Cookies & Bars

I think about cookies often. Mostly crisp-edged, buttery, chocolate-chippy cookies, but sometimes I think about soft, chewy, sugary cookies, too. Not much beats a warm cookie (or two) washed down with a glass of cold milk. Or even a room-temperature cookie eaten slowly over the kitchen sink while you think about what to make for dinner. (Ahem. Who made the rule that says that dessert goes after dinner, anyway?) I guess you could say I think cookies, chocolate-chipped and otherwise, are the bees knees. That’s why when my sister, Emily, told me she wanted to bake something involving peanut butter and white chocolate, I thought it best to try making peanut butter and white chocolate chip cookies. So, we gathered the ingredients and made peanut butter and white chocolate chip cookies, and it was definitively best.

I’ve been on a cookie bender ever since I heard about Drop In & Decorate, a cookie donation program in which I recently became involved. It’s simple, really – get some friends together, decorate cookies, and then donate them to a local shelter, soup kitchen, or other community agency serving people in need. I did some decorating with my new friend and fellow food blogger, Maris, who introduced me to Drop In & Decorate. Here are a few of our creations (note: what we lacked in artistic ability, we made up for in enthusiasm):

Not bad, huh? I mean, they’re probably not the prettiest cookies you’ve ever seen, but they taste delicious. (I know because I had to try one to make sure they were safe to bring to the Ronald McDonald house. They are.) Hopefully these cookies will brighten someone’s day.

Cookies for charity are wonderful, but so are cookies for me, so I’ll get back to the peanut butter white chocolate chips. I’ll just get straight to the recipe, because I know you have cookies on the brain. At least, I do.

PS: the nails in the pictures below belong to Emily. I’m not sure I could pull off blue nail polish, but, like everything else, it works on her. N’est pas?

Peanut Butter and White Chocolate Chip Cookies

To make these little pretties, Emily and I experimented with a simple chocolate chip cookie recipe, adding white chocolate and peanut butter chips instead of the regular chocolate. We thought about adding peanut butter swirls or a dash of cinnamon, but in the end decided that, when it comes to chippy cookies, simple is best. Just butter, flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and powder, eggs and vanilla. And chips, of course. In this case, peanut butter and white chocolate. These come out slightly crunchy, with a deep, buttery sweet, almost caramel-like flavor that makes you want to take a full stack of these guys and act slightly indecently. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ingredients:

• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 3/4 cup vanilla sugar*
• 3/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 1/2 Tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1 large egg
• 2/3 cup peanut butter chips
• 2/3 cup white chocolate chips

* We only used vanilla sugar because my mother got it as a gift and it was sitting in the pantry, waiting to be turned into a cookie. Feel free to use regular granulated sugar instead.

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a few baking sheets with parchment paper.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl and set aside.

Put the butter, granulated sugar, and light brown sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and cream the ingredients on high speed. Don’t forget to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula to fully incorporate. Add the vanilla and egg and mix on medium speed. Add the flour mixture and mix on low speed just until batter is stiff and dough-like. Turn off the mixer and, using a large spoon or plastic spatula, fold in the chocolate and peanut butter chips.

Using a melon baller or small spoon, scoop heaping spoonfuls of the dough onto the baking sheet. Repeat with remaining dough, keeping about 2 inches between scoops. (You should get about 9 cookies on each sheet.) Bake until fragrant and golden brown, about 15-20 minutes.

Let the cookies cool before devouring them indecently.

Makes about 30 cookies.

 

It’s true, you know. All good things must come to an end. I know because my Boston life, which is good, is coming to an end. If you’ve been reading this nook of the internets since the beginning, you may know that, this summer, I’m packing up all my worldly possessions (including my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, my autographed Chase Utley bobblehead doll and a healthy dose of nervous excitement) to start classes at The French Culinary Institute in New York City.

A week from Friday marks the big day (of moving, that is. Culinary classes don’t start until June. Let’s not rush things. I have a feeling it’s going to take me just as long to master the art of living in New York City as it will to master the art of french cooking. We’ll see.) At any rate, with just over a week left to call myself a Boston resident, I can’t help but feel a thick veil of finality settling in around me.

