mix, mix…stir, stir

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe. Exactly how would a cookie primarily based on wheat germ taste?

Much to my surprise they are really good. I quite like the sweet nutty taste of wheat germ. As a kid I used to eat wheat germ like cereal with milk. Not because I loved wheat germ so much, but when rooting around the kitchen hungry, it’s what I could find to snack on. Can you tell I grew up in the 70s and my mother was an Adelle Davis fan? Now I’m in a baking group that bakes very non-Adelle Davis sweet treats every week, but the value of good nutrition did imprint on my young developing brain all those years ago.  I still keep wheat germ on hand; I just don’t tend to eat it by the bowlful any more.

Honey and lemon are the star flavors in this cookie and the wheat germ just fades into the structural ingredients rather undetected. As I was mixing up the dough I began to obsess over adding nuts, almonds in particular. Once I saw that I had no almonds, toasted pine nuts seemed like an excellent choice. I mixed ¼ cup into half the batter. Having tasted “with nuts” next to ”without nuts”, I pick with nuts. The texture of the cookie is slightly cakey and soft and the softness of the pine nuts works well, adding a nice textural contrast without being jarringly crunchy. They also add a great flavor that is complemented by the lemon and honey.

Initially I thought the cookies seemed a little dry and in need of, well, a sugar coating; so much for the healthy cookie idea. I mixed up a quick powdered sugar icing infused with fresh thyme and dipped each cookie.  The added icing really made these cookies work for me.

Thyme Infused Icing
½ cup milk or butter milk
2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
nice bunch of fresh time

Heat the milk in the microwave until hot, but not boiling.  Add the fresh thyme and let steep for 10-15 minutes, then strain. Whisk the milk, a little at a time, into the powdered sugar until you reach the desired consistency. A thicker icing will result in an opaque coating, and if thinned out the icing will be translucent once it dries on the cookies.

Thanks to Michelle of Flourchild for picking this most interesting recipe. She has it posted on her blog if you happen to have some wheat germ laying around that you want to put to good use.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 114 recipes completed 107 to go! Look we are over the hump!

The only thing we love more than hearing about the different ways that SpiceCare has helped people tame the spice chaos in their kitchens is when we get to see pictures! We thought we’d share a few of the ones we’ve received so far.

It seems only fair to start with our own spices. The drawer shown on the left was only one of several places spices were stored throughout the kitchen. At right, a much more organized and functional system!

Customers in Montana transformed their unruly spice drawer into a thing of beauty!

Up in Anacortes, Washington, a pile of baggies was replaced by an elegant selection of SpiceCare containers on a lazy Susan.

In Altanta, a rack of messy bottles and jars became much more usable once SpiceCare was employed!

This SpiceCare owner in California gained a considerable amount of shelf space.

If you’re getting ready to replace your current spice mess with a SpiceCare system, don’t forget to take a picture of it now so you can better appreciate the transformation once it’s all finished. Then send up copies of the pictures and we’ll include them in our next update.

The quintessential American baked good was this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking project; chocolate chip cookies. For as common and popular as chocolate chip cookies are, I find them one of the most challenging things to bake well.

Not because it’s a complicated batter to mix up, but because it’s difficult to find the right recipe to produce the style of chocolate chip cookie desired. Crunchy, chewy, thick, thin, what do you like? But more importantly how do you know if a given recipe will result in what you like? I don’t know the answer to this most vexing question even though I have finally managed to create a chocolate chip cookie recipe that produces the perfect cookie for me. All I know is now that I have my recipe I have stopped looking for others.

How do Dorie’s “My Best Chocolate Chip Cookies” rate for me? Good, but I’m still sticking with my recipe. I found these to be better than most in that they were chewy, but they were a little greasy, though less so after sitting for a day. These baked up thinner than I like. I made the recipe as written with the exception of skipping the nuts, chopping my own chocolate from a really good bar rather than using chips, and sprinkling a little flake salt on the top of each one prior to baking. If you don’t have a favorite recipe for chocolate chip cookies, I would encourage you to give these a try and see if they might just be your cookie nirvana. Kait, of Kait’s Plate picked the recipe for this week and has it posted on her blog.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 113 recipes completed 108 to go! Look we are over the hump!

It’s brownie time again for the Tuesdays with Doriegang! This time it’s Rick Katz’s Brownies for Julia. When Dorie Greenspan was working on the PBS series, Baking with Julia,Rick Katz did all the behind the scene recipe prep and often made treats for the crew, like these brownies.

What caught Dorie’s attention about this recipe is not just that they taste good, but the procedure of beating part of the eggs and sugar until thick is quite unique as far as brownie recipes go. The texture is somewhere between gooey and cakey. I have made these twice. The first time they disappeared before we managed to get a picture so I had to whip up another batch, darn. They fell on the sweet side for me, so the second batch I made with all unsweetened chocolate rather than the suggested mix of unsweetened and bittersweet and I liked the change.

A twist to brownies I’ve been enjoying lately is sprinkling walnuts and cocoa nibs on top of the batter. I love the tiny bitter flavor hits from the nibs and the crunch is really nice too. By sprinkling the garnish on top, it’s easy to preserve half of the batch for purists that don’t care for said funny business in brownies.

Though these brownies are very tasty, the extra dirty dishes involved in making them is enough for me to remain loyal to my standard brownie recipe. I am, however, working on a new version of my brownie recipe after testing the Best Chewy Brownies in the March/April 2010 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. They actually seem to have cracked the code for making brownies as chewy as a box mix. It’s funny that boxed brownie mix is really the pinnacle of brownie greatness. Oh to capture that boxed mix chewiness. It turns out the key to a nice chewy texture lies in the fat; you need to have 29% saturated fat (butter) to 71% unsaturated fat (oil).

I applied this ratio to my brownie recipe and learned that messing with the fats messes up the whole recipe, so I’m still testing to see how I can get my recipe to be chewy-like-a-box-mix. I will post the results when I get it worked out.  Sorry I’m not posting the Cook’s Illustrated recipe, but I don’t have copyright permission to do so. It’s on the newsstand now so you can pick up a copy of the magazine or get it from your local library. Though the texture of their recipe was great, it was also too sweet for my taste.

Thank you to Tanya of Chocolatechic for selecting this week’s recipe. She has the recipe posted on her blog if you are in the mood for making brownies.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 112 recipes completed 109 to go! Look we are over the hump!

Gargantuan buttermilk rolls! I made these after seeing Michael Ruhlman’s post featuring utterly delicious looking rolls. I’m not sure why mine rose up as though they were off to conquer the world.

The first rise was wonderfully successful and the sweet yeasty aroma of the dough filled me with anticipation.

Soft dinner rolls have always evaded me. I haven’t attempted Parker House rolls for years, but I recall never being able to get them to rise very well; clearly not an issue with these. Once portioned and given time to rise again, I garnished them with fennel seeds and nigella seeds.

I weighed the ingredients and scaled out each roll to 4 ounces, same as he did.  Even though they are busting out of the pan the interior seems to have a nice crumb. I will give these another try, but bake them in something larger than a 9″ springform pan and portion them to 2 ounces rather than 4. I am interested to see the results he will be posting from other readers who tried the recipe. If you feel like baking up some delightfully tender rolls you will find the recipe on his blog.