’re mentally blocked — say because your characters insist on sitting around having endless expository conversations rather than just doing something goddamnit — a nice mindless kitchen task with a snack as a reward might be just what you need!

Idiot-Proof Microwave Popcorn
Makes around 6 cups

¼ cup popcorn kernels
1 long, thin brown paper bag
Two large bowls for sorting
Popcorn garnishes of choice: melted butter, olive or flavored oil, salt, pepper, chili or curry powder, grated Parmesan, cinnamon sugar, etc.

Place the popcorn kernels into the bag and fold the top over three or so times to close.  Lay the bag flat in the microwave, folded edge facing down, and set the microwave for around 2 minutes on high, adding time as needed until regular popping noises start.  Continue adding time in 30-second increments until the popping audibly slows down, but don’t wait until it’s totally stopped or burning will be a foregone conclusion.

Unfold the bag top, pour the contents into the first bowl, and scoop the popped kernels off the top and into the second bowl.  Discard any semi-popped duds, and pour the completely unpopped kernels back into the bag, re-folding the top.

Repeat the process until all or nearly all of the kernels have been popped, or you have as much popcorn as you need.  Garnish as desired and serve.

Notes:

My current favorite popcorn flavoring is really good extra-virgin olive oil, a lot of cracked pepper, and finely grated Reggiano Parmigiano, but a close second is butter and sugar mixed with pumpkin pie spice for that holiday feel.

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The Last of the Hurricane Posts

This is the third and final post about how I cooked my way through the hurricane.  While it’s been good for my blogging productivity, let’s hope there are no more natural disaster-induced motivators, hmm?

Anyway, having survived Irene basically unscathed, I found myself with far more time than I expected the day after.  So I baked, but just because I had the time doesn’t mean I had the inclination to pull out all the baking stops and do something stupidly “Thank God, we’re alive!” manic like eclairs (though I did make eclairs during the blogging hiatus, because there is, in fact, a correct time and place for stupidly manic cooking).  I just wanted something comforting, low on the effort scale, and, since I didn’t know if commuter rail was going to be back up in time for me to go to work on Monday morning, capable of keeping an extra day if necessary.  What fit that particular bill excellently was gingerbread.

As we all know, my quest for ever more obnoxiously in-your-face gingery things is a lifelong one, and in that quest, I had tried the Classic Gingerbread Cake recipe in this January’s issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Apart from the bordering-on-foolhardy quantities of both fresh and powdered ginger, the recipe had two other things going for it: the clever use of stout to deepen the flavor, and the promise of eliminating the sunken and damp middle gingerbread is so often prone to. The recipe delivered on both intense gingery flavor and structural soundness, and was particularly well-received by the coworkers, who as we’ve established are surprisingly amenable to having their palates challenged via their weekly baked goods.

The one snag was that I had no stout on hand, and because I live in a state with patently absurd liquor laws and was not going to make a special trip to the beer distributor on the day after a hurricane to buy stout by the full case, I had to substitute what I did have: a nice hard cider.  To make up the required volume and add some more depth, I spiked it with some really spectacular rum we picked up on our now-annual summer jaunt to the Berkshires with His Lordship’s community orchestra. Despite the fact that the CI people said it wasn’t worth making the recipe with anything but stout, I noticed no dumbing down of the cake once baked.  The cider, rum and very dark blackstrap molasses I had in the pantry contributed more than enough low notes to support the double-ginger assault.  Honestly, I think it’s just as good with the substitution, and since we have not much use for stout while I adore hard cider, I’ll be going with this combination from now on.

For ease of distribution, as usual with Monday treats, I converted the recipe to cupcakes, which I spread with a cream cheese and lemon curd frosting. The frosting is seriously optional, and if it were up to His Lordship there would be no question about leaving it off, since he didn’t care for the additional sourness.  For those of you who are similarly less obsessed about citrus than I am, feel free to eat them plain or with a dab of salted butter for just the merest bit of decadence.

