Category Archives: Baked Explorations

By Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Sunday Night Cake

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This is like the little black dresses of cakes. Simple but elegant. Easy to make, but elegant enough for guests. It is also endlessly adaptable. Don’t like cinnamon? Leave it out. Add vanilla or lemon zest. Don’t like the chocolate frosting? Leave it off or use fresh fruit.

The cake is a standard butter/sour cream cake that uses cake flour and a bit of cinnamon for flavor. The frosting is a little unusual. You make a chocolate pudding (with water), beat the pudding until it is cool, then add butter and beat it some more. Depending on how long you beat the pudding, it can be more pudding-like or more spreadable. I got a little distracted and ended up with frosting that was more on the spreadable side.

My only quibble with this recipe is that I found the frosting to be too sweet. I ended up adding some salt to it, which helped, but next time I’ll use less sugar.

This is the last recipe, for now, out of Baked Explorations. I really enjoyed this book, even more so than the original Baked cookbook. The recipes seemed to be more geared towards the home baker and less bakery-ish. The burnt sugar cake and the nutella scones were standout recipes, while the Mississippi Mud Pie was good, but a lot of work. At some point, I’d like to try one of the more fancy cakes, but right now, I’m ready for recipes that don’t call for butter and sugar.

Honey Corn Muffins

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Let’s get one thing straight. No self-respecting southerner would consider these muffins proper cornbread. But I’m not a southerner, so I’m comfortable saying I loved these sweet, tender muffins.

The recipe is a pretty standard muffin recipe, using cornmeal for part of the flour, honey and brown sugar as sweeteners and buttermilk for the liquid. The muffins came together quickly and in about 30 minutes, from start to finish, I was enjoying warm baked goodness.

I had a few problems, though. As you can see from the picture, the muffins didn’t rise. At all. I think there might be too much leavening in the recipe, so next time I make them, I’ll cut it down a bit. In addition, the muffins were quite crumbly.

Chocolate Mint Thumbprints

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Fact #1: Mint and chocolate are a classic Christmas combination.

Fact #2: Waiting until next December to make these cookies would be wrong, wrong, wrong.

Fact #3: It snowed last night and the snow STUCK! For heaven’s sakes, it is almost May. I want some sun. Until then, I’m going to keep making these cookies.

Fact #4: If I keep eating these cookies, I will not look good in a bathing suit.

Fact #5: It would be totally worth it.

These cookies are somewhere between a truffle (dense and chocolatey) and a slightly crunchy crumbly cookie. The mint is subtle, and despite not liking white chocolate, I loved the white chocolate ganache in the middle. It was just the right amount of sweetness since the cookies aren’t all that sweet. I also liked the texture that rolling the cookie dough in sugar gives.

This is a pretty simple recipe, and if you didn’t want to bother with the white chocolate ganache, you can easily leave it out. The cookies are good plain. The dough starts off by melting dark chocolate and mint chocolate (or Andes mint chocolate candies). As the chocolate mixture cools, you cream butter, sugar and brown sugar, add a couple of egg yolks and vanilla, then the cooled melted chocolate. Finally, flour, cocoa powder and salt are mixed in to form a rough, slightly dry dough. After a rest in the fridge, the dough is portioned out into tablespoon-sized balls, rolled in sugar and baked. If you are going to fill the cookies with the ganache, an indentation is made both before baking and halfway through the baking time in the dough balls.

The white chocolate ganache is simply white chocolate, hot cream and mint extract. You chop up the white chocolate, pour the hot cream over it and stir until everything is melted and smooth. Stir in the extract, and once the cookies are cooled, fill each indentation with the white chocolate ganache.

My only quibble is the fact that the authors want you to buy mint chocolate or Andes mint chocolate candies to melt and add to the dough. Why can’t you just add some mint extract to the cookie dough and use plain chocolate?

Mississippi Mud Pie (B)

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Let me introduce you to Mr. Chocolate, Chocolate and More Chocolate. That dessert up there? Hoo boy, can you say over the top chocolatey richness? Don’t get me wrong, it was really good. But even for this chocoholic, a small slice went a long way.

