The Malt Fest Continues: Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops

After making the Malted Crisp Tart, I had some leftover malted milk powder and malt balls on hand.  Fortunately, I happened to come across Dorie Greenspan's recipe for "Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops" in Baking: From My Home to Yours.  This is a malted chocolate cookie (made from flour, malted milk powder, cocoa powder, baking powder, salt, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and milk), with equal parts coarsely chopped Whoppers and bittersweet chocolate chunks mixed in. 

As Dorie notes in the recipe, the finished batter looks like fudge frosting instead of cookie dough.  Since the batter was so loose, a cookie scoop made it much easier to handle.  I used a #40 scoop and ended up with cookies a little less than three inches in diameter.  

Shortly out of the oven, the cookies had a soft texture, almost like cake.  I didn't like it.  If I want something that tastes like cake, I'll just make cake; this is also why I don't believe in making cakey brownies.  However, by the next day, the cookies had a nice firm texture that definitely was not cake-like in any way.  The mix-ins make this cookie very interesting -- some of the malt ball pieces were crunchy, and others that had been in contact with the pan during baking (they melted, I suppose?) became ultra chewy.  Thus, this cookie is a mix of flavors and textures -- chocolately, malty, chewy, and crunchy.

I thought this cookie was good, but not spectacular.  However, I think it would be outstanding with milk or ice cream.  And for the malt inclined, this cookie definitely delivers!

Recipe: "Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops," from Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Malted Crisp Tart

This week's recipe for Baked Sunday Mornings is a maltravaganza!  The Malted Crisp Tart is a brown sugar-malt crust topped with milk chocolate-malt ganache, crushed malt balls and caramelized Rice Krispies, malted diplomat cream, and more malt balls and caramelized Rice Krispies as garnish.  If you like malted milk, this tart is for you!

As the recipe points out, making this tart is time-consuming but not difficult.  It only take about 15 seconds to mix together the tart crust -- you put flour, salt, malted milk powder, cold butter, brown sugar, and vanilla into a food processor and pulse until combined.  The resulting mixture is bone dry, so it required a bit of effort to press it into the greased tart pan.  You freeze the tart shell and then bake it until golden brown. 

The next layer in the tart is a ganache made from milk chocolate, malted milk powder, and heavy cream.  After you pour the ganache into the baked and cooled tart shell, you sprinkle on crushed malt balls (I just put some Whoppers into a Ziploc bag and bashed them with a rolling pin -- much faster than chopping) and caramelized krispies, and press them into the ganache.

The caramelized crispies were my favorite part of of this recipe.  To make them, you just put sugar and water in a pan, bring the mixture to a boil, and then add Rice Krispies and stir.  When you first add the cereal, you get a wet mixture of sugar syrup and cereal, but the recipe instructs you to keep stirring until the mixture is dry.  You have to keep stirring until the sugar caramelizes and the pan starts to smoke.  My cereal dried out quickly, but then nothing happened for a very long time.  I kept stirring the dry cereal around the pan wondering when something was going to happen, fully expecting the pan to combust at any moment since the recipe indicates that it will start smoking.  I never got any smoke, but after 25 minutes, the sugar finally caramelized and I was able to coat all of the cereal in the caramel and pour it out onto a Silpat to cool.  The caramelized crispies are crazy delicious.  The sugar coating is sweet, to be sure, but it also makes the Rice Krispies unbelievably crunchy.  They are quite addictive and I really wanted to eat them all.  Caramelizing the cereal completely transforms it, as you can see in the picture below, which shows the caramelized version on the left and plain Rice Krispies on the right.

 

The diplomat cream is a malted pastry cream (whole milk, sugar, egg, egg yolk, cornstarch, malted milk powder, butter, and vanilla) that is cooked until it's thickened, sieved, and chilled, with whipped heavy cream folded in after it's cold.  You spread the diplomat cream over the layer of crushed malt balls and caramelized crispies, and then garnish with whole malt balls and more caramelized crispies.  The tart needs a little more time in the fridge before it sets up and is ready to serve.