Gingerbread Cupcakes with Lemon Curd Frosting
(Adapted from Classic Gingerbread Cake, Cook’s Illustrated, January/February 2011)
Makes 30 cupcakes

For the gingerbread:
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 bottle (11.2 ounces) hard cider plus enough dark rum to make 1 ½ cups
1 teaspoon baking soda
⅔ cup blackstrap molasses
⅔ cup honey
1 ½ cups packed light brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs
⅔ cup canola oil
2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger

For the frosting (utterly optional):
4 ounces (half a block) of cream cheese, at room temperature
4 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
½ powdered sugar
2 pinches sea salt
Half a (10.5 ounce) jar of lemon curd, or more to taste

Whisk together flour, ginger, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and black pepper in a large bowl and set aside.

Bring the cider and rum to a boil in a small pan over medium heat.  In the meantime, set the oven rack to the middle position, preheat the oven to 350 F and line 2 ½ muffin trays with cupcake liners.

Pour the hot cider and rum into a medium bowl and stir in the baking soda, which will foam up aggressively, then stir in the molasses, honey, and sugars.  Once the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is a bit cooler, whisk in the eggs, oil and grated ginger.

Add the wet mixture into the dry ingredients a third at a time, whisking vigorously between additions until completely smooth before adding the next third.  (For once, you need not be afraid of over-mixing.)  The batter will be quite liquid after the final addition, so use a ladle to divide it evenly among the lined muffin cups.

Tap the filled muffin trays gently against the counter a couple of times to release any air bubbles, and bake 25-30 minutes, until the tops are firm to the touch and a tester comes out mostly clean.  Cool briefly in their tins before lifting out by the liners onto a wire rack and cooling completely.

While the cupcakes are cooling, beat the cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar and salt together in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until light.  Beat in the lemon curd and taste, adding more if you want a more pronounced lemon flavor.  Spread the frosting thinly over the cooled cupcakes.

Unfrosted cupcakes will keep for several days at room temperature in an airtight container.  Once frosted, they really should be refrigerated, though you should bring them back to room temperature before serving since the chill will blunt some of the spicy kick.

Notes:

I could have stretched the batter among three full muffin tins, yielding 36 cupcakes, but they would have been slightly smaller than I wanted.  If you prefer that many, start checking them at 20 minutes for doneness. If you want to make a large sheet cake instead, pour the batter into a 9×13 pan, greased and floured, and bake 35-45 minutes.  Cool completely in the pan before frosting and slicing.

The quantity of frosting here is just enough to thinly cover the full batch of cupcakes.  If you want to be much more generous or to pipe designs with it, double the quantities.

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I’m Still Here

I know it’s been forever, and I will detail some of the reasons why at the end of this post.  Those reasons having come to a satisfactory conclusion about a month ago, I’d basically been dithering about for a few weeks, looking for the right theme and recipe for finally breaking the silence, and then the East Coast experienced an epically ridiculous confluence of events (an earthquake AND a hurricane in the same week?  Seriously, Universe? Seriously?) that presented me with the perfect solution.

I mean, once all the flashlight batteries have been replaced, the patio furniture has been brought inside, and the hatches have been battened as far down as they’re going to go, there’s really only one thing you can do, right?

Make jam.

Now, stay with me here: Jam is shelf-stable, so it doesn’t matter if the power goes out.  It uses up fruit that would just speed up its sitting-around-getting-squishy process without refrigeration. It goes excellently with all the classic natural disaster foods: ice cream that needs to be consumed immediately, peanut butter sandwiches eaten by candlelight, and, of course, French toast the next morning.  Not to mention, it keeps your mind off the impending doom, and gives you the sense that at least one thing is under your control despite the increasingly hysterical news coverage.

See?  It makes total sense.

Since plums were the fruit preparing to give up the ghost in my crisper, that’s the kind of jam I made.  Plums are an excellent jam candidate, since the skins are often too acidic and leathery while the interior flesh can be squishy in texture and unexciting in flavor.  Cook them down with a few spices, though, and they make really stunning amethyst-colored jam the likes of which you can’t find in a store for less than $8 a jar, so you shouldn’t actually need meteorological insanity to nudge you to try this recipe.

I also made a huge pot of black bean soup to pass the time waiting for the basement to flood, and I will write that up next. As for what’s been occupying me for the past six months and kept me off the blogosphere until Irene gave me the kick in the pants….

