Bake One For the Gipper This Passover

I wanted to try at least one new recipe for Passover this year, and while browsing epicurious.com, I came across this interesting little number: Orange Flourless Chocolate Cake for the Reagan Family. The recipe comes from the memoir of former White House Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier, and for some reason I kind of got a kick from thinking that I could make a cake once enjoyed by the Reagans. I am not exactly a huge Ronald Reagan fan, but I did develop a bit of a soft spot for the Gipper after visiting the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley a few years ago. The man wrote the most amazing love letters to his wife, a number of which are on display at the Library. I couldn't help but be moved by his incredibly charming and unrestrained expressions of adoration for Nancy.

Anyway, back to the cake. It's a snap to put together. Melt chocolate and butter in a double boiler, mix in sugar and orange zest, add eggs and egg yolks, and stir in sifted cocoa powder. I made a batch and a half and baked it in a 9-inch by 13-inch rectangular pan (which has exactly 1.5 times the volume of the 10-inch round pan specified in the recipe, so no adjustment in baking time was required). The cake was ready in 35 minutes and had a nice firm crust on top.

I was pleasantly surprised by the way this cake turned out. It was very moist, had a nice light texture, and the orange flavor was terrific. This cake is completely passable for Passover, or any other occasion.

To round out the Passover baked goods selection, I also made a Chocolate-Almond Soufflé Torte, which I like to serve cold. It's one of my favorite creamy delicious treats any time of year!

Recipes:

• Orange Flourless Chocolate Cake for the Reagan Family from All the Presidents' Pastries: Twenty-Five Years in the White House, a Memoir by Roland Mesnier.
• Chocolate-Almond Soufflé Torte from epicurious.com.

Previous Posts:

• "Bastille Day Treats," July 14, 2008.
• "Holiday Party Recap, Part III: Ready For a Throwdown!," December 17, 2008.
  

Brownie Throwdown: Peanut Butter Caramel Swirled Brownies

Recently, Tom and I caught an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay on Food Network where Bobby Flay challenged the Vermont Brownie Company to a brownie throwdown. Flay developed a Peanut Butter Caramel Swirled Brownie to put up against the Vermont Brownie Company's signature Dark Chocolate Goat Cheese Brownie. I was really pulling for the goat cheese brownie, but the PB Caramel Brownie looked pretty tasty too... So when I noticed that Flay's brownie recipe was on the Food Network website, I decided to give it a try.

I have made quite a few peanut butter brownies in my time, but what attracted me to this recipe was the caramel element combined with the peanut butter, which is something I haven't seen before. You start out by making caramel on the stove: heating 1/4 cup of water and 1/4 cup of sugar until the mixture turns amber, and then stirring in hot cream, peanut butter, corn syrup, vanilla, and salt. Now 1/4 cup of water and 1/4 cup of sugar makes only a very small amount of liquid and I was really afraid that I was going to burn the mixture, so I didn't let it get too brown before adding the cream. The resulting peanut butter-caramel mixture definitely had a light caramel flavor, but it might have been more caramel-y if I had let the mixture brown a bit more. It was very easily to marble the caramel-peanut butter into the brownie batter, so I got a nice looking brownie.

The recipe instructs you to bake the brownie for 23-25 minutes at 325 degrees, at which point a toothpick will come out gooey. The instructions tell you not to worry about the brownies being underbaked: "be brave! -- underbaking the brownies is one of the secrets to their fudgy texture." After 25 minutes, a toothpick came out covered in completely raw batter. Nothwithstanding the recipe's instructions, I put the brownies back in the oven for another 3 minutes. When I tested the brownies again, the toothpick came out in a 50-50 mixture of cooked batter and raw batter, and I crossed by fingers that the brownie was cooked enough. After cooling the brownies completely and chilling them for a few hours, I was able to cut them cleanly, but the brownies were ridiculously fudgy -- a little too fudgy for my taste. If I make these again, I would bake them for another 3-5 minutes, or maybe bake them at 350 degrees instead.