I thought this tart was extraordinary, and it's one of my favorite items from Baked Explorations so far.  The brown sugar crust is crisp and delicious, with a rich and complex caramel-like flavor.  In fact, several people who ate this tart asked me if there was a layer of caramel in it.  The crunch of the malt balls and caramelized crispies is a wonderful contrast to the smooth diplomat cream, and while there is an awful lot going on in this tart, all of the flavors and textures combine to make something that is fun, interesting, and very special.  Check out what the rest of Baked Sunday Morning bakers have to say about this tart, here. 

Recipe: "Malted Crisp Tart" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

A Dish Best Served Cold: Chocolate Mint Thumbprints

Last night I stopped by CVS after work to pick up some malt balls for my next assignment for Baked Sunday Mornings, the Malted Crisp Tart.  As I was looking around the candy aisle, I happened to spot some Andes Mints, and I recalled that Andes Mints are a necessary ingredient in another Baked Explorations recipe.  So I bought a box of mints along with my carton of Whoppers, and after I got home, I found the recipe I was looking for -- "Chocolate Mint Thumbprints."

While I often make vanilla thumbprint cookies with fruit jam, I have never made any other variety.  The chocolate mint thumbprints are chocolate mint cookies filled with white chocolate-mint ganache.  The cookie dough contains three types of chocolate (dark chocolate, mint chocolate or Andes mints, and cocoa), in addition to flour, salt, butter, sugar, dark brown sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla.  You have to chill the dough for at least 30 minutes before forming it into balls (I used a #50 scoop), rolling the balls in coarse sugar, and making an indentation on top.

Normally when I make thumbprint cookies, I really do use my thumb to make the wells for the filling.  However, for this cookie, the indentations you make in the raw dough almost disappear during baking, shrinking to a barely discernible dimple.  Accordingly, the recipe instructs you to pull the cookies out of the oven partway through baking and make the indentations more visible -- essentially, you have to make the indentations all over again and then put the cookies back in the oven to finish baking.  Thus, it's a good idea to use something other than your finger (the rounded end of wooden handles on kitchen tools worked for me) to make the indentations, because otherwise you're going to burn yourself if you try sticking your thumb in hot cookies that have come straight out of the oven. 

The filling for these cookies is a ganache made from heavy cream, white chocolate, and peppermint extract.  The recipe instructs you to put the filled cookies in the refrigerator until the ganache sets, about 30 minutes.  While my ganache set sufficiently to keep its shape, it remained tacky to the touch and I was unable to stack these cookies (even using layers of parchment) without getting ganache everywhere.

The chocolate cookie is lightly minty with a nice crunch from the coarse sugar coating, and the creamy ganache filling has a lovely texture.  The cookie is a bit dry, but it's still good overall when paired with the ganache.  Tom and I both preferred eating these cookies straight out of the refrigerator; it may be purely psychological, but for some reason, eating the cookie cold seemed to enhance its minty flavor.  I liked this cookie, although I have to say that I prefer getting my chocolate-mint fix either from the Girl Scouts, or from the "Chocolate Chip-Mint Cookies" in Mollie Katzen's Still Life With Menu Cookbook.

Recipe: "Chocolate Mint Thumbprints" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

St. Patrick's Day for the Baker in a Rush: Soda Bread Two Ways

Since Tom and I were headed out of town last Thursday, I was a bit pressed for time trying to come up with a baking idea for St. Patrick's Day.  While normally I would probably go the green cupcake or cookie route, I instead took the path of least resistance -- Irish soda bread.  I don't know why I've never made soda bread before, because it's so quick and easy.  In fact, even though I was busy packing for our trip, I had time to make a couple of different varieties -- a savory version with rosemary and black pepper, and a sweet version with raisins. 