Baked Explorations includes two Mississippi Mud Pie recipes. The first is a pie made with a chocolate cookie crust, filled with fudge and coffee ice cream and topped with a fudge sauce. This one starts with a chocolate cookie crust, followed by a flourless chocolate cake layer, then a layer of chocolate pudding and a topping of whipped cream. Why did I pick this one to test? The picture is awesome. You can almost smell the chocolate coming off the page.

Unfortunately, my pie didn’t look so awesome (but I’ll bet it tasted just as good). My pie slice was a little floppy. As soon as I cut into it, the pudding and the whipped cream layers started sliding off together, kinda like they were trying to elope. I had a few other small problems, but nothing that affected the taste.

As I said above, this pie starts out with a pretty standard chocolate cookie crust (cookie crumbs mixed with butter and pressed into the pan). Here was my first problem. I couldn’t get the cookie crumb mixture to go up the side of the pan very far. I did my best and went ahead and baked it.

Once the crust has baked for about 10 minutes and cooled, you make a flourless chocolate cake, spiked with coffee, and bake it in the cookie crust. My next problem was that there was too much flourless chocolate cake batter to fit into my pan. I used about 2/3 of the batter for the pie; the rest I baked in a smaller baking dish. While the flourless chocolate cake baked up fine, as it cooled it fell pretty dramatically (which the authors said would happen), but as it fell, it pulled my cookie crust with it. Again, it didn’t hurt the taste of the pie, it just made it look a little sloppy.

The last major component of this pie is a layer of rich chocolate pudding. Nothing special here, just a cornstarch-thickened pudding full of chocolate. Okay, maybe it is a little special. To top everything off (and to cut the chocolatey-ness of this pie), a simple topping of whipped cream is piled on.

I made this pie over two days. On day one, I made the crust and the flourless chocolate cake layers. On day two, I made the chocolate pudding. Both the flourless chocolate cake layer and the pudding need to hang out in the fridge before the next layer is added, so breaking it up made a lot of sense. It also made this recipe much less intimidating.

Was it worth the work? Yes, if you are looking to bury yourself in chocolate. There are a lot of different textures going on here, from the slightly crunchy crust, to the almost dry, dense cake to the rich, soft pudding, that keeps each bite interesting. If you are looking to impress somebody, this is the dessert that will do it.

Double Chocolate Loaf

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I think this may be one of the easiest recipes out of Baked Explorations. It isn’t quite a dump and stir recipe, but it is pretty darn close. And the end product is a dark, tasty, not-to-sweet cake. Or is it a quick bread? I can’t quite decide. Whatever it is, it is delicious.

You start of by combining cocoa powder, brown sugar, granulated sugar, flour, salt and leavening in a mixer bowl. In a separate bowl, you whisk a couple of eggs and a yolk with buttermilk, oil and vanilla extract. This gets poured into the mixer bowl with the dry ingredients, and the whole lot is mixed just until everything is combined. Finally chopped chocolate (or chocolate chips if you are lazy like me) is stirred into the batter, and the cake/quick bread bakes for nearly an hour.

As you can see, my loaf fell in the middle. I’m blaming the leavening, even though I cut the baking soda down by half. Next time, I’ll cut it down even further. My loaf started to burn around the edges, and it was very crumbly. Despite that, though, it was still very good, especially when spread with peanut butter or nutella or both! The recipe includes a spread of peanut butter and cream cheese, and I’d bet that’s be fantastic. I was too lazy to go to the store for cream cheese.

Malted Milk Sandwich Cookies

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No, that isn’t a typo in the post heading. These are supposed to be sandwich cookies (sandwiched with a vanilla, Oreo-like filling), but I liked them sans filling so much, I decided not to bother.

Besides, in my world, I can eat at least twice as many cookies if they aren’t sandwiched together. Or something like that. I need a calculator . . .