Well, just after the holidays I taught my first seminar, which was an amazingly rewarding experience but also one of the most intellectually and physically tiring things I’ve ever done.  NaNoWriMo is a walk in the park compared to that, let me tell you.  I don’t think I enjoyed a full night’s sleep until Easter, and I needed about a month to get my energy back afterward.

I didn’t get it, though, because — and this is of more pressing relevance to you all — at the same time, His Lordship and I were in the process of shopping for a house.  It was a confusing, stressful, nerve-wracking time, but we did finally end our long reign of renting at the beginning of the summer, and now have a proper Chez Disdain.  The new manse needs a fair amount of work, so I may well be grumbling about contractors and repair people for some time to come, but the one thing I can’t really complain about is the kitchen, which is fab.  I’ll provide more details and some pictures along with the black bean soup recipe, but for now, here’s just a wee bit of a tease:

Know what that is, my little chickadees?  Need a close-up (kindly overlooking the obvious need to clean, if you would)?

That’s right, a Viking range.  SCORE!

Oh, and in case it wasn’t self-evident from my reappearance, His Lordship, the Monster and I made it through the eye of the hurricane with minimal trauma; just a bit of basement flooding that was dispatched with a few rounds of wet/dry vacuuming and mopping. Now, on to the jam!

Hurricane Preparedness Plum Jam
Makes 3 cups

1 1/2 pounds plums, halved and pitted
Zest and juice of 2 clementines or 1 orange
2/3 cup water
1 vanilla bean, split
2 large slices candied ginger
1/2 small cinnamon stick
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
Juice of half a lemon

Place the plums in a heavy medium pan with the clementine zest and juice, water, vanilla, ginger and cinnamon stick and bring to a boil over medium heat.  Cover, lower the heat to a simmer, and cook until the plums are very soft and starting to break up, about 20 minutes.  Cool to room temperature.

While the plums are cooling, clean and sterilize about half a dozen 4-ounce jam jars with their rings and lids, along with any other equipment you feel you need for the preserving process (e.g. a ladle, a wide-mouthed funnel and long-handled tongs).

Remove the cinnamon stick, vanilla bean and ginger slices from the fruit.  Run the plums through a food mill or push it through a sieve into a large measuring cup.

Return the pureed plums to the pot, along with the sugar and lemon juice. Stir over medium-low heat until the sugar dissolves, then increase the heat to medium to bring the jam to a boil.  Continue cooking at a low boil, stirring frequently, until it’s thickened and holds its shape when spooned onto a chilled plate, 20-25 minutes.

Transfer the jam into the prepared jars, then seal using the boiling water method.  Refrigerate any jars that don’t seal properly.

Notes:

I used about half a dozen varieties of plums from the farmers market in this batch: yellow-fleshed ones with mottled skins, giant plain red ones, purple ovoid Italian ones, and little unassuming ones with hearts the color of blood. Mixing your plums will give you a more complex and interesting jam, but any variety should be delicious.

This jam is tart and rich enough for savory applications too.  It made a lovely post-hurricane lunch with Manchego on whole wheat for me, and slow-cooked pork loin for His Lordship. I strongly suspect it’d also be smashing with turkey instead of or mixed into cranberry sauce in a couple of months, if you want to get a jump on your holiday prep.

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Twas the Night Before Christmas

…aaaand I didn’t give a reindeer’s fluffy behind, honestly. I have zero holiday spirit this year. Literally zilch, zip, nada, rien, nichts. There are no lights or ornaments up, no stockings have been hung with care, and I’m planning on spending the majority of my Christmas Day getting acquainted with TSA measures and enjoying all the other delights of trans-continental air travel these days. The Grinch ain’t got nothing on me.

But since I can’t let the year ring itself out without one more blog post no matter how Scroogey my outlook, I would like to share a recipe that just might make your heart grow two sizes, should you need a no-fuss showstopper of a brunch or dessert item between now and Twelfth Night. I whipped it up during my November novel writing-related insanity, so if I say you can do this one with only half a functional brain, you can take my word for it.

As is my wont this time of year, I had bought a panettone before Thanksgiving, but since it’s just me and His Lordship, I quickly sated my eggy, fruity cravings and still had a little over a quarter of the loaf left, forlornly sitting in its box. I thought about making French toast, which is a perfectly lovely application for leftover panettone, but decided bread pudding would be even better. I adapted an America’s Test Kitchen recipe and made four individual puddings in the high-sided ramekins I picked up at IKEA some time back, and have found a bazillion uses for since.