The savory recipe for brown butter soda bread includes browned butter, flour, oats, sugar, fresh rosemary, baking powder, baking soda, salt, black pepper, and buttermilk.  Basically, all you have to do is brown the butter, and then mix the wet ingredients into the dry ones.  You form the dough into two free-form rounds, brush them with egg white and sprinkle them with more black pepper, and then bake until golden. 

I absolutely loved the brown butter soda bread.  The rosemary and black pepper were intensely flavorful without being overpowering.  The rosemary in particular gave the bread a wonderful fresh herbaceous quality.  Tom said that the bread made him crave gravy.  We ate the bread the morning after I baked it, but I can only imagine how delectable it would have been served warm with butter.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to make it for our next dinner party.

To make the sweet soda bread with raisins, you cut cold butter into a mixture of flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and baking soda, and then incorporate buttermilk and raisins.  You are supposed to put the dough into a greased 8-inch round cake pan and sprinkle it with granulated sugar before baking; I used a 9-inch pan and coarse sugar.  The bread expanded during baking to reach the sides of the pan and from the outside, it looked like a single giant scone.

The inside has a flavor similar to a sweet (but not overly sweet) scone, although it lacked the the tender crumbly texture typical of a good scone.  However, it was tasty, and I thought the coarse sugar on top was a very nice touch.  Again, I served this the day after baking, and I'm sure it would have been much better served warm. 

I would happily make either of these again, especially because they are so simple to make.  There's definitely no reason to limit these just to St. Patrick's Day!

Recipes: "Brown Butter Soda Bread" and "Irish Soda Bread with Raisins," from epicurious.com.

The Sweeter Side is Sometimes Salty: Nutty Peanut Butter Cookies

Last month, Tom and I enjoyed a wonderful weekend in New York City, including some terrific food.  Our very first stop was Dorie Greenspan's pop-up store, CookieBar.  From time to time, Dorie and her son Josh set up in a store in NYC to sell cookies, but the store sadly disappears after only a few days.  Although Tom and I had not intentionally planned our trip to coincide with CookieBar, we arrived in New York on the store final's day.  Unfortunately, by the time we got to CookieBar in the early afternoon, the store was literally reduced to nothing more than a few crumbs.  It was a tragicomic scene as we watched a steady stream of people come into the store after us, looking around, and exclaiming in a mixture of disbelief and desperation, "Oh no, are we too late?," or  "Are all of the cookies gone?!"  Dorie was kind enough to stick around to greet all of her disappointed fans, and she is just as lovely in person as I had always imagined her to be. 

It wasn't exactly an auspicious start to our trip, but I was able to stop by two other great bakeries while we were in NYC.  Tom and I stayed at the Kimpton Ink48, and it so happened that Sullivan Street Bakery (famed for owner Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe, which found a national audience after Mark Bittman wrote about it in the New York Times in 2006) and Amy's Bread were both located within a couple of blocks of the hotel.  I had never been to Amy's Bread before, but Tom and I liked it so much that not only did we stop by the Hell's Kitchen location on Ninth Avenue, but we also popped into the Chelsea Market location as well.

When we got home from New York, I immediately went on Amazon and purchased The Sweeter Side of Amy's Bread, by Amy Scherber -- the "Amy" of Amy's Bread -- and Toy Dupree.  (Scherber and Dupree also published a cookbook focusing solely on breads in 1996; an updated edition was released last year.)  One terrific feature of this cookbook is that all of the recipes provide three separate sets of measurements for the dry ingredients: volume, metric weight, and avoirdupois weight.  The recipes are also quite detailed in a way I particularly appreciate, specifying the precise weight of each cookie necessary to produce the stated yield, and the weight of batter you should have in each layer of the multi-layer cakes.  (I am sort of compulsive about this kind of thing, and whenever I make layer cakes, I actually bring out my digital scale to make sure that I have evenly divided the batter between the pans.)

