Blackberries are a sure sign of summer to me. I usually go berry picking towards the end of August, but all the sunny hot weather we had in July means that the earliest berries are ripe, so over the weekend I was out with my bucket, lurking in the neighbourhood ditches, picking blackberries. The berries right now are still quite small, with a good tart pucker to go with their sweetness, and if the unripe berries on the bushes are anything to go by, it’s going to be a great blackberry year.
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Pinterest is a dangerous place. I was browsing through some of the hundreds of recipes I have pinned (I know some people also pin, like, fashion or crafts or home decor or whatever, but 98% of my pins are food) and these toffee espresso cookies just spoke to me. I’m not a regular coffee drinker, but I can’t say no to a coffee-infused baked good, especially when it is talking so loudly (must be the caffeine).
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While I’ve definitely made my fair share of regular chocolate chip cookies, the reverse chocolate chip cookie – that is, chocolate dough studded with white chocolate chips – has eluded me. Until now.
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This is a cookie recipe that I came up with when I was about 12 years old, and I tell ya, I was onto something! It’s been a while since I last made them but they’re just as good as I remember: buttery, chewy oatmeal cookies with a hint of caramel from brown sugar, loaded with chocolate chips, nuts, and dried fruit. They are thick and almost cake-like in the middle, and thin, lacy, and crisp around the edges. Seriously delicious.
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While perusing the delicious brownie and blondie offerings from May’s Sourdough Surprises, I realized that I’d never made a blondie, let alone eaten one, and it became clear, based on the delicious recipes I was seeing, that this needed to change as soon as possible. A blondie is essentially a brownie made without chocolate, instead employing brown sugar for a caramel-toffee flavour. Imagine a square with the texture of a fudgey, chewy brownie and the taste of chocolate chip cookie dough (minus the chocolate chips) and you’ve got a blondie. And if you’re like me, you will feel compelled to make a batch as soon as you come to this realization.
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Of all the things I imagined making with a sourdough starter, brownies were not one of them. This month Sourdough Surprises showed me otherwise. Silly me.
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I have a new favorite ingredient: dates.
I discovered them first in this totally amazing raw brownie recipe (seriously, they are awesome brownies, raw or otherwise) and I was basically flabbergasted that you could make something that tastes this good out of nothing but pulverized nuts, dates, and cocoa powder.
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Francijn of Koken in de Brouwerij was our January 2013 Daring Bakers’ Hostess and she challenged us to make the traditional Dutch pastry, Gevulde Speculaas from scratch! That includes making our own spice mix, almond paste and dough! Delicious!
I had just posted about the speculaas I made for Christmas, so it was like déjà vue to read that the Daring Bakers challenge this month was speculaas. But these ones are different: they are gevulde speculass, which means they are stuffed with almond paste to make more of a dense, crumbly cake than a cookie. Interestingly, the dough for gevulde speculaas is essentially the same as the dough as for making speculaas cookies, but you end up with something completely different. And as much as I like regular speculaas, turns out that I loooooove gevulde speculaas, and I implore you to make these as soon as possible!
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I can now officially cross an item off my list: homemade nut butter! It literally is as simple as roasting some nuts (in this case, almonds) and grinding them in a food processor until they turn into nut butter. The only reason it’s taken me this long to make it is because my former food processor was such a disappointment: it could barely purée cooked squash, let alone pulverize whole nuts. BUT, I now have a powerful new Cuisinart food processor and nut butter is fully within my realm of possibility. Yay!
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I can’t believe it’s the end of 2012 already. How did that happen so fast? A lot has happened this year, including Nate and me becoming homeowners. We celebrated Thanksgiving in our new house with both of our families, I baked a bazillion Christmas cookies in our new kitchen (see one last recipe below), and we made plans to buy a new oven. 2013: Year of the New Oven! (Hopefully, anyway!)
Everyone seems to be posting a year end round-up today, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon to share some favorites from my blog this year. Which are, in no particular order…
Brain Cupcakes – outrageously chocolatey cupcakes with creamy, smooth vanilla buttercream. Chocolate and vanilla are a classic combination for good reason.
Cream Puff Swans – yup.
Mint Chocolate Chip Battenburg Cake – such a fun cake. I need to revisit this with another flavour combination.
Sourdough Danish Pastries – possibly my favorite post this year. I was so proud of those!…