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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More Holiday Cookies

This is the gingerbread recipe I’ve been making since I can’t even remember when, probably college or just after.  Its origin is in a long-gone December issue of Vegetarian Times, but I’ve made so many changes along the way that at this point I think it’s fair to call it mine.

Although there are a lot of spices, the quantities are such that these are just nicely spicy instead of obnoxious.  The addition of the orange zest and ground almonds further mellows things out and sets them a step above your average gingerbread people.

The dough is supple and easy to roll and decorate, if you’re so inclined, but it makes perfectly good plain slice-and-bake cookies as well.  It also freezes beautifully and makes a ton, so if you’d like to stockpile for later use, it’s a great choice.

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Hurry Up and Wait

I’m starting to suspect I’m the winter equivalent of Typhoid Mary.  All too often have I moved somewhere and it’s suddenly weather they haven’t seen in over a decade, and I regret to say it’s happened again.  Sorry, Pacific Northwest.

Part of me opens the door to the whole three inches out there and wants to laugh uproariously, since this feeble dusting is not enough to cause so much as a hiccup back east. The rest of me is in a snit because here it’s enough to cripple the infrastructure and set off paroxysms of “We’re all gonna die!” hysterics, and His Lordship, the monster and I need to hit the road tomorrow to spend the holidays down south with our families.  Someone is damn well going to pay if we’re socked in until Monday, I assure you.

I’m also cranky because I actually managed to get organized enough this year to finish up all the cookie baking and card writing, and I can’t get to the post office to mail a single item.  The one year I was planning on not taking advantage of the loosest possible definition of the holiday timetable (I’ve been known to temporarily adopt the Russian Orthodox calendar when necessary), and all my good intentions go to waste.  Sorry, Secret Santa giftees, you’re going to have to wait a little longer.

Their loss is your gain, though, since I have nothing to do but blog and pack, probably in vain.  It may ruin the surprise for my giftees, but I’ll share this year’s holiday cookie selection a little early in case anyone’s looking for some inspiration.  Each one is an easy and great last-minute entertaining choice if you’re not already committed to a lineup.  As I said, I know people get touchy about holiday food, so if you absolutely must make Grandma’s pfeffernusse, I totally understand.

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More North and South Stories

Cranberry-Quince Pastafrola

Thanks to multiple rounds of entertaining over the Thanksgiving, I only had about a cup of cranberry sauce left this time around. This was just the right quantity to allow me to write a tidy little epilogue to my American story about the melding of my Southern Hemisphere roots, my New England sojourn, and all the years between and since.

As I’ve mentioned before, pastafrola is a typically Argentine afternoon snack and casual dessert, somewhere between a tart and a bar cookie.  It’s composed of a thick layer of quince preserves (membrillo), sandwiched between layers of a slightly eggy pastry used extensively in Italian baking, pasta frolla, whence the name.  If you’d like to see what the real deal looks like, Pip’s and Katy’s are legit.

This, my friends, is not legit, but it’s closer than the bastard cousin deconstructed version I made during my pre-move pantry clearing efforts.  I’d like to think that if my grandmother ever had transplanted to Boston, she would have come up with a cranberry version like this. I rather suspect my mom would approve, too, since she disfavors highly sugary desserts.

I’m not perfectly content with the pastry here, since it was a little bit more biscuity and puffy than it really needed to be, but I do love how the tartness of the cranberries tones down the sweetness of the quince and pear and richness of the pastry, to say nothing of adding a seasonally-appropriate red sparkle.  I’ll definitely be engaging in further experimentation with the Christmas batch of cranberry sauce.

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And So It Begins

Well, that didn’t take long.  Despite my good intentions, despite the fact that it’s only been two months, and more importantly, despite my student budget, I bought another cookbook.

Oh, I could protest that it was just a lucky find on the bargain table (always a bane to my willpower), that I’ll stop after just this one more, but we all know that’s classic junkie denial, don’t we?  I’ll do it again. I won’t even feel guilty about it until we’re packing to move back, and then I’ll curse the weight and the extra shipping expense.

Although hey, it’s not just a cookbook.  It’s Sally Schneider’s cool treatise on how to improvise in the kitchen, in which she gives basic recipes and shows how she plays with variations to come up with new and creative dishes.  This is already an approach I’ve been trying to take since making the decision a while ago to be less recipe-bound, but with its pretty pictures and enthusiastic narrative, this book is a great source of fresh inspiration.