The first recipe I tried from the cookbook was "Nutty Peanut Butter Cookies."  This cookie is pretty straightforward, made with flour, salt, baking soda, eggs, vanilla, smooth peanut butter, butter, dark brown sugar, sugar, and salted peanuts.  The recipe states that you should scoop the dough into 80g balls (or a scant 1/2 cup) that should be flattened before baking.  That would be a ginormous amount of batter.  Instead, I used a #20 scoop to portion out balls of dough that weighed about 40g (still, the recipe's instruction to scoop out 80g cookies was helpful, because I got exactly twice the stated yield when I made cookies half the specified size).  The finished cookies were 3 and 1/2 inches in diameter, which I thought was plenty big.  

This is an excellent cookie.  I find that peanut butter cookies often have a tendency to be dry, but these were not dry at all, and they had a nice crisp exterior.  Best of all, the salted peanuts added a wonderful crunch and salty bite.  I do have several other peanut butter cookies that I like quite a bit (such as the Baked monster cookie and the peanut butter cookie with chocolate chunks), but this cookie is impressive for being quite delicious without the need for any chocolate chips or any other mix-ins, aside from peanuts.  Interestingly enough, this recipe is somewhat similar to the peanut butter jumbles from Carole Walter's Great Cookies that I tried a couple of years ago and found to be unremarkable.  I'm not sure what it is about this particular recipe that makes it so tasty, but it a wonderful salty-sweet treat. 

Recipe: "Nutty Peanut Butter Cookies" from The Sweeter Side of Amy's Bread: Cakes, Cookies Bars, Pastries and More from from New York City's Favorite Bakery, by Amy Scherber and Toy Kim Dupree.

Baked Sunday Mornings: Salt-n-Pepper Sandwich Cookies

I couldn't wait to try the Salt-n-Pepper Sandwich Cookie from Baked Explorations.  I love the combination of sweet and salty (see, e.g., the Baked salted caramel brownie, the salted fudge brownie, the salted chocolate chip cookie, and the peanut butter pretzel chocolate chip cookie).  And while I don't have any experience baking with white pepper, I loved the pistachio-black pepper creme caramel I made a little while back.  So I was confident that the combination of salt and pepper with chocolate was sure to be, as some might say, #WINNING.

I mixed together my dough of flour, salt, fleur de sel, white pepper, cocoa powder, butter, sugar, powdered sugar, egg yolks, vanilla, and melted dark chocolate.  As directed, I formed the dough into two balls and refrigerated them for more than 3 hours.  When I was ready to bake, I took the dough out of the fridge and discovered that the dough was hard.  Deadly-weapon hard.  No-way-in-hell-you-could-possibly-roll-it-out hard.  Fortunately, I also had a batch of malted milk sandwich cookie dough ready in the fridge, so I left the salt-n-pepper dough at room temperature while I rolled, cut, and baked all of the malted milk cookies. 

A few hours later, I rolled out the salt-n-pepper cookies.  The dough was much easier to handle than the malted milk dough; it was fairly dry (although slightly prone to tearing) and didn't stick much.  I used a fluted 2-inch diameter round cutter and was able to cut 90 cookies (enough to yield 45 sandwiches, more than the expected yield of 36).  However, the cookies that I had cut from re-rolled scraps had air bubbles in them; if I ever make these again, I would just throw away the scraps. 

These cookies have the same filling as the malted milk sandwich cookies, a mixture of shortening, butter, powdered sugar, salt, and vanilla.  The finished cookies were beautiful, especially with the little sprinkle of fleur de sel on top.  

I am at a bit of a loss trying to pass judgment on these cookies.  To me personally, the cookie has a nice chocolate and salt flavor on the front end, but a strong and unpleasant aftertaste of white pepper on the back end.  While I love pepper, I thought that the pepper gave this cookie a medicinal taste that completely ruined it for me.  Tom wasn't a big fan either -- and he definitely preferred the malted milk cookies -- but he thought that the cookie was okay. 

