Mardi Gras

My daughter Claire is in her first year of taking French. She announced last week that her class would be having a Mardi Gras party and that there would be lots of fun foods and snacks to eat during the party. After five minutes of her rhapsodizing, I asked, "Is this your way of letting me know I need to make something?" It's hard to put one like this past me.

Initially, she wanted to bring that old French favorite chocolate-chip cookies, but by the time the sign-up sheet got to her, someone else had already grabbed that one. So Claire signed up to bring snickerdoodles, another classic from the French pastry collection.

I knew I had a reliable recipe from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie, although Tish calls her cookies Cinnamon Sugar Crinkles. My Cookie Day pal Ryan always makes a batch (or two) of snickerdoodles every holiday season, and Tish Boyle's is his go-to recipe.

So Claire and I made a batch of snickerdoodles, and by all accounts, the French class enjoyed them -- enough so that not a single cookie came home, at any rate.

A Trip to Houston

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Texas for the Houston Marathon. Because the holidays had put me in a cookie-baking frame of mind, I baked a lot of cookies to bring along and share with the friends who were also going to be at the race. I relied on recipes from three books.

From Mom’s Big Book of Cookies by Lauren Chattman, I made:
Benne Wafers: excellent cookie, with an unusual flavor from the sesame seeds.
Sour Cream Chocolate Mint Chip Cookies: soft, cakey. I didn’t love these cookies, truth be told.
Snickerdoodles: a thinner, crisper version than the ones Ryan usually makes on Cookie Day (from a recipe in The Good Cookie by Tish Boyle).
Mexican Chocolate Chip Cookies: pretty good, a chocolate chocolate-chip cookie with cinnamon in the dough.

From A Baker’s Field Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies by Dede Wilson, I made:
Double Chip Browned-Butter Oat Scotchies: excellent. Oaty, butterscotchy.
Coffee-Toffee-Chocolate Chunk Cookies: a classic.

From Cookies by Jill Snider, I made:
Lemon-Poppy Seed Balls: nice and tender, but in need of a bit more lemon flavor.
Key Lime-Coconut Macaroons: didn’t like them at all; they had a rubbery texture. I made the dough in advance and refrigerated it for a day before baking it. I wonder if that contributed to the unfortunate texture.

Also, to fulfill a promise, I brought along a Sweet Potato Pound Cake, from a recipe in Southern Cakes by Nancie McDermott. I’ve made this one before, and absolutely love it.

Finally, I made a couple of flourless treats for my good friend Enid, who can’t consume wheat-based baked goods. Although I really like baking for friends in general, I get a special bit of joy in baking for Enid because I know that homemade baked goods can be harder to come by for those who can’t eat wheat. So for Enid, it was a batch of Cliff's Brownies (from Gluten-Free Baking by Rebecca Reilly) and a batch of Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies from Lauren Chattman’s book. It’s a brilliantly simple four-ingredient recipe (peanut butter, egg, vanilla, sugar) that I augmented with some Ghirardelli dark-chocolate chips.

Lemon Squares

When I make lemon squares anymore, they are a complete disaster. For many years, I used a lemon square recipe by Emily Luchetti. It had always worked until the last few times I made it. (Clearly, the problem has become me, not the recipe!) Because I had some lemons that were close to turning the corner, I decided to try a lemon-square recipe from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie. Zesty Lemon Squares had a lot of appeal: plenty of lemon juice in the filling, plus a brown-sugar crust spiked with crystallized ginger. I followed the recipe, and I think that was my undoing. The crust is baked before the filling is poured on it. I allowed the crust to cool before adding the filling, and apparently, the crust contracted enough that the filling all oozed under the crust.

Serving the bars was essentially a rescue operation. I flipped the baked bars over onto a cutting board, and served them upside down. They were very lemony, as a good lemon square should be, but they definitely were not something to pick up and eat out of hand.

