Lime Mexican Wedding Cookies

Yesterday was Day 1 of my holiday baking fest.  First up were Mexican wedding cookies with lime, a nice twist on the traditional version of the cookies.  These include lime zest and coconut, which help to cut the richness of the butter and nuts (not that there's anything wrong with that ...)  The last step of these cookies -- rolling them in confectioner's sugar twice -- is messy, but it's so worth it.  I made a double batch, as these are small and disappear quickly.

Thanksgiving Brunch

Before the feast, we had another feast.  We had to have something to sustain us until the turkey was done.  We tend to have Thankgiving dinner later in the day, so this does actually make sense, though it's possible I went overboard in my baking.  We had fresh scones (cranberry-chocolate chip and pecan praline), crumb cake, apple-cinnamon coffee cake, eggs, bacon, Canadian bacon, cheese, fruit ... just a few things to keep us going during the day.

Maple Nutty Sticky Buns

The idea behind this recipe, from King Arthur Flour, is that it's a quick version of sticky buns. There's no yeast, so there's no rising, and you don't even need a mixer. It took me about an hour, including mixing, rolling and baking. Waiting for them to cool from molten to merely warm takes a little longer, but it's worth it. The recipe is also pretty flexible -- I used maple syrup instead of dark corn syrup, soured milk instead of buttermilk, and added cinnamon, ginger and more nuts to the filling. I could also see adding apples or pears, dried cranberries, or even dark chocolate chips.

Thanksgiving Just Desserts

After the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and squash, there's not always a lot of room for dessert on Thanksgiving. Still, I usually make three or four pies and cakes so we can have choices. But this year, thinking more is better, and having more people over, I made seven desserts. Yes, seven--it's not like I made 19 pies or anything. From front to back, we had classic apple pie, raspberry key lime tart, pumpkin chiffon pie, carrot cake, chocolate-cranberry-pecan pie, apple crumble cake, and mocha buttercrunch pie. Possibly it was too much ... but I don't think so. One day later, and there's not too much left.
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All-in-One-Thanksgiving Cake

This recipe combines pumpkin, apples, pecans, and cranberries. Technically, I think it's called an all-in-one holiday cake, but to me it just says Thanksgiving. All that's missing is the turkey--but I don't want turkey in my cake. I was a little dubious with the combination--everything all in together?--but it's so good. It's not too sweet, and it disappeared very quickly. It was a great first use for my cool new cathedral Bundt pan.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Fest

It's late June and I have a freezer-full of cookies. We've had some sudden breaks in the high heat, and I feel almost compelled to bake--if only because I can without heating up the whole house. Cookies are always good, and they store well too. The cookies above are toffee-oatmeal-chocolate-chip, based on the recipe in Diane Mott Davidson's "Crunch Time". The cookies below were perhaps a cry for more caffeine: chewy coffee chip cookies (like coffee chip ice cream, not with coffee-flavored chips) and thin, crispy mocha-cocoa chip cookies.







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Banana Cake with Pecans and Coffee Buttercream

This recipe, from Saveur, is delicious though a little different. The cake isn't super sweet, but the bananas and pecans take on a kind of caramelly flavor. The buttercream is, of course, rich; however, the coffee flavor really comes through, too.



Just a slice

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Snowy Day Treats

Today was a snow day, and while I did work from home, I found some time later to bake up a few things. The brownies above are chocolate fudge with a peanut butter swirl. I also played around with a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, adding oatmeal and switching around the sugars and flour. The result is a very tasty chocolate chip-oatmeal-pecan cookie that is soft and chewy and buttery and nutty. And chocolatey too, of course.



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Christmas Cookies 2010

The holidays are here, and I am done with my baking! Well, at least the immediate baking -- I've been told I missed a few key kinds of cookies and that we're at risk of running out. Not likely. This year I made, triple peanut butter cookies, gingersnaps, chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons, pecan divines, and almond buttercrunch, which is pictured above.

