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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Psst! Wanna Know a Secret?

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

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

Ready? Here it is:

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

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

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

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

Honey Apricot Pecan Cookies, Perfected
Makes 5-6 dozen

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

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

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

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

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The Return of Sunday Baking: German Chocolate Cupcakes

I won’t even bother with the usual feeble attempt at excusing the lags in blogging. Let’s just look at the pretty picture and forget all about it, OK? Right, moving on…

This lovely little morsel evolved out of my interest in this recipe, which I ran across mid-week and knew I wanted to try over the weekend. I love dulce de leche and I love coconut, so the idea of combining them was irresistible. I stocked up on coconut milk and happily boiled away until I had two and a half cups of caramel, which was…

…to be honest, not everything I had hoped for. I had wanted a clean coconut and caramel flavor, but the brown sugar flavor was a bit overwhelming and it imparted a less than stunning greyish cast to the finished gel. It was still tasty, though, and I still love the idea, so I might try it again soon with white sugar instead.

In the meantime, I had two and a half cups of this interesting goo. In trying to find uses for it, it occurred to me that the taste and texture were very much like the filling for German chocolate cake, only more coconutty. A few quick mental hops later, I had pulled together the following recipe by adapting one of my favorite old-fashioned chocolate fudge cake recipes, from Scharffen Berger’s house cookbook, The Essence of Chocolate. I carried the coconut theme even further by substituting coconut milk for the heavy cream in the frosting, which worked seamlessly. Since coconut milk is shelf-stable and always in my cupboard, unlike cream, which I have to make special trips for, I will probably do this all the time in the future.

As I discovered when I brought them to work this morning, German chocolate cake has a massive fan base. There are a fair amount of steps involved here, but these were such a huge hit that I will definitely pull out the recipe for special occasions. If you’re so inclined, you can turn this back into a full-sized cake by following the baking instructions for the original recipe.

German Chocolate Cupcakes

Makes 36

For the coconut caramel:
2 14-ounce cans unsweetened coconut milk
1 1/2 cups light brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

For the coconut ganache:
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 cup unsweetened coconut milk
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the cupcakes:
2 cups granulated sugar
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup natural cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup canola oil
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons espresso powder
1 cup boiling water

For the coconut-pecan topping:
1 cup coconut caramel
1 1/2 cups pecans
1 1/2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut

To make the caramel:

Whisk ingredients together in large heavy pot over medium heat until sugar has dissolved and mixture comes to a boil. Lower heat and simmer vigorously, stirring occasionally, until mixture has thickened to a caramel texture and reduced to approximately 2 1/2 cups, about 30-40 minutes.

Transfer to glass jars and cool completely. Cover and refrigerate once cool.

To make the ganache:

In a heavy saucepan, combine the sugar and coconut milk and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat and simmer for 6 minutes.

Remove from heat, add the chocolate and butter and stir until melted. Pour into a bowl and stir in the vanilla. Cool until thickened to a spreadable consistency.

To make the cupcakes:

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line 3 cupcake tins with paper liners.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the sugar, flour, cocoa, salt, baking powder, and baking soda on low speed.

In a liquid measuring cup, mix together eggs, oil and milk. Add liquid ingredients to mixer and beat on medium speed for 2 minutes.

Dissolve espresso powder in boiling water. Reduce mixer to low speed and add water mixture, blending just until a very liquid batter forms.

Ladle batter into lined cupcake tins, filling each cup just over half full. Bake for 20 minutes, or until tester inserted into a cupcake comes out clean. Remove from oven and allow to cool completely in tins.

To finish the cupcakes:

While the cupcakes are cooling, spread the pecans and the coconut on separate quarter-sheet pans and toast in the oven for 10-15 minutes, until pecans are fragrant and coconut is pale gold. Stir midway through toasting to prevent the coconut from burning. Set aside to cool while frosting the cupcakes.

Frost each cupcake with a generous amount of ganache, then set aside briefly to set up while finishing the topping.

