Snow Witches to the Rescue: White Chocolate Bars

After a couple of disappointing experiences right out of the box, I was just about ready to write off the Fat Witch Brownies cookbook. I decided I had to give the book at least once more chance -- so last night I tried the recipe for "White Chocolate Bars." I'm both relieved and thrilled to be able to declare this one a winner.

This recipe attracted my attention for a few reasons. First was the fact that I've never seen a recipe quite like this one before -- essentially a brownie made entirely with white chocolate. Second, it's extremely easy to make. It only contains eight ingredients (white chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla, flour, baking powder, and salt). To make the batter, you mix together the eggs, sugar, and vanilla, add the melted and cooled chocolate and butter, and then stir in the sifted dry ingredients. At the Fat Witch Bakery, they call these bars "Snow Witches."

The baking instructions were also slightly unusual -- the recipe tells you to bake these bars in a preheated 350 degree oven for 25 minutes, and then to turn off the oven and leave the bars in for another 8 minutes. When I took the bars out, the oven temperature had dropped to 300 degrees. My bars came out beautifully golden, with a slightly wrinkly crust.

These bars were very easy to cut and handle. Most importantly, they tasted great. The bars had a nice chewy texture, especially parts that were along the edges of the pan. They were super moist and very reminiscent of a blondie, except more interesting. The white chocolate flavor was not overwhelming -- which I think is a good thing, because a lot of people don't like eating straight white chocolate. All in all, a very lovely and unusual bar. Certainly enough to encourage me to try more recipes from the cookbook!

Recipe: "White Chocolate Bars," from Fat Witch Brownies: Brownies, Blondies, and Bars from New York's Legendary Fat Witch Bakery, by Patricia Helding.

A Piece of Cake: Baked Doughnuts

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from King Arthur Flour with the subject line, "Secrets revealed! Homemade cake doughnuts." Now while I'm not a fan of frying (I love eating fried food as much as the next person -- I just don't like the muss and fuss involved with making fried food myself), King Arthur has a recipe for baked doughnuts that has received rave reviews. I purchased some nonstick doughnut pans so that I could give it a try.

It's really simple to put the doughnut batter together -- just mix the dry ingredients together, mix the wet ingredients together, and then mix the wet into the dry. (Not having any pastry flour on hand, I used a 50-50 mix of cake flour and White Lily all-purpose flour, which should have come pretty close to the gluten content of pastry flour.) I didn't have any trouble getting the doughnuts out of the pan, and I topped them with a vanilla glaze (powdered sugar, vanilla, and milk) and white sprinkles.

The doughnuts were attractive enough. At first glance, you probably couldn't tell that they were baked and not fried. They were moist and tender and tasted exactly like spice cake. But I was not a fan -- if I wanted spice cake, I would just make a spice cake. And the texture might have been fine for a cake, but it was all wrong for a doughnut -- usually a fried cake doughnut has a much denser texture. When I eat something shaped like a doughnut, I want it to taste like a doughnut.

I have a few other baked doughnut recipes around that I would like to give a try, but I don't think I would make this one again.

Recipe: Baked Doughnuts from King Arthur Flour.

The Suspense Has Been Killing Me: Strawberry-Coconut Layer Cake

Although I read the Food Section of the Los Angeles Times each week without fail, I recently went through several weeks where I was borderline obsessive waiting for the section to come out each Thursday. This is because during the first week of August, I read a post on the LA Times Daily Dish Blog introducing one of the newspaper test kitchen's new interns, Joe Moon. The post described at length Moon's experience testing a possible Culinary SOS recipe for a strawberry coconut cake that looked fantastic. There was a note at the end of the blog post indicating that the strawberry coconut cake recipe would run in the Culinary SOS column "in the next few weeks." So after that, I was compulsively checking the Culinary SOS column each week to look for the cake recipe. The paper kept me in suspense for four agonizing weeks!

While I wanted to try the strawberry coconut cake recipe from L'Angelo Café right away, a number of things kept cropping up and getting in the way. I finally got the chance to make the cake this week.

The cake batter contains coconut milk, flaked coconut, and chopped strawberries. The resulting cake was moist and was predominantly vanilla flavored; the strawberry and coconut flavors were not as strong as I had expected, although the coconut added a great texture to every bite and the bits of chopped strawberry were quite pretty. (From the picture accompanying the article, it looks like the LA Times used sweetened flaked coconut in this recipe. I used unsweetened shredded coconut instead. The cake was still plenty sweet.) I didn't have any problems with the strawberry filling. The filling turned out extremely thick, and I was able to use all of it in the middle of the cake without any leakage.

