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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You Can Keep Your Oreos

Well, hello there, strangers.  Long time no see!

While I was off in my start-of-the-year teaching crunch, which left me no evenings or weekends free to blog, I understand we had the 100th anniversary of America’s favorite sandwich cookie.  I can appreciate the basic charms of the Oreo as much as anybody, and when I was a teenager in Mexico I was obsessed with them, because this everyday All-American snack couldn’t be had by anyone not affiliated with the US Embassy and thus, they were the perfect symbol for my expatriate adolescent angst. I would insist on my father bringing as many packages as he could from his business trips back to the home office, just so I could feel “normal” for the few days they lasted.

But that phase is mercifully in my past now, and as a grown-up I can also look critically at the little hockey pucks and acknowledge the fact that they’re not really all they’re cracked up to be, which is why I’m going to make up for my latest intermittent silence with a recipe for what I think is the best sandwich cookie in the world.

Alfajores are to Argentina what the chocolate chip cookie is to the U.S.  They’re ubiquitous and can be found in iterations from the mass-produced, individually-wrapped Hostess-equivalent kinds purchasable at the convenience store to the high-end boutique variety in beribboned boxes. When I was growing up and into my adulthood, every relative who visited was expected to bring us at least one box of my personal favorite brand. (Are we sensing a theme about international cookie commissioning by me as a kid?  I was way ahead of the curve on free trade.)

So what are alfajores?  Well, besides being sadly unknown in this hemisphere, confusing to pronounce (all-fah-hor-es) and what I think should replace the macaron as the next fad, they’re shortbready disks faintly hinting at lemon pressed around a layer of dulce de leche, although you can also find fruit-filled ones.  The commercial kind are generally enrobed in either a crackly, powdery sugar glaze or a smooth semisweet chocolate one, which is wonderful but way too much bother for home baking.  Home bakers instead make an easier but no less delicious version in which the cookies, made with cornstarch (the maizena of the name below) for a perfectly delicate crumb, are filled and rolled in coconut to keep the dulce de leche from sticking to your fingers.

Like the Oreo, this is one of those things that sounds too basic to be all that great, but is actually dangerously addictive instead.  The cookies are buttery and tender and neither too oily nor too soft, the dulce de leche adds just the right amount of sweetness to the not-very-sweet cookies, the hint of citrus makes everything sparkle just the tiniest bit, and it all just really, really works.

If you absolutely insist on chocolate in your sandwich cookies, I still have you covered, because not having enough regular dulce de leche on hand, I made part of the batch with chocolate dulce de leche I picked up on sale at the local Whole Paycheck.  Personally, I remain unconvinced by the chocolate kind, which tastes generically fudgy to me and lacks the lovely milky, caramely flavor I think dulce de leche really ought to put front and center in order to live up to the name.  Man, did my coworkers disagree with me, though, because the chocolate ones were by far the favorites and were gone in a blink.

I also filled some with the hurricane plum jam I previously posted about, which worked so splendidly that I hoarded them at home and took none to work. If you use jam, be sure to use a very firm one so that the cookies don’t ooze apart.  You may need to cook it down a bit if what you have is too runny.

However you fill them, seriously, you have to try these.  The minute you do, I know you too will recognize their undeniable awesomeness.

Alfajores de Maizena
Makes about five dozen small cookies, or 2-3 dozen larger ones

For cookies:
1 ½ cups (200 grams) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 ½ cups (300 grams) cornstarch
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon sea salt
14 tablespoons (200 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¾ cup (150 grams) granulated sugar
3 large egg yolks
1 tablespoon brandy
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Zest of one medium lemon

For assembly:
One 16-ounce jar dulce de leche or very thick jam
1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut

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

Sift the flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda and salt through a fine sieve twice, the second time onto a large sheet of parchment or wax paper for easy transfer, and set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and sugar.  Add the yolks one at a time, scraping down between additions. Beat in the brandy, vanilla and lemon zest.

Add the dry ingredients in three batches at low speed, mixing until just combined.  Turn onto a Silpat or the reserved parchment sheet that held the dry ingredients, and gently roll to a thickness of about a quarter of an inch or half a centimeter for thinner cookies, and double that for slightly puffier ones.  (Dust the rolling pin with cornstarch if sticking starts to occur.)

Cut the dough with 1½ to 2-inch diameter round cutters, being as careful as you can to minimize the waste.  Use a bench scraper or spatula to transfer the cookies to the baking sheets, spacing about an inch apart.  Gently pull the scraps together and re-roll to use up all the dough.

