Paris Chocolate tour

A NYT article about chocolate shops in Paris...

You got peanut butter in my chocolate

The other night I made chocolate sauce (chocolate pieces melted into cream) to top the mint-basil chocolate-chip ice cream, and there was a ton left over. It's so good that I've been dipping a spoon straight in to the sauce, which, when cold is a lot more like ganache. But Joel, who isn't a huge straight-chocolate fan, pioneered a new treat the other night.

Last December, my grandma brought over some empty chocolate cups (the package showed them full of delicious things and she thought that was what she was getting), which have been sitting in the cupboard since then. Joel grabbed those and some peanut butter and assembled little homemade reese's, much to the delight of my nine-year-old cousin Donella, who was over watching the Olympics with us.

Peanut butter cross-section

Cross-section of the peanut butter and chocolate dessert.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Yes, this is a post inspired by the recent David Leite article in the New York Times.

I love chocolate chip cookies to distraction, and I like David Leite's site Leite's Culinaria (it's a great resource for recipes from newer cookbooks), so I was excited to try this recipe, though I'm always skeptical of articles touting perfection. Along with articles promising secrets or anything in list form, they're click-through gold, but it's pretty hard to live up to the claim.

I made the dough on Friday with the intention of bringing them to the Sommerfest at pub in the woods (The Tourist Club). Each time I opened the fridge during the two-day chilling process, I grew giddier.

On Sunday morning, I heated up the oven and got out my scale, ready to measure 3.5 oz portions out onto the cookie sheet. The scale ended up being vital because I would not have made the cookies that large without actually seeing the weight. The recipe very coyly says that the cookie dough balls should end up being the size of a golf ball, but 3 1/2 ounces is more like a small baseball. I pressed a bit of sea salt onto the top of each cookie before putting them in the oven.

The first batch came out with molten-dough middles, which was good except for the salmonella fear. I kept the next two batches in a few minutes longer (20 minutes as opposed to 18), and the results were better.

The verdict: They were good, but the best? No. They tasted like bakery chocolate chip cookies, or like...mall cookies. Rich, melting, well-engineered, surely, but not transcendent.

Brandied cherry chocolate tart

This tart, oh, this tart. Even Joel, who lacks enthusiasm for both cherries and chocolate loved this one, and was disappointed when he returned home from work to discover that I had given the rest of it away (part to a neighbor, the rest to my aunt).

This recipe cemented an obsession with the Macrina Bakery and Cafe Cookbook (breads, pastries, and sweets edition). Kathryn bought me the cookbook after eating at the bakery and cafe in Seattle during her U.S. road trip honeymoon. Looking through it, I got the food tingle- that sensation where my brain and my taste buds start jumping around in unison just-won-the-lottery style.

Cooking from it gave both brain and buds even more giddy pleasures. And it solved, in one easy step, my biggest problem with tart/pie crusts. Though I handle gently and chill often, I still tend to get crust shrinkage. But the flaky pie dough recipe (flour, salt, cold unsalted butter, chilled vegetable shortening, and ice water) called for me to roll a slightly larger circle, leave 3/4 inch overhang, and then build a double-thick crust. No shrinkage, and more glorious crust!

Next, I simmered cherries (they were supposed to be all bing, but it was the last bing cherry dessert of the season, and I had to add a few rainier cherries) in a brandy simple syrup, then drained them, sprinkled them around the pre-baked tart crust, and then whipped up a chocolately custard which struck that perfect balance of rich-but-not-oppressive.

I baked it, let it cool, sprinkled a bit of powdered sugar, and served it alongside a dollop of only faintly-sweetened whipped cream. I really liked it because each of the three elements (crust, cherries, custard) was delicious, complimentary, but also able to be tasted and appreciated in itself.

Chocolate scales

I was cutting up chocolate while preparing to make truffles and had to take a photo of the pretty pattern the thinly sliced chocolate made on the knife.

The best recipes in the Bittersweet cookbook

My friend and coworker (and co-Bay-Area-remote-worker) Erica also happens to be the most chocolate-oriented person I know. Her great love of chocolate makes my affection for it look like a mere schoolgirl crush.

So when she wrote to me yesterday after reading this mid-December post about my frustration with the format of the Alice Medrich Bittersweet cookbook, I took her suggestions not as informed opinions, but as a road map to the best of the book.

Here's what she wrote:

"Here are totally winning recipes because there's no useful TOC in this book:

PB/Chocolate Torte p. 114

Bittersweet Deception p. 170

Marble cheesecake p. 266

Raspberry-laced chocolate cupcakes p.272

Saucepan fudge drops p. 285"

Thanks Erica!