Dunk & Crumble

Recipes

Pistachio Shortbread Cookies

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It’s beginning to look a lot like cookies.  Buttery pistachio ones.

Just trying to make Santa happy.  Can you imagine what he might bring you if you left these out for him by the chimney alongside a nice glass of milk?  Can you?

You might get tickets to see the new Alvin & the Chipmunks movie!  A pretty new cake stand!  Maybe you’d get fancy new yoga pants!  A Dorie Greenspan baking book!  Membership to Bedford Cheese Shop’s cheese of the month club!  Or dinner at The French Laundry!  A safe yet exciting ride in a hot air balloon!  Over Tuscany!

Or maybe you’d just get to eat leftover cookies.  That’d be okay too.

But, you know, Tuscany.  Or Greece.  Or maybe Paris.

Or else just the cookies.  Fine.  Cookies.

But I’m eating these with a side of two percent (!) milk.  Take that, Paris.

Merry merry!

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Meyer Lemon Gingerbread Muffins

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Sometimes you want a little extra zing in your breakfast.  A little bit of zing.

You know?

Meyer lemons are in season now, and a good Meyer lemon makes an excellent (and I mean excellent) muffin.  Golden tinged yellow, moist and tender crumbed, flecked with brightly sweet, sour zest — a lemon yogurt quick bread is as good a breakfast as any, I think you will agree.

But when you add some gingerbread spice to a bang-up lemon cake, what you get, my lovely readers, is zing.  Maybe you call it zip.  Kick.  A little get-up-and-go.  Maybe you don’t call it anything at all, because you’re, you know, normal, and you just like to sip your tea and swallow your muffin and get on with your day.

Well, fine.

 

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Squash & Potato Latkes, Homemade Apple Sauce

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So, um, this is awkward.

A week after my pro-Christmas/Hannukah-bashing post, and here I am with a recipe for latkes.

Jewish guilt at it’s finest.

In truth, I love latkes.  For me, they’re the best part of Hannukah.  Better than the story of Judah Maccabee, better than my aunt Lis’ fancy menorah, better than lighting candles for eight nights running is the golden, crispy latke.  Gently fried and filled with soft potato and, in this case, butternut squash, they’re like hash browns, only Jewier.

And with homemade apple sauce?  Fine.  I’ll admit it.  Hannukah is kind of awesome.

 

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Salty Rosemary Toffee Crunch

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‘Tis the season, and all that.  Isn’t it?  Everyone’s favorite.  The season of Christmas trees, candy canes, shiny bells and baubles.

So, um, I’ll just say it.  It’s rough to be a Jew in December.

Here, two haikus I wrote to express my feelings this month:

You drink hot cocoa
Wait for fat man in red suit
I fake not caring.

You with your cookies
Justin Bieber sings carols
Me, Chinese take-out.

In truth, I’m not a very good Jew.  I mean, I sort of switch hit, this time of year.  No offense to Hannukah, but Christmas is just more fun.  Sorry, Grandpa.  I’m not trying to make any sort of religious statement here; all I’m saying is that I probably bake more Christmas cookies than anyone else with a menorah.  I’m okay with it.

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Sweet Potato Quinoa Cakes with Yogurt Sauce

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Maybe you had a pretty great Thanksgiving.

Maybe you ate too much of your Gramma’s chopped chicken liver.

Maybe your new cousin Matt wore corduroys to the family football game and nobody cared.  Maybe you spent the whole game running in circles and giggling with your other cousin, Katie, anyway, except for the time you caught two passes and did a little Tebowing.

Maybe you made Deb’s sweet potato biscuits and ate them with too much butter.

Maybe you and your Aunt Maggie tried a new pecan pie recipe that totally rocked.

Maybe you clinked lots of glasses, and drank lots of wine, and hugged lots of hugs, and sang made-up songs with your cousin Teddy at the piano.

Maybe you miss it.

Maybe you have leftover sweet potato!  Make these.

 

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Maple Sweet Potato Soufflé

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Well, they did it.  Last weekend, two of my best friends in the world got married (hooray for Mr. and Mrs. Smooth!), and then threw one hell of a party.

It was a fancy affair; I made an appointment to get my hair did and everything.  I got gussied up in a strapless black bridesmaid dress.  I ate lobster tails and miniature grilled cheese sandwiches and did lots of Beyoncé dancing.  Speeches were given, champagne was drunk, rugs were cut.  It was an absolutely gorgeous evening, from the first notes of the ceremony to the last (boozy) drops of the reception.  And getting to share it all with wonderful friends and family?  Sigh.  That’s the part that left me beaming on Sunday afternoon.

Today is Wednesday — it’s been three days since the party ended, and I won’t lie, it’s been rough.  I miss the party.  I miss my pretty hair.  I miss Beyoncé dancing, and I miss my friends.

Still, I’ve found some things that help alleviate the general melancholy that follows a dreamy, friends and family-filled weekend.  If you find yourself looking for something to fill a post-wedding weekend void, you could do any of the following:

  1. Find a job that allows you to bake pumpkin cookies with 3-year-olds all day.
  2. Go to Jen & Steve’s apartment, order deli sandwiches and debrief every detail of the weekend.
  3. Think about how fun it would be to take a trip to Hawaii.
  4. Sweat it out on the treadmill — you won’t want to, but it will make you feel better.  Do it.
  5. Hop on a train to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving with your (read: my) family.

