Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Fennel-Orange Shortbread Wedges
April 6, 2021 at 1:43 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, savory things, snacks, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 6 CommentsTags: baking, cookies, savory, shortbread, snacks
These Fennel-Orange Shortbread Wedges are an apéro hour delight. Just a little sweet with a salty zip, they are finely flavored and fragranced with orange zest and cracked fennel seeds. They have that crisp yet tender texture that earns the name “shortbread.” These are really good with olives and a piece of cheese. And a glass of wine…don’t forget that. I made half of the recipe and patted the dough out into a six-inch cake pan for baking.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us anytime!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Peanut Brownie Sablés
March 16, 2021 at 2:11 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 2 CommentsTags: baking, chocolate, cookies, nuts
Peanut Brownie Sablés…when two become one. You do actually need to make two different doughs to make this recipe, something that initially sounded very annoying to my lazy self but is actually no biggie. First mix up a peanut butter sablé dough then get cracking on a brownie batter. The brownie just uses cocoa, so there’s no messing with a water bath (also, I followed Mardi’s lead and used room temp butter for that batter). The two separate mixes get paddled together to become the final hybrid dough.
This cookie mash-up was a hit for me. Chocolate and PB is a most winning combo, and these cookies are nice and soft in the middle. I have some more dough in the freezer that I’ll bake off this weekend.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
Everyday Dorie: Tangerine-Topped Cheesecake
March 12, 2021 at 12:01 am | Posted in cakes & tortes, everyday dorie, groups, simple cakes, sweet things | 5 CommentsTags: cake, cheesecake, everyday dorie
I’m looking at this photo of a slice Tangerine-Topped Cheesecake and am wondering why I didn’t actually top it with any tangerine segments. They’re all in the bowl in the background! Ah well, it’s a pretty nice-looking slice anyway, and that citrus did eventually find it’s way on top. This cheesecake has a blend of cream cheese and ricotta, which, along with a long beating time, keeps it light. It’s also basically a crustless cheesecake, with just a dusting of crumbs on the bottom to keep it from sticking. A thick slice of NY-style cheesecake often hits me like a brick (of cream cheese), so I really liked this lighter style. I do enjoy a proper graham cracker crust, though, but I don’t see why I couldn’t make one for this next time. Since we’re just two cheesecake-eaters here at home, I scaled down the recipe and made a third of it my 6″ loose-bottomed pan.
No futzing with a water bath makes this pretty easy to make. The cake mix has plenty of tangerine zest in it, but you could use any other citrus zest or the seeds of a vanilla bean for flavor instead. And who’s to say it has to be tangerine-topped? Berries, figs, poached pears or stewed dried fruit all sound like good toppers to me.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see all of our cheesecakes this week.
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Ms. Corbitt’s Pecan Cake Fingers
March 2, 2021 at 3:35 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 CommentsTags: baking, nuts
Ms. Corbitt’s Pecan Cake Fingers has a name that makes me giggle and is a vintage recipe straight out of the late 50s. A pecan-loaded brown sugar meringue bakes up into something that I guess could be called cake-like, although still recognizable to me as a chewy meringue, and is topped with a thick brown sugar and vanilla-speckled icing.
When I took my baked meringue out of the oven, it had formed a shell that was a bit souffléd with a hollow gap above the rest of the base. This maybe…probably…had to with my mixing, but I knew that wouldn’t cut or ice easily. I decided to dampen the raised shell slightly, press it down onto the rest of the base and pop it back into the low oven for ten minutes to dry and fuse. Success! It seemed fine.
Dorie and Ms. Corbitt make a stiff, moldable icing that is hand-formed onto the tops of the individually sliced cookies. Boy, that sounds time-consuming, even for the 1/3 sized batch I made. I also didn’t want to handle my cookies quite so much (after I’d already had to squash them into submission once), so I altered the icing a bit to be a spreadable frosting that I could more gently apply to the whole slab before cutting. I let my browned butter set to a soft room temp before stirring in the powdered sugar and vanilla. Then I added just a few drops of milk to get it moving. I frosted the slab, let it set up in the fridge for a few and it was good to slice.
