Chocolate Chip Cookies

It’s New Year’s Eve. I’m in New Orleans. There’s a huge shindig down in Jackson Square, at least two masquerade balls, and I have no doubt that Bourbon Street is in full swing. Closer to home, I hear fireworks, and at least one of the bars in walking distance is having some kind of event.

Of course there’s more than one bar within walking distance of my apartment. There’s also a drive-through daiquiri place up the street, just in case you need a daiquiri while driving, I guess.

This city takes its holidays seriously, enough that even I feel like I might be missing out on something by staying in tonight. I mean, a masquerade? How do you pass that up? Especially given that I own a lovely venetian mask which I never have occasion to wear. But honestly, it’s a relief. There’s no need to caffeinate to keep energy up until midnight, no crowd of party-goers to shout over. And if I’d gone to a masked ball, I’d have missed out on and evening lounging on the couch in purple argyle socks, watching Blade Runner and eating seared duck and couscous.

I concede that a formal masked ball may well serve duck, but is likely to frown on the purple socks.

On an unrelated note, I made chocolate chip cookies during the insane holiday baking spree a couple of weeks ago. I never make chocolate chip cookies. Really. This is the second time since high school that it’s happened. But after all this time, I still remember exactly how it’s done.

Apparently making these cookies is like riding a bike. Even after almost ten years, muscle memory just kicks in.

Ingredients (makes 2 dozen)

16 T (2 sticks) butter

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 cup brown sugar

1 T vanilla extract

2  eggs

2 1/4 cups flour

1 1/2 t baking soda

1 1/2 t salt

1/2 t nutmeg

3 chocolate bars, preferably all different

Directions

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Cream butter in a mixer. Add sugars and continue to mix until thoroughly combined.

Forgot to take a picture with the sugar. oops.

Add eggs and vanilla and mix just to combine.

Add flour, salt, baking soda, and nutmeg, and mix again to combine.

Chop the chocolate bars. The size of the chunks is really up to you. I prefer them about 1 cm².

Add the chopped chocolate to the batter. . .

. . .and fold it in.

Then just drop the batter in about 1 1/2 tablespoon blobs onto parchment lined cookie sheets. I don’t measure. I just estimate blobs to approximately the size of a golf ball.

Bake at 375°F for 10-12 minutes. As soon as they come out of the oven, add a small pinch of kosher salt to the whole batch. It sounds crazy, I know, but just go with it. Salt is delicious.

These ones spread a bit too much. That’s okay. Ugly cookies are my specialty.

If you’re baking cookies to ship halfway across the country, do not attempt to get them bagged and shipped five minutes after they come out of the oven, even if the post office is closing in twenty minutes. You will get chocolate everywhere.

Don’t tell the recipient of your cookies if you used a nonstandard flavor of chocolate bar, either. It’s amusing to hear about an office arguing over whether the hint of flavor in the cookies is orange or coffee. It was coffee, incidentally. Coffee goes with nutmeg. If I were using orange peel or orange oil, I’d swap the nutmeg with anise and then never ever share the cookies because that combination is amazing.

Happy new year!

More GMO Notes, and a Chocolate Caramel Coffee Tart

Do you see the little “Science!” label down there on the right? After you scroll down a bit, underneath all the tasty stuff?

Exhibit A: Tasty Stuff

Those scientists and science bloggers are working hard to make foods better, safer, and more understandable for everyone else. Recently, the good folks at Biofortified have explained, in very clear terms, why GM foods don’t have any more scary genes in them than any other foods you’ve ever eaten, since of course bacteria and viruses are already everywhere, and every time you eat anything you eat the little guys and all of their genes as well. And if you still think after my earlier discussion of the subject that GM foods lead to horizontal gene transfer and presumably plant-people? The GMO Pundit explains an article that shows that a happy little beetle managed to get a useful little bacteria gene all his own, without a GMO in sight.

I know this is a food blog, and I promised chocolate, so I’ll keep this short. Basically, if you cook, you use science. You don’t have to think in terms of chemistry when caramelizing sugar, because following the protocol recipe will get you results just the same. You don’t need to know the biological mechanisms of capsiacinoids to add the heat of chile to a dish. But I think at least knowing the information is out there– and that it’s available and understandable if you’re interested whether you did well in science in school or not– is important. And hey, it’s cool! Scientists are doing things with plants and nutrition that look straight out of science fiction, and it’s brilliant. Give it a quick peek, is all I’m saying.