Bake the cookies just until firm and barely gold on the bottom.  Do not allow to brown on the top or sides.  Remove to a cooling rack immediately and cool completely.

Once the cookies have cooled, form sandwiches by spreading a teaspoonful of dulce de leche or jam onto the bottom of one cookie, and covering with a second. Squeeze gently, just enough to push the filling out to the edges of the cookies.  Place the coconut in a small, shallow container and roll the edges of the cookies in the coconut to evenly coat the exposed filling.

Store the filled cookies in an airtight container, and consume within the next day or two.

Notes:

Because of the very high proportion of cornstarch to flour, the dough is much more resilient on re-rolling than standard dough, but it’s still a good idea to treat it gently to ensure tender cookies.

This is my mom’s recipe, by the way.  I just did the conversions from metric and put back the coconut, which she hates.  Thanks, Mom!

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New Year, New Insanity

On the off chance that my prior Wednesday night baklava, candy making adventures, or Sunday layer cake baking haven’t convinced you that I’m a wee bit off my rocker, this really ought to do the trick. How many people go on impromptu solo tamales-making binges, I ask you? Tamales are the sort of thing that generally involve tons of planning and the rallying of an army of assistants, but I decided at lunchtime on New Year’s Eve eve not just to make tamales, but to start by making mole as the sauce first, which is normally considered a whole-day, once-a-year, multi-abuela job all on its own.

But the thing is, even rationally accepting how insane the idea was, I still had to do it, because while on a shopping excursion on Friday, I finally stumbled on a place in this generally foodie-positive but sadly Mexican-ingredient unfriendly city that sold fresh masa. I hadn’t had really good tamales since my last California trip, this time last year, so finally having the proper ingredients on hand, I was going to do it up right, damn it. Since it was also nearly New Year’s, I was also going to incorporate lentils somehow, as has been my habit for the past decade or so.

Tamales really are a ton of work and time, so I don’t expect anyone to try this particular recipe any time soon, but if you don’t have a ready source of really fantastic tamales, I seriously think these are worth the trouble once a year. They’re sweet and spicy and scrumptious, not to mention colorful, comforting, and festive, and unless you’re actually having them in the context of a tamales-making party, you should have at least a dozen tamales and at least a cup of mole to stash in your freezer for a few lovely effortless meals later on.

Roasted Sweet Potato, Beluga Lentil and Mole Tamales
(Adapted from Nancy Zaslavsky, Meatless Mexican Home Cooking, 1997)
Makes approximately two dozen tamales

For mole:
4 ancho chiles
4 guajillo chiles
1 chipotle chile
¼ cup golden raisins
4 garlic cloves, peeled
1 small yellow onion, peeled and quartered
¼ cup toasted sliced almonds
1 ½ cup vegetable stock
½ can fire-roasted diced tomatoes
½ teaspoon kosher salt
3-4 grinds black pepper
1 ½ tablespoons peanut or olive oil
1 ounce bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
1 2-ounce disk palm sugar, grated or shaved, or 2-3 tablespoons light brown sugar

For filling:
2 large orange-fleshed sweet potatoes
Peanut or olive oil for roasting
½ cup beluga, black, or French green lentils

For masa:
1 kilo (2.2 lbs) fresh masa
1 ½ cups softened unsalted butter, vegetarian non-hydrogenated shortening, or a mixture of the two
1 cup frozen corn
2-3 tablespoons cream or vegetable stock
1 tablespoon kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper

For assembly:
2 1-lb packages frozen banana leaves, defrosted

Stem and seed the chiles, then toast them in a dry pan over medium heat until pliable, flipping often to prevent any browning. Put the toasted chiles in a large bowl or measuring cup with the raisins, cover with boiling water, and soak for 20 minutes.

Toast the onion and garlic in the same dry pan until beginning to darken slightly on each side. Place the onion and garlic in the carafe of a blender with the drained chiles and raisins and a few tablespoons of the vegetable broth. Blend until smooth, adding more broth as needed to keep the blender running. Add the tomatoes, salt and pepper and blend again.

Heat the oil in a medium pot with a heavy bottom and high sides, and fry the sauce for five minutes, stirring regularly. Add the chocolate, spices, sugar, and remaining broth, lower the heat, and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to avoid scorching along the bottom and sides. Set aside to cool while preparing the rest of the tamale components..