Even More Cookies

Before the excitement of Cookie Day even began, I learned that some friends in Philadelphia were planning a get-together: a Sunday-morning run followed by a cookie exchange. When I asked Ryan if he was interested in heading to Philly for the shindig, he said yes. So we made plans to participate in this year's Philly event.

The run was a lot of fun; we really lucked out with a mild December morning. The cookie swap was a lot of fun, too. I wish I'd done a better job of keeping track of what other people brought. There were some great meringues, some tahini cookies, blondies, and more.

I brought along the following:

Mom's Chocolate Chip Cookies, from Lauren Chattman's Mom's Big Book of Cookies; I made these with a tablespoon (or so) of orange zest in the dough. Very nice. These cookies were the ones we left out for Santa this year, too. Awesome. I add 1/4 to 1/2 cup more flour than the recipe calls for; the extra flour makes for a cookie that spreads less, which I like.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies, also from the Chattman book; a chocolate cookie with peanut butter and peanut-butter chips in the dough. Excellent.

Oatmeal Cookies with Cranberries and White Chocolate Chips, also from the Chattman book. The recipe was developed with butterscotch chips, but I used white chocolate instead. They went well with the dried cranberries.

Orange Poppy Seed Spirals, from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie. In the end, not a bad cookie, what what a pain making them. I ruined the first batch of poppy-seed filling, which involves just scalding 2 tablespoons of whole milk and 1 tablespoon of honey. Good grief! That liquid is then combined with poppy seeds ground in the food processor with sugar, cloves, and lemon zest. It's then swirled into rounds with an orange-spiked cookie dough. The cookies tasted terrific; the orange and clove are great partners. In fact, the cookies smelled and tasted a lot like Constant Comment tea.

Mojito Shortbread, from a recipe in Cook's Country magazine. In 2006, Ryan and I put this cookie on the list for Cookie Day. We didn't make it. In 2007, we put it on the list for Cookie Day. We didn't make it. Because I had purchased fresh mint (again), I finally had to make it. It seemed like a great idea for a cookie: a shortbread with lemon and lime zest baked til lightly golden, then sprinkled with a combination of mint and sugar chopped together in the food processor. I don't know. In the end, I was really underwhelmed, maybe mostly because after the mint-sugar coating hardened on top of the shortbread, it crumbled in big chunks and fell off. Also, I think I bought some lousy mint that just lacked flavor. This shortbread just left me with a shrug.

Reach the Beach

For the past four years, I've had the privilege to run Reach the Beach, a 200-mile relay race in New Hampshire, with 11 of my good running buddies. On Friday at 1:30 p.m., Becky will commence this year's event near the Flume Gorge in the White Mountains, and at some point on Saturday afternoon, Ken will scurry across the finish line in Hampton Beach. A good time will be had by all; new jokes will join the pantheon of one-liners; and as usual, everyone will go home with a goody bag of baked treats.

Since my ice-cream-making pal and teammate Ryan also likes to bake, we got together on a torrid September afternoon to prepare some treats for the Fellowship of the Bubblewrap's fifth Reach the Beach adventure. When Ryan and I are baking, each of us tends to prepare his own things. It's mostly just fun having company in the kitchen while baking is occurring.



On Saturday, I got things going with a batch of Chewy Orange Granola Bars from Chewy Cookies by Eileen E. Talanian. Last year, we made granola bars, and they were a huge hit. I have to admit that I tweaked this recipe from the get-go. First, I doubled the recipe and made it in a 9x13 pan instead of the 9x9 that was called for. Then I substituted dried cranberries for raisins. Also, I subbed a mix of whole toasted cashews and almonds for sliced almonds. Finally, since I had no orange to zest, I subbed a teaspoon of orange oil for orange flavor. Although they looked good in the pan, there were clearly problems when I attempted to slice them (photo above). I'm not sure what happened, but there was far more liquid than the granola could absorb. (Perhaps it was the unrelentingly muggy weather; perhaps it was the super-moist Bear Naked granola.) What to do? How about mix in about 2 cups of oats and rebake them? That seems to have done the trick (photo below).

