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. 

Lemon Cake

Two pounds of lemons

Address the elephant in the (virtual) room or not? I suppose I will.

Quite honestly, moving into a new home that happened to be an older home with lots of needs and quirks has the amazing ability to consume extra time and energy. Even after our new, gorgeous, highly functional kitchen was finished (I KNOW, you need to see pictures!), I didn't feel like cooking, or when I did, I made basic, boring, run of the mill dishes that didn't need to be shared. So I am sorry to have been absent for so long and if anyone is still reading, I have a couple seriously delicious recipes to share this week.

Let's start with dessert! MM's sister and brother-in-law came over this weekend to see our new house and while I couldn't bring myself to actually make lunch, I did make a delectable dessert. Although I love lemons, lemonade, lemon squares, lemon curd, etc., a lemon cake isn't the first thing I would be drawn to when deciding on a dessert. However, I had some inside knowledge that MM's brother-in-law loves lemon cake, so I thought I would give it a try.

I settled on Ina Garten's recipe from FoodNetwork.com, mainly because it has so many rave reviews. Well, they are for good reason. This cake was perfect: moist, delicate crumb, a slight tartness, but just the right amount of sweetness. As you can see, I made it in a bundt pan because I thought it would be prettier. I was impressed that it came out of the pan so perfectly, but I obsessively greased and floured every nook and cranny. I pulled the cake at exactly 45 minutes and it was perfect (in fact, it probably could have come out a couple minutes earlier). If you are looking for something a little different, or happen to have a surplus of lemons lying around, give this recipe a try!

Salted Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

The photographer was a slacker and took this photo with her Blackberry, which accounts for its terrible condition.

Our new range is installed and I have been able to start cooking and baking again! Marshal Mike's first request was salted oatmeal cookies. While I was making the batter, a bag of peanut butter chips serendipitous fell out of the cupboard and I thought, adding peanut butter chips to salted oatmeal cookies sounds delicious! Luckily, I was right.

The first thing I learned about baking with our new range is that there is going to be a learning curve. The ovens get to temperature quickly and hold the temperature. I practically burned the first sheet of these cookies because the recipe says 15 minutes, and my old oven used to take 16, 17, 18 minutes depending on its attitude that day, and these were easily done in 13 or 14 minutes. A-maz-ing.

Photos of our new kitchen will be coming soon!

Lofthouse Cookies

Marshal Mike loves the supermarket sugar cookies with frosting that changes color depending on the holiday or season and I randomly came across a recipe for those very cookies, which I learned are Lofthouse cookies.

I found the recipe on the blog Two Peas and Their Pod, but a quick search will bring up a bunch of different sites with the same recipe. I found the cookies to be really dry, but MM and all of my reliable tasters at work loved them. The buttercream frosting, however, is one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. The frosting does not get very hard though, which makes packaging and transporting the cookies a little messy. And a warning: when I made this recipe, I ended up with 95 cookies. It probably would have been closer to 100, but I didn't roll some of the dough as thinly as I should have. Also, do not attempt this recipe without a heavy duty stand mixer. I have a 5 quart Professional Kitchen Aid mixer and the dough was creeping up the blade and trying to jump out of the bowl. I would also recommend separating the dough into 3 sections (instead of 2) before refrigerating it - it is just easier to deal with later on.

New Year's Eve Lunch

As we did last year, Marshal Mike and I had his sister and brother-in-law over for lunch on New Year's Eve.

This year, we started with Roasted Fennel and White Bean dip on crostini.

The recipe is from Food52 and was superb. Since the fennel is roasted, the flavor mellows and sweetens and the resulting dip is creamy with a crunchy, slightly salty crust on top. It will delight fennel-lovers and haters alike.

For lunch I made Giada's Butternut Squash Lasagna, which is in her cookbook, Giada's Family Dinners. It was phenomenal. We couldn't stop eating it. MM's sister took some home and ate it for breakfast and lunch the following day!

And for dessert, I made Giada's Cornmeal and Rosemary Cake with Balsamic Syrup, which is in her cookbook, Giada's Kitchen.

This is a great cake: light in texture and it straddles the delicate line between sweet and savory. The balsamic syrup was the perfect foil; it added just the right amount of tang. I wanted to lick my plate, but restrained myself. We did have guests afterall!