While the chiles for the mole are soaking, preheat the oven to 425 F and line a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Peel the sweet potatoes, then halve them and cut into 1-inch slices. Toss them on the baking sheet with just enough oil to lightly coat them, and bake until cooked through and starting to caramelize on the bottom, around 30-45 minutes. Let cool slightly, then cut into chunks of about half an inch. At the same time, boil the lentils with ample water to cover until they are tender but not falling apart. Drain the lentils and set aside while making the masa.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, cream the butter and/or shortening until light. Scrape down the sides and, with the mixer running, slowly add the masa by the spoonful and continue beating until fluffy, about another 10 minutes. With a food processor or immersion blender, puree the corn and cream or stock, then whip into the masa with the salt and pepper. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap to prevent the masa from drying out.

Unfold the banana leaves and rinse the powdery residue off. If they’re not already cut in half, remove the center vein from the leaves and cut into two long strips with a pair of kitchen shears, then cut each leaf strip into 10-inch rectangles. Steam the leaves in a large steamer until they’re pliable. Tear a few of the less nice leaves, or any that have torn while processing, into ribbons for tying up the tamales.

Lay down a steamed banana leaf square on a work surface. Using an ice cream scoop, portion out a ball-sized scoop of masa, and press it into a 6-inch circle in the middle of the leaf. Over the center of the masa, pile 2-3 pieces of roasted sweet potato, a small spoonful of lentils, and a spoonful of mole. Using the bottom edge of the leaf, flip over about a third of the masa over the filling, then lay the leaf flat again. Starting at the top edge, flip over the other edge of the masa to seal in the filling, then keep rolling to enclose the tamal completely. Fold under the two open sides until they meet underneath the tamal, and use a strip to tie it securely shut. Lay the finished tamal on a cookie sheet and continue forming tamales until the masa runs out.

Lay a few of the leftover banana leaves on the bottom of a large steamer over simmering water, and fill with the finished tamales. Cover with a few more leaves, and steam for about 1 hour, adding water to the bottom as necessary. Tamales are done when the leaf pulls cleanly away from the masa. Let rest for a few minutes before serving with the remaining mole on the side.

Leftover cooked tamales will keep in the fridge for a few days and reheat well in the microwave, or they can be frozen immediately after folding and steamed later.

Notes:

If you can’t find a source of fresh masa, you can substitute the equivalent amount of reconstituted masa harina, which should be available in most supermarkets. It won’t taste quite as sweet and lovely as fresh masa, but it should still be good, especially when livened up with the pureed sweet corn.

I used banana leaves rather than corn husks as the wrapper because I could easily get the leaves at the Asian market a block away from the tortilleria that sells the masa. Tamales are traditionally made with either of those wrappers in the various parts of Mexico and Central America, so use whichever you prefer. They will each impart a slightly different flavor to the tamales but will work equally well.

Palm sugar, like the banana leaves, is commonly found in Asian markets. It’s less sweet than cane or beet sugar and has a wonderful rich caramel flavor, similar to maple sugar, which you could also use. If you don’t have either one, light brown sugar is more than fine, but start with the smaller amount and taste before adding more, because it’s significantly sweeter.

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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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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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The Holiday Madness is Upon Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Cookie Long Overdue

It recently occurred to me that although I’ve made plenty of cookies with chocolate, including several takes on chocolate chunk biscotti, I have never actually put up a recipe for plain old American chocolate chip cookies.  It’s about time I rectified that.

These are not my trademark chocolate chip cookies, which are a kitchen-sink affair involving a number of extra ingredients I don’t currently have on hand.  Instead, I looked at the four different versions in my temporarily reduced cookbook collection and decided on the one in Entertaining for a Veggie Planet, because I can’t use Cook’s Illustrated every single time, and Didi Emmons has never failed to exceed expectations.  Her recipes always look deceptively simple, yet are supremely doable and yield huge taste dividends.

I made a few changes to the recipe, starting by doubling it to ensure I’d have enough to share.  I also added the hazelnuts from the deconstructed trail mix whence came the cashews for the granola bars, and supplemented them with walnuts because I didn’t have enough of either for the doubled amount.  Finally, I changed the method a little bit, and most importantly, aged the dough overnight.

Aging the batter overnight is not absolutely essential, but it does make a difference and is worth doing if you can. I discovered this inadvertently years ago when I was routinely too time-pressed or lazy to bake all the dough on a single day, and eventually realized that the next-day batch was always better than the first day’s.  Apparently this is because the flour has more time to fully hydrate, as the New York Times recently reported, setting off a blogstorm of cookie baking with the Jacques Torres-inspired recipe that accompanied the article.  It’s nice to know that the wages of sloth are chewy, buttery, and chocolatey.

The appropriately aged cookies were a little flatter than I would like but were quite tasty, especially with a tiny sprinkling of extra sea salt on top, as suggested by the NYT.  In the future, I would bump up the quantity of nuts for a little more structure, and probably just use hazelnuts if possible, since hazelnuts do not get enough cookie love outside Italy, in my biased opinion.