I took the cookies to work and received a wide range of feedback. Some gushed enthusiastically without reservation that the cookies were delicious.  Others politely said it wasn't one of their favorites.  Some said that they were a better match for the sweet filling than the malted milk cookie (which I had brought to work just the day before).  Others said the filling was too sweet for the cookie.  Some specifically praised the strong salt and pepper flavors.  Others didn't like the strong pepper flavor.  And some comments were mixed, such as: "Great taste.  Weird aftertaste."  No one told me that it was terrible, but my co-workers are really nice people, and I wouldn't expect any of them to tell me such a thing, even if it were true.

In the many years that I have been baking -- including the more than a decade that I've been bringing baked goods to my office at least once a week -- I have never encountered a more divergent set of opinions about something that I've made.  This cookie is the Rashomon of baked goods.  I don't know if I would make these again.  I have an idea in the back of my head that I might like them better with black pepper, so who knows, I may have to give them another try.

This cookie was a good reminder that many things in life, including taste, are in fact just that -- a matter of taste.  I do understand, however, why Matt and Renato chose to feature these cookies on the cover of their cookbook along with the malted milk sandwiches; they are both so lovely to look at, especially together!

Recipe: "Salt-n-Pepper Sandwich Cookies" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at BAKED Sunday Mornings.

Baking the Baked Cover Recipe: Malted Milk Sandwich Cookies

My next upcoming assignment for Baked Sunday Mornings is Salt-n-Pepper Sandwich Cookies, one of the two cookies featured in the photo on the cover of Baked Explorations.  I quickly decided that I also wanted to try the other cookie in the cover photo, the "Malted Milk Sandwich Cookie."  Actually, baking both cookies at the same time makes a lot of sense, because the two cookies share the exact same filling.

In the past, I have kept malted milk powder on hand for the sole purpose of making homemade Chubby Hubby ice cream (the real thing from Ben & Jerry's is fudge-covered peanut butter-filled pretzels in vanilla malt ice cream, rippled with fudge and peanut butter), and I don't recall having used it in any baked goods before.  This cookie dough is made from flour, malt powder, baking powder, baking soda, salt, butter, dark brown sugar, sugar, eggs, sour cream, and vanilla.  You have to chill the dough for several hours before rolling it out.  This dough was quite soft and I had to use a lot of flour for rolling and cutting, although I was able to repeatedly re-roll scraps without any problems.  I used a 2-inch diameter round cutter for my cookies, and they spread slightly in the oven for a finished size 2 and 1/4 inches across.  The recipe says that it yields 30 sandwiches, but I got a whopping 63. 

The cookie filling is supposed to be an approximation of what's inside an Oreo, and it comes pretty darn close.  Made from butter, shortening, powdered sugar, salt, and vanilla (you are also supposed to include rum, which I omitted), the filling is firm and holds its shape at room temperature.  I was also very surprised that you could fill these cookies and store them at room temperature for a few days without the cookies becoming soft or soggy.  I quite liked the contrast of the crisp cookies against the filling, although these cookies were slightly messy to eat, because taking a bite forced the filling to squish out from the sides.

I thought that these cookies were great, although the malt flavor is not very pronounced.  However, it's a perfectly good vanilla sandwich cookie. The fact that it's also a good looking cookie that keeps well for a few days is a bonus.

Stay tuned until Sunday to read about the salt-n-pepper sandwich cookies!

Recipe: "Malted Milk Sandwich Cookies" from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.

Plainly Delicious: Almond Cake with Boysenberry Jam

The February 2011 issue of Bon Appétit contained not only a great brownie recipe, but also a recipe in the RSVP column that I knew I had to try: an "Almond Cake with Boysenberry Jam" from New York City restaurant Locanda Verde.  The current pastry chef at Locanda Verde is Karen DeMasco, author of the fantastic cookbook Craft of Baking, so I had a hunch this would be a great cake (and, as I have previously mentioned, I don't think I've ever met an almond dessert that I didn't like).