Riffing on her basic recipe for brown sugar butter cookies produced a sophisticated and pretty shortbread flavored with lemon and speckles of black tea.  One of the suggested variations used Earl Gray tea, which I actually loathe despite my usual love of citrus in all forms.  Since I liked the idea of fusing my tea and cookies, I put together my own lemony blend and made a few other changes.  The new all-me shortbread has a great up-front citrus hit followed by a low note of smoky floral tea, wrapped in a buttery, crumbly matrix.  They’re perfect for a rainy afternoon snack with more tea or, if you feel like mixing your metaphors, a cup of cocoa.  I’ll definitely be trying this again, since I’m now tempted to try darjeeling and spices for a chai feel.

Lemon Black Tea Shortbread
Makes 3 dozen bite-sized cookies
(Adapted from Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook)

1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into 16 pieces
3 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon Penzeys dried orange peel, rehydrated in just enough boiling water to cover
Grated zest of one large lemon
Contents of 2 premium black tea bags (approximately 2 teaspoons)
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons cornstarch
Raw sugar for coating

In a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat together the butter, sugars and salt until fluffy.  Beat in the vanilla, orange peel, lemon zest and tea.

Whisk together the flour and cornstarch, and add to the sugar mixture in the mixer.  Stir on low speed until just clumping into a ball, then dump out onto a sheet of parchment paper and shape into a long log 1 1/2 to 2 inches in diameter.  Wrap the log tightly in the parchment and then in plastic wrap.  Refrigerate until firm, at least 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 325 F.  Line baking sheets with additional parchment.

Slice the log into 1/8 inch slices.  Roll the edges in the raw sugar to coat, and set the slices on the baking sheets 1 1/2 inches apart.  Bake until golden in the middle and just browning along the edges, approximately 18 minutes.  Remove to a rack to cool.

Like all shortbread, these will keep for days or even weeks in an airtight container, should you have the willpower to keep your hands off.

Notes:

These are two-bite cookies, just right to rest on a saucer.  You could make the log fatter if you would like fewer but bigger cookies.

Since I’m a citrus freak, next time I would increase the amount of lemon zest, but these are plenty lemony as is if you’re not as crazed as I am.

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When Life Gives You Figs

Make fig bars!

His Lordship’s father has quite the green thumb, and grows a variety of fruit in a backyard micro-orchard.  Each fall, he has a bumper crop of figs, which he painstakingly stems, halves, and dries.  Since fig season immediately precedes His Lordship’s birthday, around this time each year we receive a care package bearing a card and a gift, plus many zip-top bags full of beautifully jade-and-tan seedy little hemispheres.

They are delicious, completely organic, better than any you could get in a store, and utterly free.  They are also so copious that we always end up putting the half-full box on top of the fridge before Thanksgiving, and there they’ll remain in suspended animation until we remember they exist, probably shortly before the next batch is due.

Vowing to do better this year, I seized one of the bags for immediate use in baking.  After the success of the granola bars, I aimed for a not-too-sweet cookie that leaned toward a breakfast bar and could be snarfed between classes.  The need for portability meant that instead of my usual press-in-the-pan layered approach, I would have to go to the extra effort of rolling out dough to fully enclose the sticky figgy filling.  I also wanted to make it a little healthier by using whole wheat pastry flour in addition to all-purpose.

Since the interwebs didn’t offer any one recipe for a fig cookie or filled cereal bar that seemed to fit all my needs, I ended up combining elements from around five different recipes in addition to my own ideas, and am quite pleased with the outcome.  Flavoring the figs with orange and just a hint of cardamom gave them a boost without detracting from their essential figgyness, and the whole wheat pastry flour added a nutty roundness that supported the homey and crackly filling without making the cookies punitively cardboardy, as whole wheat pastries can sometimes be.

These bars have a just-sweet-enough, not-too-rich quasi-cakey wholesomeness that is just right for this time of year and perfect with a cup of tea.  Since I think my father-in-law would approve, and in keeping with the tradition whereby Fig Newtons got their name, I’m naming these after the California birthplace of the figs.

Fig bar assembly

Incidentally, His Lordship’s family is also an excellent source of lemons, which I certainly would never dream of complaining about.  When we still lived in the vicinity, I used to bring home huge grocery bags full of regular and my best-beloved Meyer lemons from each gathering of the in-laws.  Now that we’re back on the same coast, I fully intend to haul back as much as I can from our holiday visit.

Fig Fremont Bars
Makes 40-50 1-inch bars

Dough:
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 tablespoon cream cheese, softened
2/3 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Filling:
2 cups halved dried green figs
1 teaspoon dried orange rind or 1 tablespoon grated fresh orange zest
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 cups orange juice
2 cups water
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 pinches salt

Raw sugar for sprinkling

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together the butter, cream cheese and sugar until fluffy.  Add eggs one at a time, beating well between additions, then beat in the vanilla.