So now we can get back to caramelizing sugar and melting chocolate and keeping that smell in your kitchen as long as possible.  Because caramel and chocolate go together like nothing else. Because coffee makes both caramel and chocolate taste better. And because everyone should have a chocolate tart recipe. So I adapted one from David Lebovitz. I removed the flour from his filling, as mine seemed thick enough without it and I want to be able to pour it into a gluten-free crust* if we have company with Celiac. The chocolate is a tad darker in mine as well, but offset by the slightly sweeter chocolate ovals used to decorate it. And the smell in the kitchen? I turned off all air circulation in the apartment just so we could breathe it a little longer. It’s sweet and complex and full of coffee. If we could bottle that smell, I could quit my day job and just sell chocolate-caramel-coffee scented candles because who doesn’t want a dozen of those?

Ingredients (Makes 1 9-inch tart; serves 10-12. Crust adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s sweet tart dough, filling adapted from David Lebovitz’ chocolate tart)

For the crust:

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 t salt

1 t vanilla

9 T butter

1 egg

For the filling:

1 cup sugar

6 oz. espresso

8 T (1/4 lb, 1 stick, 4 oz) butter

3 oz unsweetened chocolate

3 oz bittersweet (72% +) chocolate

2 eggs at room temperature

1 T vanilla extract

optional: for a bit of heat, add 1-3 t chile powder when you add the chocolate (how much you use depends on the heat of the powder you’re using; a pinch of Habañero powder goes a lot further than a whole teaspoon of Poblano).

Directions The crust comes first, of course. To prevent it being grainy, you’ll want to use superfine sugar. To make superfine sugar, place granulated sugar in the bowl of your food processor  and run it for about 30 seconds to a minute.

Add the flour and salt and pulse briefly to combine.

Add the butter and egg (and the vanilla, not shown).

Apparently I forgot to keep taking pictures of dough making, but if you’d find them helpful it’s just about the same dough as used way back here for a lemon-blueberry tart. Sorry about that. Pulse the dough in 2-3 second bursts until it comes together in a smooth ball. Chill the dough for two hours or more, then roll it out to about 1/4 inch thick. Line a buttered 9-inch tart pan with the dough, and line the prepared crust with buttered tin foil. Add pie weights and bake with foil and weights at 375°F for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and weights and bake another 10 minutes to brown. Set aside the crust and turn the oven down to 350°F. Start the filling by caramelizing some sugar. Just pour a cup of sugar into a saucepan. . .

. . .and heat it up over medium-high heat, stirring gently, until you have thick, bubbly caramel.

Pour in the espresso and whisk vigorously to combine.

Try not to spill espresso all over the chocolate. Add the butter to the coffee-caramel mixture.

Whisk in the butter and add the chocolate.

Whisk the mixture until smooth.

Test the temperature of the mixture by dipping a spoon in it and tasting. If it’s scalding to the tongue, keep whisking until it’s merely pleasantly warm before adding your eggs. Unless of course you want scrambled eggs in you chocolate tart. When the mixture is not too hot, add the eggs.

Whisk the eggs in, giving the filling a lovely pudding-like texture, and pour it into the waiting tart shell.

Bake at 350°F for 20-22 minutes until the filling is just set but not dry or cracking. If you have any pretty chocolate pieces like these Valrhona fèves lying around, grab a handful for decorating the top. What can I say? I can’t resist the bulk chocolates at Central Market.

The texture is completely smooth, almost a warm pudding. The tart shell adds sweetness and a lovely crunch to the mixture, and the sweeter chocolates on top (only 53% cocoa) finished it out perfectly.

I didn’t cut into the tart warm, as it was a birthday tart for a co-worker and tradition dictates that the birthday boy or girl gets to cut the first slice, but I did re-heat a slice in the oven the next night and it was divine. Not that anyone complained at room temperature; there really is no comparison to a good chocolate tart.

Sadly, I can’t make or eat anything like this right now; I had my third molars removed this morning and am having a certain amount of difficulty with yogurt and mashed potatoes, let alone a delightful flaky-crisp tart shell. So eat one of these for me, okay?

* to make this a gluten-free pie or tart, simply use this filling and the gluten-free graham cracker crust found here, or any other GF crust that you like.

Meyer Lemon Tiramisu

Meyer lemons only seem to appear here for a scant few weeks every year. When they do, I buy more than I can use and cook up a storm in hopes that the lemony goodness will last me until next winter. It never does, but that’s all right because there are sweet, delicious Meyer lemons right now.

As much as I love a traditional tiramisu, coffee and chocolate seem to make the dish a bit too rich for my taste. Replacing them with lemon removes any heaviness from the dish, replacing it with a tart freshness that acts as a perfect foil to the slight sweetness of the ladyfingers. A sprinkling of  lemon zest and shaved white chocolate provide a perfect finish.