                                                                    Spicy gingersnaps


                                                           Chewy, nutty pecan divines


                                                    Chocolate-dipped coconut macaroons


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Rugelach with All the Right Things

The last time I made rugelach, I wasn't so impressed with the results. This time, however, I'm much happier. Growing up, I was never a big fan of rugelach, as they were usually pretty dry and filled some raisiny/figgy/apricoty mixture. The chocolate ones were good, but rare. This recipe uses raspberry jam, pecans, dried cranberries AND dark chocolate--a fairly perfect combination, I think, though of course you can switch it around for what like, too.

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Apple-y Apple Cake

There are a lot of apple cake recipes out there, and pretty much everyone you ask says their recipe is the best. I found this recipe in a cooking forum where people were just falling all over themselves saying how good this is. And they were right -- it really is that good.  I added a few more spices to the cake, but all the flavors really shine together.  This cake is full of apples, but you taste the butter, pecans, and spices, too.

Apple Cake
(based on the recipe in Ronald Johnson's An American Table)

4 c apples peeled and cut into a small dice
1 c chopped pecans
1 c butter, softened
1 c sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 tsp cinnamon (I used 1 tsp cinnamon, heaping 1/2 tsp ginger, 1/4 tsp allspice, big pinch of cloves, and 1-2 tsp chopped crystallized ginger)
2 eggs
2 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Cream together the butter and sugar.  Mix in the vanilla and then the spices.  Add the eggs one at a time.

Mix together the flour, baking soda and salt.  Then add the dry ingredients to the batter, alternating with the chopped apples and pecans.  The batter will be very stiff.

Spoon into a thoroughly buttered Bundt pan (I used two mini Bundts and the six-inch heart above), and bake at 350 degrees for about one hour (til golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean ... smaller cakes will take less time.)

Cool briefly in the pan and then turn out onto a wire rack and let cool completely.

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Mocha Turtle Brownies

Faced with yet another big snow storm and a lot of time indoors, I decided to try a recipe I'd been eyeing for while. The recipe, from Ghirardelli, was for caramel turtle bars. Out of circumstance, and preference, I made these into mocha turtle brownies, using a combination of mocha cocoa and espresso powder. In the end I had really dark, fudgy, chocolatey, chewy, nutty bars that work equally well with coffee or a big glass of milk. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Christmas Cookies!

This year's Christmas cookies are done, and the kitchen is now closed. At least for a few days. And despite my plans to not go overboard this year, it's possible I did, though strangely there aren't many left at this point. As usual, there were a couple of regulars and a few new flavors, too -- I kept finding new recipes to try, but eventually even I had to call it quits. In the final tally, I made peach-raspberry linzers, shortbread snowflakes, chocolate-dipped espresso shortbread trees, soft ginger cookies, fleur de sel caramel, almond buttercrunch, chocolate chip-pretzel cookies, cranberry-oatmeal-chip cookies, and pecan bars with cranberries.

Jacques Torres' Chocolate Chip Cookies

Everyone has a favorite chocolate chip recipe. I have several, now including this one. Chef Jacques Torres' recipe for chocolate chip cookies is fairly straightforward, but it calls for well over 1 lb of chocolate, and even with the amounts of butter and sugar, it just seemed like too much. I put in 1.5 Scharffenburger 62% chocolate bars (which is fairly bittersweet, despite the number), so about 14 oz all chunked up, reduced the sugar some, and added about a cup each of chopped up pecans and toasted almonds. My preference is for a soft cookie, so I watched these carefully and took them out of the oven before they became too browned and they turned out chewy and soft and delicious. And, as you can see, they're not lacking in chocolate.

Pecan-Chocolate Chip Cookies

Essentially these are chocolate chip cookies, but there are more pecans than chocolate chips, and the resulting flavor is delicious. And despite all the cookies in the picture--more than six dozen--I think there's only one left now. I only had a couple ... well maybe a few more than that ... but most were given away to family and friends. It's not safe to have these sitting around, even if tucked away in the freezer.