As a bonus, you can put this cake together pretty quickly.  You start by running some almond paste and granulated sugar through the food processor.  You then cream the almond paste-sugar mixture with some softened butter and vanilla until the mixture is light and fluffy.  Next, you add in eggs, fold in the sifted dry ingredients (cake flour, baking powder, and salt), and bake.  Once the cake is cooled, you split the cake and spread boysenberry jam between the layers.  With a dusting of powdered sugar (and the recipe suggests sweetened whipped cream as well, although I skipped it), the cake is ready to serve.

This cake has a soft, granular crumb and is incredibly moist.  The flavor is very almond-y, with the jam adding a nice burst of fruit flavor.  The cake doesn't have any fancy bells and whistles, but is simply delicious.

Recipe: "Almond Cake with Boysenberry Jam," from Locanda Verde, featured in the February 2011 Bon Appétit RSVP column.  Unfortunately, this recipe is not available on epicurious.com.

Giving It 86%: Seven-Layer Cake

Last week during a meeting at work, a co-worker passed me a note asking if I could bake a seven-layer cake with chocolate frosting.  I was totally unfamiliar with seven-layer cake, so I had no idea what he was talking about.  Afterward, we chatted and he explained that he wanted a cake that was seven layers of vanilla cake, with chocolate frosting.  I figured that just putting together cake and frosting shouldn't be difficult -- even if there were a few extra layers -- so I set out to find a recipe and give it my best effort.

When I Googled "seven-layer cake," the first result was a recipe for "Hungarian Seven-Layer Cake" from Gil Marks' World of Jewish Desserts on epicurious.com.  The recipe was highly rated, so I decided to go with it.  The cake is a vanilla sponge that contains eggs, sugar, vanilla, salt, and flour.  The recipe instructs to you either make a round cake by baking seven individual thin layers in round cake pans, or to make an oblong cake by baking two large cakes in jelly roll pans and cutting the cakes into thirds to make six rectangular layers.  I chose to go the oblong cake route, since it required less effort and fuss than making a round cake.  I divided my batter between two parchment-lined jelly roll pans (filling each with a little over 3 cups of cake batter), and baked each layer for 9 minutes.  After the cakes cooled, I trimmed the edges off and cut them into thirds, ending up with 6 identical cake layers that were 5 inches wide, 10 and 1/2 inches long, and 5/16 inch high.  I tasted the ends that I trimmed off, and the cake was very good -- moist and not overly sweet.

The buttercream frosting for this recipe is a public health nightmare; it is basically saturated fat mixed with more saturated fat.  You bring a mixture of water and sugar to 250 degrees on the stove, and then incorporate it into six egg yolks.  You beat the yolks and sugar syrup until the mixture cools, and then add shortening, a pound of softened butter, melted chocolate, vanilla, and salt (rum is optional; I left it out). You have to chill the buttercream for a few hours before it becomes thick enough to use as frosting.

I wanted to try to put an even amount of frosting between each layer of cake, so I measured out 1/3 cup to put between each layer.  I ended up with quite a bit of frosting at the end to cover the top and sides of the cake, so in the future, I would probably either increase the amount of frosting between each layer to 1/2 cup, or use some of the frosting to pipe decorative rosettes around the edges. The finished cake was 3 inches tall.

The cake looks quite impressive when sliced, and the frosting in particular is sinfully good -- a smooth and mild chocolate flavor, with a silky texture that melts in your mouth.  My only criticism was that the sponge cake was a little dry; I baked it before I made the frosting, and I left the cake out for a few hours while I made the frosting and waited for it to chill and firm up to the proper consistency.  I think I should have made the cake a little closer to the time of final assembly, or perhaps brushed the layers with sugar syrup before frosting.  Nonetheless, it was a very pretty and delicious cake.

Even though I only made it 86% of the way to making a seven-layer cake, I'm still going to chalk this one up as a success.

Recipe: "Hungarian Seven-Layer Cake," from The World of Jewish Desserts by Gil Marks, recipe available on epicurious.com.