And then, because I’m me, I also decided that a salted caramel sauce would make it even more inspirational to my writerly efforts, and modified Nigella Lawson’s quick butterscotch sauce to fit the bill.

The puddings, I’m not ashamed to say, are stupendous. The custard is neither too eggy nor too sweet, and the bread absorbs just enough of it to stay airy and light without going mushy. The bits that stick out the very top get lovely and crispy, while the dried fruit in the panettone stays moist and chewy. You could leave off the sauce if you like, and as His Lordship did, but I think it adds both elegance and a nice intensity to contrast with the soothing softness of the pudding.

So there you have it, my little Cindy Lou Whos. I may have a raging case of the bah humbugs, but you can’t say I didn’t deliver any holiday cheer. Ho, ho, ho!

Panettone Bread Pudding with Salted Caramel Sauce
(Adapted from America’s Test Kitchen’s The Best Recipe and Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat)
Serves 4

For the puddings:

4 cups panettone, sliced into 2-inch cubes (approximately 1/4 of a standard panettone)
2 eggs
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons bourbon
1 tablespoon vanilla
Pinch of salt

For the sauce:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/3 cup Lyle’s Golden Syrup
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large pinches Maldon salt

Move the oven rack to the lower-third position and preheat oven to 325 F. Generously butter 4 large, high-sided ramekins.

Spread the panettone cubes in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake 5-7 minutes to dry them out a bit, removing immediately if they start showing signs of browning. Divide the panettone evenly between the ramekins and set back on the sheet.

In a large measuring cup, whisk together the eggs and sugar until well combined, then blend in the milk, cream, bourbon, vanilla and salt. Pour a quarter of the custard mixture into each of the bread-filled cups.

Bake the puddings 30-35 minutes, until golden brown on top and rising up in the cups, and just barely jiggly when shaken. Set aside to cool to just warm while making the sauce, or cool completely and refrigerate for later.

To make the sauce, combine the butter, sugars and golden syrup in a small, heavy pan and melt together over medium heat. Allow to simmer enthusiastically for 5 minutes, then remove from heat and stir in cream, vanilla, and salt. Stir well to melt the salt, then decant into a pitcher.

Notes:

This recipe can be scaled up easily to accommodate however much leftover panettone you have. Should you not have any leftover panettone (though why wouldn’t you, since they’re everywhere now and will be everywhere and on sale after the holidays?), you could use raisin challah or brioche instead.

If you can’t find Lyle’s Golden Syrup, you could substitute light corn syrup or honey. Likewise, if you don’t have Maldon salt, another good-quality coarse sea salt will do.

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A Balm for Writer’s Block

Blogging is going to be light this month, because I have more pressing matters to attend to. I’m still baking for the coworkers every Sunday because they’ve made it clear it’s no longer optional to bring in treats on Monday morning, so there will be things to blog, but it’s bound to be more hit-and-run in nature than I’d normally like.

So, since I have a daily word quota hanging over my head, here’s a very quick write-up of the perfect cookie for the November insanity. Not only are they the kind of yummy calories your brain needs for heavy thinking, but they are practically instantaneous to make because there’s no creaming of butter and they go straight from bowl to oven.

Interestingly, making these cookies last night for a lunch with students today also kicked me out of what had been a pretty weak start to this year’s NaNoWriMo. I was really organized about preparing for it last week, but I was also still pretty tired from a very busy October so the words weren’t coming as fast as they should have. Having fixed fifteen-minute windows between batches actually made me more productive than I had been with unstructured evenings on Monday and Tuesday, and since then I’ve been much more enthusiastic about the whole thing.

These cookies are adapted from the recipe for chewy sugar cookies in this month’s Cook’s Illustrated. Normally, I am no fan of sugar cookies, because almost every one I’ve ever had has been the equivalent of a white canvas — not in a stripped-down-to-essentials, purity of ingredients way like a good shortbread, but in a bland, bland, boring, nothing but flavorless-fat-and-sugar way. I gave this recipe a try, though, because His Lordship loves a chewy cookie, and the recipe relied on the same liquid-fat-ratio math that recently produced the first batch of brownies to really meet his chewiness requirement. I made changes to inject some interest, though, because I still wasn’t buying the whole plain sugar cookie idea.

