TWD DC Rewind: Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels
November 30, 2021 at 8:46 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
I pulled what now seems to be my signature move on these Cherry-Nut Chocolate Pinwheels: I baked them on time and then totally didn’t feel like writing a post about them. I guess now I easily have something to post for Rewind week. Please don’t think that means I didn’t like these. Not so– I actually liked them a lot! A cooked down dried cherry and walnut paste is rolled up inside Dorie’s Do-Almost-Anything Chocolate Dough. What’s not to like? They even held their shape (a fear of mine with pinwheels, and slice and bake cookies in general)! I decided to decorate them with the optional white chocolate drizzle, but it sort of hides the spiral of goodies going on. These have kind of a fruit cake vibe, and I think they would make great holiday cookies.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check the TWD Blogroll!
Everyday Dorie: Roasted Butternut Squash Soup
November 26, 2021 at 4:55 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, savory things, soups | 7 CommentsTags: everyday dorie, savory, soup
I feel like I’ve made squash soup every which way I can think of, but this Roasted Butternut Squash Soup has some flavorings that I, in fact, had not thought of before. The squash, along with onions, carrots and garlic are coated in a mix containing maple, cayenne and soy before roasting, and then later they’re all simmered in a gingery broth and pureed. The soup is spiced with cinnamon and star anise…since I don’t have any anise, I subbed these spices for Chinese five-spice. This was good and warming, and I loved these flavors with the squash. I tried to compliment them with my garnishes of scallions, chile crisp and toasted squash seeds.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: English Muffins
November 24, 2021 at 8:53 pm | Posted in breakfast things, BWD, groups, savory things, tuesdays with dorie, yeast breads | 7 CommentsTags: baking, bread
It’s Thanksgiving week and I can’t get enough carbs..homemade English Muffins will do quite nicely for breakfast. This is actually the second batch of English muffins I’ve made in the past week. The first was a different recipe (and slightly different technique) that I had to make for work. This recipe of Dorie’s is pretty straight forward. A quick-to-make, sticky dough gets a long chill (I went overnight) and is then shaped into rounds and griddled up free-form. After chilling, the dough wasn’t hard to work with and I think my muffins retained a fairly nice shape without using rings. Dorie stops short of cooking the muffins all the way through on the stovetop (the other recipe I made finished them off in the oven for about 10 minutes after griddling them to the desired color). She reasons that toasting the muffins becomes the final step in their cooking process. While this is true, my muffins were still a bit doughy inside when I forked them in half to toast them, and I do think a little dense as a result. Still delicious, though, and I will enjoy every last one, but next time I may think about cooking them a little longer, either in the oven at the end, or keeping them on the griddle a few minutes more if they aren’t getting too browned.
With two English muffin successes under my belt this week, I’m feeling pretty good about applying for that management position at Thomas’. If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, you can test drive this English Muffin recipe here. But get the book and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Coco-Almond Thumbprints
November 16, 2021 at 9:25 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 3 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
One candy bar that I would never trade away in my Halloween stash was always the Almond Joy, and these Coco-Almond Thumbprints are pretty much the homemade cookie version. Dorie originally concocted these gluten-free sweets to be a Passover dessert, and you can see (and taste) the resemblance to macaroons. They are so easy to make that they can be a year-round anytime treat: just whiz coconut, almonds, sugar, a pinch of salt if you’d like and egg whites in the food processor. Roll that mix into balls, give ’em the thumbprint press and stick ’em in the oven. Once baked they get a generous spoonful of chocolate ganache to fill their bellies.
