Chocolate Chip Espresso Muffins

Photo from SeriousEats.com

Please excuse my extreme laziness and enjoy the pretty photo that I did not take!

I had been craving a chocolate muffin for whatever reason, so instead of buying one, I decided to make a batch to satisfy my craving and provide a treat for my co-workers. 

I found this recipe on Serious Eats and am mostly happy with the results. The top of the muffin has more flavor and a better texture than the bottom, which is a little dry. I left them in the oven for 17 minutes, as the recipe suggests, but should have pulled them at 15 or 16 minutes. I am still getting used to my new oven which holds heat like a champ. I didn't fill my muffin tins as full as the recipe's author did, so my yield was 18 muffins instead of 12. 

Chocolate Espresso Biscotti

I usually leave the biscotti-making to my mom, because I don't like how sticky the dough is and how it sticks to your fingers when trying to shape the dough into logs before baking (no matter how much flour I use). (A while ago I watched this show on the Discovery Channel, or something similar, about the Serengeti and a part of it described how when the baby flamingos walk across a dry salt lake, the salt builds up on their wings and it becomes so heavy that some of them collapse and die. Clearly this has scarred me for life and I can't help but think about this every time I make biscotti!) Anyway, I put aside my biscotti/baby flamingo neuroses and attempted these beauties!

I found this recipe on a blog named Make It Naked, which is not about cooking in the nude, but rather cooking with whole ingredients and real food. (Kind of like the Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver.) The biscotti turned out all right. They weren't incredibly chocolatey or espresso-y. They have kind of a cake-like consistency. One of my friends described them as tasting a little like devil's food cake. I like the idea of chocolate espresso biscotti, but I would try a different recipe next time. (Or maybe I like the idea of chocolate espresso cookies! No flamingos will be harmed in the making of cookies!)

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

Can you see Patton's out of focus face at the top of the picture? He was willing the cookies to fall off the plate and into his mouth. I keep telling him he can't have chocolate, but he doesn't believe me.

Oh my goodness. No baked good I have ever made has solicited the kind of response that these have. My co-workers are asking for seconds and asking when I will be making more. They really are that good.

I am a little late to the Kim Boyce, Good to the Grain bandwagon. Her whole-grain cookbook came out in early 2010 and has accumulated accolades ever since. I had three adaptations for her whole wheat chocolate chips cookies clipped in my recipe book: the Washington Post's version, a skillet version, and Molly Wizenberg's version. I decided to go with Wizenberg's version because she can do no wrong and there were helpful instructions included.

Remarkably, the hardest part about this recipe was finding 8oz of bittersweet chocolate! I had a 4oz bar of 75% chocolate in the pantry and headed to the grocery assuming it would be easy to find the other 4oz. Silly me. Scharffen Berger's 70% bar is only 3oz. Both Lindt's 70% bar and Ghirardelli's 70% bar were 3.5oz. (Hmm, Ghirardelli's 70% bar online is 4oz. Sneaky!) So I decided on the Lindt bar and I threw in some Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chunks to make up the difference (the bag was almost gone, so it needed a purpose anyway).

It was a little annoying to chop up the chocolate, but I liked the results in the cookies. There were some large areas of chocolate, similar to how it would have turned out with chips, but the chocolate also got incorporated throughout the whole cookie because of the smaller chards from chopping.

One more thing to mention: as Wizenberg mentions in her post, the dough benefits from chilling. In the picture below, the cookie on the left was on the first pan that went in the oven. As you can see, it totally spread out. The cookie on the right was on the last pan that went in the oven and had been chilled for 20-30 minutes. Same amount of dough (I always use my 1 1/2 tablespoon cookie scoop, no matter what the recipe says), but different results. There is certainly nothing wrong with a flatter cookie (and if you like crisper cookies, you would probably prefer flat), but you have to place them further apart on the sheet so they don't all run together, which means you have to put fewer on a sheet and as a result, it takes longer to cook all of the batter. And for impatient people like me, that just doesn't fly.

So, long story short, if you like chocolate chip cookies, but are looking for a slight variation that truly elevates the taste of the cookie, give these a try. But be warned, make sure you have enough supplies on hand to make a second batch!

