May 16, 2012
Mocha Chip Cookies

Ever in the mood for chocolate that isn’t over the top?  These mocha chip cookies are perfect for exactly that.  A chocolate cookie laced with a hint of coffee without being overly rich or heavy.  Don’t get me wrong — I like rich, dense, decadence as much as the next person.  But sometimes lighter fare is in order.  These mocha chip cookies curb that chocolate hankering without knocking you off your feet.

Ingredients:
2 cups + 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 cup dark cocoa powder
3 tablespoons instant coffee powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg + 1 egg yolk, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/3 cup coffee (can substitute coffee liqueur)
1 cup chocolate chunks
sea salt for topping

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 325°F.  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a bowl, mix together flour, cocoa, coffee powder, salt and baking soda and set aside.  In another bowl, mix the melted butter and sugars until they are combined.  Add the egg, yolk, coffee (or coffee liqueur), and vanilla and mix well.  Gradually incorporate flour mixture, mixing until dough forms.  Fold in the chocolate chunks.  Refrigerate dough for 30 minutes.

Remove dough from the fridge and roll into small balls, about 1 inch in diameter.  Set on baking sheet with 2 inches between each cookie.  Sprinkle each cookie with a pinch of sea salt.  Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the edges are set and the middles are still soft.  Be careful not to over bake. Remove from oven and allow to cool for a few minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

As much as everyone loves a gooey cookie hot out of the oven, the landlord and I have found that these cookies are actually best the day after.  Within the first few minutes or hours of baking they are yummy enough, but not special.  They’re a chocolate cookie and lack pop.  The next morning, however, the flavors have melded and the coffee flavor really shines.  I’ve made them a few times and this has been consistent with each batch, making them the perfect cookie to make a day ahead for a party or bake sale.  Or to overnight cross-country for your best friend’s birthday (hi Smaych!).

Chocolate and coffee.  Balanced and not over the top.  Perfect for simple occasions, or just because.

Recipe adapted from How Sweet It Is.

9:56am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZCzbQyLakB5F
(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: mocha chocolate chip cookies baking recipe coffee 
April 26, 2012
Banana Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding

Bread pudding isn’t something I grew up with.  I’m not even sure I knew it existed until I was in college.  Even then it was some vague strange thing other people ordered at restaurants.  Bread pudding?  No thank you.

The landlord and his family love them some bread pudding.  Hence I’ve had my fair share of bread pudding tastes over the last couple years.  I don’t particularly care for it.  It’s almost always eggy, like french toast.  The landlord insists he doesn’t detect the eggy-ness, he who abhors eggs, but the boy is also fond of french toast.  His palate isn’t exactly neutral.

It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered you can make bread pudding without eggs.  In fact, you can make it with or without pretty much anything your heart desires.  Bread pudding is the dessert for cooks — no measuring or chemistry required.  Sure, the bakers may scoff, and they can certainly follow a recipe and measure quantities as they please.  But the beauty of bread pudding is that all that measuring is optional.

This bread pudding was born of a quarter of a loaf of stale french bread, cut into roughly 1-inch cubes.  In a bowl, I whisked together about a 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2+ cup milk, a splash of vanilla, a pinch of salt, and two large very ripe bananas, smashed.  I then added the bread and about a 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips.  I stirred everything together for a good minute or two to ensure the bread was well-coated, and then allowed it to sit and absorb the liquid for 30-40 minutes.  None of the above was measured, all was eye-balled.

Once saturated, I gave the mix another stir and transferred it to a loaf pan.  I then topped it with a pinch of kosher salt flakes and a generous dusting of turbinado (raw) sugar.  It baked at 350F for 45 minutes.

The loaf that emerged was akin to the gooey bread puddings often found at restaurants, steaming beneath a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream.  Dense, sticky, packed with flavor, and everything I imagine a childhood memory of bread pudding might be.

It was a snap to whip up, requiring only one bowl and no recipe (or ingredients) to fret over.  There are infinite variations: pumpkin spice, cinnamon apple, chocolate, peanut butter — the list goes on and on.  The next time we’re struck with a craving for something sweet and the lack of desire to see a recipe through I know exactly what I’m making.  For those of you that shy away from the kitchen, this is the dessert for you.

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZCzbQyKMG2QX
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: banana chocolate chip bread pudding baking recipe 
January 27, 2012
Chewy Molasses Chocolate Chip Cookies

Sometimes you need a chocolate chip cookie.  No way around it, it’s the only thing that’ll do.  Perhaps I’m confusing “chocolate chip cookie” with “something sweet.”  All I know is last week we were jonesin’ hard for chocolate chip cookies.

Every night I promised to make them after dinner.  Every night the clock struck 8 and then 9 and then 10 and baking so late lost its appeal.  Until finally, I outsmarted Father Time.  I made the dough before dinner.  Stuck it in the fridge as required and baked them after the dishes were cleared.  Thus, a genius was born.

We’re not talking any old chocolate chip cookies either.  We’re talking Joy the Baker’s Chewy Molasses Chocolate Chip Cookies.  The soft vanilla-scented dough is buttery and light, the chocolate chips dark and nostalgic.  They bake up beautifully and are just as scrumptious the following day (and the day after that, should you have the will power not to eat them all in one sitting).