These are sweet, for sure, and it’s no wonder our friend Ms. Corbitt cuts them into slim “fingers,” but they are excellent with a cup of strong coffee. The browned butter icing, whichever way you choose to get it on top, is not to be skipped.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (it’s also here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Lucky Charm Brownies
February 16, 2021 at 10:27 am | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, brownies, chocolate
If you are here expecting a brownie topped with pastel mini marshmallows and cereal bits, you will have to look elsewhere (they do exist, I checked the Google). These Lucky Charm Brownies have a different sweet treasure, both on top and in the batter- amaretti cookies.
The brownie batter contains many of the usual suspects…melted chocolate, cocoa, butter, sugar and eggs…but it’s gluten-free, as the flour is replaced with a mix of pulverized almonds and amaretti. The whole batter is actually whizzed up in the food processor, which makes it super quick and easy. It bakes up into a fudgy, truffle-like slab.
You could just stop there and cut them up into rich little squares. But why would you, when you could also dress them up with chocolate glaze and more crushed amaretti cookies? This makes them even richer but also even more irresistible, which is lucky for everyone who gets to try them.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (it’s also here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!
Everyday Dorie: Dark Chocolate Pudding
February 12, 2021 at 9:05 am | Posted in everyday dorie, groups, puddings, custards, mousses, sweet things | 3 CommentsTags: chocolate, everyday dorie, pudding
I do love a good homemade pudding, but I only seem to make it when a recipe rolls around for a blog group. That’s the case today, with this Dark Chocolate Pudding. This is delicious- thick, rich and luxurious. It comes together quickly in a pot and with constant whisking, you can skip the immersion blender whiz at the end (which is great, since I don’t have one). Not all pudding recipes call for eggs, but this one does, so I did push it through a strainer at the end, mostly to make sure all the little egg chalaza squiggle bits were gone.
Dorie suggests serving the pudding with a sprinkling of cocoa streusel crumbs she calls “chocolate crunch,” but I didn’t feel like firing up the oven for something that would have otherwise been a no-bake dessert. I went freezer foraging instead and came up with a handful of leftover misshapen almond macaron shells. I decided to turn them into my own crunchies by roughly crumbling them and coating them in melted chocolate. Once the chocolate set up, I had some nice rubbly bits to scatter on top of the pudding…or on top of the crème fraîche on top of the pudding.
For the recipe, see Everyday Dorie by Dorie Greenspan, and head over to Cook the Book Fridays to see all of our pudding cups this week.
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Major Grey’s Roll-Ups
February 2, 2021 at 4:09 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, savory things, snacks, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 7 CommentsTags: baking, cookies, savory, snacks
I know we just did a rugelach cookie last month, but I had a half-finished box of Triscuits left from holiday times, as well as an open jar of chutney in the fridge, that I wanted to get crafty with. So, here we have Major Grey’s Rollups, a savory rugelach-style cookie with a cream cheese and ground Triscuit dough and a mango chutney filling. It sounds like a bizarre thing to turn crackers into cookies, and it kind of is, but this uses the same dough as the Triscuity Bites we made a couple of years ago.
I only made a quarter-recipe of these cookies, which not only means I still have Triscuits left(!), but also that I ran into the same “issue” that I did last month. My rolled out dough circle wasn’t big enough to really form them nicely…I knew that would be the case and I just went with it anyway. I sprinkled my roll-ups with some nigella seeds before popping them into the oven.
The dough is flaky, crisp and buttery, and the finished cookies have that sweet and salty combo that does go well with a cocktail.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll and please join us anytime!
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Chocolate-Cranberry and Almond Cookies
January 19, 2021 at 8:50 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 4 CommentsTags: baking, chocolate, cookies
At first glance, to me, the recipe for these Chocolate-Cranberry and Almond Cookies sounded like a bit of a throw-away….not weird, but just some random stuff squished together to make a cookie. But then I made them and tried them, and I really liked them.
