Thumbprint cookies are one of the riskiest choices in the pre-made cookie world. I’ve been disappointed by cookies that taste like shortening, are excessively dry, or have jam that is so congealed and leathery that it sticks to my teeth.  What I want is a rich tender buttery cookie with a tart brightly flavored jam or rich dark chocolate, just like this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie thumbprint cookies.

The recipe called for finely ground hazelnuts and raspberry jam, a favorite flavor combination of Dorie Greenspan’s. I didn’t have either of those items, so I started thinking about my favorite flavor combinations. Using almond meal as a substitute for the hazelnuts I made a chocolate peanut butter filling with David in mind and cracked into my last jar of rosemary rhubarb jelly (good thing rhubarb season is right around the corner!) as my personal indulgence. But this was just the start, then came a pink peppercorn chocolate ganache version followed by a cardamom kumquat combo.

This cookie is a simple butter and sugar shortbread style of dough. I found the dough to be a bit crumbly and difficult to shape, but the texture and flavor once baked were lovely.  I added 1/2 teaspoon of salt to the recipe because I think all baked goods benefit from a bit of salt. While mixing the dough I really wanted to add an egg yolk to give it a bit more moisture and richness, so that was my next experiment that led to my Pink Peppercorn Thumbprint Cookies.

The dough is slightly more tender and moist with the added egg yolk, which I really like.  The flavor of pink peppercorn blooms forward through the initial buttery flavor of the cookie making the first bite a bit of a discovery. Pink peppercorn and chocolate is a beautiful combination and somewhat behind me spoiling my appetite before dinner these last two nights. With four tasty varieties of pop-in-the-mouth cookies in the house, would you be hungry for dinner?

I thought the cardamom kumquat cookies were a stroke of genius, until they came out of the oven. The flavor was brilliant, but the appearance left a lot to be desired. Baked kumquats just aren’t pretty, but the flavor is fantastic. Kumquat marmalade added after the cookies bake will be a much better approach next time.  I used the same dough recipe as the pink peppercorn cookies, but added ¼ teaspoon of almond extract and ½ teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom instead of the pink pepper.

Mike of  Ugly Food Dude  selected this week’s recipe and he has it posted on his blog if you feel like making some prints with your thumbs and possibly spoiling your appetite for meals.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 115 recipes completed 106 to go!

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie resulted in forced creativity. Sometimes creativity comes from an inspired idea and other times it’s just a necessity to compensate for a missing ingredient, often rooted in the lack of desire to go to the store and purchase said ingredient.

In reading over this week’s recipe it was clear that the 2 tablespoons of dark rum was a key flavor of the finished product. After a thorough inspection of my hooch collection, my suspicion was confirmed; I didn’t have dark rum. A slightly annoying problem because I can’t just add dark rum to my grocery list, in Washington State acquiring such a substance means a special trip to a state-run liquor store. A task I wasn’t willing to add to my day, so I began working on a creative solution.

Dark rum has a spicy rich flavor which brought allspice immediately to mind as a good alternative. Rather than just adding ground allspice I thought I could achieve a deeper flavor by infusing it in the hot milk called for in the recipe. Because I was going the spice route I decided to boost the suggested pinch of coriander and infuse it along with the allspice. I made  half a batch of custard, so for 1 cup of milk I used 1 teaspoon each of whole allspice and coriander seeds that were simply crushed to open them up. After heating the milk to just below a boil, I removed it from the burner, added the crushed spices, covered the pan, and let it infuse for 10-15 minutes. Once strained, I moved on with the recipe as written.

The aroma wafting from the milk was a heady spicy sweet scent that assured me my Toasted-Coconut Custard Tart wasn’t going to be lacking in any way by the absence of dark rum. The flavor combined with the creamy custard texture reminds me of eggnog. This would be a fantastic holiday tart. The color of the custard is a bit unfortunate, but draped with a blanket of billowy white whipped cream, it’s hardly a problem.

Whenever a recipe just uses coconut flakes I never pick up much coconut flavor, but find the real contribution of the coconut to be textural. I found this to be the case here as well especially because the allspice flavor was so dominate. I only added the coconut to half of the individual tartlets I made and prefered the no-coconut version. I wish I had thought to add the coconut to the crust, where I think it would have been better represented. Next time.

A quick note on the crust, it’s a pâte sablée style of crust which is very buttery and crisp much like a shortbread cookie rather than a pie crust type crust. With the aid of a food processor it’s a snap to make and this style of dough is simply pressed into the tart pan rather than needing to be rolled out.  If you are looking for a versatile tart dough, Dorie Greenspan has the recipe posted on her site as part of her French Pear Tart recipe. I was a little short on butter and added in some of my home-rendered lard, I keep on hand for pie crusts, with great results.

Thank you to Beryl of Cinnamon Girl for this week’s recipe pick. Visit her blog for the Toasted-Coconut Custard recipe. I think I will be making my allspice version again during the holidays.

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!

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.

Personal sized desserts always look like they were more work to make, but really there is no difference and they are a lot easier to serve. This week for Tuesdays with Dorie it was Milk Chocolate Mini Bundt Cakes, and the recipe really got me thinking about ingredient substitutions.

Most notably I didn’t use milk chocolate. I much prefer dark, really dark, chocolate so I rarely have milk chocolate on hand and just did a straight substitution of dark for milk. The flavor was great. I often bend a recipe to suit my taste, or to work with ingredients I have on hand. If you don’t care for an ingredient in a recipe don’t be afraid to find an equivalent to substitute. The trick is to understanding the role of the objectionable ingredient so you substitute an alternate that serves the same purpose. David likes to mock me, “well I didn’t have any ground beef so I substituted peanut butter” or some other outlandish swap, but I rarely have a substitution related disaster. Notice I didn’t use the word “never”, hence the mocking.