The finished cake is quite attractive, although next time I will take the time to level the cake layers before assembly so that the finished cake has a neater appearance after it's sliced. Even though there wasn't that much coconut flavor in the cake itself, the fact that the cake is coated in toasted coconut unmistakeably makes this a coconut cake. The filling was also just lovely, and overall, I was extremely pleased with the way the cake came out.

This cake was totally worth the wait!

Recipe: L'Angelo Café's Strawberry-Coconut Layer Cake, from the September 2, 2010, Los Angeles Times Culinary SOS Column.

Alexander Turns Old Enough to Make a Baked Goods Request

I have supplied the baked goods for my little friend Alexander at his birthday party each year. This year, Alexander turned four -- or, much to my delight, old enough to finally care about his birthday and make a specific request for baked goods. Alexander's mother passed along his wish for cupcakes with blue frosting, and I was all too happy to comply.

I wanted to make red velvet cupcakes, but I thought that the red color would really clash with blue frosting -- so I just made the red velvet cupcake batter without the food coloring. The cupcakes came out light brown because of the small amount of cocoa in the cake batter. I used blue striped cupcake liners and dyed the frosting to match the lighter blue color on the liners. These cupcakes were tasty, although it really does throw people for a loop when you hand them a red velvet cupcake that isn't actually red. I think that the visual component of a red velvet cupcake is an important factor in most people's enjoyment. And let's face it, the name "Tan Velvet" doesn't sound too interesting.

I also decided try the basic recipe for Fat Witch Brownies from the Fat Witch Brownie cookbook. There are no bells and whistles to the recipe. It calls for butter, bittersweet chocolate chips, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, and salt. The recipe provides the option of substituting unsweetened chocolate and additional sugar for the bittersweet chocolate; I decided to try this since the unsweetened Guittard chocolate I use is very high quality, and I think it's important to use good chocolate in a brownie. These brownies had a lovely aroma as they were baking, and they looked great when I took them out of the oven.

I was disappointed in these brownies. They were more fudgy than cakey, but the texture was soft and not very dense. I thought the main problem was that they weren't very chocolate-y. The texture might have been improved if I had chilled the brownies before cutting and serving, but the flavor was just not interesting enough to make me want to try them again. Fortunately, I think that most of the kids at the party were too busy playing with Alexander's new Stomp Rocket to really care about how the brownies tasted.

Let's see what Alexander asks for next year!

Recipes:

• "Fat Witch Brownies" from Fat Witch Brownies: Brownies, Blondies and Bars from New York's Legendary Fat Witch Bakery, by Patricia Helding.
• Red Velvet Cake from Cake Man Raven, recipe available here.
  
• Cream cheese frosting recipe from Pumpkin-Raisin Bars, from epicurious.com.
  

Previous Posts:

• "Alexander Turns Three," September 15, 2009.
• "Alexander's Birthday Party," September 21, 2008.
  

My Husband Is Awesome: Lemon Cheesecake Brownies

Last Tuesday I came home from work to find several packages from Amazon.com on our doorstep. I set aside one package that was addressed to Tom and opened my boxes of goodies. One of the arrivals was the Fat Witch Brownies cookbook, which I had pre-ordered months ago. Notwithstanding the fact that I've never been to Fat Witch Bakery in New York, I'm a huge fan of brownies and bars and the cookbook seemed promising. I was excited to dive right into it, and I quickly flipped through the cookbook and selected a recipe to make that very evening. I had already decided to try the recipe for "Lemon Cheesecake Brownies" and started setting up the ingredients on the kitchen counter when Tom arrived home.

He asked what I was doing, and I told him that I was trying out a recipe from the cookbook I had just received that day. He asked which cookbook, and when I told him, he let out a disappointed sigh. He opened up his package from Amazon to reveal... another copy of the Fat Witch Brownies cookbook that he had ordered for me as a surprise. I really do have any incredibly thoughtful husband!