Nicole's Baby Shower

Over the weekend I was one of three co-hosts for my good friend Nicole's baby shower (longtime readers should know this is the same Nicole of birthday cake fame and a regular taster of BlB food).

We held the shower at a restaurant in the Ballston area of Arlington, called Rustico, but of course I couldn't help making some baked goods for all our guests.

For favors, I made a gingerbread mama and baby:

Gingerbread Mama and Baby

I used King Arthur Flour's gingerbread cookie recipe, and I don't think I will ever look for another gingerbread recipe in my life. These have just the right amount of spice, the center stays chewy and the edges are crisp. I used KAF's royal icing recipe as well. Meringue powder is really easy to find. I bought mine off of Amazon, but you can find it at AC Moore, or other craft stores that carry Wilton products.

I found the adorable gingerbread cookie cutters at CopperGifts.com. The mama is 4 1/2 inches and the baby is their mini size.

For our dessert I made red velvet cupcakes.

Red Velvet Cupcake

I used the same red velvet cupcake and cream cheese frosting recipe that I used for my friend Amy's bridal shower last year. (If you don't want to click through, the recipe can be found on Simply Recipes.) They were delicious!

Brunch menu and favor

Tower 'o' Cupcakes

Our crafty friend, Michelle, made this adorable diaper cake snowman. Nicole said she doesn't think she can stand to take it apart!

Diaper Snowman

Michelle also made these great, simple centerpieces.

She spraypainted branches silver and hung a couple small ornaments from them. They were pretty and festive!

Salted Peanut Butter Cookies

Longtime readers of BlB know that Marshal Mike loves peanut butter anything and salted oatmeal cookies. I recently found this great recipe for Salted Peanut Butter cookies on Molly Wizenberg's blog Orangette and thought, well, that sounds right up MM's alley!

I followed the recipe as written, except I couldn't find pastry flour. I have whole wheat pastry flour, but decided that might be a little weird. So I used half cake flour and half all purpose flour. These cookies are extremely crumbly. Like fall apart on command crumbly. But they are delicious! I brought the extras into work (I sent most of them to MM in Afcrapistan) and my co-workers may like these better than the whole wheat chocolate chip cookies!

Snickerdoodles

When I told my friend Nicole that I made snickerdoodles this weekend, she said, "Oh, that is a cookie I have never tried to make!" After she said that, I realized that her statement held true for me, too.

I have always wanted to make snickerdoodles, mainly because the name is so fun to say. But also, they aren't complicated and taste of butter, cinnamon and sugar. What could be wrong with that? I used Michael Ruhlman's recipe from his blog and was extremely pleased with the results. These cookies are crunchy on the edges and soft and chewy in the middle. (After looking at the pictures on Ruhlman's blog again, I think I may have overcooked my cookies, which is why they are crunchy; Ruhlman's look a lot softer. Oh well!)

The other thing I liked about the recipe is that the measurements are in both volume and weight. Everything I read says that baking with weight measurements is easier and more precise than using volume and I have been wanting to try out that theory. I got a great kitchen scale for Christmas last year (thanks, Mom!) and have only used it for a couple random things here and there. Let me tell you, recipe writers need to start writing recipes with weight measurements instead of volume. It is so much easier! Put the bowl on the scale, zero the scale, add the first ingredient until its desired weight, zero the scale, add the next, etc. So much easier! And way less clean up!

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!)

Gajar Halwa (Indian Carrot "Pudding")

A month or two ago, a couple co-workers and I went to an Indian buffet for lunch. At the dessert station there was this delicious, sweet, decadent carrot "pudding" called gajar halwa. With my surplus of CSA carrots, I decided I needed to try to make it!

There are actually a lot of recipes on the web for this, but I chose one on the blog Beyond [the Plate]. As you can see from my picture compared to the ones on Beyond [the Plate], my patience (or lack thereof) got the best of me and I didn't let all of the liquid evaporate. Regardless, I was really pleased with the results. I thought the cardamom flavor was a little strong and would  be interested to try one of the other recipes out there to see how it compares.

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.

Blueberry Sorbet

I bought the ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid mixer last year and never got around to taking it out of the box.

Well, this past weekend, my good friend, Molly, was in town and she said it's got to get out of the box and into the freezer!