Probably the best thing about tiramisu is how easy it is to make, and how mind-bogglingly impressed people are when you make one. I buy ladyfingers pre-made, because although they’re not difficult to make, getting the sides perfectly straight isn’t a trick I’ve mastered yet, and I have no complaints about the flavor of store bought cookies. I do use raw egg, which bothers some people, but if your eggs are fresh and clean the risk of Salmonella infection is minimal. If you prefer, you can use pasteurized eggs to remove the possibility entirely.

Other than an egg and some ladyfingers, all you need is marscapone,  a touch of sugar, the juice and zest of a Meyer (or regular, if you prefer) lemon, and a splash of vodka or limoncello.

Ingredients (makes a square three-layer tiramisu, serves two)

9 ladyfingers

8 oz Marscapone cheese

1 egg

2 T sugar

juice of one Meyer lemon, divided use

2 T vodka or limoncello

zest of one Meyer lemon

white chocolate shavings, to garnish

Directions

Measure out 2 T of lemon juice.

Combine the marscapone, egg yolk, sugar, and 2 T lemon juice, and 1 T of vodka in a mixing bowl.

Mix until uniform in color and texture.

Whip the egg white to stiff peaks. Scoop the egg white over the marscapone mixture.

Fold it in gently to incorporate.

Set the bowl aside and combine the rest of the lemon juice and the remaining 1 T of vodka in a shallow dish. Dip three ladyfingers in the mixture for about 2 seconds each side, being careful not to oversaturate. You’ll know it’s oversaturated if it crumbles in your hands. Arrange the three cookies on a serving plate.

Spread about 1/3 of the marscapone mixture over the three ladyfingers. Dip the next three, add them perpendicular to the first stack (this add structural stability, like in Jenga), then another 1/3 of the marscapone mixture, and finish with the rest of the ladyfingers and marscapone.

Refrigerate until you’re ready to serve. Before serving, grate the zest of a Meyer lemon over the top of the tiramisu, and grate a bit of white chocolate over that.

The flavor is bright but not overwhelming. The lemon is present, but takes a backseat the the creaminess of marscapone and the delightful contrast of texture provided by the ladyfingers. If you want something simple and elegant for Valentines day, add a couple of raspberries for the obligatory pink color and you’re set for dessert. In any case, make this soon. It’s amazing.

 

 

Not-Quite Mary Mac’s Peanut Butter Pie

I know it’s been said about 84 million times before, but it still bears repeating: peanut butter and chocolate are made for each other. It’s Mr. B’s favorite-ever flavor combination. So you can imagine my shock when, at a delightful restaurant in Atlanta clever enough to ask you to order dessert before you eat, he went with peach cobbler.

I ordered the peanut butter pie for him. After I tried it, I wouldn’t share. It was that good. (Mary Mac’s, people. I’d move to Georgia just for this restaurant.) That pie was the sort of dessert that leads to religious conversions and serious risks of diabetes (the peach cobbler was also delightful.) It was the silky texture of a Key lime pie, and tasted more peanut-buttery than peanut butter by itself. It was an awe-inspiring dessert.

When I decided to make it at home, I had to guess. There are a million peanut butter pie recipes on the Internet, and half a dozen in my modest scary and growing cookbook collection, but none of them seemed quite right. The one I ended up making was good, but I had to go order the Mary Mac’s cookbook at the end of it, because after eating theirs a close second simply would not do.

This didn’t stop us devouring it.

Ingredients (makes one pie, serves 8-12 depending on gluttony and availability of ice cream)

For the crust:

24 Oreos

4 T melted butter

For the filling:

1 1/2 cups sugar (I’d probably use 1/2 brown sugar next time; I was out.)

1 1/4 cups peanut butter

1 8-ounce package cream cheese

1 T vanilla

1/2 t salt

4 egg yolks

1 cup heavy cream

Directions 

Preheat the oven to 300°F. Place the Oreos, filling and all, in the bowl of a food processor.

Process them until finely ground. There will probably be a few outlying chunks. I just ate them and didn’t worry about it.

Pour the crumbs into a bowl and mix in the melted butter.

Press the chocolate cookie mud into a buttered pie pan. Set the crust aside.

Place the cream cheese, peanut butter, and sugar(s) in a mixing bowl.

Mix well. The mixture will be very grainy and thick, like cookie dough.

Add the egg yolks, salt, and vanilla.

Mix them in, too. The mixture should be creamier now.

Add the cream.

And mix.

Pour the mixture into the Oreo crust.

Bake at 300°F for 40-50 minutes until the filling doesn’t slosh anymore. The filling on mine cracked and bubbled and was altogether rather evil-looking (I’d have taken pictures, but we had guests.) but it was very tasty. I think it needed less cream, maybe even none at all, to get the thicker and richer consistency.