The brownies tasted fine. Very chocolate-y, especially because there were chocolate chips in the batter as well. It was very sweet. The caramel peanut butter was interesting, but I'm not sure that I liked it better than I would have liked peanut butter alone. All in all, not a bad little brownie, but also nothing spectacular.

Recipe: Peanut Butter Caramel Swirled Brownies by Bobby Flay.

I'm Thowing in the Towel on This One: Compost Cookies 2.0

So I decided to give Christina Tosi's Compost Cookie one more try after the very disappointing results I got after my first attempt. I got some advice from commenter Louise and took a look at Anna Ginsberg's blog Cookie Madness, which recently featured no less than three posts on the Compost Cookie. This post provided a slightly adapted version of the recipe using weight measurements (instead of volume) for flour. I gave this version a try, and I even stuck the scooped dough in the freezer for a few hours before baking. While I got slightly better results, I still wasn't happy with the cookies.

The cookies were less flat this time, but they still spread too much and the texture was all wrong. I'm sure if I just keep adding more flour, eventually this cookie would turn out correctly. But honestly, at this point, I don't really care enough to keep trying. I am just not such a fan of the flavor of the cookie dough, and I think I might get more enjoyment from eating the mix-ins plain (in this case, I used Butterfingers, Twix, Reese's Dark Peanut Butter Cups, and potato chips) than in the cookie, where they morph a bit into an amorphous sweet blob.

I don't feel bad walking away from this recipe. There are lots of other really delicious cookies out there just waited to be discovered!

Recipe: Compost Cookies from Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar, as adapted here from Cookie Madness.

Previous Post: "The Name Says It All: Compost Cookies Destined for the Garbage Heap," March 9, 2010.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: the Super Earthy Brownie

This is a Chocolate Fudge Brownie with Toffee and Dried Cherries from Regan Daley's In the Sweet Kitchen. The one word that most accurately describes the brownie's flavor is "earthy." This brownie's deep flavor and the wonderfully chewy cherries leave a lasting impression!

Recipe: "Chocolate Fudge Brownies with Toffee and Dried Cherries" from In the Sweet Kitchen: the Definitive Baker's Companion by Regan Daley.

Previous Post: "Making Brownies With Chocolate in Short Supply," May 14, 2009.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: St. Patrick's Day Comes Late This Year

I was at the party store on Saturday morning and they still had a good selection of St. Patrick's Day merchandise, so I picked up a set of shamrock-shaped cookie cutters. They were perfect for another batch of green tea cookies.

Recipe: "Green Tea Sweets" from Amai Tea & Bake Shop, available here.

Previous Post: "Take Me to Your Leader: Green Tea Sweets," March 18, 2010.

Take Me to Your Leader: Green Tea Sweets

On Tuesday, I started thinking about what green baked goods I could make for St. Patrick's Day. Two years ago for St. Patrick's Day I tried a King Arthur Flour recipe for St. Pat's Pistachio Cookies. The recipe ingredients included a box of pistachio instant pudding mix, and I wasn't all that thrilled with the color or flavor of the resulting cookies.

I wanted to find a recipe that would make naturally green baked goods without the need for food coloring, so I Googled the term "green tea desserts." One of the top search results was this May 2007 blog entry with the recipe for Green Tea Sweets from now-defunct New York City tea and bake shop Amai. It looked quite promising, so I gave it a try.

The dough is just a mixture of butter, powdered sugar, matcha green tea powder, flour, and egg yolks. I don't make roll and cut cookies very often (I could be wrong, but I believe that the number of roll and cut cookie recipes I've made in the almost two years I've been maintaining this blog is precisely zero), because I often get frustrated with the time and hassle involved. But this dough was very easy to handle after chilling. It was about the consistency of Play Doh, and I was able to roll it out on a silicone mat without any trouble or the need for any additional flour to prevent sticking. I rolled the dough out to a half-inch thickness as specified in the recipe, and the resulting cut cookies were nice and firm so that I could pick them up with my bare fingers, toss them in granulated sugar, and move them to a baking pan without any drooping or deformation. They kept their shape in the oven and baked up beautifully.

