Step one : make chocolate batter

Step two : drop dough onto parchment paper and bake

Step three : make peanut butter filling

Step four : put filling on one cookie and top with another cookie

Viola!

Another recipe down from Martha Stewart’s Cookies cook book. Only 157 left to go!!!

More specifically, let them eat cakes. In honor of Bastille Day, I decided to finally make madeleines. I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the idea of madeleines for months, even going so far as to buy a madeleine pan (at least it was on sale…), despite the fact that I have never even HAD a madeleine.

As ever, I did a little too much reading on the subject. Some recipes are fairly simple, with just a few ingredients and minimal instruction. Some are more complicated, and VERY specific as far as what pan to use, what temperature the ingredients should be when you start, etc. I settled for one that came in somewhere in the middle. I had to make a few substitutions… I didn’t have any coriander, so I used cardamom pods. (Those were fun–I also christened my mortar & pestle!) And I don’t have any allspice, so I used ground cloves. The result was a sort of warm, wintry combination of flavors, perhaps not so appropriate for a hot day in July, but delicious nonetheless.

My madeleines lack the browned crust that you get with a metal pan; mine is silicone. And, though they puffed up nicely, and cooked evenly, they don’t have the traditional bump on the non-scalloped side. If I were to make them again, I’d let the batter rest a bit before putting the batter in the molds. My second batch (with stiffer batter) seemed closer to the shape I was trying to approximate.

The recipe:

Spiced Madeleines. Adapted from here.

3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted, plus 1 tablespoon (melted) for greasing molds
3/4 cup all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
Confectioners sugar for dusting

Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 400°F. Brush molds with some melted butter, then chill until set, about 5 minutes. Brush molds again with some melted butter and chill pan.

Sift together flour, baking powder, spices, and a pinch of salt.

Whisk together sugars and eggs until combined well. Add flour mixture and whisk until just combined, then stir in remaining butter (6 tablespoons) until just incorporated. 3Spoon batter into molds, filling them about two thirds full. Bake 5 minutes, then reduce oven temperature to 350 °F and bake until springy to the touch and edges are lightly browned, 4 to 6 minutes. Turn out onto a rack and cool 15 minutes. Just before serving, dust with confectioners sugar.

Eat quickly. Before they take you to the guillotine!

When life hands you rhubarb, you make a pie. At least, that’s what I figured when I was handed an armful last week. The problem was, I had never made a pie before. Not a real one. There have been galettes, (rustic fruit tarts), and no-bake pudding pies (is that even a pie?), but I always used a purchased pie crust. There’s something intimidating about making one’s own crust. Everyone has an opinion about how to best go about it… freeze your butter, use ice water, use vodka, use a specialized tool, use your fingers, use a voodoo doll, use a spray bottle, only attempt it when there’s a full moon, etc. You get the idea.

Being who I am (obsessed with food), I have of course READ much of this advice, or looked it up, or seen it on TV. So when I looked in my trusty Fannie Farmer cookbook, I was surprised to see that it didn’t really mention any of these things. It just sort of assumed that any idiot knew the method for making pie crust, and it just gave the ingredients. So I made it up, substituted ingredients when I didn’t have them, and just basically went for it.

It was shockingly edible for my first attempt.

I ended up with an all-butter crust, since I don’t keep vegetable shortening in the house. Or Crisco, or lard, or any other recommended fat. Most recipes say that a combination of butter and shortening is your best bet… the flavor of butter and the stability of shortening. I gamely went for it, the resulting crust was delicious. I found the dough a little hard to manage, but I used an Alton Brown method—rolling the dough out inside a zip-top bag, which you then cut along the sides to remove. This keeps it from sticking to the rolling pin, or fracturing too badly, and it makes it easier to transfer to the pie dish without performing some kind of dangerous pie-dough-rolling-pin-draping trick.

Then all I had to do was fill the pie, roll out and trim the top, and voila. Something resembling actual pie. I even had enough trimmings to make some attempt at decoration. Look out, Aunt Bee.

A few hours in the oven, and the house started to smell like… well, charred rhubarb syrup. Pies (at least, in my observation) always bubble over. I hadn’t forgotten to put something underneath my pie dish, but it still made quite a mess and a small amount of smoke. But when it was finished, it looked like this.

Not only is it pretty, but I’m fairly certain that pie is the actual breakfast of champions. Wheaties, schmeaties.

As promised here are the coconut macaroons and the anise drops from the Martha Stewart’s Cookies book. The macaroons were simple to make, 5 ingredients, one bowl, mixed by hand. They baked for 17 minutes and came out browned on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside. The recipe made 10 cookies so if you want more than that I would double the recipe. The only drawback to the Martha Stewart’s Cookies book that I have found is that it doesn’t list how many cookies a recipe will yield.

The anise cookies were also quick and simple to make. 6 ingredients total, the dry had to be sifted together in one bowl and the other ingredients went right into my Kitchen Aid mixer with the whisk attachment. I put the first couple of batches onto parchment paper to cook but they were difficult to remove from the paper. I tried my Silpat next and surprisingly they stuck to that too. When I eventually got them off the trays and cooled the result was a thin cookie that was crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. The smell of the anise in the house was terrific and reason enough to try making a batch of these cookies.