These cookies use Dorie’s “Do-Almost-Anything” chocolate dough, which is a nice dough that holds it’s shape well and can be used for cut-outs, pinwheels, thumbprints, whateves. Take the base dough and mix in bits of tart dried cranberries, roll and cut the cookies and top them with a sugary, meringue-like sliced almond topping. In keeping with my on-going pandemic pantry-purge, and in the spirit of this recipe of random stuff, I used what I had when I made these cookies: dried cherries in place of the cranberries and granulated almonds in place of the sliced. I made just half of this recipe, which was a pretty small amount of dough, so I did something I usually avoid at all costs…I formed it into a slice-and-bake log. I don’t normally like messing with that style of cookie formation, but I thought I wouldn’t get a good yield as roll-outs, without re-rolling scrap a zillion times. They aren’t perfect rounds because I stink at slicing, but they tasted good (sweet, tart and chocolatey), and that’s what matters.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
Tuesdays with Dorie DC: Friendship Cookies
January 5, 2021 at 5:41 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 CommentsTags: baking, cookies
Happy 2021– to celebrate another year of baking cookies with my friends, I present you with a plate of Friendship Cookies! These are really rugelach, with a flaky cream cheese dough filled with lots of things that play well together. I had a just little bloop of Philly that was exactly enough to make the dough for a quarter-recipe of these cookies. Not getting to invite friends for cookie parties and the “use what ya got” challenge are two 2020 trends that seem to be continuing into this year, so a smaller amount was just fine with me. The one downside to the downsize is that my cookies were a bit squat. The dough is rolled into a circle that’s spread with the filling and cut like a pizza into triangles, which are then individually spiraled into the rugelach shape. Since I was working with a smaller piece of dough, my rolled-out circle was a smaller diameter and as such, my triangles weren’t long enough for me to get the extra loop in. I don’t know if that makes any sense unless you’ve made the recipe, but you can see that there is something just a bit off about the way these look. You may have to look closely, because I tried to distract the eye with some rainbow sugar sprinkle.
I filled my cookies with cranberry jam (and by that I mean leftover cranberry sauce), boozy golden raisins, toasted walnuts and cinnamon sugar. I had to leave my very best friend out of these cookies…I could tell there just wasn’t going to be any room for chopped chocolate with my smaller dough round…the filling that I already had in there was basically busting out! It’s all good though. These were delicious as-is, and that chocolate will no doubt get used another time.
For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll.
TWD DC Rewind: World Peace Cookies
December 29, 2020 at 5:00 pm | Posted in cookies & bars, DC, groups, sweet things, tuesdays with dorie | 5 CommentsTags: chocolate, cookies
This isn’t the first time I’ve made the famous World Peace Cookies, but I did skip making the recipe again 2017, when they were the pick for Dorie’s Cookies. That a cookie could bring about peace is a sweet sentiment for the end of a weirdly unsettling year, so I whipped up a quick batch of these to say farewell to 2020. They might not achieve world peace, but the delicious lightly salty, extra chocolatey flavor of these cookies certainly gives me a good feeling inside.
After mixing my dough (to which I added a 50/50 combo of chopped chocolate bits and cocoa nibs), I formed it into slice-and-bake logs. Then I put the sliced cookie coins into the cups of a muffin tin for baking (rather than just baking them on a sheet tray). Dorie doesn’t use the muffin tin method in her recipe for this cookie, and having tried it out, I might understand why. After the fact, it dawned on me that this dough has a bit of baking soda in it, which is not typical of a sablé, so it was probably designed to spread more than the cookies she usually bakes in a tin. I think they weren’t able to fully expand within the confines of the muffin cups, as each cookie had a raised rim and a slightly sunken interior. I didn’t let this take away my sense of inner peace, though. I considered the center divots the perfect nesting spot for a little spoonful of vanilla ice cream!
So, a very happy new year to you!! For the recipe, see Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan (or get it here). Don’t forget to check out the rest of this week’s rewind on the TWD Blogroll!
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