But back to the recipe... The lemon cheesecake brownies include a layer of fudgy brownie topped with a layer of lemon cheesecake batter, with the two layers slightly marbled together before baking. The brownie batter (butter, unsweetened chocolate, bittersweet chocolate chips, sugar, vanilla, eggs, flour, and salt) is very thick, so it was difficult to marble it neatly with the cheesecake layer (cream cheese, sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, egg, and flour).

In the cookbook, the photo accompanying the recipe shows that the tops of these bars are cream cheese colored, i.e., they appear not to have browned at all in the oven. In contrast, you can see from the photo above that my bars were completely brown on top. I was afraid that they might have been overbaked, but the brownie layer was very dense and moist -- I think it might have been undercooked if I had pulled the bars out of the oven any sooner.

As for the taste, I thought that the lemon-chocolate combination was just okay. I am a fan of chocolate and citrus together (particularly chocolate and lime, or chocolate and orange), but neither the chocolate flavor or the lemon flavor here were very assertive, leaving me wanting more. I probably wouldn't make these particular brownies again, but I'm looking forward to trying some of the other recipes from the cookbook.

Thanks, Tom!

Recipe: "Lemon Cheesecake Brownies" from Fat Witch Brownies: Brownies, Blondies and Bars from New York's Legendary Fat Witch Bakery, by Patricia Helding.

This Cookie is a Contender: Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Nutella

Since I discovered Jacques Torres' chocolate chip cookie recipe after it was published in the New York Times two years ago, it's become my go-to chocolate chip cookie. I still make other varieties of cookies that contain chocolate chips (e.g. oatmeal chocolate chip, peanut butter chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip). But as far as straight-up, traditional chocolate chip cookies go, I have pretty much stopped trying other recipes -- because I'm pretty sure I'll never find one to surpass it.

However, as I am a huge fan of Nutella, I couldn't resist trying Bill Yosses' recipe for Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Nutella from The Perfect Finish. Even though I love hazelnuts, I never bake with them -- not only are they expensive and somewhat hard to find, but peeling them is a tedious chore. On the other hand, Nutella offers chocolate-hazelnut gratification that requires no more effort than unscrewing the jar lid and scooping some out with a spoon.

Yosses' recipe calls for flour, baking soda, salt, butter, sugar, light brown sugar, Nutella, eggs, a vanilla bean, bittersweet chocolate chunks, and nuts. I used semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of chunks, and skipped the nuts. The Nutella turns the cookie batter an odd shade of brown. The baked cookies had a dull grayish muddy hue, like chocolate milk.

My first reaction when I tried a cookie was immediate dismay; I really couldn't taste the Nutella, which was the sole reason I had wanted to try this recipe in the first place. However, my disappointment was fleeting. Despite the lack of hazelnut flavor, this is an excellent chocolate chip cookie. It has a very good texture -- moist and chewy. And while I don't think the Nutella would be detectable by someone who didn't know it was part of the recipe, the cookie has a certain extra flavor oomph. Yosses says that the Nutella keeps the cookies flexible and chewy and gives an overall subtle nutty taste. He also says the moisture in the Nutella helps the cookie keep well for 3 or 4 days (I can't verify that; there were no leftovers!).

Tom actually said he liked the Nutella cookie better than the Monster Cookies with Pretzel M&Ms I made recently, which is quite a statement, since the monster cookies were really delicious. He does agree with me that the Jacques Torres recipe still rules the chocolate chip cookie category. However, this recipe does have one significant advantage over the Jacques Torres cookie. You can make the batter and bake the cookies right away, without any need to chill the cookie dough. In contrast, you need to chill the monster cookie dough for five hours and the Jacques Torres dough for at least 24 hours. I will definitely make this cookie again, and it's wonderful to have a tasty option for chocolate chip cookies that don't require advance planning!

Recipe: "Chocolate Chunk Cookies with Nutella" from The Perfect Finish: Special Desserts for Every Occasion, by Bill Yosses and Melisssa Clark.

Previous posts:

• "The Cookie That Has Everything: Monster Cookies," August 24, 2010.
• "Sustenance for the 46th St. Shovel Brigade: Chocolate Chip Cookies," February 11, 2010.
  

A Delicious Start for a Sweet New Year: Majestic and Moist New Year's Honey Cake

Even though Tom and I aren't Jewish and don't observe Jewish holidays, I couldn't resist the urge to make a honey cake for Rosh Hashanah. I love the fact that honey is associated with Rosh Hashanah to signify a sweet new year.