In another bowl, whisk together the flours, baking powder, salt and cinnamon.  Add the dry ingredients to the mixer, and combine well.  (Since these will be rolled out and do need some tensile strength, for once you don’t have to be too paranoid about over-mixing, but don’t walk away from the mixer either.)  Divide dough in half and place each half in its own quart-sized zip-top bag, patting and squishing into an even, flat square.  Chill dough for at least an hour.

While the dough is chilling, place the figs, orange rind or zest, sugar, juice and water in a small saucepan.  Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer until the figs are very tender, 30-40 minutes.  If necessary, cover the pan halfway through to prevent the liquid from evaporating completely.

When the figs are tender, remove from the heat and blend with an immersion blender (or in a food processor or blender) until smooth.  Stir in the cardamom and salt, and set aside to cool completely.

Preheat oven to 350 F.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Using scissors, trim the top and sides off the first bag of dough, flip the bag open, and turn the dough gently out onto another sheet of parchment.  Cover the dough with either the cut-open bag or more parchment to prevent it sticking to the rolling pin, and roll into a long rectangle approximately 18 inches by 6 inches, squaring off the edges with a pizza cutter or sharp knife if needed.

Spread half the filling lengthwise down the center third of the dough, leaving space at the top and bottom for proper sealing.  Brush the exposed dough with water, then use the parchment to flip each edge lengthwise over the filling, overlapping slightly in the middle.  Press the edges together gently to seal.

Turn the roll onto the baking sheet on the diagonal, seam side down.  Brush the top of the roll with water and sprinkle liberally with raw sugar.

Bake 20-25 minutes, until golden brown and beginning to crack slightly along the top.  Remove from oven and set on a wire rack to cool while repeating the process with the remainind dough and filling.

When the rolls are mostly or completely cooled, slice into inch-wide bars with a serrated knife.

Notes:

The small amount of cream cheese adds both flavor and flexibility to the dough, a trick I picked up from (big surprise) Cook’s Illustrated’s holiday all-in-one cookie dough recipe.  You could leave it out, if you prefer not to open a new container of cream cheese for just one tablespoon.

If these aren’t sweet enough for you, you could glaze the bars with a simple icing of powdered sugar thinned with milk or more orange juice to a drizzling consistency.

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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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One for the Road

All packed and ready to go.

My house is a hollow wreck of a corpse.  Everything we want to keep but won’t need for the next year has been packed and put in storage, and almost all the furniture we don’t want to keep has been sold off.  A handful of boxes full of winter clothes and other need-but-not-immediately items have been shipped on the slow and cheap to the new place.  Tomorrow His Lordship, the Monster and I will stuff all our can’t-live-withouts into the car and head for the other coast at a brisk but not breakneck pace.

There is absolutely no reason why I should have been baking Monday night.  I no longer have coworkers to bake for.  I most certainly have not been inviting people over for dinner.  There is no shortage of other chores I could have been tackling.

And yet I made a full batch of biscotti, including skinning the hazelnuts. I told myself I still had things in my pantry I would lament throwing away, and that every road trip should be accompanied by a homemade treat to make up for the less-than-optimal meals along the way.  But the truth is that I’m not a practical person by nature, and beneath all that pretense was the impulse to push back at the forces swirling around me.

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The End of An Era

It’s my last week at work, which means this was the last round of Sunday baking for the office.

I’ll miss doing it, and I hope that they’ll miss it (and me!) at least a little bit.  It was nice to have an excuse to bake, and rewarding to be able to give my coworkers something to look forward to on Monday mornings.  I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to bake for my classmates, but time works so differently when you’re a student that it won’t be the same.

That’s why there was a certain wistful quality to this Sunday evening, even if I didn’t go so far as to cry into my cookie dough.  That’s also why it seemed appropriate to be making a comforting prior favorite, the five-spice molasses cookies with bourbon I dug out of the archives while putting up the sesame cookies.

I’ll post the recipe, because I made a couple of alterations to accommodate what I still have in the pantry as well as to work through my notes from the last go.  It was already good, but nothing is ever perfect, and I think these small changes made it that much better. Since I had no more crystallized ginger, I increased the quantity of powdered ginger accordingly, and decreased the bourbon by a teaspoon.  I think both were the right call, since this combination allowed the five-spice to really come through.  I also found a box of bright-white pearl sugar way on a back shelf, and thought it would look even better than coarse raw sugar.  It did give the finished cookies a fabulous dotted-swiss mod appeal, but it also added a great crunch that would make me seek it out for future experimentation with texture.

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Alton, We Need to Talk.

Sigh.

Didn’t I just equate your lava muffin recipe with divinity?  Haven’t I been your biggest fan since your very first episode, in a burning-adoration-from-afar, entirely nonthreatening, restraining-order-free, totally un-Kathy Bates way? Didn’t I even forgive you for the exercise in self-indulgent whimsy that was your functionally useless book, the first cookbook I have ever in my entire life wanted my money back for?