Why oh why did I have to buy the Martha Stewart’s Cookies cook book? I couldn’t have been content to borrow it from the library, make a few recipes and return it, oh no. I had to have it. Now it sits on my shelf in my kitchen beckoning me to pick it up and make a batch of cookies.
I’ve made nine of the recipes so far, yep nine. Every time I make one of the recipes I’ll say ok, everyone in the family can have one for a treat to see if we like them and to make sure they came out good enough to pass onto friends, family and co-workers. Well lets just say that they don’t always make it out of the house.
I am looking at it as a learning experience. I’ve bought an offset spatula, I’ve used espresso powder and sanding sugar and am now an expert with parchment paper.

The Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies and Grammy’s Chocolate Cookies, were to die for. Probably the two best cookie recipes that I have ever made! The Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars were a huge hit with my husband and his co-workers. The Milk-Chocolate Cookies, the Chunky Peanut, Chocolate, and Cinnamon Cookies and the Butter Twists were yummy too. I was disappointed in the Chocolate Pretzels, the Lemon Squares and the Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies. Still though even a cookie recipe that isn’t the best is still tasty and doesn’t go to waste around here. Next up on the list to try are the Coconut Macaroons with and without chocolate chips and the Anise Drops, I already have my shopping list ready.

Lately my husband and I have been trying to expand our culinary horizons by picking a new cuisine to try out each week. To start, we search the 641s for interesting tomes or harass our foodie friends for their wonderful cookbooks. We then pick four or five different meals and hit the store all the while crossing our fingers that the new ingredients we’ve copied out from the recipes are indeed lurking in some undiscovered corner of our local grocery. We round up the goodies and pay, and I try not to think about how my mother fed a family of six for a week on what we just shelled out for two people (really, who knew that sesame oil could be so expensive?).

My favorite part of the whole shebang comes when my husband and I cook together. This is a somewhat new and wonderful experience for me – not just because we’re newlyweds, but because up until we married my husband did not seem to have much interest in the kitchen and seemed to thrive on hotdogs topped with peanut butter (no joke, it’s his favorite way to eat the darned canines). To say that his culinary horizons have broadened is a bit of an understatement.

To get back to the photograph, last night was the second night of our four chinese dishes. All of them were taken from this book, which so far I highly recommend. Since both of us were home by 5:30 we decided to try one of the more involved meals: egg rolls and sesame noodles. The noodles were fantastic and will be remade frequently during the hot summer months. Unlike the 20 minute noodles, our homemade egg rolls topped out at about 90 minutes of prep – but they were sooo worth it.

Shrimp were sliced lengthwise, cabbage and celery were boiled in garlic ginger water (which smelled fantastic), stuffing was stir-fried and my husband did the honors of rolling the whole kit and kaboodle up in the wrappers. This miracle of miracles can be attributed to the aforementioned cookbook. Once I got to the part of the recipe where the rolling method was described I was shocked to be reading baseball jargon! The wrapper was to be placed like a baseball diamond, filling spread from first base to third, home plate to be rolled over the filling towards second base…I knew immediately that this was a job for my sports-loving hubby. Bases were tucked, edges were sealed and before I knew it my husband had produced 12 beautifully wrapped egg rolls. I was so proud.

I won’t get into the pan-frying except to say that when working at high temps it is best not to use a set of nylon tongs to flip your food.

Next week: French Food

I have made bread before; this year has been The Year of the Yeast Bread for me. I’ve made some basic white bread (The 1996 Fannie Farmer version), some interesting yeasted rolls that involved saffron and getting up at the crack of dawn, and I’m a devoted follower of the No-Knead Bread cult. But there are so many recipes out there, and I am and will ever be a HUGE fan of carbs, so I thought I should broaden my horizons. So, naturally, I made another basic white bread recipe. (Yep, very broad.) I got it from Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. (I have borrowed this book so many times that a) I probably need to invest in my own copy so that someone else can stumble across it on the shelves, and b) I should be ashamed that I have not attained domestic goddess status yet.)

It’s a good recipe, though very plain. I found the finished product to be somewhat salty–there was a full tablespoon of salt in the dough… I would probably reduce that quantity if I make this recipe again. Nigella recommends that you avoid all those tricks you can use to make your bread crustier (spritzing the dough with water right before baking, or the more exciting “throwing ice cubes on the oven floor” option, etc), since it will never be as crusty as a commercial oven can get it. I ignored this advice and spent the baking time replenishing a pan of water on the rack underneath the bread and periodically flinging water at the crust. So when I took it out of the oven it LOOKED good, but the outer crust was roughly the consistency of moon rock. (Why would I ever doubt you, Nigella?) I draped a clean kitchen towel over it and went out to eat Chinese food with some friends, and by the time I got back the crust was a much more approachable texture. I wrapped it in plastic overnight, and now it’s not crusty at all. It has a nice crumb, and makes FABULOUS toast, as my poached egg and I discovered this morning.

All in all, a success. Pass the butter.