But seriously, these cookies don’t need a filling. They are just lovely by themselves. The cookie dough gets started by creaming butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. A couple of eggs, sour cream and a hefty dose of vanilla round out the wet ingredients. On the dry side are flour, malt powder, leavening and salt. Once the dough has come together, you refrigerate it for a few hours, roll the dough out and cut out your cookies for baking.

According to the instructions, these cookies can be either soft and chewy or crispy. depending on how long you bake them. I decided to play with the baking times and made some of the cookies softer and some of them crispier. I tried to choose a favorite, but I liked them both. The malt flavor is subtle; if you didn’t know it was in there, you’d be hard pressed to identify it. Rather, the malt and the brown sugar combine to give these cookies a caramelly flavor, with a strong kick of vanilla. Even though these cookies are a little plain looking, they are dangerously addictive.

Nutella Scones

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These scones need to come with a warning. Something like this:

WARNING! These scones may be hazardous to your health if you like chocolate or hazelnuts.

Or maybe this:

WARNING! If you have uncontrollable urges when in close proximity to an open jar of Nutella, avoid these scones at all costs.

Holy crap, they are that good, especially if you like Nutella, that chocolatey hazelnutty goodness that I would totally make out with if I weren’t so busy spooning it straight into my mouth.

Besides being really, really good, these scones are super easy to make. They are a pretty standard scone recipe with some cocoa powder added in with the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Butter is rubbed into the dry ingredients until it is pea-sized, then heavy cream and an egg is mixed in until a rough dough is formed. For some added crunch, chopped hazelnuts are kneaded into the dough. Finally, the dough is patted out into a square, and Nutella is spread over it, before the dough is rolled up, pattted out again and cut into triangles (or squares or circles or whatever shape blows your skirt up).

Once the scones are baked, more Nutella is dripped over the top of them, taking their yumminess factor up by about a zillion.

Lewis and Poliafito have hit a homerun with this recipe. These scones aren’t too sweet (only 1/4 cup of sugar to 1/4 cup of cocoa powder), they are tender without being greasy, and they have a great texture due to the chopped hazelnuts. If you’d rather not gild the lilly with that last application of Nutella, these would be divine with raspberry jam. Fresh strawberries would also taste mighty good.

Did I mention there is Nutella in there?

Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars

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I seem to have a propensity for picking recipes that include combinations that I ordinarily wouldn’t like. For example, although I love peanut butter, I don’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I blame the gazillion of them I ate growing up. In fact, I prefer my peanut butter straight up, or possibly swirled with nutella (oh, nutella, the nectar of the gods. Let me sing your praises . . .) and delivered to my mouth via spoon. No bread required, thankyouverymuch.

But peanut butter and jelly bars . . . I just had to try them.

You start out by making a sweet pastry dough for the bottom crust. I had a bit of problem here. The ingredients called for one egg, but the instructions tell you to “whisk the eggs.” Not sure if I should be using one or two eggs, I started with one, but the dough looked very dry, so I added a second egg. This gave me a very wet dough which baked up into a fairly tough, dense bottom crust. Now I’m thinking that it should only be one egg, but I think some internet sleuthing is in order.

Onward.

Once the pastry dough has chilled, you roll it out, fit it the bottom of your pan and blind bake it. My dough shrank and never got brown in the middle, although the edges were quite brown. I decided to use it anyway.

Next up is the peanut butter filling which consists of peanut butter, butter (as in two TWO! sticks of butter), vanilla and powdered sugar. This gets beaten until smooth and then spread over the cooled crust. Next comes a layer of preserves. I went with seedless blackberry. Finally, you make an oatmeal crumb topping (flour, rolled oats, more butter, leavening, brown sugar and cinnamon) and sprinkle that on top. The bars are baked for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the top is browned. I baked my bars for something like 40 minutes, and the top never got quite brown.

I didn’t like these bars when they were warm, but I liked them a whole lot at room temperature. As I mentioned above, the bottom crust was very hard, but the peanut butter layer, with just a bit of the preserves, was so flavorful. And I loved the oats in the crumb topping. These are pretty rich, so a small piece went a long way.