On a whim, I had decided to use a small gingerbread man cookie cutter, and I couldn't help thinking that "Martian Cookies" would be a good name for these adorable little green men (my cookie cutter was only 2.25 inches high from head to toe). The finished cookies had a firm, but not crisp texture, and were lightly sweet with just the slightest hint of green tea flavor. Without the green color, I don't think most people would be able to correctly identify that they contained green tea. I made a double batch of dough and got 61 little Martians.

I would definitely make these cookies again. They're an unusual and attractive little treat!

Recipe: "Green Tea Sweets" from Amai Tea & Bake Shop, recipe available here.

Ipso Fatto Instant Photo: Ella's Baby Shower Cake

It's a Restaurant Eve Cake. The duck on top is chocolate. Well, "chocolate-like" is probably more like it -- I think it's mostly food coloring and partially hydrogenated oils, but it is edible. It's always particularly convenient to bake baby-themed stuff in the early spring -- you can easily find lots of ducks and other great pastel cake decorations around Easter.

Recipe: Restaurant Eve's Cake from the Washington Post, April 23, 2006.

The Name Says It All: Compost Cookies Destined For the Garbage Heap

Last week a friend of mine sent me a link to this blog post by David Lebovitz, describing his experience with Christina Tosi's recipe for Compost Cookies. Seeing as how I was pretty happy with Tosi's Crack Pie recipe when I tried it out last week, I set out to try making the Compost Cookie as soon as possible. Live with Regis and Kelly recently aired a segment where Kelly visited Tosi at Milk Bar and learned how to make the cookie; you can watch the segment here [apparently this video segment has been removed]. The show website also provides the recipe.

The Compost Cookie is a cookie that has a whole bunch of random sweet and salty stuff in it. According to Tosi, the version at Momofuku Milk Bar contains potato chips, pretzels, coffee grounds, chocolate chips, graham cracker crumbs, and butterscotch chips. When Kelly Ripa visited the bakery, she and Tosi made a version with Fritos, Ritz crakers, Goldfish crackers, Rolos, chocolate chips, Cocoa Krispies, and Raisinettes.

This concept doesn't seem all that strange to me. One of my favorite cookie recipes has pretzel bits in it, and while I'm not sure if they're still available, Immaculate Baking Company used to offer cookies that included Route 11 potato chips. I am a big fan of salty and sweet flavors mixed together. Tom and I have perhaps never had as much fun at the grocery store as when we were shopping for my compost ingredients; we spent the whole time just looking for junk food. In the end, I decided to go with Whoppers, Milk Duds, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, chocolate chips, Cocoa Krispies, and Cape Cod Potato Chips.

I made the dough, scooped out 4 oz. balls of dough (I used a #16 scoop and got 22 cookies), and refrigerated the scooped dough for 48 hours before baking. The dough was extremely soft, and I wanted to make sure that the dough was really well chilled so that the cookies maintained their shape during baking. I was also thinking that these might be a bit like Jacques Torres's chocolate chip cookie recipe that was published in the New York Times, where the dough benefits from several days in the fridge.

Unfortunately, my efforts failed and the result was a complete loss (although I was somewhat comforted by the fact that David Lebovitz suffered the same fate when he tried the recipe the first time). The cookies spread excessively and ended up very flat -- the finished cookies were four and a half inches in diameter and only one quarter inch tall. They were close to burned on the outside and yet raw and soggy in the middle. I realized afterwards that the problem might be traceable to the fact that I only chilled the dough, and not the cookie sheets I ended up using, before I baked the cookies. Sigh.