Blueberries were on sale at the grocery store, and we had bought a couple pints, so we thought, why not make blueberry sorbet? We used the Cooks Illustrated recipe, which was super easy and created the most delicious sorbet. Fresh blueberry taste with a hint of lemon. BlB readers, be prepared for more ice cream, sorbet and gelato this summer!

 

Blueberry Sorbet

Cooks Illustrated, Published July 1, 1995 

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 2 ½ cups fresh blueberries pureed with 1/2 cup cold water until smooth
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice from 1 large lemon
• 1 tablespoon vodka

Instructions

1.      Combine berry puree, sugar, lemon juice, and alcohol in large bowl. Stir on and off for several minutes until sugar has dissolved. (Or, to speed chilling process in next step, combine ingredients in a metal bowl set over a larger bowl filled with ice water.) Rub finger along bottom of bowl to see if sugar has dissolved.

2.      Pour mixture into small container. Seal and refrigerate until mixture is no more than 40 degrees. (If mixture has been stirred over a bowl of ice water, it may already be cold enough, and this step may be omitted.)

3.      Pour chilled mixture into container of an ice cream machine and churn until frozen.

4.      Scoop frozen sorbet into a container. Seal and transfer container to freezer for several hours to allow sorbet to firm up. (Sorbet can be kept frozen for up to 3 days.)

One-Year Blogiversary and Biscotti

Glamour Shot

Today is BlB's one-year blogiversary! To celebrate, you get biscotti! 

My mom was in town this past weekend and helped me make her famous recipe for almond biscotti (with and without chocolate chips) and one of Giada's recipes for Almond and Lemon Biscotti. I looooved Giada's recipe. The extra crunch of the cornmeal and the subtle lemon flavor were fabulous (Giada's is the biscotti at the top of the picture). My mom's recipe is below.

Almond Biscotti

2 c. all-purpose flour
2 c. sugar
1/8 c. – fill half-way with water, then add 1-2 tsp almond extract, fill remainder with vanilla extract
3 eggs
2 c. whole almonds coarsely chopped
¾ c. mini chocolate chips (optional)
1 egg beaten for egg wash

Preheat oven to 350F.

In a stand mixer, mix flour and sugar together. Add eggs and water mixture. Stir in almonds (and chocolate chips). If the dough is really sticky (to the point you can't handle it) add more flour and mix again.

Divide into 4 or 5 portions. Roll on lightly floured surface to form “logs”. Each log should be about 10 inches by ½ inch. Brush egg wash on top of logs with a pastry brush.

Bake on parchment paper-covered cookie sheets until light brown and firm to the touch, about 30 minutes. Let cool a little and then cut on the diagonal. For harder biscotti places pieces on their sides and bake a little longer. For more chewy biscotti do not bake again.

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.

Birthday Cupcakes

Happy Birthday, Joe!

My friend, and loyal BlB reader, Joe, celebrated his birthday this past weekend, and had asked ever so nicely if I would make him the same cake that I had made for his wife, my good friend and loyal BlB reader, Nicole. As you may remember from this post, Nicole's cake was the Restaurant Eve cake recipe. Well, I decided that I wanted to make cupcakes from the cake recipe because my plastic cupcake carrier is much easier to transport than my "needs two hands" glass cake stand. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my cake stand, it just doesn't travel well.

The cupcakes were mostly a success (that cake recipe is just unbelievably delicious - may have something to do with the butter). Although, even though I used a cookie scoop with the hopes that each cupcake would be the same size, I had some that barely made it above the liners and some that over flowed onto the pan. The one in the picture above was the only one that was actually presentable! Luckily, appearance does not affect taste.

The other problem I had was that I ran out of frosting and ended up with a bunch of ugly naked cupcakes. Now, this may be user error because I lost count of how many cups of powdered sugar I had added to the mixing bowl, but when I tasted the frosting it was plenty sweet, so didn't want to add more sugar.

In case anyone out there would like to try making cupcakes out of this recipe, I followed it exactly, except the cupcakes were done at about 19 minutes. I made 36 cupcakes, but if I had portioned the cupcakes correctly, I probably could have made 3-4 more (and truth be told there was about 1 cupcake's worth of batter left in the bowl after #36, but I wasn't going to put a cupcake pan in the oven with one well filled).

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.