These were so good…the cookies stayed chewy like a macaroon and the ganache never set completely firm. I would have been happy to childishly hoard them for myself in the back of my closet (which is where I used to hide my Halloween candy pumpkin so my brother wouldn’t raid it), but some dude who seems to never go to the office anymore was on to the fact that I was baking cookies, so I was forced to share.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Everyday Dorie: Chicken and Winter Squash Tagine
November 12, 2021 at 8:21 pm | Posted in cook the book fridays, everyday dorie, groups, other savory, savory things | 7 CommentsTags: chicken, everyday dorie, savory
When the weather turns chilly, it’s nice to have a fragrant, braised meat and veg dish simmering away on the stove. This Chicken and Winter Squash Tagine is just that. Spiced with ras el hanout, this tagine is Dorie’s pantry version of a North African stew. Not that I have made so many tagines in my life, but I usually think of them as one-pot meals, so I turned her recipe into one. Rather than cooking down onions and browning off chicken in separate pots, I browned the chicken in my Dutch oven first. Then I removed it to cook down the onions…once they were melty-soft and spiced up, I added the chicken back into the pot along with slices of acorn squash to simmer until completely tender.
I had some homemade preserved lemon, so I swapped that in for the fresh zest and juice in the recipe. Because I love them in a tagine, some green olives went into mine as well, and next time, in order to thicken the sauce up a bit (which Dorie does warn us will be thin), I’ll probably add some chickpeas and a few spoonfuls of their starchy liquid near the end of cooking. All in all though, this was warming and tasty, and while Dorie says it’s best freshly made, I thought it was even more flavorful the next day.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see how the group liked this one.
Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Apple Pandowdy
November 9, 2021 at 2:07 pm | Posted in BWD, cakes & tortes, groups, simple cakes, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 23 CommentsTags: baking, fruit
We’re already onto our second recipe from Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple! I was going to do the English Muffins this week, but then you know how it goes. I didn’t get around to making the dough, and apparently English muffins don’t make themselves…but I did have a round of homemade rough puff pastry in the freezer, so Apple Pandowdy it was!
A pandowdy is one of those olde-fashioned desserts I’ve never actually made before. Likely invented to use off-cuts and scraps of pie pastry (an idea I like very much, btw since I never throw out my trimmings), it is assembled like a pot pie, with a fruit filling underneath a top crust. You can spice up your fruit any way you like, but this one has just a simple filling of sliced apples, sugar, lemon and a little butter. My apples let out a lot of juice, but once the pandowdy had cooled, it was actually quite a nice sauce-like consistency. A sprinkle of flour in the filling would probably help bind that up a bit next time.
Even though I was using brand-new dough and not scraps here, I assembled my crust higgledy-piggledy from randomly-sized overlapping triangles and squiggles, as Dorie suggests. Because I used puff pastry, my pieces got very poofy in the oven, and probably didn’t quite conform to the shape of the cooked down apples quite as much as if I’d used a pie dough. I guess it’s still cute in it’s own dowdy way.
If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan yet, you can test drive this Apple Pandowdy recipe here. But get the book and join us as we bake through it every second and fourth Tuesdays! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and all the other participation deets over on Tuesdays with Dorie!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Pecan-Butterscotch Shortbread
November 2, 2021 at 8:11 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 8 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
I’ve been working on another recipe testing job for an upcoming cookbook, and my diet over the past two weeks has been largely puff pasty-based. In an effort to get all my nutrients, I did manage to clear some time and an oven rack to squeeze in these Pecan-Butterscotch Shortbreads. These crispy, buttery, brown sugary rounds have bits of toasted pecans and milk chocolate, and a nip of Scotch (or rum because I don’t have any) to boot.
I don’t think I’ve met a Dorie shortbread that I didn’t love, and these are no exception, but the full recipe makes forty cookies. That’s probably thirty more than two people need to be eating in a “normal” week, much less a week of countless other baked goods. Also, these are made in a muffin tin, and there’s no way I’m doing four rounds of baking in the one tin I have. I scaled back the recipe and just made a quarter of the dough to get ten cookies. I also didn’t bother with the rolling and cutting step…I scooped the dough into my muffin tin and gave each cookie a little pat down to flatten and fill the cavities. I took some shortcuts, but I don’t think they hurt anything…in fact, these are so tasty, I’ll probably have an empty cookie tin in no time and wish I’d made more!
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
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