One-bowl Chocolate Chip Cranberry Walnut Cookies

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How long does it take to make cookies, start to finish?  Pruitt and I decided to challenge ourselves one night.  Our motivation: a half-baked order of cookies (pun intended) from a late-night cookie vendor that will go unnamed.  Instead of a dozen warm cookies, raw cookie dough conformed to the takeout box.  Not even we can avoid the temptation of door-to-door cookie delivery but we had been (figuratively) burned.  We were determined to prove we could finish a tasty batch faster than the delivery time.

We came up with this recipe on the spot, primarily to use up the cranberries in my pantry.  Unlike other cookie recipes, it’s not necessary to bring your butter to room temperature before whipping, though slicing the butter will make it easier to beat in the sugar.  Also, did I mention this is a SINGLE-BOWL RECIPE?!  It’s a great go-to cookie recipe since it’s easy to adjust or double.  If your mix-ins aren’t very sweet (e.g. toasted nuts, shell-covered chocolates, etc.), you can increase the amount of sugar.

So how long did it take us?  About 20-25 minutes for warm cookies, which beats subpar cookie delivery any day.

Do you have a go-to cookie recipe?  Tell us in the comments!

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Matcha Macarons

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macaronThe first time I saw macarons, I knew we were meant to be. I remember gaping at the colorful display in the window of a patisserie on a family trip to Paris when I was eight or nine, wondering what these little tidbits, almost too beautiful to be food, could be. With no comman

d of the language and no control over our tour group’s itinerary (ever seen those tour groups that travel by giant buses, disembarking to gobble up tourist attractions in 30-minute intervals? Yeah, that was us), I didn’t get the chance to find out.

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Then, many years later, like star-crossed lovers, the macaron and I again encountered one another, this time, at my (at the time future) in-laws’. Someone had sent my mother-in-law a box of them from an expensive New York patisserie as a present. At long last, I took my first bite of this beautiful, illusive morsel… and was  terribly, terribly underwhelmed. Dry, chalky and one-noted in its flavor, it fell far short of what I had imagined.

Despite my disappointment, I knew that the macaron could, at least in theory, be far more. Thus began my quest to capture the Platonic ideal of the macaron: a sandwich cookie with shells sturdy enough to withhold assembly, yet tender enough to melt in your mouth, holding a filling that’s assertive enough to impart an interesting flavor, but not so sweet that it turns the whole endeavor into a cloying sugar-fest.

Below is a recipe for one of my favorite iterations of this cookie so far. Matcha, or Japanese ceremonial green tea powder, provides a deep flavor and a little bit of bitterness to balance out the sweetness. To boot, it also provides great color with no added moisture.macarondone2

 

While we’re on the subject of moisture, it’s important to note that letting your cookies dry before baking them is key. I kept skipping this at first, and kept ending up with cracked shells. Turns out that letting a skin develop on top of your shells before baking them is key to protecting their facades and creating their “feet,” that signature ruffle that forms around the base of macarons when they rise correctly (i.e. from the bottom). That said, even if your macarons do crack, who cares as long as they are delicious?

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Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream

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It’s almost too late for pumpkins but Thanksgiving isn’t Thanksgiving to me without pumpkin. My usual contribution to my large family’s Thanksgiving feasts back in LA was pumpkin pie, and it’s been on the menu since hosting dinner with friends. This year, Pruitt and I decided on macaron ice cream sandwiches filled with pumpkin ice cream. I think of it as our modified version of pumpkin pie, perfect for those already tackling a 22-lb turkey, five sides, and pecan pie.

 

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This recipe is adapted from Jeni Britton Bauer’s Roasted Pumpkin 5-Spice Ice Cream recipe, included in Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home.  As Pruitt mentioned in a previous post, Jeni’s recipes call for cream cheese instead of egg yolks, which results in creamier (not icy) ice cream. The honey and pumpkin (and additional cream cheese) also give the ice cream a velvety texture. The spices can be adjusted as necessary.  I started off with 1/8 teaspoon of each and had to increase significantly to get a bolder spice taste.  The hardest part is stirring the milk mixture while it heats up. I usually have music playing or chat/switch off with Pruitt while we wait for it to boil.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Pumpkin Muffins with Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

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These pumpkin muffins are moist and flavorful without being overly sweet (it’s a muffin, people, not a cupcake!). The toasted pumpkin seeds provide an added textural element. They’re perfect for breakfast or brunch right out of the oven, but will keep for a few days covered and refrigerated. There’s no better weekday breakfast (or midnight snack) than a muffin, split in half and toasted until golden brown, served with a knob of butter or cream cheese.

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Here, I used canned pumpkin purée (the plain kind, not the pre-seasoned pumpkin pie filling) because that’s what I had on hand and, as usual, I’d left myself less than an hour to put together Sunday brunch. With a little foresight, fresh pumpkin purée could, of course, be used instead.

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Chocolate Chip Walnut Blondies

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A good blondie recipe is an important asset for any dessert repertoire. Sometimes called butterscotch brownies, these morsels of butter and sugar are easy to master, delicious, and infinitely adaptable. You can make them plain or dress them up with nuts, chocolate chips or dried fruits.

Since butter is the main ingredient here, the key to the perfect blondie is coaxing as much flavor out of it as possible. The nuttiness of the browned butter, emphasized by the nutmeg, adds depth and character to this particular batter.

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Adapted from How to Cook Everything and the Joy of Cooking.

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Ginger & Cardamom Ice Cream with Crystallized Ginger Chunks, or Why Pokémon Training is the Perfect Analogy for Ice Cream Making

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The presence of free-roaming water molecules is what separates delicious ice cream from crappy, icy milk. Think of water molecules as wild Pokémon, waiting to jump out of the tall grass to attack you and ruin your ice cream. Your job as ice cream maker is similar to that of a Pokémon trainer: you must use the Pokémon/ingredients in your roster – in this case, sugar, starch and protein – to capture the wild roaming water molecules and put them to work for you.

Ginger ice cream

When Rhys and I got married last summer, my lovely coworkers got us a 2 Quart Cuisinart ice cream maker, along with a copy of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home to help get me started. While Jeni’s recipes are delicious and inspiring, the true asset of the cookbook is its ice cream base recipe, which provides a solid foundation for experimenting with other flavor combinations as well.

In the place of egg yolks, Jeni uses cream cheese as the primary source of protein to “capture” the water molecules in the ice cream mixture, giving it that smooth, velvety texture once frozen. When heated, the casein in the cream cheese binds with the water molecules in the milk and cream, preventing them from sticking together and forming ice chunks once frozen. Since you only need about 3 tablespoons of the stuff, the cream cheese barely contributes any taste to the final product. Plus, there is no risk of leaving scrambled eggs in your ice cream (yuck).

Here, the base serves as a great conduit for the ginger and cardamom flavors.

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Lemon Cream Puffs, or The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Pâte Sucrée

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Every time I flip through my copy of Pierre Hermé’s Pastries, I find myself coming back again and again to the recipe for Choux Infiniment Citron – partly because it brings together two of my favorite things, cream puffs and lemon curd, and partly because of the sweet tart dough which, once baked, mysteriously disappears from the page altogether (It took five read throughs and all the patience my friends could muster to finally confirm that this was indeed a mistake and not a symptom of my own inability to read).

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Vanishing pâte sucrée aside, the recipe still serves as a wonderful source of inspiration. With a little help from my trusty friends The Joy of Cooking and Cooks‘ Illustrated, I came away with a simplified version that’s easy enough to include in my regular potluck rotation. Because face it, potlucks are always at least a little bit of a competition.

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