The texture of these cookies was everything that was promised: crackly on the outside and beautifully chewy on the inside. With my additions of toasted coconut and macadamia nuts, they also have rich coconutty flavor and tender crunch, enough to inspire at least a couple of hundred words.

Since I now have cookies and an awesome new caffeine delivery vehicle, I have no excuses. Back to work!

Coconut-Macadamia Sugar Cookies
(Adapted from Chewy Sugar Cookies, Cook’s Illustrated, November/December 2010)
Makes 4 dozen cookies

1/2 cup finely shredded unsweetened coconut
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 ounces cream cheese, in 8 pieces
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 large egg
1 tablespoon coconut milk (or regular milk)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted roasted macadamia nuts, coarsely chopped
Additional sugar for rolling

In a small nonstick skillet, toast the coconut on medium-low heat, stirring frequently, until golden brown. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 350 F and line multiple baking sheets with parchment paper.

Place the sugar in a large bowl and scatter the cream cheese cubes over the surface. Melt the butter and pour it over the sugar and cream cheese while still warm, stirring and folding with a spatula until most of the cream cheese has melted (streaks and a few small lumps are OK). Switch to a whisk and mix in the oil, then the egg, coconut milk and vanilla until smooth.

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and powder, and salt, and add to the wet ingredients. Whisk until almost incorporated, then stir in the toasted coconut and macadamia nuts.

Fill a shallow bowl with about half a cup of sugar. Scoop up heaping tablespoon-sized bits of dough and roll into balls, dropping them into the sugar and rolling to coat. Set the balls on the baking sheets, two inches apart.

Bake on the middle rack for 12-13 minutes, until turning golden at the edges. Allow to cool to room temperature on the sheets. Store in an airtight container for up to a week.

Notes:

This makes a very soft, oily, weird-looking dough, but it will come out fine, I promise!

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Better Than Pie

A couple of months back, His Lordship and I checked out the newest upscale barbecue joint. I was pleasantly surprised by the vegetarian chili, which was pleasantly spicy and full of chewy seitan pieces and chunks of vegetables in a not-too-thick tomato base. I was equally impressed by their pecan pie, which nimbly sidestepped all the usual dangers of the genre. It was sweet but not tooth-destroying, had quite a decently flaky crust, and was bursting with nicely-sized pecan pieces.

Good though it was, the pie reminded me of an even-better bar cookie I’d previously made. The cookies poured a decadent honey and brown sugar caramel over a buttery base and covered it with a blanket of chopped toasted nuts, taking all the charms of a really good pecan pie and ramping them up to dazzling. A week or so later, I made the bars again, and was wowed all over again.

The price to be paid for this degree of wonderfulness is getting out the dreaded candy thermometer, but I promise it’s absolutely worth it. The bourbon-infused caramel offers all the symphonic roundness the standard one-note corn syrup substrate can’t. Since the cookie base holds up much better than pie crust, I’d even venture to suggest that these bars, cut into more pie-sized slices, would make the perfect make-ahead dessert for Thanksgiving.

Honey Caramel Pecan Bars
(Adapted from Nancy Baggett, The All-American Cookie Book)
Makes 36-48 small bars

For cookie layer:
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

For caramel pecan layer:
2 cups whole pecans
1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter
1/2 cup mild honey
6 tablespoons light brown sugar
3 tablespoons heavy cream
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons bourbon

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Line a 9 x 13 baking pan with nonstick aluminum foil, leaving several inches of overhang all around.

In the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter, sugar and egg and beat until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Whisk together the dry ingredients and add to the butter mixture, beating just until smooth. Spread the cookie dough in a thin, even layer in the lined pan. Bake on the center oven rack for 12-15 minutes, until golden in the center and a bit darker at the edges. Set on a wire rack while preparing the caramel layer.

Lower the oven temperature to 350 F. Spread the pecans on a baking sheet and toast just until they darken slightly and release a nutty aroma. Chop the pecans moderately fine and set aside.

