Goes together like…

tipple and cookies

A friend who has very discerning tastes in matters of, well, taste, gave me this combination as a gift, suggesting that they’re best consumed together. I couldn’t wait, of course, and tore into the cookie package and had one (numnumnum..what Bing marshmallow experiment?). You don’t have to sell me on salt or brown butter; I make the latter just to have on hand, in case I get inspired. The cookie was scrumptious, but almost the tiniest tad bit too salty (and I like salt! Despite what all those nutritionists have told me during interviews over the years…).

A couple of days later, I did right by her recommendation.

grown-up snack time

And…balance achieved! The sweet, thick port offset the buttery cookies; I could feel the liquid dissolving the salt crystals, a perfect flavor amalgam of richness and bite. I felt like I had made something by having the combination, too, like how Seinfeld used to say about dumping milk into cereal. How’s that for accomplishment.

I’ve been told by pro food people that chocolate and wine don’t go together—both are acidic and mute each other’s flavors—but this is the cocoa-and-wine combo you can get away with and enjoy.

Do it!

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What cookies do you see in your near future?

hazelnut kipferls

Alright, my holiday-baking friends: what doughs are you elbow deep in right now? Mexican wedding cake cookies? Pignolis? Or the gool ‘ol classic gingersnaps? If I can muster up the energy, I might whip up a batch or two of some hazelnut kipferls, which are lip-smacking cookies that don’t have a big enough presence in my life. Come find me sometime during Xmas day, and I might just have a few leftover. You better hope that there’s not another foot-tall snowfall, because you might just go weak-kneed after tasting these and then you won’t be able to get home. Which is fine, because I’ve missed you for the past four months and we can spend some QT together.

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Eating raw cookie dough…

…can take a toll (ha ha) per the news about Nestle’s recall and the e. coli outbreak. Seriously, though, e. coli is no laughing matter, and food-borne illnesses happen too often these days: ground beef, spinach, onions, peanut butter, and so on. “Shiga-toxin? It’s the shits,” my ServSafe Food Safety instructor once alliterated. Happy to see, though, that New York State is not in the yellow on this outbreak map…yet.

Tubes of cookie dough encased in sausage-casing plastic make me sad. No one’s life can be that busy or saved that much by convenience. Why not make it yourself, and as a bonus, sidestep the diarrhea? It’s the easiest recipe—takes five minutes to throw together. You can leave out the eggs, even, and eat it raw without consequences.  Do it for your tummy.

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Me not *eat* cookies, me *make* cookies

Salted shortbread cookies wearing chocolate pants

I spent Saturday morning tempering chocolate for these salted shortbread cookies (above), which will be a part of a cookie plate at a luncheon my sister is hosting.

It reminded me why I like to consume chocolate, not temper it. It seems like a pretty simple process—take it up to 122 degrees, bring it down to 81, then take it back up to 86—but it sometimes doesn’t work out and you have no idea why. Is it humidity? Barometric pressure? Sometimes it just likes to be mercurial and you must try and try again and conquer it.

Taste-wise, there’s a playful balance here between the salt and the sweet and the chocolate. I could give you the recipe, but then I’d have to kill you. I kid! If you’d like it, please write me.

I also made Martha Stewart’s carrot cake cookies with cream cheese icing for the plate. You can get the recipe online or in the book.

Sea of carrot cookies

I’m generally against the idea of and weirded out by carrot cake (‘Why is there a vegetable in my cake??’) but these are plain delicious. The cookies are chewy, and the sweetness of the icing is just right, plus I used really flavorful (and happened to be organic) carrots and golden raisins. I took some to a gathering after (related post coming) and friends gobbled them up.

The third part of the cookie plate were sesame tuiles. They’re normally light and thin and crispy, but I didn’t take any photos as they turned out, er, not so light, thin, and crispy. To get them looking perfect, you need a tuile template, or an infinite amount of patience to spread the batter evenly in a uniform shape on the Silpat. But after the chocolate, the tuiles were an uphill battle. Here’s to hoping the shortbread and carrot cookies will distract the guests.

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Report, as promised

Break time!

These are great everyday cookies. They won’t knock your socks off like a special-occasion City Bakery or a Jacques Torres chocolate chip cookie (I’m still waiting to try that recipe), but they surely do you right when you need one, right about…now.

The cookie part is buttery and crumbly, and there’s something for everyone (that really means all the voices in my head) with the mix of the different kinds of chocolate chips.