All that and more, Alton.  So why are you doing this to me?

The only thing I wanted was a recipe to use up my remaining cocoa supply.  As if by fate, your cocoa brownies drifted out of the entropy event that is my recipe binder when I was looking for the instructions for my birthday souffle, which only exists in one newspaper clipping.  Hurrah, I cried, This will finish off all my cocoa, and Alton’s always fantastic! Do you want to tell me why I ended up with nothing remotely special after having to spend two hours deciphering an incoherent garble of directions, then getting up close and personal with my oven in fifteen, ten and five minute increments for nearly two more hours?

The ingredient list and instructions on the Food Network site were so unclear that I had to look up the episode on YouTube just to get started.  I then discovered that the posted recipe not only was a mess on its own terms, but actively contradicted what was in the episode and obliterated all the methodological details that were supposedly critical.  I should have heeded the warning signs and cut my losses there, but I had faith in you.  I made two minor changes, adding nuts and a handful of chocolate chips that also needed eliminating, but otherwise I did exactly what you said, and lived to regret it.

Oh, I’m not saying they weren’t tasty.  They just weren’t by any possible metric better than my preferred Cook’s Illustrated recipe, which makes twice as many identically cacaorrific brownies in a third of the time, with half the equipment and none of the headache.

It’s brownies, my darling bespectacled food geek, not croquembouche. There isn’t supposed to be this much sweat equity involved in baking a simple bar cookie, and certainly not for this little payoff.  I suspect you just got a little too clever for your own good, the way you did with that unsalvageable pie crust recipe. (Apple juice concentrate? Spray bottles?  Not even Shirley Corriher came up with that many hoops to jump through.)  You thought straightforward good eats wasn’t going to be flashy enough, right?  So you threw the entire bag of tricks at a humble little American classic and it collapsed under the weight.

If that’s what it was, I have to say I’m a little disappointed in you.  I can watch Iron Chef for the fun of pyrotechnic excess I have no desire to reproduce, plus the occasional thrill of seeing Bobby Flay receive a well-deserved smackdown.  The only thing you need to do to deserve my undying affection is give me recipes for yummy food that make my life easier because they work.

If, instead of that, it was the geniuses at the Food Network pushing through an episode that wasn’t ready and letting some intern half-ass the transcription for the website, then that’s exactly the exacting attention to detail and dedication to quality control that lost me as a viewer, you tools.

So anyway, thanks for using up all my remaining cocoa, but no thanks for giving me a recipe that was this big a pain in the ass.  I’m going back to the America’s Test Kitchen people for my brownies.  Chris Kimball may not make my heart flutter the way you do, but at least he and his obsessive-compulsive crew have never let me down.

Cut while warm? More like mangle while warm.

Consolidated Cocoa Brownies with Walnuts and Milk Chocolate
(Modified by necessity from Alton Brown’s Cocoa Brownies)
Makes 16 brownies

1 cup walnut pieces
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 1/4 cups natural (not Dutch) cocoa powder, sifted
1/2 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla paste
1 cup milk chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  Spread the walnut pieces on a baking sheet and toast until fragrant but not dark, 7-9 minutes.  Transfer to a shallow bowl to cool, and lower the oven to 300 F.

Line an 8 x 8-inch pan with nonstick foil or parchment, leaving overhang for lifting the finished brownies out easily.

Place the butter in a large glass measuring cup and melt in the microwave at half power, approximately 2 minutes.

Sift the sugars, cocoa, flour and salt into a medium bowl.

In a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, beat the eggs at medium speed until light and pale, and just barely foamy. With the mixer at low speed, slowly sift in the dry ingredients, beating until incorporated, then do the same with the vanilla paste.  Still running the mixer at low, pour in the butter in a very slow, thin stream to maintain the emulsion, the way you would add oil while making mayonnaise.  Run the mixer for 30 additional seconds after the last of the butter has gone in, then scrape down the sides and gently fold in the chips.

Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and sprinkle the toasted nuts evenly on the top. Bake for 60-90 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with just a few moist crumbs attached.  Let cool for 15 minutes in the pan, then lift them out by the overhanging foil or parchment and slice while still warm into 16 squares.  Use the foil sling to transfer the sliced brownies onto a rack and allow to cool the rest of the way.

Notes:

I’m writing this up because I really did waste four hours of my Sunday and I’ll at least have done the public service of making the recipe intelligible. I don’t recommend actually using it unless you want to practice your fat-dribbling skills and spend fully twice as long as he claimed it would take, only to get standard-issue squidgy brownies no better than your average good one-bowl version, like this one.

If you still want to try this recipe, proceed at your own risk. In contrast to the banana cake above, which, it bears repeating, you need to make right now.

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