Bring the butter, honey, brown sugar, and cream to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Insert a candy thermometer and continue to cook at a low boil until the caramel reaches 250 F. Remove from the heat and stir in the bourbon and half the chopped pecans.

Pour the caramel over the crust, spreading all the way to the edges, and sprinkle the remaining cup of pecans over the top. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until bubbling and browned. Cool to room temperature on a wire rack, then refrigerate until well chilled, at least 1 1/2 hours.

Use the overhang to lift the cookie slab out of the pan and onto a cutting board. Pull the foil away, then use a sharp knife to cut the slab into narrow bars, cleaning the sticky residue off the blade between cuts for a clean slice.

Notes:

The original recipe was made with hazelnuts, which are wonderful but obviously more work. It also had a chocolate garnish on top, formed by sprinkling the still-warm bars with very finely chopped chocolate and leaving it to melt. Uncharacteristically, I found it to be a wee bit overkill, since the chocolate distracted from the clean flavor of the hazelnuts and definitely would have overwhelmed the pecans, but feel free to add that back in if you disagree.

If you don’t have a thermometer, you can test the caramel for doneness by dropping 1/2 a teaspoon of it into a glass of ice water once it thickens and starts to darken. It should form a soft ball in the water which flattens once lifted out.

The unsliced slab can supposedly be wrapped tightly and frozen for several weeks, although I have never had the necessary level of willpower to put theory to practice.

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I’ve Been Slimed!

Only, you know, not, because if you’re okra-averse due to the slime factor, fried is definitely the way to go. Frying gives you a completely un-slimy result, which more than justifies the inconvenience and mess.

I first fell in love with okra not in this form, or in any typically southern application like gumbo, but in Thai food. One of our regular hang-outs adds okra to their vegetarian red and green curries. The okra’s mucilage melts into the surrounding coconut milk to create a velvety sauce, and the de-slimed rounds have a fabulously crunchy-firm texture and fresh green flavor, the exact opposite of all of offensive things I’d always heard about okra.

Since I had no time for Thai curry on the Monday I made these, I went looking for the easiest fried okra recipe I could find. Mark Bittman’s sounded almost perfect, except that I wasn’t going to batter each individual piece of okra. I opted instead for whisking together the dry ingredients, stirring in the buttermilk, then dumping in the okra to coat. It worked perfectly, the slime from the okra leaching into the cornmeal batter and thickening it so efficiently that you would have thought I’d used eggs.

We had these fritters for dinner with leftover cauliflower and potato soup from Sunday, dipping the crunchy little bites into a cocktail sauce thrown together by His Lordship from ketchup, mayo, horseradish, and some homemade hot sauce. The hot sauce was originally intended to serve as a basic red enchilada sauce, but the peppers, probably mislabeled at the farmers market, were so infernally spicy that we ended up having to dilute it down with vinegar and put it in tiny bottles to use as a pants-kicking alternative to the two commercial hot sauces we already have on hand. If I can reconstruct what went into it, I’ll write it up, because it might have been serious overkill for enchiladas, but is really quite good as a condiment.

Okra Fritters
(Adapted from Fried Okra in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian)
Serves 2

1/4 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
4-5 grinds black pepper
1/4 teaspoon each chipotle and ancho powder
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/4 pound okra, trimmed and sliced into 1/2-inch rounds

Canola or vegetable oil for deep frying

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Stir in the buttermilk to form a thinnish batter, then fold in the okra. Let the batter sit for several minutes, long enough for the slime to release into the batter and thicken it up.

In the meantime, heat several inches of oil in a medium, high-sided pot until it burbles around a wooden chopstick or spoon handle (technically around 350 F).

With two soup spoons, scoop up around two tablespoons of batter and drop it into the hot oil. The fritters should consist of no more than three slices of okra and its surrounding batter, to keep them small enough to cook through all the way without burning the outside. Once the fritters are a deep golden brown, remove from the oil with a slotted spoon or mesh strainer and set on a rack over brown paper to drain the excess oil and cool to edible temperature.

Notes:

Should you have peanut oil around instead, I imagine that would give the fritters that much more genuine Southern appeal.

Since it’s the okra that thickens the batter, I would think that you could probably make this successfully vegan by swapping the buttermilk for soy milk.

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