German Chocolate Cake Cookies

I found this recipe in a mystery I was reading and decided we needed to have them. The cookies come out of the oven very poofed up--and much bigger than when they went in--but they flatten out as they cool. The recipe uses melted butter, instead of room temperature, which leaves them chewy and delicious. I go chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp.... like clahm chowdah! These cookies are superyummalicious!!! I shall eat them and they shall be my eatables and I shall call them eaties! - Umm, my blog was momentarily taken over by a crazed teenager, but apparently she liked the cookies. The recipe is from Joanne Fluke's Peach Cobbler Murder. I used semisweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate. German Chocolate Cake Cookies (based on the recipe from Joanne Fluke) Yield six dozen tasty cookies 2 sticks unsalted butter 2 c semisweet chips (one bag) 2 c sugar 2 eggs ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 2-3 tsp vanilla 3 c flour ½ c firmly packed brown sugar ¾ c tightly packed flaked coconut ½ c chopped pecans 4 oz butter, cold 2 egg yolks, lightly mixed 1. In a small pan on the stove, melt the chocolate chips and butter. Set aside to cool somewhat. 2. In a large bowl, blend together the sugar and the 2 whole eggs until well mixed. Then add the baking powder, baking soda, salt, and vanilla. Add in the melted chocolate-butter mixture. 3. Then add the flour and blend well. The dough will be very stiff, but this is how you want it. Cover the dough til you're ready to use it (to keep it from drying out.) 4. Meanwhile in a food processor fitted with a steel blade, combine the sugar, coconut, and pecans and pulse until they are all in small pieces. Add the butter and pulse a few more times. Then add the egg yolks and process until well mixed. Chill this mixture--the frosting--until you're done forming the cookies. 5. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. 6. Using your fingers, roll the dough into one-inch balls. Place them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, 12 per pan. Make a deep dent with your thumb in the center of each ball. The dough might crumble a bit as you do this, but a) it's pretty forgiving and b) the frosting doesn't travel much when it bakes, so just press together any big cracks and continue on. 7. Form the frosting into 1/2-inch balls, to fit into each indentation. 8. Bake for about 12 min. The cookies will have spread a lot, and they will be very puffy. Take them out of the oven and let them cool on the cookie sheets for about 2 min.--they will flatten out but still be soft, which is how you want them. Place on a wire rack to finish cooling. Enjoy!

Mudslide Cookies, aka Chocolate Bliss in a Bite

I've been eyeing Jacques Torres' recipe for mudslide cookies for a while now. Aside from all of the other cookies I've been baking, one thing that's made me hesitate is that these contain more than two pounds of chocolate. The recipe itself is fairly simple, containing both bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate, a little flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, walnuts (I used pecans) and eggs. Once all the chocolate cools, the batter stiffens up to become fairly hard and crumbly, so forming the cookies can be messy. I used about a tablespoon of batter per cookie and ended up with seven dozen cookies. I baked the cookies for a couple minutes less than recommended, so they're still soft, and I actually prefer them more the next day--possibly because I was overwhelmed by all the chocolate so soon after baking them. And that's saying something. These are not cookies you can eat a lot of in one sitting, nor can you drink them without milk. They're just that intense.

Christmas Cookies, Day 2

Not that I really needed more, but I finished the Christmas cookies yesterday. I made almond buttercrunch (above), lemon-glazed lemon cookies, and meringue kisses. Lemon-glazed lemon cookies, from Carole Walters' Great Cookies. Meringue kisses: light and airy meringue mixed with toasted pecans and unsweetened coconut. Also from Carole Walters' Great Cookies.

Cranberry Turtle Bars

I love cranberries, caramel and pecans, so what could be wrong with combining them all? Not a thing ... these are delicious. And the cranberry topping, drizzled with dark chocolate, is just so pretty. Lacking the larger pan called for in the recipe, I made two pans of very thin bars--which actually works because they're so rich, though it does make them a bit more delicate to handle. Next time, and there will be a next time, I'm going to make a single pan of thicker bars.

Brown Sugar-Pecan Cookies

More from my favorite baker, Dorie Greenspan. These shortbread cookies are not overly sweet, but the brown sugar and finely ground pecans give them a wonderful richness