Black-Bottom Cookie Bars

Even though you wouldn't necessarily know it by reading this blog, I generally prefer making bars to cookies because they usually require less time and effort. (Who's lazy? This girl!) When I found this recipe on the blog Bake or Break, I thought it sounded perfect: regular cookie, chocolate cookie, no mixer required and an 8x8 pan (if you make a 13x9 pan full of cookie bars, you have to eat a 13x9 pan of cookie bars!).

It turns out this recipe is from Martha Stewart's Everyday Food special summer issue, which I don't remember seeing at the grocery. The bars eventually turned out good, but they needed about 50 minutes in the oven, instead of the suggested 25-30 minutes. The butter also started to pool on top of them towards the end of their epic cooking. I actually blotted them like you might blot a piece of pizza. If I made these again I would absolutely cut back on the butter.  I also found them to be a little overly sweet, so I would probably cut back on the sugar too.

Marshal Mike's Party

Marshal Mike is home on his two week break from Army duty in Afghanistan, so we decided to get our friends together for a little party.

Herewith the food I made for the party:

Crostini with fresh ricotta, honey and lemon zest

If you try nothing else new this year, try making fresh ricotta. As I mentioned the first time I made ricotta, it is so simple, but the results are so amazing.

I wanted to try a new recipe this time, so I chose this one from Food 52.  I hate to say it, but I was underwhelmed. It just tasted like cream in curd form. Delicious and creamy, yes, but it was lacking the tang and the flavor of the recipe I made last time (Ina Garten's). So I went back to the store, bought more whole milk and heavy cream, and whipped up a batch of Ina's ricotta. Yum, yum, yum. I did find that if using Ina's recipe, let the mixture sit in the pan for about 10 minutes (instead of the recommended 1 minute) before transferring to a cheesecloth-lined sieve. The recipe will yield about 3 cups of ricotta this way instead of 2.

Now, the ricotta is fabulous on its own, but it really shines when you use it in this recipe for Bruschetta with Ricotta, Honey and Lemon Zest. The flavor combination of these items is perfection!

I thought about trying to make pigs in a blanket as I have never made them (from scratch, anyway), but then I stumbled upon this recipe for Chicks in Blankets on epicurious.

Chicks in a blanket

I love apple chicken sausage, so decided to give this recipe a try. As you can see in the picture, some of my blankets didn't stay closed (exhibitionist chicks?), but they still tasted great! I did include little bowls of mustard to dip them in because I found each piece to be a little pastry-heavy.

To round out the homemade appetizers, I made avocado hummus, which I have posted about here. It is a recipe from the Washington Post that I have made a couple times (and never photograph!) and it is a crowd pleaser every time. I made pita chips to go with it.

Salted Double Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies

For dessert, I tried this recipe for salted double chocolate peanut butter cookies, which was created by a fellow Rhode Islander! These were also a crowd pleaser; if you like chocolate and peanut butter, give them a try!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Blondies

These are insanely peanut buttery and insanely delicious!

MM loves just about any dessert that has peanut butter as an ingredient, so I am always on the look-out for recipes. My friend Allison forwarded this recipe from a runner's blog she reads.

I have to admit I wasn't paying full attention to the recipe when I made them and I ended up putting in over two times the called for amount of peanut butter.  Luckily, as my mom assured me, sometimes mistakes end up being successful. Now, I couldn't imagine making these with less peanut butter!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Blondies

Accidentally adapted from Eat, Run, Read
makes a 13x9 inch pan

Ingredients

2 2/3 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon sea salt
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
3/4 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup peanut butter
2 eggs, at room temperature
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chunks

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 13x9 inch baking pan.

2. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. In a large bowl with a hand mixer, or in the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together brown sugar, butter, peanut butter, eggs and vanilla until smooth. Gradually add the flour mixture and mix until well blended. Add the chocolate chunks.

3. Spread evenly in the prepared pan. Bake 20-25 minutes (mine was done at 20 minutes) until a toothpick comes out clean. Don't overcook them!

Cheesecake Cookie Dough bars

Cheesecake is not one of my favorite desserts. I usually like it when I eat it, but it isn't something I crave or ever have the desire to make or order. But, it has been so hot lately that I liked the idea of a cool treat, and really, isn't everything better with cookie dough?