Chill before serving. As with most pies, this only gets better with ice cream!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cookies

Who doesn’t love chocolate and peanut butter? We all have those days when you run out of Reese’s cups and find yourself smearing peanut butter over a Hershey’s bar, right?

I mean, if that weren’t normal behavior I certainly wouldn’t be admitting to it.

But low-quality chocolate candy and overly sweetened peanut butter aren’t always going to cut it. Sometimes you’ve got to have cookies, homemade and piping hot. Thank goodness for this recipe from Picky Palate.

I took one look at the peanut butter-chocolate ratio and decided it was all wrong. Chocolate is great, sure, but I’d rather have just enough to add bitterness and complexity to the peanut butter, rather than drown out all that nutty goodness with a wave of cocoa. Even with the changes I made, I think next time I’ll amp up the peanut butter even more, but these cookies are delightful. They’re gooey and sweet and oh so chocolaty. Serve them hot with ice cream and you’ll swear you never need another dessert again. Until you start looking at recipes 20 minutes later, anyway.

Ingredients (makes about 3 dozen. Recipe adapted from Picky Palate.)

1 1/2 cups peanut butter

2 sticks/16 T butter

3/4 cup granulated sugar

1 1/2 cups brown sugar, divided use*

2 eggs

1 T vanilla

1 3/4 cups flour

1 t baking soda

1 t salt

1 cup cocoa powder

1 cup chocolate chips

1 cup peanut butter chips

4 Reese’s peanut butter cups (the original sized ones. One king-size pack, in other words.)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Mix the 1 1/2 cups of peanut butter with 1/2 cup of brown sugar and put it in the freezer. Cream the butter and remaining sugar (3/4 cup granulated, 1 cup brown) together in a large bowl.

Mix in the eggs and vanilla.

Pour the flour, salt, leavening, and cocoa powder into a fine mesh sieve.

Sift all the dry ingredients into the dough.

Mix the dough well. It’s very chocolaty.

Chop the Reese’s cups into approximate 16ths.

Add the chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, and chopped Reese’s cups to the dough. Mix well.

Add the frozen peanut butter and brown sugar mixture in dollops.

Don’t use the mixer this time, just fold the peanut butter gently a few times with a spatula.

Line a couple of baking sheets with parchment paper. Place dollops (about 2 T each) of dough on the lined cookie sheets about 2 inches apart from each other. They’ll be sticky and misshapen. It’s okay. Lumpy cookies still taste nice.

Bake 15 minutes at 350°F, rotating the cookie sheets and switching their positions in the oven halfway through baking.

Let the cookies sit a few minutes before serving, or they will break in half and you will be obligated to eat the broken ones before anyone sees them. It’s in the rules. They are delightful on their own, with a few extra peanut butter chips for the peanut butter fiends in us all. . .

But they truly shine with a big scoop of ice cream. Even though I just used vanilla ice cream, it really brought out the peanut butter flavor and mellowed out the chocolate significantly. Plus, hot cookie+frozen ice cream=melted, gooey, tasty mess. One should eat all cookies this way.

Berry Meringue Pie

You may not be aware of this, because you may be summering in the Southern hemisphere or on the space station or fielding an expedition to the North Pole, but it is HOT out here in Texas. I’m talking 107°F without a cloud in sight. And since the Dallas area has some kind of religious aversion to trees, there’s not much shade to be found, either.

Times like these call for desperate measures.  For things crisp and cold topped with fresh berries and then frozen again because fresh berries just aren’t cold enough. It helps that this pie is also easy to make, enough so that I didn’t mind making it between 11:30 PM and 1:00 in the morning so that it would be nice and frozen for the fourth of July shindig I was heading to after work. Another bonus to baking in the middle of the night? It’s not so damn hot. Only about 85°F. My air conditioning can do more than growl helplessly at 85°F, even with the oven on.

I found the idea for this lovely pie here,  and my first thought was “Cool. But that looks finicky. Why not use an Italian meringue?” So I did. I also used chocolate graham crackers instead of Oreos, because I’m not allowed to have Oreos in the apartment. It isn’t safe. The filling, even at room temperature, is a pile of sticky goodness that I just wanted to eat out of the bowl (Note to everyone who ate these pies: I did not. I did, however, lick the spatula once the pies were in the freezer. And it was great.) and I’d like to try to make meringue cookies using this much berry flavor. I don’t know if that will work, though. It’s a lot of berries.

Ingredients (makes 1 9-inch pie. I doubled the recipe and made two. Each pie serves about 12.)

