Baking For Others

I know it’s first thing in the morning. But I want to talk about booze. No, not vodka, not tequila, and not gin. Something sweeter and nuttier. Maybe more like breakfast? Or really, dessert. It’s Frangelico, a hazelnut-flavored liquor that’s about to take my chocolate mousse to the next level.

But first, let’s go way back.

Years ago, I interned in the test kitchen of a famous food personality. As the only non-professional chef in the kitchen, I spent my days feeling like Amelia Bedelia, pouring salt in the sugar jar and spilling sugar on the floor.

Now, there is a lot of know-how involved in being a home cook, like understanding how to improvise meals from an empty pantry or what it means to stretch dinner to feed double the number of guests intended (hint: add potatoes), but not knowing how to handle a hazelnut is one of the downfalls of never having earned a culinary degree.

One quiet afternoon in the test kitchen, we were testing recipes and a chef handed me some extra pie dough to play with. With the freedom to fill my pie crust with any of the kitchen’s gourmet wonders, I kicked around ideas, finally deciding on a chocolate mousse filling with hazelnuts. The crust baked up fine, and the mousse set. Feeling good, I toasted the hazelnuts, failed to remove their papery skins, scattered them across my tart, offered slices around the kitchen, and drooped home after the entire test kitchen staff declined to taste my tart.

“You know you have to remove the skins before you serve them?” the head chef finally said.

Obviously I hadn’t known. Right then I knew, though. Lesson learned.

So when I got the chance to work with Frangelico, a hazelnut-flavored liquor, I knew my recipe was going to be the story not just of hazelnut liqueur but of redemption. Make that crustless redemption.

Join me in a collective moan, please. My three-year-old MacBook died this morning as I went to turn it on to finish this post. I’ve got worse problems than photo editing, currently, such as retrieving an insane amount of data, but today we’re going to make do with just one photo in a post. The rest of the pretty pictures are on a hard drive that just keeled over and died. (Don’t worry, I have back-ups, so I’m not totally panicked, just temporarily adrift.)

But I wanted to get this post to you before you read it and think, “What? …

The bright pink-covered cookbook that emerged from our brains almost two years ago contains a lot of recipe wins, recipes I use all the time. Even though I should have memorized the recipe, I’ll breezily flip to page 92 when friends are coming for dinner, in order to check the ratio of peanut butter to sesame oil to sugar in BGSK Peanut Noodles.

A lot of other people like the noodles too. Maybe they’re aware of them because I mention them in practically every post. When we asked bloggers to review the book around pub date, a lot of them naturally chose that recipe. I think I knew they would.

About my other favorite recipe, chocolate-flecked clafoutis, there have been crickets. Not a word! I have no idea if anyone but me has ever made it. Seriously. This wouldn’t be a problem if the recipe was a dud. But it’s so good! Almost as delicate as a pot de creme but with a rustic golden crust and the most straightforward directions. The clafoutis in my mind, should be a crowd pleaser.

I remember when I developed it, I was looking for a cinch of a recipe. I was bent on crafting a sweet dish formal enough to serve after a dinner party but so easy it wouldn’t occupy much real estate in your brain as you plotted out crostini and wine and table settings and chicken preparations and salad.

I learned to make clafoutis at a week-long French basics class I took one summer in college and have loved the idea of the recipe ever since – a throw-together dish that as presentable and homey as a pancake beneath its pretty crackled top. You will love it too, now that I’ve told you that you have to make it. Right?

The following post is written in celebration of my half birthday, which occured on Monday–April 1st.  I couldn’t have posted this on my actual half birthday, since it was April Fool’s and you wouldn’t have believed for a second that I was serious in what I’m about to say.

I was born on the best day of the year. October first. Ten-one. 10/1. A palindrome. Binary. A Libra.

Since my birthday falls on such a singular day,  I always made a big deal of celebrations when I was younger. One birthday wasn’t enough–I prized not just my half birthday but also my quarter and three-quarter birthdays.

To this day, each morning I wake up on the first of the of the month, I calculate the fraction of my age and rejoice a little (or mourn the ascent of 30). Most of the time I keep these celebrations private, confined to the interior of my head, because normal people don’t celebrate half birthdays, let alone 5/12th birthdays.

Alex loves when people ask him how well he eats, being married to me. He smiles and tells them dinner is always awesome, forgetting to mention that we’ve eaten lentils for the last three nights running.

Because of his enthusiasm for dinners both special and mundane, I love cooking for Alex. While he helps me with ideas when I have what’s-for-dinner fatigue and dishes when I’ve filled the sink with dirty plates, he’s usually pretty happy to cede the kitchen to me.

But occasionally, he has important suggestions. After Christmas, when we had gorged ourselves on cookies for days and even brought back a few of our favorites in a baggie, he asked if I’d make his mom’s lemon cookies. She sent me the recipe for the sweets, which are plain-ish little cakes until you spread a sugary, lemony glaze thickly on top of each that adds satisfying crunch and a delightful tang.  I took the recipe and tweaked it for Valentine’s Day, cutting the cookies into hearts. And then I took the recipe and subbed grapefruits in for the lemons, making them less tangy, almost candy-like, citrusy, dreamy, and surprising.

Grapefruits are so photogenic, and the light was nice when I made these yesterday, so I took about a million shots of making these cookies. I’ll leave you to them, and also have you know that once you’ve made these with grapefruit, you should sub back in lemon zest and juice and make the original version, too.

With Food Network’s Comfort Food Feast hosting a day of chocolate chip cookies in virtuous January, I racked my brain for a recipe that I could share with you that wouldn’t, you know, tempt you to eat chocolate chip cookies if you didn’t want to go there yet.

(If you do want to, we’ve got some options! Chocolate Chip Cookie Squares. Chocolate Chip Cookies with Milk and Dark Chocolate. Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake. Chocolate Chip Macaroons. Flourless Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies. Coffee-Toffee Ice Cream Sandwich Squares. Insane.)

I remembered a recipe from Weelicious, a blog and book about cooking for kids and families. That seemed an unexpected choice for a quarter-life cook, but stay with me. I love kid food. The recipe I remembered is for breakfast bars, not-too-sweet rectangles of baked oatmeal punctuated by fruit and nuts.

To make my bars suitable for the adult palates around here, I made a couple of changes. Alex is a guy who believes in breakfast dessert, which usually takes the form of a small handful of chocolate chips. So chocolate chips replaced the fruit. The original recipe calls for applesauce, which isn’t something I usually have around. Out went applesauce, in went peanut butter (banned, I hear, in schools).

Last, I used pecans, whose rich, sweet flavor enhanced the chocolatey nature of these cookie-bars which function as a real, healthful, portable breakfast. In fact, I’m even more likely to eat these as snacks than breakfast, and I sometimes wrap them in plastic and stock in my purse, just in case hunger strikes. 

No matter the decade, no matter the trend, chocolate mousse figures as the ultimate in dinner party desserts. This particular lovable chocolate mousse pie has stood as one my favorite desserts for decades, not least because its method is just so cool. With one batter, you make both the crust and the filling of a chocolate-y pie that’s at once hearty and light. All that goes into this super-batter are eggs, chocolate, and sugar (more or less), which means that this exquisite, elegant tart is both flour and butter free.

Maida Heatter has a way with chocolate. She mastered not-too-sweet, not-too-rich chocolate desserts even before these times of high-quality, bittersweet bars. And this recipe, from her book, Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, not only shows her cacao expertise but also comes with the cutest intro paragraph I’ve ever read.

Of the many recipes that were born in my kitchen, this was one of the most exciting because it became The New York Times’s 1972 Dessert of the Year.

Cute, right?