This past weekend I sang my last song and took my last bow and said my goodbyes to the wonderful cast of Gypsy. I’m glad to have my weekends back, but I already miss the cast comraderie and the nervous pride of putting on a show. Today is my last day of work, and while I’m thrilled to finally rid myself of cubicles and expense reports and overused consulting phrases (don’t even get me started on “low-hanging fruit”), I’m going to miss the office banter with Dan and long lunches (including LOST recaps and people watching) with Maral. Oh, and the steady paycheck. That I’m definitely going to miss. I’ve cleaned out my desk and bought boxes for packing and cancelled my gym membership, and as my daily routine crumbles, everything is really starting to feel over.

For now, I can only focus on the endings, but I know that soon I’ll be surrounded by beginnings, fresh and scary and fun. There will be a new apartment to paint and new friends to make, a new city to learn and new knives to sharpen, and for all of that I cannot wait. Still, goodbyes are always bittersweet, and I think this one, especially, calls for brownies.

Bittersweet Brownies

These brownies are sort of a signature of mine; I make them whenever I need an easy yet impressive dessert (or else just a straight shot of gooey chocolate), and though brownies may seem like a pedestrian, ho-hum sort of choice, these never fail to impress (or to trigger a magnificent chocolate-induced coma).

Laced with two forms of coffee and a dash of Bailey’s Irish Cream, these brownies are a grownup version of your favorite afterschool treat. They’re moist, dense and sinfully chocolatey, and if you decide to make them for someone (an office full of your colleagues on your last day of work, say), they won’t soon forget you.

Ingredients:

2 sticks plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
½ cup brewed coffee
12 ounces bittersweet chocolate
4 large eggs
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1.5 tablespoons ground coffee
1 cup all purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoons vanilla extract
3 tablespoons Bailey’s Irish Cream Liquor
8 ounces milk chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9x13x2 inch metal baking dish and line the bottom with parchment paper. Butter the parchment, too.

Heat the butter in a medium pot over low heat until melted. Add the chocolate and stir until melted, removing from the heat. Stir in the brewed coffee.

In a small bowl, mix together the flour and salt.

In a medium bowl, mix the eggs and sugars with the ground coffee, vanilla and Bailey’s until combined. Once the butter/chocolate mixture has cooled a bit, add the egg/sugar mixture and stir to combine. Add the flour mixture, stirring until just blended. Lightly coat the chocolate chips with flour and fold into the batter. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the top cracks slightly and a skewer inserted into the center comes out with moist pieces clinging to it. Do not overcook the brownies (remember that they will continue to cook slightly after being removed from the oven).

Allow brownies to cool completely before cutting into 2-inch square bars. Serve with a glass of milk or a dollop of whipped cream (or both. I don’t judge.)

Makes about 24 brownies.

So apparently I’m not that great at remembering certain holidays. First Pi Day, now Purim. There was also that time that I forgot my little sister Emily’s 9th birthday while we were both at summer camp, but I’m pretty sure she’s gotten over that. And technically Purim was before Pi Day, but that is irrelevant because, if you haven’t figured it out yet, there’s something you should probably know about me: I’m not that great at being Jewish.

To be fair, I’m probably not much worse at Judaism than a normal Reform Jew. …Fine, maybe a little worse. Organized religion is just not a major force in my life. I do, however, very much like being Jewish. I may not be a particularly religious person, but culturally, I’m very happy to be part of the tribe. Jews have a rich cultural and culinary history, and I love being part of it all… especially the culinary part. Between brisket, matzoh ball soup, chopped chicken liver, blintzes, knishes, latkes, kugel, challah, schmaltz, falafel and, of course, bagels, Jews have cornered the market on delicious. Which brings me to those sweet little triangular symbols of Purim: hamantashen.