And I will lay off the Mark Bittman for a bit…at least for a week.

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Mark Bittman’s Chocolate Chunk Cookie Dough

What other sight promises more comfort?

From the May 5th “Freeze That Thought” story in the Times. Contrary to popular belief, something can be frozen and still be fresh. Of course, freezing has its limits, too, like that unidentifiable piece of meat that’s now encrusted with an icy fur coat (…is it…breathing??!). But the freezer is a very valuable tool to bakers. You can freeze cookie and eclair doughs, for instance, for at least a couple of weeks, even months, and the day you bake them you can call tell your friends “Fresh Baked!” and you wouldn’t be lying. Nearly magical!

I fussed only with the chocolate content here: 1/3 milk chocolate chips, 1/3 bittersweet chocolate chips, and 1/3 unsweetened chocolate, because I like it extra bitter to offset the sweetness of the dough—matches my emotional makeup, and indecisiveness. I once watched a demo by Alain Sailhac, former chef at Le Cirque and now dean at FCI, and he said some chefs taught him to fully peel rhubarb and others told him not to peel rhubarb at all, so he now just peels half of it. So, can’t decide between milk, bittersweet, semisweet, or unsweetened? Throw them all in there!

Will bake off and report soon.

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Toodloo for today

I sincerely would love to sit here in this still, cramped corner in a small NYC apartment and provide some sort of pastry-related distraction to you, dear, lovely, patient readers. Alas, I have a long list of to-dos, and a tic, itching to check all the boxes off. Whether any of the list items will bring me money in the long run I don’t know for now, but here’s to hoping.

In the meanwhile, I will leave you with this photo hodge-podge.

In season now, strawberries at the farmer’s market. Hellooooo fruit tarts and jam and muddled strawberry-rhubarb cocktails.

At Philips Farm on Saturdays

This swan holds half a cup of sugar:

Once, it was an ugly-duckling cup measure

And lastly, a word to the wise: Do not add a cocktail mixer as a substitute for actual liqueur to flavor macaron batter. I learned the hard way this weekend, thinking this below would suffice for cassis. But it was fun, eating macarons like those candy buttons that come stuck on paper.

When life gives you lemons, make like candy buttons

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…and everything nice

Orange Chai Spice Cookies

Inspirations can come from strange places, and this one is a hybrid, from two different sources. One, a recipe for chai spice shortbread cookies that I’ve adapted from a Lever House recipe. It doesn’t use the tea, but just the spices in chai. Being extremely caffeine-sensitive but chai-loving (don’t get me started about how hard it is to find house-brewed chai here even in NYC), these provide the fix sans the shakes.

Two, a Leonard Cohen song lyric. This one’s on loop a lot in my head. I know I’m not crazy because Hamilton Leithauser from the band The Walkmen had a side-project called “Tea and Oranges” covering LC songs. And at the risk of sounding too cornball, have you ever had tea and an orange together? It tastes perfect, like you’re not missing anything. Not even cake.

So this cookie was an organic (orangic?) marriage of the zest of an orange with the idea and flavor of tea. Perfect for a cool, cloudy afternoon when you’re feeling sullen and want a little brightness and spice.

Ingredients:

Zest of 1 orange [Use a super light touch with your Microplane. A chef told us in school that zested citrus should “look and feel like suede” when finished with no pith showing. That somewhat poetic description stuck with me.]

2 sticks of room-temperature butter

1 egg yolk

2 cups of flour

1 cup of confectioners sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp cardamom

1/4 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp salt

To make:

In a mixing bowl, combine the zest and butter and let it sit for awhile (you can do this step first, and then measure out all the other ingredients). Add egg yolk and paddle until the mixture is light and fluffy.

In a separate bowl, mix together the sugar, flour, all the spices, and salt. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture in three batches, and mix until just incorporated.

Roll into logs about 1 to 1-1/2 inches wide, roll in plastic wrap, and chill in the freezer for a half hour (you can keep the dough frozen for a week or two if you don’t want to bake right away). While they freeze, preheat oven to 350. When ready, cut into 1/4 inch-thick slices and bake on parchment paper for 7-10 minutes or until slightly shy of golden around the edges.

Yield: About two dozen cookies.