Chop pecans medium-coarsely and mix together with coconut and approximately one cup of the caramel, or just enough to bind the pecans and shredded coconut together. Top each cupcake with a large scoop of the sticky mixture, and serve.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging: Memory Quest Edition

When we were students, His Lordship and I used to frequent a bakery that specialized in cookies, not high-impact cookies like tuiles or madeleines, but homey, chock-full-of-bits variations on the basic chocolate chip cookie. They were all unassumingly wonderful, but there was one for which His Lordship, who can otherwise take or leave desserts, would take regular detours. It was a honey-apricot-pecan cookie, moist and chewy because of the honey and full of nuts and fruit, and despite the fact that we’d buy a pound of them at a time, they never seemed to last until the next day.

We finished school and moved away, and then the bakery closed, depriving His Lordship of the opportunity to buy them ever again. Since he never stopped pining for them, I decided to try reproducing them at home, and began a long and occasionally frustrating quest for the right recipe. I began by trying to modify a standard chocolate chip cookie with nuts, exchanging some of the sugar for honey and replacing the chocolate with the apricots, assuming that that’s what the bakery had done. The taste was fine, but the texture was wrong. His Lordship wanted it to be chewier, and to have a more pronounced honey flavor. Since nothing I could do to a basic creamed-butter dough would produce the level of chewiness he wanted, I decided to switch the paradigm to a modified ginger cookie instead, which had the double virtue of built-in chewiness and one-for-one substitutability of honey for molasses. Using the same basic recipe underlying the five-spice and bourbon-infused cookies I previously posted, I added a cup each of chopped pecans and dried apricots. His Lordship proclaimed the results closer than any of my previous attempts, and they’ve been a big hit with family, friends and coworkers as well.

I appear to be on the right track, but I’m still not perfectly satisfied. Although the combination of flavors and the level of chewiness are right, they still spread quite a lot, producing a much flatter cookie than the one I remember, and, if not watched carefully, they over-brown and become almost praline-like. I’ve tried increasing the proportion of nuts and apricots to add more structure, thoroughly chilling (even pre-freezing) the dough, lowering the baking temperature, and making sure to remove the cookies from the oven while just barely golden. All of this has helped, but not enough. I’m starting to suspect that I may need to play around with adding extra flour for additional support. Next time, I will try increasing it by a quarter of a cup, to see if that makes any difference. In the meantime, it’s still a damn good cookie, even if it can still use a bit more refining, so I’m putting up the in-progress recipe. Keep watching this space for ongoing installments of the Great Cookie Quest.

Honey Apricot Pecan Cookies
Makes approx. five dozen

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup strong-flavored honey
1 large egg
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups pecans, coarsely chopped
1 1/2 cup dried apricots, coarsely chopped

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

Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt.

Melt the butter and place in a large mixing bowl, allowing it to cool to room temperature. Once cool, add the granulated sugar, honey, egg, and vanilla, and mix well. Add the sifted dry ingredients and stir until barely blended, then stir in the pecans and apricots. Cover the bowl and chill thoroughly.

Scoop out the cookie with a tablespoon-sized scoop and place two inches apart on the cookie sheets. Bake 9-10 minutes, until just beginning to turn golden. Immediately slide the cookies, parchment and all, onto a cooling rack and leave to cool completely and set up.

Notes: Next time, I will try increasing the flour by 1/4 cup to see what that does, and I will probably also increase the amount of nuts and apricots again.

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Sunday Night Cookie Blogging

For some reason, I always develop a mad desire to bake on Sundays. Maybe it’s a desperate attempt to stave off Monday for a little longer, or perhaps it’s just that Sundays are the only day of the week I really have the leisure to bake, since Saturdays are usually taken up with errands and eating out and movies and the million other things you feel you have to cram into your two days off. By Sunday night, you’ve given up on having the time of your life, and you’re happy to settle for the small and quiet pleasures you can fit into those last few hours.

Since even I am not ambitious enough to bake a cake or eclairs at the last minute and for just two people, it’s almost inevitably cookies that I end up making on Sundays. Cookies are fast, easy, and endlessly varied, so I can usually indulge whatever particular craving I have with ingredients I already have on hand. The other nice thing about cookies is that I can bake as many as I think the Lord and I will actually eat, and put the rest of the dough in the freezer for another day. Most of the time, I end up freezing half the batch and taking all but about a half-dozen of the baked cookies to work with me on Monday, which provides the dual benefit of getting all of those calories out of the house and ingratiating me to the coworkers.

