brownies for a birthday boy

This weekend, there was a brownie lover in my midst. It was my sister's boyfriend, and we were all together to celebrate my mom's birthday. But as it turns out, the brownie lover would be celebrating his birthday soon, so at the last minute I was informed that we would be celebrating two birthdays at once. With my limited financial resources, I thought it wise to stay home and make his gift than hopping in my car to go buy something (which, feeling the way I was after my 15-mile run, seemed like a bad idea for me and everyone else on the road).

Now, I know the point of this blog is to post new recipes. And if you know me at all, you'll know that I am not a stranger to homemade brownies. In fact, I spent the better part of my college years baking them for various occasions: new roomies, finals, birthdays, welcome back from your semester abroad, etc. In those days, I was uberloyal to Mollie Katzen's recipe in the original Moosewood Cookbook. But looking at it now, I'm not so in love as I once was. It seems really . . . complicated. In comparison, How to Cook Everything was still on my kitchen table, and its brownie recipe seemed ridiculously simple. Plus, I'm running low on flour, and HtCE calls for just one half cup. Bittman 1, Katzen 0.

Danny's birthday brownies
Adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
Yield: MB says 1 to 2 dozen. I say, are you serious?! I came out with nine. Granted, they were big, birthday-sized brownies, but still . . . you will get 1 to 2 dozen brownies only if they are very small
Time: 40 minutes

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate, roughly chopped*
8 Tbps. (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened, plus a little for greasing the pan
1 c. sugar*
2 eggs
1/2 c. all-purpose flour
Pinch salt
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 c. chopped toasted almonds
1/2 c. chocolate chips

*soooooo, I realized almost too late that I was using grain-sweetened chocolate chips, which are sweet but not very. I knew I'd probably want to add sugar, but I wasn't sure how much, so I nervously added some little by little, tasting the mixture a few times and worrying that the end result would either be shockingly sweet or taste like chocolate-laced cardboard. I guess I ended up adding 1/4 to 1/3 cup, but I don't know for sure!

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line an 8-inch square baking pan with aluminum foil, and butter the foil.

2. Combine chocolate and butter in small saucepan over very low heat, stirring occasionally. When chocolate is just about melted, remove from heat and continue stirring until mixture is smooth.

3. Transfer chocolate mixture to a medium bowl and stir in sugar. Then beat in eggs, one at a time. Gently stir in flour, salt and vanilla. Then stir in almonds and chocolate chips.

4. Pour and scrape into prepared pan, and bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until just set in the middle. It's better to underbake than to overbake them. Cool on a rack before cutting. Store, covered and at room temperature, for no more than a day.

candies, cake and catchup

Hello, my little bloglets! After a shamefully long hiatus since my last post--a combination of getting a job(!) and really, truly not doing much interesting cooking while spending weekends at friends' apartments, down the shore, etc.--I am back in the saddle.

First things first: Waaaay back in early May, I spent the night before a big race at the apartment of two very dear friends, and I wanted to bring some comestible to thank them for their hospitality. My usual go-to, the cheapest bottle of respectable-looking wine I can find, didn't seem to jive with our plans (carb-load, sleep well, rise early); nor did any baked good I could think of and had time to make. Something delicious, light, perhaps small-portioned was what I needed. I decided on two things: almond-stuffed dates rolled in shredded coconut, and chocolate-dipped dried apricots. (Fruit, no matter how adulterated and dessert-ified, always seems relatively virtuous.) Recipes don't seem to make sense for these guys, but here goes:

• Almond-stuffed dates rolled in shredded coconut: Use the best dates you can find. (I adore Woodstock Farms's medjools that come in the resealable clear plastic bag.) Remove stem end if necessary, then make a small slit lengthwise along the date with a paring knife (running in the same direction as the pit) and, using the point of the knife to help you, gently pop out the pit without otherwise cutting the flesh of the fruit. Slip one whole almond into the cavity left by the pit, and gently squeeze the two cut sides of the date back together. Roll date in a bowl with some shredded coconut in the bottom to coat. (Not a ton of coconut stuck to my dates, but they were still amazing!)
• Chocolate-dipped dried apricots: The name pretty much says it all, but here's what I did: I melted most of a bar of Scharffen Berger 70% cacao bittersweet chocolate in my DIY double boiler, then dunked apricots about halfway into the chocolate and laid them on a parchment-lined baking sheet. I ran out of apricots before I ran out of chocolate, at which point I began rooting through the cabinets searching for anything that would (could) be made better by its introduction into melted chocolate. I found quite a few: pretzel nuggets, dried blueberries, coffee beans. All these were dunked, then laid out on the parchment and popped into the fridge to let the chocolate set. The coffee beans actually imparted their flavor into the chocolate, which mean that the pretzels I dunked afterward had a hint of coffee--which wasn't awful, but also wasn't so good as the pretzels I dunked before the chocolate.

So that was the bulk of my kitchen activity for the month of May. I have kicked things off for June with a bold, daring move: a dessert that most people of my generation have never heard of, to surprise my dad for his birthday yesterday. That dessert is icebox cake, and it both appeals to me for its distinctive, almost science-experimenty preparation (put cookies and whipped cream into the fridge, and out comes a cake!) and horrifies my natural-whenever-possible approach to cooking. This is because the key ingredient is Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers, a near-paper-thin chocolate cookie that I keep likening to the outside of an Oreo that, because it was made back when my dad was a tot, undoubtedly contains scary, possibly man-made or -bastardized ingredients. I refused to look closely at the ingredients list which, from a glance, looked alarmingly long. There will probably come a day when my curiosity and healthful-mindedness will drive me to make these cookies from scratch, thanks to the help of my favorite food blogger, but for now, in the name of authenticity and making something for my dad that I know he'd like, I went for the storebought cookies.


Icebox cake and cupcakes
Adapted from: the back of the box of Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers, Smitten Kitchen and anectdotal accounts from my dad and Dorothy Noble, my godmother and aunt
Yield: at least one cake, maybe two, depending on how long you make them, or quite a few cupcakes if you go that route

3 c. heavy cream
3 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
1 box Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers
Unsweetened cocoa powder, for dusting

1. Combine heavy cream, sugar and vanilla, and using an electric mixer, whip on high speed until cream forms soft peaks. (I think this took me only about 2 minutes.)

2. If making icebox cake: Spread about 1/2 Tbsp. whipped cream on the top of one cookie, top with another cookie, spread that cookie's top with 1/2 Tbsp. whipped cream, and continue the process, building a stack on a serving plate or baking pan. (The stack needs to be tall enough that it can support itself when you stand it on its side, but not so tall that inverting it onto its side is difficult and unwieldy.) When you have a nice little stack going, gently pick it up and set it, horizontally, on its side. Then top another cookie with whipped cream, and affix it to the end of the sideways stack, continuing until you have a long roll. Cover roll with remaining whipped cream. Note: I didn't actually do it this way. This is how you're supposed to do it, but in a fit of thriftyness (I don't want to waste any of these cookies!) and curiosity (I stupidly decided to use this wide loaf pan... I wonder how I can best take advantage of its space?), I made two rows of slightly overlapping cookies with whipped cream in between, to make a kind of double-wide roll.

3. If making icebox cupcakes: It's a good idea to start with big cupcake papers. Sort of open/flatten the papers a bit (the diameter of the cookies will probably exceed the diameter of the bottom of the papers), and set out several on a cookie sheet. Spread about 1/2 Tbsp. whipped cream on the top of one cookie, top with another cookie, spread that cookie's top with 1/2 Tbsp. whipped cream, and continue the process, building a stack of about 3-5 cookies, depending on how big you want them. Plop each little stack into a cupcake paper, then move on to the next. The photo above shows the three junior cupcakes I made with the whipped cream and cookies remaining after I'd filled my big loaf pan.