I would never serve these to anyone. These Compost Cookies went right into the garbage. That said, the part of the cookies that was fully cooked on the outside edge was pretty darn tasty. The cookies had an extremely chewy texture, and you could really taste the Milk Duds and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I thought that the cereal, malt balls, and potato chips would add a nice crunchy texture, but I couldn't detect any of these ingredients in the final cookie (I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they all got soggy during the extended period of refrigeration, especially since I chopped the Whoppers before I mixed them into the batter). I'm going to have to try this recipe again, and I will definitely try chilling or freezing the baking sheets beforehand -- I've still got quite a selection of junk food around to use for my next effort!

Recipe: "Compost Cookies" from chef Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar.

What the Heck is Anderson Cooper Talking About?: Crack Pie

Recently, I couldn't help noticing that the food blogosphere has been hopping with stories about the Crack Pie at Momofuku Milk Bar in New York City. The pie is a variation of chess pie, a Southern classic. While I haven't the pleasure of visiting Milk Bar, I am a huge fan of chef David Chang -- the mind behind all of the Momofuku restaurants -- and until someone proves otherwise, I'm going to stick with my current opinion that he can do no wrong.

What really piqued my interest in Crack Pie, however, was hearing CNN's Anderson Cooper rave -- on multiple occasions -- that he is completely addicted to the stuff. After all, Anderson Cooper is not exactly an Oprah type who regularly goes around gabbing about his favorite things. I figured if he's hooked, this pie has got to be some good stuff. In January, the Martha Stewart Show aired a segment where Martha visited Milk Bar, and David Chang and pastry chef Christina Tosi showed her how to make the pie. I watched the video (you can see it here) a few times and transcribed the recipe. Then a few weeks later, the LA Times ran an article on Crack Pie and printed the recipe. I couldn't wait to give it a try.

You start out by making your own oatmeal cookie. After it cools, you crumble it up and run it through the food processor with brown sugar, salt, and butter to make the crust, which you then press into two pie tins (the recipe yields two pies). This oatmeal cookie smelled absolutely amazing in the oven, and it also tasted delicious. I was getting pretty excited about this pie even after just making the crust.

The filling is very simple. It's just brown sugar, granulated sugar, salt, milk powder, melted butter, heavy cream, vanilla, and egg yolks. I used 10-inch pie pans as directed in the recipe and I was a little concerned as to how little filling there was. When I poured the filling into the pans, there wasn't a lot of it and I was wondering it there was too much exposed crust above the filling.

However, after 30 minutes in the oven (I ended up baking my pies for 5 minutes longer than the recipe suggested), the filling had risen nicely, right up to the top of the crust. The filling was quite puffy and jiggly when I took it out of the oven, but it soon sank and firmed up upon cooling. The top was nicely golden and I refrigerated the pies overnight.

The next day, I sprinkled the pies liberally with powdered sugar before serving. I had a huge problem with the bottom crust sticking to the pan, and when I tried to cut slices, I couldn't get them out of the pan cleanly. I made a couple more pies later in the week and tried to see if some baking spray on the bottom of the pie tins and lots of tamping down on the pie crust might help. It didn't seem to make any difference, and I still had a major stickage problem. Out of four pies I made, I was able to get one slice out cleanly, and it's the one you see in the picture below.

So what's the verdict on Crack Pie? It pretty much tastes like the gooey part of a pecan pie, without the pecans. If you like pecan pie, you'll love Crack Pie. Pecan pie happens to be my least favorite pie in the world; even so, I thought this pie was quite tasty. The crust is absolutely delicious, and the creamy/gooey texture is just luxuriously decadent. It's very sweet. Tom said he swears he could feel a cavity forming as he tried a slice. I would not rate it as addictive, but I can definitely see how some folks might go bananas over the stuff.

Momofuku sells whole Crack Pies for $44. If you live outside of New York City, they will send you one via FedEx for a pretty penny. But if you're interested in trying it, I suggest you put away your wallet and just try the recipe for yourself!