Next up, Ryan made a batch of Chocolate Peanut Butter Surprise Bars from Tish Boyle's Good Cookie, which has become an often-used volume on Cookie Day (the Saturday in December when we spend upward of 10 hours making holiday treats). These bars have traveled to previous RTBs and, not surprisingly, have been a big hit. Seriously: Is it possible to go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter?

I then segued into Chewy, Chunky Blondies from Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours. I'm always leery of leavening in blondies and brownies, and this recipe was a good reason why. The blondies baked with a big puffed-up top crust that rose far above the batter, leaving the bottom and top thin and fragile, with a big air gap in between. These blondies were a bit of a disappointment.


Ryan, meanwhile, prepared Banana-Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Cookies from The Good Cookie. Only he was leaving out a key ingredient: "Martha can't eat chocolate, so I'm making them without the chips." Of course, his point was well taken, but still. No chocolate in the cookies with "chip" in the name? As you can see (photo), I made a chipped cookie for my own personal enjoyment.

Next up: Chipster-Topped Brownies from the Dorie Greenspan book. These two-layer bars (brownie bottom, blondie top) turned out better than the blondies, although the chocolate-chip layer was thinner than I'd hoped. I've made other versions of these cookies (Abby Johnson Dodge, Kathleen King), and they were more balanced between the blondie and brownie layers. The Dorie Greenspan edition is far more brownie than blondie. That's not at all a bad thing, just a different thing.

Finally, Ryan made a double batch of snickerdoodles, using a recipe from The Good Cookie. We've made these cookies before (filed under the recipe Cinnamon Sugar Crinkles), and as ever, I jumped in to help out on these. It's a marvelous version of a classic cookie.


Now everything is in the freezer, awaiting packing Thursday morning and devouring over the weekend. (That's the Chipster-Topped Brownies in the photo.)

Rediscovering Maida Heatter

Today we celebrated my boss's birthday. His actual birthday was last Friday, but I had the day off. Celebration deferred.

For all other work birthdays, I bake what catches my eye or what I feel like preparing. For Kevin, I go out of my way to find something that sublimely blends chocolate and peanut butter, one of his favorite flavor combinations. (To be sure, I've never heard anyone complaining about the various dynamic-duo combos I've brought in for Kevin's birthday.) This year, I was feeling a little stumped. I hadn't found a recipe that caught my eye. I browsed one cookbook and saw recipes for peanut-butter mousse and chocolate mousse, then toyed with the idea of mini-refrigerator cakes (the mousses stacked with chocolate wafers). Then the leading contender became a peanut-butter mousse cake recipe from Tish Boyle's The Cake Book.

Eventually, I started browsing my stack of supplementary baking books and flipped to the index of Cakes by Maida Heatter. It's one of her compilation books (companion to Pies & Tarts and Cookies). Although I have several Maida Heatter cookbooks, the only recipe of hers that I can remember making is her legendary Palm Beach Brownies (with their insane preparation technique, baked at 425F). These brownies are great, and I've made them several times.

At any rate, browsing the index of Cakes, I saw a listing for Chocolate-Peanut Butter Icing, so I figured I'd check to see what it was all about. Much to my utter delight, the frosting recipe was associated with the recipe for Chocolate Festival Cake, a monster of a tube cake featuring chocolate, bananas, and peanut butter. I felt as if I'd hit the motherlode and shouted out loud, "Maida Heatter, you rock!"

I am extremely pleased with this cake. It's a dense beast of a thing, overwhelmingly rich with peanut butter and chocolate goodness. The batter has mashed banana in it, but that flavor was unnoticeable, primarily because I had to use barely ripe bananas. The cake is slathered with a thick coat of chocolate-peanut butter frosting. The frosting was the only tweak I made in the recipe. It called for an egg. I didn't much feel like messing around with a raw egg in a frosting recipe, so I substituted 1/4 cup of heavy cream. Then I drizzled in enough additional heavy cream to give the frosting a nice consistency.