Monthly Archives: December 2009

Dark Chocolate Fleur de Sel Cupcakes with Snappy Butterscotch Icing

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fleur_de_sel_cupcakesSalty sweets seem to be catching my eye lately. First there were those salty oatmeal cookies and now these dark chocolate cupcakes that are liberally sprinkled with coarse salt before baking and after frosting. The cupcakes were good, but the star of this recipe is the butterscotch icing. Oh my.

The recipe comes from a new book by Christie Matheson called Salty Sweets. I got the recipe here.  The first time I made these cupcakes, it was for a family dinner on Christmas Eve. They were easy enough to make, but I thought they could benefit from a few modifications.

First, I scaled down the amount of baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon. I also added 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder to the batter. Second, and mostly importantly, I doubled the amount of butterscotch icing.

But that icing? Oh. My.

See, you really only need one batch of the icing to cover the cupcakes (unless you like a really thick layer of frosting), but you really should try this stuff drizzled over ice cream or straight from the fridge by the spoonful.

The icing is the only part of the recipe that gave me any trouble. You combine brown sugar, heavy cream, butter, water and coarse salt and cook it, on the stovetop, until it thickens. The first time I made the icing, I let it cook for the 15 minutes that the recipe calls for. Well, it never thickened enough that I could frost the cupcakes with it. I ended up beating the icing with a hand mixer to thicken it.

The second time I made the icing, I let it cook for almost 40 minutes. This time it thickened enough to stay put on the cupcakes, but it was pretty thin. In the end, I think I prefer the beaten version of the icing. It makes for a really nice mouth feel, you can mound it up like frosting, and it just looks better.

Salted Oatmeal Cookies

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oatmeal_cookies_brightThe two weeks before Christmas were filled with batches of caramel and almond toffee, peppermint bark and nougat. At the end of it all, I was sugared out. That lasted approximately 10 seconds, then I found this recipe for oatmeal cookies.

Unlike regular oatmeal cookies, the dough for these contain no salt. Sea salt (or kosher salt, in my case) is sprinkled over the dough before baking. Another difference in this recipe is that the dough is chilled for at least an hour before baking.

The result is a cookie full of oatmeal flavor with a hit of salt. Not too sweet, these cookies bake up thicker than most oatmeal cookies. They’re a bit crunchy on the edges and softer in the middle.

The first batch I made plain. They were good. The second batch I added dried cranberries to half of the dough and chocolate chips to the other half of the dough. This batch was better, with the cranberry version edging slightly ahead of the chocolate chip version. I really liked the brightness of the cranberries.

But I wouldn’t turn down the chocolate chip version, either.

Chicken & Pork Adobado

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adobadoCurrently cooking from All About Braising by Molly Stevens

My last dish out of All About Braising was a bit disappointing. The first night we ate this chicken and pork dish, it was really good. The sauce was tangy and full of flavor. Unfortunately, there was only enough sauce for that first meal. Leftovers were dry and tasteless. and I ended up tossing the rest.

Stevens calls this a Philippine-style braised dish. You start out by marinating a mix of chicken thighs and pork ribs in garlic, vinegar, lime zest and soy sauce, then braising the meat in the marinade. Once the thighs and ribs are tender, you panfry them until crispy brown on the outside. The braising liquid gets boiled down into a syrupy sauce which gets served over the meats.

It sounds like a lot of steps, but it really isn’t. As promised panfrying the braised meats crisped the chicken skin into a shiny brown lacquer and gave the ribs a nice color. We served this over white rice, and for me, the star of the meal was the sauce. It was rich and tangy and vinegary, but not overpoweringly so. In fact, I could have just drizzled the sauce over the rice and been happy.

I’m sad to be leaving this book behind. The meals I’ve made from it were deeply satisfying, especially when the weather outside was frightful. None of the recipes were overly complicated, and the results went (mostly) beyond my expectations. I expect to return to this book over and over.

I haven’t picked out the next cookbook, but it will likely be a baking one. I expect I’ll start up again in January, but for now I’m elbow deep in making candies and cookies for the holidays.

Chocolate Cookies

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choc_cookiesThe folks over at www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/ have the perfect job. See, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make money by baking whatever I want, whenever I want. So far, I haven’t had much luck, but I’m sure enjoying the practice.

Anyway, that blog up there? Well, they’re the source for these cookies. The cookies don’t really have a name, and the recipe (which you’ll find here) is completely open to substitutions. They used different kinds of chocolate chunks. Other people used nuts and/or dried fruit. I used chocolate chips. I thought about throwing some dried cranberries in there, but in the end, I just wanted chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate.

The simple chocolate batter is made up of butter, sugar, baking powder, salt, eggs, vanilla, flour and cocoa powder (they call for Dutch-process cocoa powder, but I just used regular). It all gets mixed up in one bowl, then scooped onto cookie sheets and baked. No resting, no refrigeration. In less then 30 minutes, start to finish, you too can be enjoying warm chocolate cookies with a glass of cold milk.

