December 17, 2009
Whenever I put a variety of cookies together, I try really hard to include something for every kind of cookie taste. For example, I always include some kind of buttery and crumbly sable, something uber-chocolate, something gooey, something jammy and fruity, and something nutty and spiced. I’m never short on ideas for these categories, but I always freeze when it comes to bars. I love including a bar cookie, no question, but with the dizzying variety, from cheesecakes to lemon bars to brownies, it’s almost another food category entirely and I just can’t decide.
This year was no exception, and an exhaustive research session with my stacks of cookbooks only left me feeling more bewildered. That’s when I decided to combine two of my favorite recipes of all time, this one, and this one (which resulted in EVK recently being featured on Saveur.com). The cookie love-child that resulted was absolutely worth my angst.
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December 13, 2009
I’m trying hard to keep my holiday baking interesting this year, and my strategy is to integrate unexpected, fun pieces into my cookie presentations. Gingerbread men, rum balls, and peppermint sandwich cookies all have their place, indeed it wouldn’t feel like the holidays without them. But, as your second, or third, or tenth holiday party rolls around, you might start to get a little tired of sampling them.
That’s why I’ve decided to offer up some different ideas for hand-held holiday treats. They may not be the first ideas that come to mind when you think about seasonal indulgence, but you’ll also notice that they tend to disappear first from the dessert table.
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December 11, 2009
There are cookie recipes everywhere I turn, a sure hallmark of the holiday season. They’re on the blogs, they’re in my email, and they’re are all over my food mags. They’re at my internship too. It’s the holidays and everyone loves the excuse to bake, including yours truly. I love setting aside whole days devoted to baking, then turning up the music in my apartment, plotting my recipes, and then stocking the fridge with a dozen different doughs that I turn out, one after another.
I’ve been in pastry school for three months now and I’ve been a pastry intern for two. When I come calling with my cookie plates this year, people rightly have high expectations for the treats that I bring and I don’t want to let them down. So I’m pulling out the stops. I’m assembling all of my favorites together on one festive silver platter, and that platter could never, ever be complete without meringue mushrooms.
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December 8, 2009
When I was a kid, I was envious of those who were Jewish. It has nothing to do with my interest in the faith, the appeal of its strong community, or the preservation of very old traditions. Rather, it came down to simple mathematics; with eight being decidedly greater than one, I was convinced that Christmas-celebrators were being shortchanged days of celebration.
Now I’m grown up and about to marry a Jewish man, and through our courtship I’ve discovered something entirely different to envy about the chosen people – their delicious and comforting foods. It’s a stretch for me to choose, but if I had to pick my favorite from the mass of sumptuous kugels, brisket, noodle pudding, lox, and knish I’ve enjoyed, I’d still have to say that latkes (potato pancakes) are the dish that I look forward to more than any other.
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December 4, 2009
This Thanksgiving, for the first time in my thirty year long pie-eating career, I had a pumpkin pie breakthrough. Each year of my life someone has baked one and I always partake, unable to resist what I’d imagined and build up in my mind as a creamy, airy manifestation of pure pumpkin flavor. And year after year, I’m met with disappointing first bites that are some variation of overly-spiced, too-sweet, oily, or lumpy-textured pies (many of which are made by otherwise great cooks). And so, I’d come to accept that what I hoped pumpkin pie to be was not actually what it was.
But for Thanksgiving this year, the pumpkin pie gods were smiling down on me. As the only guest at the table who has logged over two months in pastry school and done some time in a real restaurant kitchen, I was put in charge of desserts. In my role as pastry chef of Thanksgiving, I seized the opportunity to create the pumpkin pie of my dreams, with the help of this book
.
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December 1, 2009
During the weekend following Thanksgiving I received no less than ten emails from readers and friends containing questions about how to bake bread. It’s not much of a stretch to see why, since lazing around the house (obviously, how I spent the long weekend) is very conducive to bread baking, and bread dough provides lots of time for lazing, so the yeast has time to bring the proper rise.
I was happy to see that many of the emails were from first-time bread bakers, but quickly discovered that with bread, it’s hard to answer general baking questions, such as, “Dear Lauren, How does one go about making bread?” in a succinct email. I’d start out discussing gluten development, find myself going off on a tangent about the science involved , only to realize that (four paragraphs later), I still hadn’t touched upon the subject of yeasts and leaveners. I’m pretty sure that I ended up causing confusion instead of clarity.
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November 27, 2009
It never ceases to amaze me just how fast the biggest meals go rushing by before our very eyes. As cooks we spend days, even weeks choosing our menu, shopping for our ingredients, and stocking our fridges to the gills with containers filled with our raw materials. We cook and cook our hearts out until the last guest has taken his seat at the table, the last bowl of soup placed upon the serving plate.
And then, for one exquisite moment, not a word is spoken and the only sound that can be heard is that of silver brushing against china. For those of us who love entertaining, this is the payoff for all of our toils.
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November 24, 2009
Last year at this time, I was fretting over the crusts for my Thanksgiving pies. Would they be as flaky as they were tasty? Would they live up to the high standards of my soon-to-be mother in law’s beautifully set table? And, the ever-popular, who the heck has time for all this nonsense anyway?
During that time, when my fascination with making pie evolved into a love for doing it, I also started to appreciate why so many people would rather just not even bother.
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November 20, 2009
When I first saw this cake, the term that immediately came to my mind was “food porn”. It’s a giant, solidly delicious brownie smothered with salty peanuts and seductive caramel that just oozes over the edge. The kind of guilty pleasure meant to be devoured, with raw, unadulterated, dessert-loving hunger, but I’d feel a little funny bringing it home to meet my mother.
This here, is the James Dean of cakes.
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November 18, 2009
Unseasonably warm weather be damned, Thanksgiving panic has gripped New York City. An innocent trip to Whole Foods yesterday afternoon almost turned ugly when one crazed, 200 item-list-clutching-shopper and I reached for the same bag of fresh cranberries. There was fire in her eyes, so I backed off. Nothing good can come from standing between a cook with a deadline and her fresh cranberry chutney.
Besides, my cranberries are destined to sit in the fridge well past next week’s festivities. My only mission on this Whole Foods voyage was of the pumpkin variety; for dinner most definitely, and for next week’s pumpkin pie as well.
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