One other thing to be aware of: These are full of butter, in the crust, in the peanut butter layer and in the crumb topping. I literally had butter running out of the bars when I took them out of the oven. As they cooled, most of the butter seemed to get re-absorbed.

Note: After typing up this post, I emailed the guys at Baked to ask them about the eggs. None other than Matt Lewis himself replied. According to Matt, the ingredient list is correct, only one egg is called for. So, start with one egg, and if you find that your crust is still too dry and crumbly to hold together, add a teaspoon or two of water.

The No-Bake Peanut Butter Cookie

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Grade school, for me, is murky. I don’t remember a whole lot, but a couple of things stand out. In sixth grade, my boyfriend, Justin, used to leave dingdongs in my desk at lunch. In kindergarten, Mrs. Tucker twisted my ear because I wouldn’t stop talking. And once or twice a month, these cookies showed up for lunch.

Funny note: I had no idea there was peanut butter in them until I saw this recipe. I always just thought they were chocolate and oatmeal.

Over the past weekend, I was looking for something quick and easy to make out of this cookbook. I’ve been in a bit of a cooking/baking lull because of some recent dental surgery. My thinking went along the lines of this: If I can’t eat solid food, I ain’t cooking/baking anything. So Bryan has been eating a lot of prepared meals while I drink protein drinks (chocolate protein drinks, please). This recipe fit the easy/quick criteria.

You bring milk, sugar, cocoa power and butter to a boil. Stir in some chunky peanut butter and rolled oats, scoop the goop onto parchment-lined baking sheets and let ‘em cool.

One bite (I’m back to solid foods, thankyouverymuch) and I was right back in grade school. These cookies are sweet, so small is better, but they go quite nicely with a glass of cold milk. They have a bit of chew thanks to the oats (I used old-fashioned rolled oats), and I added about a half of a teaspoon of kosher salt. I think that hint of salt really cuts the sweetness and makes these just a little more sophisticated.

Note: I know these cookies look like balls of dog poop, but they don’t taste like it, at all.

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cake

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This cake is dangerous. Really, really dangerous. Like, even though I didn’t cook it long enough and it was gooey in the middle, we still ate most of it dangerous.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This cake is the love child of an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie and a cinnamon coffee cake. This recipe is simple to make, as it calls for pantry ingredients, and the just-baked cake is hearty and warming, filled with chewy bits of oatmeal and pockets of melted chocolate. Let the cake cool for a bit, and the brown sugar and cinnamon start to make more of an appearance, and the cake starts to taste a little more oaty (and I mean that in the best possible way). You can dress this cake up with a cream cheese frosting, or leave it plain, like I did, and pretend that it is almost healthy. Either way, you will eat far too many pieces of it.

The recipe starts by having you soak old-fashioned rolled oats in boiling water. As the oats soak, you whisk together a couple of eggs, granulated sugar, brown sugar, salt, leavening an cinnamon. Next you fold in the soaked oats and some flour. Finally, chocolate chips are stirred into the batter, and the whole thing bakes for about 45 minutes. Easy peasy.

Except (you knew that was coming), I did have a few problems. Even though the recipe has you toss the chocolate chips with some flour to stop them from sinking to the bottom of the cake, all my chocolate chips ended up at the bottom of the cake. Not a deal breaker, but it would have been nice to have the chips more evenly distributed throughout the cake.

I suspect the amount of leavening is slightly off. Next time, I’ll back off on the baking soda. And finally, as I mentioned above, I didn’t completely bake the cake. After 45 minutes, my edges were done and pulling away from the pan, but the middle of my cake was still quite wet. I went ahead and took the cake out, which was a mistake. However, if I had cooked it longer, the edges would have begun to dry out. This is a tricky one. Perhaps baking the cake at 350 degrees, instead of 375 degrees, would work. I’ll just have to practice, I guess.