This recipe gave an alternative that I wouldn’t have thought of off the top of my head, but will remember for future applications. The cake called for ½ cup whole milk and in the sidebar notes Dorie mentioned buttermilk can be substituted with the addition of 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda to the dry ingredients (the baking soda is important to neutralize the acidity of the buttermilk). I was happy for the option because I had buttermilk, but no whole milk, thus no special trip to the store needed!

These little cakes hold a surprise swirl of crunchy treats. Had I followed the recipe, it would be walnuts with cocoa powder and sugar, but I thought walnuts and cocoa nibs would be more interesting. The cocoa nibs were fantastic. They were actually the hit of the cake requiring vigilant attention to ward off intruding forks attempting to sneak over and steal them off of one another’s plates. There was an increased risk of nib pilfering because I over baked the cakes which made them crumbly and if a crumb contained a cocoa nib, be on guard it might get snitched. I think it’s because I baked them on the convection setting, but forgot to decrease the baking time. I’ll be interested to visit other Tuesday with Dorie baker’s posts to see if anyone else had dry cakes.

If you haven’t used cocoa nibs, I hope you will pick some up and give them a try. They make a great addition to most baked goods. They add texture that is crunchy but not gritty. Nibs crunch and then sort of  melt when chewed. They also lend a deep chocolate flavor the way unsweetened chocolate or cocoa powder would. Cocoa nibs are created very early in the chocolate making process. Once cocoa beans are roasted they are run through a machine called a winnoer to remove the outer husk. The pieces of bean that are kept for chocolate are cocoa nibs. The nibs are then ground and conched, which is essentially a grinding process to create a beautiful smooth texture before the chocolate is molded into bars or candies. My favorite cocoa nibs come from Theo Chocolate. They are a local Seattle company that is one of very few manufacturers in the US making chocolate from raw beans to finished bars. One of the reasons they have such a nice product is they process in very small batches so the quality of the roast on the nibs is carefully monitored.

Kristin of I’m Right About Everything picked the recipe for this week and will have it posted on her blog if you’d like to give it a try.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 111 recipes completed 110 to go! Look we are over the hump!

If you want to eat chocolate for breakfast, here’s your ticket. This bread drives the deliciously bitter and complex flavors of cocoa front and center leaving the bananas to the finish as a hint that this is legitimate breakfast food.

A full cup of cocoa powder gives the bread a dark enticing appearance and bold flavor; it reminded me more of coffee than chocolate. What could be more perfect for breakfast? I would even consider leaving out the pieces of chopped chocolate next time. I added a generous ¼ teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom which created a beautiful lingering warm floral flavor that complimented both the cocoa and banana equally well.

It turned out I could have pulled my bread out of the oven a few minutes earlier because it was just on the boarder of being over baked. I may have been thrown off by the bits of chocolate in the batter making it look like the toothpick I inserted to check for doneness was coming out with wet batter attached, when I actually just stabbed a reservoir of chocolate. It’s probably a good idea to try pricking a few different spots before making a final assessment as to the doneness of the bread.

A parchment paper sling is my surefire way to be able to remove baked goods from pans. In the recipe, Dorie suggests placing the loaf pan on a sheet pan, but instead I used two nested loaf pans to create a little air space in the bottom for insulation. It worked great. The batter filled a 9×5 loaf pan perfectly. If you have a smaller 4×8 loaf pan, bake some of the batter in a separate ramekin or muffin tin.

I am so thrilled with this bread and can’t wait to make it again. I was really taken with the beautiful bitterness of the cocoa that came through. My favorite cocoa powder is Felchlin Cacaopulver. I buy it through The Chocolate Man who offers a fantastic selection of quality chocolates from around the world.

Steph of Obsessed with Baking made the recipe selection for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie kitchen activity. She has the recipe posted on her wonderful blog. I encourage you to check out the recipe for Cocoa-Nana Bread and click around to see what other culinary adventures she has been on.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 110 recipes completed 111 to go!

I’ve been on a nice run of baking successes lately, but had a doozie of a failure last night. I made rye bread that is better suited as a doorstop rather than as a consumable.

I expected creating the rye starter to be the tricky part, but that worked like a charm, sort of. I tried two different starter methods. The one from the recipe I was interested in trying seemed so unconventional that I decided it would be wise to create a back-up starter, which turned out to be a good plan. The recipe called for a starter made from rye flour, buttermilk and salt, which was then to be left for four days to do it’s starter thing. The use of buttermilk in starter is unusual though not unheard of, but I have never heard of salt being added so early in the game as it’s a yeast inhibitor, and I was very suspicious that the starter didn’t need to be fed daily. 

For my back up starter I turned to a new book I have been exploring. I received a review copy of Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley from the publisher, Andrews McMeel. The book gives a great overview of rye starter and bread and instructions for a simple starter of rye flour and water that was bubbly and active after the first day. After four days of feeding it was ready to go, unlike the buttermilk starter which I tossed out on day two when I discovered a thick coating of fuzzy mold growing across the top.

As Whitley describes in Bread Matters, rye bread dough is supposed to be very wet and loose like the consistency of mashed potatoes. The recipe I made created dough more like cake batter. I think it was just too wet to be able to rise. Now that I at least have a healthy rye starter I look forward to trying the rye bread recipes from Bread Matters and I expect they will be winners. The only thing I have made so far from the book besides the rye starter is the English muffin recipe, which I make almost weekly. This recipe alone is enough to put this book on my “buy” list, but once I do a bit more baking from the book I will share a full review.  I have to say I find myself reaching for this book over the other bread books I own when I want information, like how to make a rye starter, for example.