Recipe: Crack Pie from Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar, printed in the February 11, 2010 Los Angeles Times.

Prior Posts:

• "Vegetarian Quiche and Not-So-Vegetarian Panna Cotta," April 15, 2009.
• "Checking Out Momofuku's New Digs," June 10, 2008.
  

A Whole Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: Chocolate-Orange Brownies

Last week as Tom was flipping through the most recent issue of Bon Appétit, he brought the magazine over to me, pointed to a recipe for Chocolate-Orange Brownies and said it looked like something that I should try. I looked it over and quickly agreed. The recipe ran in the magazine's R.S.V.P. column, which features restaurant recipes that are obtained in response to reader requests, akin to the Los Angeles Times Culinary S.O.S. column. I had high hopes for this recipe from the Homepage Cafe in Bozeman, Montana. I really like the combination of chocolate and orange together, and I thought it would be good to have another orange brownie recipe to turn to since I've had some problems with the other recipe I've been relying on.

The ingredient list includes cocoa (dissolved in boiling water), dark brown sugar, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, pecans, eggs, melted butter, grated orange peel, and vanilla.

The magazine describes these brownies as "cake-like," which is basically accurate. They were somewhere between cakey and fudgy, with the overall texture being somewhat sticky and difficult to cut cleanly. The brownies had a lovely and strong orange aroma, but only a subtle orange taste, and an underwhelming chocolate flavor. All in all, these half-fudgy, half-cakey, half-chocolately, half-orangey, half-sticky squares completely failed to impress. I would much rather risk it with the Midnight Chocolate Brownie Bite recipe from the L.A. Times the next time I'm in the mood for chocolate and orange.

Recipe: "Chocolate-Orange Brownies" from Bon Appétit, March 2010. [This recipe is not available on-line yet; I'll update this post with a link if/when it gets added to epicurious.com.]

Salt is the Spice of Life: Orange Dinner Rolls

Last week the Los Angeles Times ran a yummy-looking recipe in the Culinary SOS Column for the Orange Dinner Rolls from Morrison's Lodge in Oregon. Even though I rarely make yeasted baked goods (well, except for the no-knead breads that I've been into lately -- and those don't really count), these rolls looked so pretty and interesting that I had to give the recipe a try. The bread is made from a slightly sweet yeasted dough, and it has a mixture of sugar and orange zest rolled up inside. The individual rolls are then baked in muffin pans, which makes for a charming presentation.

The recipe was easier than I thought it was going to be. The dough was extremely sticky when I took it out of the Kitchenaid mixer, but after incorporating some more flour during kneading, I was able to handle it and roll it out very easily. The recipe advises that cutting the rolls with string is easier and cleaner than using a knife. I used plain dental floss, which is sturdier than string and cuts like a charm. I let the rolls rise in the muffin pans for about 90 minutes before baking.

These rolls were just gorgeous coming out of the oven and I was initially pleased as punch with the way that they turned out. Then Tom and I each tasted one. Even though the orange filling was nice, the bread itself was unbelievably bland. I was trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with the rolls when Tom honed in on the problem immediately: "Did you put any salt in these?" I quickly realized that in fact, I had completely forgotten to add any salt at all to the dough. When I read the recipe before starting it, I had noticed that the salt wasn't added with the flour and other dry ingredients as I would have expected, but instead incorporated at the very end, right before kneading. I remember thinking this was strange because when is salt ever added to a sticky dough at the very end? In any case, I accidentally forgot to add the salt and ended up with a flat and flavorless result.

I can only imagine that these rolls would have been quite delicious if I had actually put together the recipe correctly. Even though oversalting is one of the most common complaints I have when I eat in restaurants, salt is in fact absolutely critical to both cooking and baking alike. This experience was an unfortunate reminder that one little teaspoon of the stuff can in fact make all the difference in the world.

Recipe: "Orange Dinner Rolls" from Morrison's Lodge, printed in the February 25, 2010 Los Angeles Times.