As per usual, I used about 3/4 of the butter and curbed the sugar a bit too.  Which means I also cut back a tad on the flour so they weren’t dry, but not enough that I was simply making 3/4 of the recipe.  I also used about 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips rather than the full 2 cups; I don’t like my cookies overly chocolatey.  Our oven tends to be slower than most, so I baked ours for closer to 12 minutes.

Joy does the recipe best, so rather than botching her perfection I’ll do you one better and simply send you to the source.  These babies are unbeatable.

10:00am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZCzbQyFSBIAz
(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: chocolate chip cookies baking recipe Joy the Baker so damn good 
October 6, 2011
Redemption

I made Earl Grey-infused brownies on Sunday.  It was a spin off Gwyneth Paltrow’s fudgy brownie recipe, which calls for coffee.  I’ve made them once before and they’re actually quite good (although while moist I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call them fudgy — there’s only so much soy milk can do).  Two takeaways from my Earl Grey experiment: 1, brew the tea much, much stronger; and 2, do not sub cacao nibs for chocolate chips.  I have a feeling Earl Grey will lend a delicate layer of flavor and will complement the fall weather quite nicely.  Cacao nibs, however, lack any and all sweetness.  And even though I tried to compensate such by nearly doubling the sugar, it was to no avail.  The brownies, while moist and otherwise spot-on, were anything but sweet or decadent.  More of a cocoa-flavored loaf specked with crunchy nibs.  Disappointing, to say the least.

It may have been the first time I’ve ever seen the landlord take a bite of dessert and decline to finish the rest.  “You don’t like them.”  “Yes I do.”  “No, you don’t.”  “I’m just not in the mood for them right now.  I’ll have them with ice cream tomorrow.”  Fast forward to three days later, when he hadn’t so much as lifted the foil to reappraise them.  “Those were the worst brownies ever.”  “I knew you didn’t like them!”  “What was I going to say?  Your brownies sucked?”  Ouch.

Needless to say, I felt the need to redeem my baking skills.  Stat.

Enter Big Girls, Small Kitchen’s banana chocolate chip cookies.  I knew they had a recipe for banana chocolate chip bread, and was intent on making that (as banana chocolate chip bread is one of the landlord’s favorites), but rather than go straight to the recipe in their cookbook I perused the site for inspiration.  BGSK came through with the inspiration alright.

I’ve never thought of adding bananas to chocolate chip cookies before, probably because banana baked into anything is not my cup of tea.  But if there’s anything the landlord likes better than banana bread it’s chocolate chip cookies.  And here they are combined?  They should package these puppies and market them as relationship security.

The main modification I made was omitting the granola because I didn’t have any on hand (even if I did I could totally hear him say “why would you mess with a perfectly good recipe by throwing something screwy in the mix?”).  I also added a wee bit more flour (less than 1/4 cup) to compensate for the change in consistency.  Also, rather than white flour I subbed half spelt and half white whole wheat — a standard substitution in my kitchen.

Upon hearing “banana” and “chocolate chip cookies” in the same sentence I was thanked with “interesting.”  Interesting.  I beg your pardon?  I combine your two favorites in what could possibly be your all-time favorite dessert and you say interesting?  Have you SMELLED the deliciousness wafting through the apartment??  Would you perhaps care to rethink your word choice?  Poor form, sir.

A verbal clobbering and one bite later and I’m rewarded with an enthusiastic “THAT’S A DAMN GOOD COOKIE.”  You bet your ass it is.  You think this is my first time at the rodeo?

So we packed up two dozen or so and took them to the landlord’s niece’s first birthday party, where they were a huge hit.  It seems both banana bread lovers and chocolate chip cookie lovers alike can’t get enough of them.  Soft, chewy, sweet, chocolatey, and just a hint of banana.  Perfection.

3:00pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZCzbQyB33_BY
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: BGSK baking banana chocolate chip cookies recipe fuck yeah 
July 30, 2011
Skillet Cookie

This may be the best damn chocolate chip cookie I have ever made.  For all that I can bake, cookies give me the most trouble.  (As do brownies from scratch, but I think I’ve finally cleared that hurdle.)  Every recipe is different — sometimes they should be pulled out early, sometimes late, and it’s entirely too easy to miss the mark altogether.  Maybe because I’m a chewy cookie girl and try to make every cookie into a chewy one.  Maybe.  (Why crunchy cookies exist, I’m not sure.  Talk about a waste of calories.)  Whatever it is, cookies tend to be my culinary nemesis.  I have the hardest time making them just so.

And then I stumbled upon this delightful little recipe by Heidi Swanson, who crafted her version based on Kim Boyce’s chocolate chip cookies.  Two of my favorite cooks of all time and one masterful rendition of the classic.  Dense, moist, chewy, not too sweet with a terrific crumb — mind-blowingly good.  And whole grain to boot.  These women are geniuses.

Needless to say, it’s bangin’.  I finally have my go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe.

12:00pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZCzbQy9uSUvY
Filed under: chocolate chip skillet cookie YUM 
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