The story of Purim centers around a King named Ahasuerus, his Queen, Esther, her good uncle, Mordecai, and a bad man named Haman. Essentially, the evil Haman hatches a plot to wipe out all of the Jews in the ancient Persian empire, but good Mordecai learns of the awful plan and teams up with Queen Esther (herself secretly a Jew) to foil Haman’s plans. …That’s the abridged version, anyway. At any rate, all’s well that ends well, and today, the festival of Purim celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from Haman’s wicked plot to destroy them. Which brings me back to the hamantashen.

Hamantashen (sometimes spelled hamantaschen, or homentashen, or homentaschen… you get the idea) are small triangular cookies, traditionally filled with poppy seed or prune jam, though I’ve enjoyed them with many different fillings, including cherry and, my favorite, apricot. The cookies are shaped like triangles to reference Haman’s three-cornered hat which, though you may not be aware, is famous. It even has a commemorative song that my kindergarten class once took much pride in mastering:

My hat it has three corners,

Three corners has my hat.

And if it not three cornered,

It would not be my hat.

Very simple and to-the-point, but really quite charming. Much like a little plate of hamantashen, actually.

I really should have known better than to mess with years of Jewish culinary tradition, but mess I did. I tried to make my own version of hamantashen, using whole apricot halves instead of apricot jam, and using a shortbread cookie as the base instead of the traditional butter-less (!) cookie dough. Needless to say, it didn’t really work out as planned.

I mixed and chilled the shortbread dough, cut it into thin cookie rounds, topped each circle of dough with a dollop of sweetened creme fraiche and half of a sweet peach (I couldn’t find any apricots at the store, fresh or jarred), and then pinched the doughy corners of the circular cookie to form a nice, hat-shaped triangle around the peach half. Success!

…Nope. I don’t know if the peach halves were too big, or if the shortbread is just too heavy a dough to be molded like that, but my “hamantashen” just didn’t want to be shaped like triangles. “To heck with Haman’s hat,” they screamed when I pulled them out of the oven, looking delicious but defiantly round and un-hamantashen-y. “Fine!” I yelled back, biting into a warm, golden cookie and sopping up the peach juice running down my chin. I mean really, what did you expect? I told you… I’m not a very good Jew.

“Hamantashen” Cookies with Whole Fruit Halves

Instead of looking like three-cornered hats, these cookies come out of the oven looking exactly like little sunny-side up eggs, which is actually how the recipe that inspired me means for them to come out. You know what they say: if it ain’t broke, don’t let Molly futz with it. Next time I’ll just skip the triangles and call these “sunny-side up cookies,” or else I’ll re-try the hamantashen with regular pie dough (instead of shortbread) and smaller fruit halves. You could use any stone fruit for these cookies – I bet they would be delicious with poached fresh plums. You could also substitute prepared vanilla pudding or pastry cream for the creme fraiche mixture. Either way, let me know how they turn out, three-cornered or otherwise.

Ingredients:

For the dough:

• 3 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 3.5 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

For the filling:

• 12-14 apricot halves (either from a jar or can or poached fresh apricots)
• 1/2 cup creme fraiche
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 to 1 Tablespoon sugar
• A few Tablespoons of apricot jam

Directions:

First, make the shortbread dough. Sift the flour and salt together in a medium bowl. In the bowl of an electric mixer (if using), mix together the butter and sugar until just combined. Add the vanilla, and then the flour/salt mixture. Mix on low speed until the dough starts to come together. Dump the dough onto a floured board and shape into a disk. Wrap the disk in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 small or 1 large cookie sheet with parchment paper.

On a lightly floured board, roll out the shortbread until it’s about 1/4-inch thick, and cut large rounds from the dough using a cookie cutter or the top of a large cup or glass. Place dough rounds onto the cookie sheet(s).

In a small bowl, whisk together the creme fraiche, vanilla, and sugar. Using a small spoon, dollop a spoonful of creme fraiche into the center of each round cookie. Place an apricot half on top of each dollop of creme fraiche. The cookies will now look like little sunny-side up eggs.

Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes, until the shortbread is lightly browned and the kitchen smells absolutely divine.

Brush the fruit halves with apricot jam for an extra boost of flavor and to help them stay fresh and shiny.

Makes roughly 12-14 sunny-side up cookies, or “hamentashen for mediocre Jews.”