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October in Paris

Le Tour Eiffel, out of focus

It’s a given that all people obsessed with food should go to Paris or spend a chunk of time there (or the rest of France, too) to acquaint the self with all matters surrounding it: the history, culture, preparation techniques that’s been well-documented for centuries, les marches en plein air. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then whereever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” He probably meant a lot more than just food (sex, booze, terse but profound conversations, hunting?), but we’ll just stick to food for our purposes.

I had never been until last October (sad, right?) until the boyfriend bought us plane tix as a pastry school graduation present. I felt so lucky! I set out to have pretty much everything we had ever covered in classes, a tall order for my blood sugar level, as we only had four days.

A hearty piece of chocolate tarte, with tar-thick ganache—almost the consistency of caramel—from Chez Michel in the 6th arrondissement capped off our post-arrival meal:

We stopped by Laduree on Champs-Elysee, but it was like Grand Central in there (mostly women with fancy bags and sharp elbows, dangerous). Plus I realized the cost of one Laduree macaron was half of what I had in my bank account, so I ended up settling for the less glossy and hyped but pretty good Dalloyau ones. They were properly crispy on the outside, and chewy on the inside, with buttercream fillings. I ate most of the contents below before I remembered to take a picture—oops! Getting better at that all the time.

I think I planned the trip around stops at Poilane. I had never had a croissant so airy, so ethereal. The layers of the puff inside it just disappeared as soon as they hit the tongue. We also bought a box of punitions, the crunchy shortbread cookies sold there, to save for the journey home.

Then there was this leek and seafood quiche we bought at a bakery off Rue Lepic near Montmartre, with a satisfying, thick crust.

There was also a tarte aux pommes from La maison Kayser, but the photo is really bad so I’ll spare you. But feel free to drool at this snapshot of profiteroles in chocolate sauce from a great dinner we had at Brasserie Lipp:

In true BWD fashion, though, the trip was equal parts bitter and sweet—personal conflicts surfaced, plus it was so short. C’est dommage. Mais que sera, non?

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Cookies don’t get much better than these.

Fresh out of the oven

I first made these Croq-Tele cookies a couple of months ago after stumbling upon the recipe in a book called Paris Sweets by Patricia Wells, which I took out from the library at The French Culinary Institute (I was a student there). The description had me at “salted cookie”—I love anything that tries to balance sugar with salt, as long as it’s not, you know, orbs of pretention some schmancy restos try to sell.

I tried to Google it then, and it was only October, mind you—but it yielded no searches. But since The New York Times included it in a story before last Christmas on butter, I’ve found a lot more searches on it in the Interweb. I’ve yet to come across a bakery selling/making them, though, and I don’t know why—it’s everything you want in a snack: buttery, nutty, salty, sweet, crunchy. (“Croq-Tele” means TV-snack, but I wouldn’t want to mindlessly chomp on these, the way I tend to do with, say, popcorn.) I’ve broken down its parts there, but the sum is surely greater than those five adjectives.

I whipped up a batch today to wait out the rain (and wait to hear back from pitches I’ve sent out, sigh), and for a friend who’s moving to Austin. Maybe they’ll sustain her while she packs up.

First, combine the first three ingredients in a bowl: a 3/4 cup blend of nut flours (hazelnut and almond flours*, I used 50-50), 1/2 cup sugar, and 3/4 teaspoon of sea salt (I used some flaky Fleur de Sel a friend brought from France–merci, ami!).

Both recipes I’ve looked at are essentially the same, and they say to use a food processor. I can barely fit a Brita on my countertop and thus don’t own one, so I just go to town and mix well with my (clean) hand.

Then mix 1 cup flour and 7 tablespoons cold butter together til it looks sandy. I used the Chef-favorite Plugra today, but have had really yummy results with Beurremont (ha ha, get it??) butter.

Then combine the two mixtures together until some clumps form. Wrap it in plastic wrap and chill for at least half hour.

After the beauty rest, form them into small rounds. Mine have gotten a little Super-sized over time—about an inch diameter, an, er, un version Americain. Patricia Wells advises “the size of cherries.”  Also, they’re supposed to be a little irregular in shape (but anal me, I like my cookies very uniform).  Place them an inch apart on parchment-lined baking sheet, and bake at 350 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes, or until it’s just golden around the edges.

Croq, croq, crunch

Here’s the link to the Times recipe.

*You can buy almond flour (not really “flour” per se, but blanched, ground almonds) at the supermarket, but hazelnuts you will have to toast and grind yourself. You can use all almond flour, or 75 almond-25 hazelnut. It’s ALL good.

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