That last one is the best I’ve got.  Thank goodness for Thanksgiving.  For family football games.  For time together in the kitchen and at the table.  For stuffing and roasted root vegetables, for sweet potato biscuits and Brussels sprouts and cranberry sauce and pie.  And for maple sweet potato soufflé.

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Cranberry Oat Ricotta Muffins

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I’m supposed to say something about cranberries, about it being the season for using cranberries.  And then something about ricotta, and how, cheese-wise, it completes me, and how I sometimes use my favorite spoon to eat it straight from the jar.  Also oats.  Something.  Right?  Something like that?  In regards to these muffins?

Well, I can’t.  Not at the moment, anyway.  Two of my great friends are getting married this weekend and I’m far too excited to discuss muffins.  Not that these aren’t excellent muffins — they are.  They’re light and fluffy, dotted with tart and jammy cranberry pockets, slightly chewy from a handful of toothsome oats, with a subtle creaminess and a tang from the ricotta that is just… right.  For breakfast, for a snack.  Smeared with butter, or extra ricotta (extra, hah), or a smudge of jam.  They’re special, these are.

But, at the end of the day, they are muffins.  And Jenny and Steve are getting married this weekend!  Married!  To each other!  I’m a little excited.  Can you tell that I’m excited?

Okay.  Whew.  It’s only Wednesday, I should tone it down.  Maybe make some tea.  It’d go well with a muffin.

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Dorie’s World Peace Cookies

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I had another post planned for today, but then Dorie tweeted at me, you know, on the Twitter, and I got too excited to post anything but these cookies.

Dorie Greenspan.  Dorie Freaking Greenspan!  Author of Around My French Table and Baking: From My Home To Yours and contributor to Bon Appetit and, you know what?  If you don’t know who she is then it’s time to get with the picture.  Dorie Greenspan, people.  Guru.

Yeah, so, she tweeted at me.  No big deal.  I started it.  I’d been invited to a potluck dinner and was thinking about making Dorie’s famous World Peace Cookies for the event, so, naturally, I decided that everyone should know about it… in fewer than 140 characters.  I took to Twitter.

On November 10th, I wrote: Attempting world peace.  Cookies, world peace cookies.  Wish me luck @doriegreenspan.

The @doriegreenspan part was just a laugh.  Just one of those things, thrown out into the Universe, never to be retrieved.  But then!

November 10th, from @doriegreenspan: @mollydunkncrumb Have fun making the World Peace Cookies and let me know how you like them. Would that cookies could bring world peace…

!!!

That response made my day.  Hell, it made my entire week.  She has no idea, but it did.  And the cookies?  So deep.  So chocolatey.  Dark and tender-crumbed and flecked with salt.  The kind of cookies you eat with your eyes closed.  Amazing.

If ever a cookie could bring world peace, this one would most certainly do it, I’m most certainly sure.  In the meantime, though, I’ll be on the Twitter.  With Dorie.  No bigs.

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Mustard Roasted Potatoes & Pears

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My lips are numb, and there’s a good chance I’m drooling.  I’ve just gotten home from the dentist, you see.  After 27 years as a blissfully cavity-free person, my teeth have violently betrayed me and my tendency to “forget” to floss.  Big time betrayal.  I mean, I thought we were in this together, teeth!  …Traitors.

Upon arrival at my twice-yearly checkup on Friday, I was informed that I had not one, but two cavities getting cozy in my chompers.  Two.  Cavities.

Naturally, I was horrified.  I gasped and I grumbled, my world of clean, sturdy enamel shattered before me.

Not that I was dramatic about it.  I mean, psh, whatever.  Just a few cavities.  Just a few needles and drills and fake things in my mouth.  No big deal, whatevs.  I totally didn’t tell everyone I came in contact with about my two cavities, and I definitely didn’t whine about my terror at having them filled.  Nope.  I mean, there’s no way I worked myself up about it so badly that my sister had to leave me a good luck note this morning, before she left for work.

Didn’t happen.

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Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake

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Here’s how it went down on Monday night.  My roommate and (incidentally) younger sister Casey and I bought three bags of candy to satisfy the trick-or-treaters we expected to come knocking.  We live in an apartment building, so figured we wouldn’t get that many kiddos come to beg for candy.

We were wrong.  By 5:30pm our bowl of Three Musketeers, York Peppermint Patties and Take Five bars was running low – dangerously low, some might say.  So Casey, excellent roommate and sister that she is, ran out to the corner store to re-stock our candy bucket.

She was gone for about fifteen minutes, during which time a few boatloads of adorable pirates, strawberries, mickey mice and, my favorite, one pint-sized Justin Bieber came and depleted our stock, almost entirely.  Returning with a bag each of miniature Kit-Kats, Milky Ways, and M&Ms, as well as four (!) large packages of regular-sized (!) Reese’s peanut butter cups, we high-fived while refilling our bucket, eager to please more of our adorable trickster/treaters.

We sat on the couch with our candy bowl brimming, waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting some more.  One group of haphazardly costumed teenagers, clearly too old to be going through the trick-or-treat song and dance, came knocking unabashedly.  They took handfuls of loot and went on their way.  We shrugged and wondered who’d be next.  Batman?  A pumpkin?  Baby Cookie Monster?

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