For the crust:

9 chocolate graham crackers

3 T granulated sugar

1/2 t salt

5 T butter (6 if your graham crackers are freakishly dry, like mine were.)

For the filling:

3 cups mixed berries (I used half blackberries and half raspberries)

1 cup sugar (divided use)

1/4 cup water

3 egg whites

extra berries, for garnish

Directions

We start with the crust. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Then you want to crush the graham crackers. There are about 84,000 ways to do this, including putting them in a bag and handing them to a husband or child, but my favorite is this.

Put them in a food processor and process until you have a fine powder. This leaves no big chunks you have to pull out and eat so no one finds them.

Add the sugar and salt to the crumbs and stir with a fork.

Then stir in 5 T of melted butter. If you can’t get a pinch of the crumbs to stick together at this point, add another tablespoon of melted butter and stir it in, too.

Press the crumb into a buttered pie dish. I forgot to butter my pie dish. This made removing pie slices complete with crust virtually impossible. Butter your pie dish, kids!

Bake the crust at 350F for about 15 minutes. Set the crust aside while you make the filling. Oh, you can turn off the oven. We’re all stove top from here on out. Rinse out your food processor and fill it with berries.

Puree!

It’s worth noting that when one doubles this recipe, the berry puree surpasses the maximum liquid fill line of a seven-cup food processor. This line is not a polite suggestion. It is the point at which your food processor starts oozing berry puree underneath the blade. On the plus side, you can use a blender if you have one, and liquify as many berries as you want.

Pour the puree into a fine mesh strainer and scrape it down until everything that isn’t a seed is in a bowl. This took me twenty minutes. I need a slightly less fine mesh strainer. You could skip this step if you are very fond of seeds, but I don’t think most people are. I can’t stand them, and obviously I represent complete normalcy with regards to taste. Set the berries aside.

Pour 3/4 cup of sugar and 1/4 cup of water into a saucepan and bring to a boil.

While the sugar starts to cook, whip the egg whites and a pinch of salt to soft peaks in a large bowl. Add the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar and continue to beat on low speed until your sugar reaches the soft-ball stage.

Oh. I don’t use (or own) a candy thermometer. The one time I used one is the one time I burned caramel. Just use your eyes. when the bubbles in your boiling sugar look lacquered and the syrup makes long thread as it drips off of the back of a spoon, it’s done. At that point, pour the boiling sugar into the egg whites. Whip the sugar and egg whites together for a long time, until the bowl is room temperature. This took me almost ten minutes. When you’re baking after midnight and have to get up for work at 5:30 the next morning, this seems like forever. I did it anyway.

Now pour the berry puree over the whipped meringue.

And fold the mixture together.

Pour the berry meringue into the pie crust.

Oops! there was some unmixed berry in the bottom of the bowl! No matter, we’re going to cover that up. Put the pie in the freezer at least 4-6 hours. Arrange 12 red raspberries and 12 white raspberries (okay, so they’re yellow. I didn’t name them) around the perimeter of the pie.

My white raspberries came with a mangled, leafy raspberry branch, so I plucked the best looking leaf and posed it under a white raspberry in the center of the pie. A mint leaf would do fine as well. Or no leaf, since no one’s going to eat it anyway.

Let it soften for 5-10 minutes before serving. It’s perfect on its own; I think whipped cream or ice cream would just be too rich and a bit redundant. I mean, it’s a frozen meringue. Do you really need to add something cold and sugary to it? If you decide it needs an accompaniment, a pile of fresh berries or a squeeze of berry puree would do nicely.

Kokosnuss Cake, or German Chocolate Cake

Coconut. My ancient foe. Why anyone would want to eat the chalky white innards of a nut that lives, smug as you please, at the top of a very non-climbing-friendly tree just waiting to detach itself and smash your car? Stupid coconuts.

But since I just can’t say no when a fierce little Russian asks for a coconut and chocolate cake for her birthday, I opened the Baked cookbook to the page I thought I’d never use.

Honestly, I’m glad I did. Not because of the coconut filling. I didn’t even deign to try that part. But the chocolate cake was revelatory. I ate the bits I had to shave off to flatten the layers for stacking, and even though those bits were all edge (the driest part of the cake, yes?) this was the moistest cake I’ve ever made. Those shavings were delightful with peanut butter. Were I less of a drama queen, I might have even enjoyed a slice of the cake. But let’s face it, I’m not going to eat coconut voluntarily.