(I’m a firm believer in the power of bribery through baked goods. I have shamelessly exploited my ability to bake on many an occasion, and I’m convinced that it was a flourless chocolate cake made with an entire jar of Nutella that really started the ice breaking with Lord Disdain’s extended family, which had previously spent a long time pretending I didn’t exist. If, like me, you are lacking in a certain degree of social finesse, you can’t go wrong by getting in the habit of bringing attractively-packaged homemade carb-loaded treats to gatherings.)

Tonight, I felt like chocolate, so I flipped through my latest favorite baking book, The Village Baker’s Wife, and found a recipe for Triple Chocolate Chunk Cookies: chocolate cookies with pecans and semisweet and white chocolate chunks. Since I’m not a great fan of white chocolate, I decided to substitute the Guittard butterscotch chips I bought a few weeks ago on a whim, thinking that the chocolate, pecan, and butterscotch combination would be reminiscent of turtle candies. The raw dough was absolutely divine; it tasted like a very thick chocolate cake batter or buttercream frosting. The baked cookies are very fudgy and brownie-like, especially if you underbake them slightly. They’re really, really rich, though, so the three dozen I’ve baked so far will be going to work tomorrow, and the remaining half of the dough will be portioned out with my miniature ice cream/cookie scoop and put into freezer bags for the next time I have last-minute guests or a frantic chocolate craving that the cocoa recipe can’t satisfy.

Turtle Cookies
(makes approximately 6 dozen)

7 oz semisweet chocolate
1 cup butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
8 oz semisweet chocolate chips
8 oz butterscotch chips
1 1/2 cups pecans, toasted and finely chopped

Preheat oven to 325F.

Chop the 7 oz of chocolate with a serrated knife and melt, either in a double boiler or in the microwave. (If the latter, use 20-second increments and stir between blasts to make sure that you don’t burn the chocolate.) Let cool slightly.

Cream the butter and sugars together in a mixer until fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, incorporating the first one thoroughly before adding the second one, then the vanilla and melted chocolate, mixing until blended.

Mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together, and add it to the creamed mixture in two or three batches, being careful not to over-mix. With a spatula or spoon, stir in the chips and pecans.

With a spoon or cookie scoop, drop 2 tablespoons of the dough onto parchment-lined baking sheets, leaving two inches between scoops. Bake for 13 minutes.

Notes: Next time, I might reduce the quantity of chips and chop the pecans more coarsely. I prefer a cookie with chips in it to a mass of chips and nuts bound by a web of dough, and this recipe is pretty close to my overload point. I bet kids would love the fully-loaded version, though. One advantage to being so chip-heavy is that the dough doesn’t spread very much, so you don’t have to be overly scrupulous about spacing with these cookies.

This recipe makes a huge amount of dough. You could probably get away with halving it if you’re not in the mood to feed an army or stockpiling for a cookie emergency.

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Last weekend’s Sunday cookie was almond macaroons, because I had three egg whites left over from making an egg yolk-based frozen honey mousse (about which I’ll blog separately when I have a moment, as it was an object lesson in Choosing Your Ingredients Carefully ). These cookies, from Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat, come in handy whenever I have egg whites to get rid of immediately but don’t want to bother with meringues, pavlovas, or anything else that will require getting out the Kitchenaid. They’re also great last-minute lazy treats, provided you have ground nuts on hand.

Almond Macaroons
(makes three to four dozen)

2 1/4 cups ground almonds
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
3 egg whites
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons almond extract
Slivered almonds or blanched whole almonds for decoration

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Combine the ingredients into a thick paste, and drop with a small cookie scoop or two spoons onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Press a few almond slivers or a whole blanched almond into each cookie, and bake for 20 minutes, or until set on the outside but slightly soft when pressed. Allow to cool on a rack before eating.

Notes: Trader Joe’s now carries ground almonds (and, sporadically, ground hazelnuts, which also work beautifully here if you substitute vanilla extract or Frangelico for the almond extract), which makes this recipe practically effortless. If you can’t find pre-ground nuts, you can make your own in a food processor by processing whole nuts with a few tablespoons of sugar, taken from the quantity required in the recipe, until finely ground. The sugar acts as an abrasive and makes sure the nuts maintain a flour-like consistency, preventing them from turning into nut butter.

The original recipe used two egg whites. I’ve scaled it up to three, since I had three whites to use up.

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