I found this recipe on the blog, My Baking Addiction. As you can see, my bars don't look anything like the picture on My Baking Addiction's page. We'll call mine "rustic." I think one of my problems is that my ratio of melted butter to graham cracker crumbs for the crust was off. I had too many crumbs and not enough butter, so it didn't hold together well. Second, I could have baked the bars longer, but I was impatient and I had already left them in the oven 5 minutes longer than the recipe indicated.

All in all the bars turned out ok. They taste great right out of the fridge, but the "cookie dough" doesn't taste like real cookie dough; more just like sugar and chocolate, which isn't bad, of course, but it isn't what I expected.

Chocolate Nutella Cookies

Mmmmm...chocolate...Nutella...

This is my second attempt at Nutella cookies (see first one here), and I am pleased with the results. This recipe is from the well-known blog, Simply Recipes, and is actually a guest post by a gentleman named Garrett McCord of the blog Vanilla Garlic. (As I mentioned on this post, if you have an extra couple minutes in your day, visit Vanilla Garlic and search "Eat Beast" - you will cry from laughing so hard.)

Anyway, a couple things I liked about this recipe: it calls for a full cup of Nutella (yum!), less butter than the first recipe I tried (healthier!), brown sugar and white sugar (interesting!), cocoa (chocolaty!), and chopped hazelnuts (crunchy!). All of those things combined into delicious cookies!

The recipe says to bake them for 10-12 minutes, but at 13 minutes mine were still practically raw in the center. I would say that mine baked for 15-16 minutes and they are still tender and soft. The recipe also says that it will make 6 dozen 1 tablespoon-sized cookies. Well, my cookie scoop is 1 1/2 tablespoons, so that is what I used, and I ended up with 42 cookies.

Nutella Chocolate Chip Cookies

There are plenty of recipes for variations of the chocolate chip cookie out there. There are even plenty of different recipes for Nutella chocolate chips cookies (do a Google search, I dare you). I found this particular one on a blog named Pink of Perfection.

I have printed lots of Nutella recipes over the year, but I always felt like it was a waste of Nutella to bake with it. I prefer to eat it with graham crackers, toast or just on a spoon when no one is looking. Nutella was one of my favorite discoveries when I studied in Florence in college and I have been mildly obsessed ever since.

This recipe is pretty good. The cookies taste a little like shortbread to me. I did over cook them, which is part of the problem (they are more crunchy than soft and chewy), but at 10 minutes they were still raw. I would suggest checking them at 10 minutes, but do not bake them longer than 15 minutes.

I made a couple alterations to Pink of Perfection's recipe. I used scant 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1/2 cup Nutella and a mixture of regular and mini semi-sweet chocolate chips (I think I actually like the mini chips better). Next time I would use less butter; the cookies are a little greasy. Some chopped hazelnuts might be nice too, to reinforce the hazelnut flavor of the Nutella.

Espresso Brownies

Rich chocolaty goodness!

This is a serious brownie.  It is a stick in your teeth, almost achingly sweet brownie with incredible depth of flavor. What can I say except Giada is a genius.

This recipe is in her cookbook, Giada's Family Dinners, which I purchased on Gilt (see here for my obsession with Gilt; my obsession with Giada is evident in just about any post on this blog and needs no explanation).

I had to alter Giada's recipe slightly because all I had in the pantry was a 17.6 ounce box of brownie mix (dark fudge with chocolate chunks). (I wonder if companies even make 19.8 ounce boxes of mix anymore - that seems so pre-recession!) (Another side note, I think it is interesting that Giada recommends Duncan Hines - are the different brands really that different? Maybe she is invested in the company. I happened to have Duncan Hines on hand, but that is probably only because I had a coupon.) I followed the box's instructions to use 1 egg, 1/4 cup water and 1/4 cup vegetable oil. I used just less than 2 tablespoons of the espresso powder. I also didn't add chocolate chips because my mix already had chocolate chunks, but in hindsight, it would have benefited from some chips.

I did find the "glaze" - it is really a frosting - to be too sweet, so would use less powdered sugar next time.