I adapted the Baked recipe pretty heavily, which I don’t usually do. I didn’t use pecans in the filling, for one. I used milk instead of buttermilk, instant espresso powder instead of coffee, and substituted some of the granulated sugar out in favor of brown sugar. In other words, don’t blame Lewis and Poliafito if you don’t like this cake; I did change it up. But if you like coconut (or want to use a peanut-butter cream cheese frosting instead of a coconut filling), I recommend this cake. It’s so moist it needs no frosting, light enough to happily absorb liquid (you know, in case you want to soak some coffee liqueur into it) and, one of the perks of a three-layer cake, it feeds even a ravenous group quite nicely.

Ingredients (makes a 3-layer cake, serves about 12)

For the cake:

2 1/4 cups flour

3/4 cups cocoa powder

1 t baking soda

1 t baking powder

1 t salt

1 cup milk

2 1/2 sticks (20 T) butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 1/4 cups dark brown sugar

5 eggs

1 cup boiling water

3 T instant espresso powder

4 oz. dark chocolate

For the filling:

2 2/3 cups shredded coconut

1 cup sugar

1 stick (8 T) butter

1 5-oz can evaporated milk

3 oz milk

3 egg yolks

1 t vanilla extract

Directions

Line three eight-inch cake pans with parchment paper, and butter the paper and sides of the pans. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Put the dark chocolate and espresso powder into a small bowl,

and pour 1 cup of boiling water over them.  Wait 1 minute (yes, 60 whole seconds) then whisk the mixture together until smooth. Set the hot chocolate coffee aside. Try not to think how amazing it would be as a drink.

Beat the butter and sugar together, add eggs and beat again, add vanilla and beat one more time.

Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt over the butter-sugar-egg mix.

Pour the milk into the coffee-chocolate mix.

Pour the now eminently drinkable mixture over the rest of the batter and mix until homogeneous.

Pour the batter into the prepared pans and shimmy the pans around a little to get the batter even in height.

Bake about 30 minutes, and set them aside to cool while you make the filling.

For the custard, toast half the coconut. Just spread it in a sheet pan and bake for less than five minutes at 350°F.

If you don’t know how to measure 3 ounces of milk, cheat. Pout the 5-ounce can of evaporated milk into a 1 cup measuring cup. Add milk till the measuring cup is full. Tada! Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium-high heat, add the milk, sugar, vanilla, and yolks, and whisk together.

Once it starts boiling hard, pour the custard into a bowl sitting in an ice bath and whisk in the coconut, both the toasted and non-toasted half.

Stir the filling until it is room temperature. Then you’re ready to build your cake! Just level the tops of the cake layers with a bread knife, stack one on your serving plate (or just a sheet of parchment paper if you’re me), spread 1/3 of the coconut filling over the layer, stack on layer 2, add another 1/3 of the coconut, stack on the final layer, spread on the rest of the coconut, and you’re done. no frosting required. I sprinkled a handful of extra coconut over the top because I thought it looked nicer than just the cooked filling, but you don’t have to.

Enjoy on its own or with ice cream.

The Baked Brownie with Matcha Chips

I shared my matcha chip recipe yesterday. Maybe you were wondering what to do with them. Sure, you can eat them by the handful while messing around on the Internet, but honestly that’s a lot less fun than brownies.

These brownies. If you have this book, you’ll notice that my version of their brownie is heavily modified. If you don’t have this book, for goodness’ sake get it. I never think someone else’s recipe is perfect when I first make it. So as much as I drool over the pictures in Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, I couldn’t help thinking that the granulated to brown sugar ratio should really be 1:1, that it needed a touch more chocolate, and of course some matcha chips.

The results blew the original out of the water. The bitterness of tea and dark chocolate combine with the earthy sweetness of dark brown sugar and a touch of malt for brownie perfection. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still more of a blondie girl, but if I’m going to eat a brownie it will forever be a variant on this. Maybe next time I’ll kick up the malt powder and throw in a pile of Whoppers. Malt makes everything better. Except Passover.

Anyway, these brownies are more of a hassle than most (and more of a hassle than blondies. Just sayin’.) but still under twenty minutes of active kitchen time even if you’re fussing with your sad, slow camera the whole time. (Seriously. I need a new camera. Recommendations?) The results are so rich and chocolatey that you will temporarily swear off cake. Don’t worry, though. That side effect last approximately two and a half minutes, at which point someone at work will remind you that you forgot to make his lemon birthday cake a month ago and you’ll be all over that idea.

Ingredients (Makes two dozen brownies in a 9×13 pan. People will want seconds.)

12 ounces dark chocolate (I used 8 ounces Baker’s semi-sweet and 4 ounces Scharffen Berger 99% dark chocolate, because that’s what I had on hand.)