4. Dust (cup)cake(s) with cocoa powder, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. Or, as my aunt says, "as long as it takes for the cookies to soften," which is the whole point--the crisp cookies gain moisture from the whipped cream (and probably their overnight stay in the chill chest) and achieve a cakelike consistency. It tastes like ice cream sandwiches. It is AWESOME. Even if, like me, you really don't know what you're doing, it ends up being really tasty and retro-feeling.


Of course, when my pops ate his slice, he said, "It's good." Momentary pause for consideration, then: "But it's not exactly how my mother made it. I think she actually put it in the freezer for a while." None of my recipes had told me to do so, but I'll give you one guess of where the leftovers are going to hang out.

Oh, PS: At some point in the last month, I made a strawberry smoothie. I don't know how I made it, and I hadn't even remember that I made it, until I found the photo on my camera. I have a feeling that yogurt, maybe some milk and a little wheat germ were also invited to the party, but as for quantities or specifics, your guess is as good as mine.

holy crap these are good

For a few weeks now I have had the craziest craving for what I now know to be seven-layer bars, but until very recently I didn't know what they were called. Because I grew up in a non-baking household (read: my mother has made it her goal never to bake anything), I've never eaten these bars at home. I probably had them at a picnic or one of the countless potlucks organized by my high school lacrosse team, and it's been so many years since I've had them that I wouldn't know where to turn for a recipe. Since starting to cook, I have become more curious in what I'm eating and how it's been prepared, but because any seven-layer bars I've had were probably devoured in my pre-cooking years, my memory of them is hazy--beyond chocolate chips, coconut and sweetness, I couldn't tell you a thing about them. Without a doubt, my musings about chocolate and coconut from earlier in the week stemmed from having this on my brain.

All this changed on Friday, when the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of my alma mater landed in my mailbox. I was giving the issue a cursory skim while watching a riveting episode of (what else) Law & Order when I saw it: a recipe for that sweet, square-shaped delight that had been running through my brain! Rejoice! They're super easy to make--even my mom offered to help out!--and better than I remembered.

Seven-layer bars
Adapted from Philadelphia Home, Spring/Summer 2009
Time: 35-40 minutes
Yield: This depends on how small or large you cut them (I made them very small, as they are super sweet and super rich!)

1 1/2 c. crushed graham crackers (this was 9 full sheets, or a third of a box)
1/2 c. unsalted butter melted
3/4 c. grain-sweetened chocolate chips
3/4 c. peanut butter chips
1/2 c. sliced almonds
1 c. dried cranberries
1 c. sweetened condensed milk
3/4 c. flaked coconut

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Prepare an 8- or 9-inch square baking pan with a thin layer of vegetable oil or butter. (I used my Misto sprayer.)

2. In a medium bowl, thoroughly combine graham cracker crumbs and butter. Pour crumb mixture into the prepared pan and with a flat-bottomed drinking glass or measuring cup, pack crumbs into a firm layer.

3. Combine chocolate and peanut butter chips, and spread over crumbs, pressing firmly into crumb layer with your hands.

4. Sprinkle a layer of almonds over chips, and then sprinkle a layer of dried cranberries over almonds. Pour sweetened condensed milk over everything, and top with a layer of coconut.

5. Bake 25 minutes, then place on a rack to cool completely before cutting into bars. (This means completely. Like, more than an hour. I cut into it after an hour of cooling, and it was still melty and gooey, which was very nice and delicious but not at all bar-like.)

The recipe concludes with, "Do not refrigerate. Can be kept overnight." Which makes me think the author means that they can't survive longer than that. But based on the sampling I did this morning (in the name of kitchen research and blogging accuracy, I swear!), they're still doing fine after a day and a half. I've stored them in a cookie tin.

My room for improvement: The bottom layer was a little mushy and fell apart easily; next time, I might bake the graham cracker crumbs for a bit before layering on the other ingredients (or either up the amount of graham crackers or reduce the amount of butter). Also, while I appreciate the nutritional benefits of the dried cranberries, I'll probably reduce the quantity (or substitute with another dried fruit) next time. Finally, I mistakenly bought shredded, not flaked, coconut, and I imagine I would prefer the texture of more substantial pieces of coconut.