I picked a recipe from epicurious.com that has received rave reviews -- the "Majestic and Moist New Year's Honey Cake" from A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking by Marcy Goldman. As I was setting up the ingredients on the kitchen counter to make the cake, Tom noticed that I had pulled out a bottle of The Macallan 25 whiskey. He pointed out that I didn't need to use such an incredibly expensive bottle of whiskey to make the cake. Of course I knew that already -- but the bottle was a wedding gift from a close family friend, and since I don't drink alcohol at all, I figured that using the whiskey to bake something would be the only way I could enjoy it.

This spice cake smelled absolutely heavenly as it was baking. The aroma and appearance of the finished cake were both reminiscent of gingerbread, and Tom and I could hardly wait for it to cool so that we could taste it.

This cake was very dense and moist, with a wonderful shiny outside crust. I made the cake in a tube pan, which I thought turned out great -- each slice had plenty of chewy crust around the edges. I used a mild clover honey for the cake, and I don't think the finished cake had a strong honey flavor -- but it had a complex and warm spice flavor. Also, the entire cake definitely had an overall boozy quality to it -- you could clearly taste the alcohol. I thought the sliced almonds on top were a terrific addition, contributing both flavor and texture.

I received a lot of great feedback on this cake, with several people telling me it was one of the best honey cakes they had ever tasted. I loved the spice flavor and the wonderful moistness of the cake, but I found the boozy flavor unpleasant -- the reason why I don't drink alcohol is that I don't like it. As an experiment, I made this cake again substituting additional orange juice for the whiskey, and I liked the results much better. Tom prefers the whiskey version.

I plan on making this cake again (and again!). It was delicious and pure comfort food. While it doesn't need any embellishment, I suspect that it would be out of this world with whipped cream or ice cream. This cake is perfect for the fall and winter -- and it certainly is a lovely and sweet way to start a new year!

Recipe: "Majestic and Moist New Year's Honey Cake" from A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking by Marcy Goldman, available on epicurious.com.

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Crunchy-Topped Whole-Wheat Plum Cake

I took the last week off from work and from baking, as I was busy entertaining my parents while they were in town for a visit. (One minor exception: at my mother's request, I baked her a batch of madeleines. She wanted to know how my madeleines compare to those she recently had at Joël Robuchon in Las Vegas. I would not pretend for a second that my cakes could hope to compare to those from one of Robuchon's restaurants -- the man has not been declared France's Chef of the Century and awarded 26 Michelin stars for nothing. But I was happy to go through the exercise to satisfy her curiosity!)

It's good to get back to baking. Recently, I've been seeing a lot of coverage of recipes for Rosh Hashanah, so I decided to try one I saw online in the New York Times last week (although I believe that it will appear in the printed edition tomorrow). The Times had an article about plum cake, and a recipe. The pictured cake looked delicious, and the recipe was particularly interesting because it was made entirely with whole grain flour and contained relatively little sugar. I was able to find some beautiful organic black plums at Whole Foods, and I was excited to see how this cake would come out.

The recipe yields a relatively small amount of cake batter, so I had to spread it quite thin in the pan (in fact, the finished product is so flat that I think it's probably more accurate to characterize these as "bars" as opposed to "cake"). I cut the plums into flat slices instead of wedges, and I laid them out on top of the batter, overlapping in neat rows. I sprinkled sanding sugar on top of the fruit before baking, but it all dissolved in the oven. I sprinkled on a bit more sugar after the cake had cooled and before serving.

This cake looked even better than the one pictured in the Times, but the taste was completely blah. I thought the cake had very little flavor. It was screaming out for a little spice (I kept thinking that some cinnamon in the batter or some crumble on top could have done wonders), and because there is so little sugar in the recipe, I didn't think it was sweet enough. To add to the problem, the cake texture was a little heavy and dry. I'm not sure if this was because of the whole grain; I used King Arthur White Whole Grain Flour. The plums on top were sweet and tasted good, but the fruit texture was soggy and unappealing. The little bit of sanding sugar on top added only the slightest bit of crunchy texture. I could see how this might be passable with some sweetened whipped cream or ice cream, but on its own, this cake was very disappointing.

Recipe: "Crunchy-Topped Whole-Wheat Plum Cake" from the September 8, 2010 New York Times. See also the accompanying article, "Updating the Holiday Plum Cake."