2 sticks (1/2 lb, 16 T) butter

1 T matcha powder

1 C granulated sugar

1 C dark brown sugar

5 eggs

2 t vanilla extract

1 1/4 cup flour

1 t salt

2 T cocoa powder

3 T malt powder

Directions

Step one: use a bigger double boiler than I did. Seriously, use a nice big mixing bowl and set it over a big pot of simmering water. I used the smaller of my two fondue pots (no, I was not around in the seventies; I just really like fondue) and had to stir very carefully at the end.

Heat the oven to 350°F and butter a 9×13 pan.

Once your double boiler is simmering, toss in the butter and chocolate.

I made these immediately after the matcha chips, and I didn’t see any point in washing the chocolate melting pot in between because the next step here is to add matcha to the chocolate and butter.

Stir the mixture as it melts. Make sure it’s completely smooth.

Remove the chocolate from the heat and add the sugars.

Stir the sugars in and set the mixture aside to cool a bit.

Sift your flour, salt, cocoa powder, and malt powder into a separate bowl.

Go back to the chocolate mixture and add the eggs and vanilla.

Stir the eggs in. This was the hard part for me and my tiny fondue pot. I’m shocked that I didn’t get chocolate and egg everywhere.

If you used a good-sized pot for the chocolate, dump the dry ingredients on top and fold them in. Don’t over-stir. Fold in the matcha chips as well, and pour the batter into your prepared 9×13 pan.

Bake for about 30 minutes at 350°F. Now, with matcha powder in the batter, and matcha chips dotting the brownies, there’s only one logical serving choice.

Matcha ice cream. Just a bit. After all, we wouldn’t want to overdo it.

Matcha Chips for Matcha Desserts

I saw these almost a month ago and proceeded to forget about the idea for all this time, until I found myself sneaking a tablespoon of malt powder into my matcha tea one morning. The idea of a baked matcha dessert came back in force, and I had no choice but to make my own. You would not believe how easy these are, and how fun! Okay, so I didn’t make most of them very pretty or chip-like. How am I supposed to bypass the allure of the star tip for the humble round?

So easy. So full of bitter tea flavor, sweetened beyond all reason with the creamy tang unique to cocoa butter. I dare you to resist.

Ingredients

 

5 ounces white chocolate (I used Callebaut, because yum.)

1 tablespoon matcha powder

That’s it.

Directions

Bring water to simmer in a double boiler*. Chop white chocolate (because greater surface area to volume ratio leads to more efficient heat transfer into the chocolate) and scoop it into the double boiler.

Stir the  chocolate as it melts until it is nice and smooth.

Get out the gorgeous green powder. . .

. . . and dump it on top.

Stir it together. The green of the matcha will remain surprisingly undiluted by the chocolate.

Scoop the melted chocolate into a piping bag or one of these fun doohickies.

Pipe in itsy little bursts onto a parchment lined sheet. Most of mine came out sideways or too big or too small, but that’s okay; they’re getting put into brownies, anyway. No one will know. Unless you tell them on the Internet.

Put the sheet of matcha chips in the refrigerator or freezer to set while you make whatever cookies or brownies or quick bread you want to add matcha to. I made brownies. Banana bread would be unbelievably fantastic with tea in it, though, don’t you think?

*Alright. I know everyone and their mother, including my mother, uses the microwave to melt chocolate. I don’t. The reason I usually give for this is that I find the process of stirring delightful aromatic stuff and things relaxing. This is true. I like making polenta and risotto, too.

But there’s another reason.

When I was eleven, there was an incident with the microwave. I was for some reason left home alone. With most eleven-year-olds, this is probably safe behavior. With me, probably not. You see, I found myself alone in the house with a microwave and a bag of marshmallows.

Maybe you already know where this was going.

I put a marshmallow on a paper plate and nuked it. It expanded. It melted. It was delicious.

So I decided to go a little further.

I piled eight or ten marshmallows on my plate, and set the microwave again. For a long time. I think I decided that if one marshmallow needed X seconds to melt, then ten marshmallows would require 10X seconds. This is untrue in nearly all culinary situations, and disastrously so in this one.

Of course I left the room at this point, and of course when I returned to the kitchen and my brilliant creation, I found the microwave filled with a steaming substance I can only describe as marshmallow concrete.

I spent the next two hours alternating between chipping at the mess with a fork and scrubbing it with a very wet sponge to melt it. I somehow got the thing clean before my parents got home, which is especially shocking because as a young corvid I had the attention span of a grouse in a field full of grasshoppers, and usually had to be yelled at about half a dozen times before I would clean my own room. The intense focus of this instance came from utter conviction that my parents were going to eviscerate me or at the very least sell my organs to pay for a new microwave.

And I’ve never told them until now.

And yeah, I’m still worried I might be in trouble.

That is why I do not trust microwaves. I use them as little as I can get away with.

Sorry about the microwave, Mom.