These are not a replacement for my trademark version, which I still (immodestly) think are close to perfect, but there’s nothing wrong with a perfectly respectable second place.

Chocolate Chip Cookies with Walnuts and Hazelnuts
(Adapted from Didi Emmons’ Entertaining for a Veggie Planet)
Makes 6-7 dozen

1 cup each chopped walnuts and skinned or blanched hazelnuts
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (2 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 large eggs
12 ounces semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Spread the nuts on a baking sheet and toast until golden, approximately 5 minutes.  Remove and let cool.

In the bowl of stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter and sugars until very light and fluffy.   Scrape down the sides and beat in the salt and vanilla.  Beat in the eggs one at a time, incorporating the first fully before adding the second.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour and baking soda.  With the mixer on low, stir in the flour and soda until just incorporated, then repeat with the nuts and chocolate.  Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight, and preferably 24 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350 F again, and line two or more baking sheets with parchment paper.  Scoop rounded tablespoons of the dough with a cookie scoop or large spoon onto the sheets, spacing at least 2 inches apart.  If desired, sprinkle lightly with additional sea salt.  Bake each batch 8 minutes, until golden, then cool on the sheet for 5 minutes.  Remove to a wire rack to cool.

Store in an airtight container.

Notes:

I like Ghirardelli double chocolate chips, which at 60% cacao solids are darker and deeper than regular semisweet chips.  Guittard’s chips are also good.  Naturally, if you want to go with Valrhona or Callebaut or another premium selection, I wouldn’t dream of stopping you, although in my experience there’s a point of diminishing returns with chocolate chip cookies.

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What Makes a House a Home, Part 2

As much as I was itching to, it took a while for me to be able to bake again.  While we did ship some particularly loved or difficult-to-replace equipment, there was so much that was too heavy or bulky that it wasn’t worth it, and a lot of demands were further up the priority chain than finding a restaurant supply store so I could fill in the gaps.

As soon as I got home from stocking up on baking sheets, cake pans, cooling racks and pie pans, I immediately had to throw together something to fill the house with the aroma of vanilla, butter and sugar.  The pantry is still pretty spartan, a state I may even try to maintain deliberately to combat the pack-rat tendencies that necessitated all the tossing just a few weeks ago.  In looking at the basics I did have and considering what could be quickly made from them, I fell back on Chlotilde’s nearly-instantaneous yogurt cake.

Since we had a nearly-full container of it, I substituted sour cream for the yogurt, and while I was at it, I threw in a few small bars of chocolate from the vestiges of the strategic chocolate reserve.

What, you thought the reserve had gone the way of the rest of the pantry dregs?  Ah, no, my little chickadees.  That is not the way we roll chez Disdain.  What was left was swept into a cooler with the biscotti, some honeycrisp apples and a couple of other snacks and stashed behind the driver’s seat for the trip.  Not only is chocolate never, ever, ever to be thrown out, but we had to be prepared if, god forbid, we got stuck in South Dakota or something.  And we did!  Circumstances were not nearly dire enough to necessitate draining the supply, but still!  They could have been!

Anyway, less than an hour after scraping the batter into my brand-new pan and popping it into the oven, I was cutting into a fragrant, buttery, chocolate-flecked symbol of home. Made with sour cream, the cake lacks the whisper of sourness yogurt imparts and offers nothing but elegant, melting richness.  It undoubtedly destroyed what little health value might have been residual in the original cake, but I think I like the end product made with sour cream even better.

Whether you have an empty new house or last-minute guests, this is instant grace.

Sour Cream Cake with Chocolate Chunks
(Adapted significantly from Chlotilde’s Yogurt Cake)
Serves 6-8

2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 tablespoon vanilla paste or extract
3 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Line the bottom of a 9- or 10-inch cake pan with parchment paper or non-stick foil, greasing the sides.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In a large bowl, combine the eggs, sour cream, sugar, oil and vanilla.  Add the dry ingredients to the liquid mixture, stirring until it just comes together.  Gently fold in the chocolate.

Scrape into the prepared pan and bake for 30-35 minutes, until the top is golden and springy, and a tester comes out clean. Transfer to a rack to cool.

Notes:

A 10-inch pan is ideal since it will produce a less domed top, but 9-inch is what I have.

I see no reason you couldn’t use light sour cream if you wanted to make this just a wee bit less decadent.  Conversely, you could bump up the proportion of chocolate, but I actually think this relatively spare amount was just right.

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