The texture of these cookies is somewhere between a cookie and a brownie. They don’t spread out at all, and you have to be careful not to over bake them, or they’ll turn out dry. And that would be a shame.

Now go make these.

Golden Pull-Apart Butter Buns

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rollsA week or so before Thanksgiving, I went on a mission to find a really good roll recipe for those all-important leftover turkey sandwiches. I think I tried three or four recipes before finally settling on this one from the King Arthur Flour website.

The only change I made to the recipe was to increase the oven temperature to 400 degrees and bake the rolls for about 15 minutes. The higher oven temperature seems to keep the rolls more moist inside.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

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pumpkin_cookiesThere it was. Staring at me with sad little orange eyes. Every time I opened the refrigerator, I could hear its insidious whisper:

“Please don’t throw me away.”

But what to do with it? I had about a cup of pumpkin puree leftover from Thanksgiving. Trying to find a savory recipe just seemed like a lot of hard work, and I was suffering a bit of a pumpkin hangover. So there it sat, that lonely container of orange mush. For days. A week almost. Then:

PUMPKIN CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES!

I found a recipe on allrecipes.com and changed it around a bit. I added my own spices (the original recipe called for pumpkin pie spice) and used a combination of brown sugar and white sugar, instead of all white sugar. These cookies are cakey and moist; warm from the oven, they are all but irresistible. I’ve tried the recipe with different kinds of nuts, but my favorite (so far) is chopped, toasted hazelnuts.

Recipe after the jump.

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Braised Celery with Crunchy Bread Crumb Topping

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braised_celeryCurrently cooking from All About Braising by Molly Stevens

Thanksgiving left me with a surplus of celery, so I took a suggestion from a commentor and tried Stevens’ braised celery recipe.

You start off by trimming and cleaning a bunch of celery stalks and making a celery stock with the trimmings. The stock is poured over the celery stalks and then braised for just over an hour. Once the celery stalks are tender, you top them with bread crumbs and gruyere cheese and bake the dish until the cheese is melted and the top is crunchy and brown.

Honestly, this was a little too much celery-ish for me. I ate a couple of the stalks, then just picked the topping off the rest. The dish felt very one dimensional (celery!) to me, even with the flavorful topping. In a book full of really good dishes, this one was disappointing.

Black Pepper and Molasses Pulled Chicken

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bbq_chickenThis is the second recipe I earmarked from the November issue of Cooking Light (that Beef-Barley Soup was the other one). And like the beef-barley soup, this was a hit.

I followed the recipe pretty closely, except for one change. In the magazine, the recipe calls for skinless, boneless chick thighs. Those are pretty hard to find around here, so I used chicken breasts instead, and it turned out just fine. You start out by mixing ketchup, vinegar, mustard, molasses, spices and the chicken in a saucepan and bringing it to a boil. At first, it looks like there isn’t enough liquid, but keep heating the pan and you’ll be okay. Once the liquid has come to a boil, you lower the heat and simmer until the chicken is done. Then you shred the chicken and serve. It really is that easy. And it tastes good. Sure, it’s not got that long, slow-cooked taste you’ll find at a BBQ joint, but for 30 minutes, you end up with a darn tasty meal.

I served this over brown rice, instead of on rolls. I also doubled everything so we’d have leftovers.

Yankee Post Roast Redux

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pot_roastCurrently cooking from All About Braising by Molly Stevens

Here’s another homerun from Stevens’ book. I’ve made lots of pot roasts (and eaten even more), but I think this might be one of my favorites due to its simplicity and ease of preparation.

You start out by browning a roast (I used a 3 1/2 pound boneless beef chuck roast). Stevens uses the broiler, but I just browned my roast on the stovetop and deglazed the pot with some hard cider and chicken stock. An onion, thyme and bay leaves are added to the liquid and the meat is braised for 90 minutes. At that point, turnips, carrots and potatoes are added, and the roast cooks for another 90 minutes, or until all the veggies are done.

One of the best things I like about all these braised dishes are the amount of leftovers. I love that one dish feeds us for two or three days, and usually, the leftovers are even better than the original meal. This pot roast just got more tender and flavorful as the days went by. The only thing I might change next time is to use parsnips instead of turnips. The turnips are pretty aggressively flavored and tended to overwhelm the other vegetables.

Beef-Barley Soup

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beef_barley

Here’s another recipe that I got from Cooking Light magazine. We tend to eat a lot of soups around here, and I’m always looking for new recipes. This one caught my eye because it looked more like a stew than a soup.

This is a pretty basic beef barley soup, made with chuck roast, carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, and, of course, barley. There’s a bit of chopping you have to do at first, but then the soup simmers unattended on the stovetop until the meat is fall-apart tender and the barley is cooked through.

The recipe says it serves 4, but I wanted lots of leftovers, so I doubled everything except the liquid. The original recipe calls for 4 cups of beef broth. After I browned the meat, the onions and mushrooms, I deglazed the pot with about a cup of dry sherry and then added the four cups of broth. In the end, my soup was a little dryer than traditional soups, but I preferred it that way.