Ice Cream Sandwiches

I defy anyone to resist these. It’s almost midnight as I’m writing this, but after a tiring day at the renaissance fair (I know, my life is so hard, right?) in Texas heat all I wanted was to eat these. Not just one. A whole plateful. I was that hungry and that overheated. Unfortunately, as we’ve just discussed, my life is terribly difficult because instead of making another batch of these and scarfing them down, I had to go see Thor with my friends. Also, I should probably get to the food part instead of just admitting to a bunch of people on the Internet (not to mention my mother) that I’m an irredeemable geek. Sorry mom! For those of you who don’t live 1,262 miles from your mothers, these would be a great treat for mother’s day.  (No, seriously. I checked on Google Earth. 1,262 miles. It’s 1,270 to my dad’s house. That’s really, really far away.) For those of you who are mothers, but your kids are lame/far away/vegans, these are super easy to make and contain enough chocolate to cheer you up. (Psst, mom: Tell your other daughter to cook them. But I still get good kid points, okay?)  

Ingredients (makes 36 cookies, therefore 18 cookie sandwiches, but still about 2 dozen servings. I brought these to work and most people cut the sandwiches in half. I don’t blame them; these cookies are enormous.) For the cookies:

16 T (2 sticks, 1/2 pound) butter

1 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs

1 t vanilla extract

1/3 cup Nutella

1 cup cocoa powder*

1 3/4 cups flour

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1/2 t salt

1/3 cup cocoa nibs or chocolate chips (optional)

For the cookie sandwiches:

1 quart ice cream

1/2 cup cocoa nibs, chocolate chips, or espresso beans (optional)

Directions Preheat the oven to 350°F. Cream the butter well, then add the sugars and mix them in. Add eggs, vanilla, and Nutella and mix again. Sift in cocoa powder, flour, baking powder and soda, and salt. I know it’s a lot of chocolate. That is a very good thing. Do not fight it. Mix everything well and stick the dough (which I did not take a picture of, sorry) in the fridge for ten or twenty minutes. This dough is incredibly sticky, and it’s much easier to manipulate when it’s chilled. Form the dough into about 2-tablespoon sized balls and arrange them on parchment lined baking sheets. I don’t always use parchment for cookies, but again, these guys are sticky. You probably want to line ‘em up. I had fun squashing each dough ball with the heel of my palm, but I doubt it’s necessary. These cookies need no encouragement to spread nicely. Incidentally, Mr. B said the dough balls looked like cow patties. He added, in case I wasn’t sure, that they looked gross. He was surprised, for some reason, when I threatened not to share the poor insulted cookies with him. Don’t insult the cookies, okay? Bake at 350°F for 8-10 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through if you suspect, as I do, that your oven cooks unevenly. These develop lovely cracked surfaces, and I kind of wish I had dusted the dough balls with powdered sugar to enhance the effect. Just look how nice they are! Now we just need to turn these things: into sandwich form. First I froze the plate of cookies, to minimize melting of ice cream while I prepared things. Yes, I’m going to keep showing you cookie pictures. I can’t get over how pretty these cookies are. Scoop some ice cream into a bowl and mix with cocoa nibs or chocolate chips or whatever other textural filling you want to use. Sorry, I can’t bring myself to measure ice cream. Just use an amount. Plop a generous scoop (still not measuring) of ice-cream mixture onto a cookie, top with another cookie, and smoosh the two cookies together. Repeat until all of the cookies are sandwiched. I used raspberry sherbet for most of the sandwiches, but made a few coffee ones as well. The nibs add a delightful bitter crunch to the filling, but I understand that there are people out there who do not like cocoa nibs. The cookies need to be kept in the freezer (obviously) until you’re ready to serve. I made sure to freeze my serving plate as well, because they had to survive a 20 minute drive to work on a rather hot day. *Yes, this recipe calls for a whole cup of cocoa powder. I use Hershey’s special dark, because it’s both palatable and cheap. I won’t use regular Hershey’s cocoa powder, because it has a chalky aftertaste and believe me, when you’re using it in this quantity, you will notice it. I’ve used Valrhona before, and would do so consistently if it weren’t (a) expensive and (b) only available, as far as I know, at Sur La Table which is like a twenty-five minute drive from both work and home and I am really, really lazy. Plus, if I go into a Sur La Table for cocoa powder I will leave with a pile of other things I don’t actually need and my kitchen will officially explode from its inability to contain all the stuff I try to fit into its poor little cabinets. Also, if you want a comparison of cocoa powders, I recommend this here, which is way more put together and informative than anything I could ever do, even if I were willing to buy 17 different kinds of cocoa powder and consume them each in shot form. Which I am not.