The Sweet Kitten

The very best chocolate chip cookies in ever

2009-11-16T17:59:00.000-08:00

Ah, the noble chocolate chip cookie. Legendary, simple, a sweet and easy favorite of all. I like mine with big chunks of good quality chocolate (save the dainty "mini" nonsense for, I don't know, eating out of hand, or melting to make big pieces of chocolate), messily soft in the middle and crunchy on the edges. The perfect chocolate chip cookie will stay this way even the next day. Pish posh to the Chips Ahoy! If I wanted a dry, crumbly amalgam of refined sugar and chocolatey product ("Now with more brown extract!") I'd dip a fistful of raw flour in some Yoo-Hoo.

I've inspected several recipes, pored over endless tomes in my search. The best general recipe I have been working with I will post here, with a solid second recipe being over at Lovintheoven, an awesome blog that I found from Tastespotting.

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 Cups Flour

1/2 Teaspoon Baking Soda

1/4 Teaspoon Salt

1 cup DARK Brown Sugar (dark is key!)

1/2 cup white sugar (slightly less is ok if you're using more chocolate!)

3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 egg

1 yolk

1 tablespoon good vanilla extract, OR one bean scraped out if you can get it (fancy!) and a teaspoon of extract

1 and 1/2 cups chocolate chunks

1 cup walnuts (Be liberal with the mix ins; I don't usually measure, I just dump until deliciousness is achieved. This is a good starting ratio.)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda. The "dump in a bowl and toss with a fork" method usually suffices in a pinch. Sieve or proper sifter is best.
Butter and sugars get whipped together in a separate bowl until well incorporated and creamy. This is best accomplished with a stand or hand mixer.
Beat the eggs and vanilla into the butter and sugar until the mixture is lighter in color and texture.
Fold in the sifted ingredients with a rubber spatula. At first, it will look like there is not enough of the wet ingredients to sop up all the flour, but keep at it with a gentle hand and it will come together. When all incorporated, stir in the chips and nuts.
Deposit dough by rounded tablespoons on your silpat or parchment lined cookie sheet, and bake 8-11 minutes. Depending on the size of your rounded spoonful, it could take a little more or less. Keep an eye on the first batch. When they are brown and crispy looking on the edges, they're perfect. When you smell caramelized cookie, it's already too late :(
Let your beauties cool on the pan for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack or a flat, cool pan to relax for a bit.

Hooray! I hope this recipe works out as well for you as for me. Also especially wonderful with macadamias and white chocolate chips ...

2009-11-09T18:32:00.000-08:00

Well, unfortunately, for the last couple of months, life has trumped the desire and need to blog. My bad! The good news is, with a little luck, I'll be in cooking school by the new year. Hooray! The trick will be to save the money for the admission fee (doable) and then try and secure a loan for the courses. Pastry is the game, my friends. I look forward to the day I can punt Craigslist administrative assistant listings into the field, meet new like-minded, young people, and finally find my niche.

Tell 'em!

Farmer's Market

2009-07-21T17:45:00.001-07:00

My most sincere apologies for the long delay between entries. Life sometimes just happens and then you find yourself in the middle of summer. The good news about this is that my town's local farmer's market is in full swing. Check it:

- Garlic Scapes that I used to make a pesto for pizza

- The colors! Strawberries and carrots

- Beets and radishes! The beets were so sweet. My mom prepared them to put on a salad, but I ate half the batch with a little salt while they were still warm...

All these pictures (I wish there were more, but, regrettably, my camera died mid-shoot) were taken at the Mycomedicinals Madura Farm Stand based out of Goshen, NY. They have fantastic mushrooms and really cool produce (like German red garlic ... awesome!). I scoped out some morels at their stand this past Wednesday, but settled for the delicious, and less preciously priced, lion's mane and king oyster mushrooms. The lion's mane was a new experience for me, and it is definitely worth searching out. It has the texture of perfect lobster with a mild mushroomy flavor. The fuzzy part fried up toasty brown and lightly crispy in the butter. So good ... now I have to pick some up tomorrow. This is why I can't save money to have nice things.

I PROMISE to update this tomorrow or later in the week. If you were at all curious, the cinnamon in the dulce de leche was good, but didn't make a terrific difference. I say save it for the apple pie recipe that I'm planning to post. Also coming: cherry vanilla ice cream and homegrown tomatoes (they're almost ready!).

Dulce de Leche and the resulting ice cream...

2009-06-23T19:57:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I know that I promised gingersnap ice cream (which I did make, but am still perfecting) in my last post, but my experiments with Dulce de Leche were too photogenic not to share.

BEHOLD!

Perhaps I have not mentioned my deep affection for all things caramelized. It's true. From the burnt crust on a lovingly baked ziti to the crispy bottom of a slightly overbaked cookie, purported carcinogens be damned, it's the best. Dulce de Leche is all creamy caramel taste, like when you're a kid and you get a caramel apple that you lick until all the soft sugar is gone and you are a sticky disaster (then toss the fruit, naturally). Maybe I only did that ... moving on ...

I used David Lebovitz's recipe (found here) for oven-made Dulce de Leche. I like to think that I'm brave in the kitchen, but the idea of exploded caramel goo all over the countertops as the result of a neglected can wasn't terribly appealing. So, to the oven! The taste of sea salt in the condensed milk really makes a difference. I'm making some at the moment, and I sprinkled some cinnamon in the uncooked milk. I'll post and mention if it's worth the trouble. It's perfect on its own though, and I really want to find the goat's milk condensed milk that they mention on David Lebovitz's site; that sounds so interesting - tangy and caramel sweet!

The second half of the equation is the vanilla custard ice cream I've been working on. I obtained some vanilla beans from Beanilla for a pretty good price (certainly better than the grocery store - $14 for just two dried up old pods!). I'd never used them before, but I think the slightly pungent black specks still stuck to the sink - sorry, got distracted by alliteration - are totally worth the trouble. A recipe you ask? With pleasure:

French Vanilla Ice Cream (about a quart)

1 cup of milk

1/2 cup white sugar

2 heaping tablespoons of brown sugar

1 vanilla bean, scraped up

2 egg yolks, mixed up a bit

2 cups of cream

1 tablespoon of good vanilla extract

Pour the milk in a small saucepan and heat until little bubbles just start to form. Constant vigilance not necessary, but very nearly so.
Once the milk is heated, add all the sugar, the vanilla bean pod, and the bean scrapings and stir until the sugar is fully dissolved.
Pour a little bit of the milk mixture, about 1/4 of it, into the eggs, stirring vigorously and constantly. If the egg starts to curdle, you're screwed - so be careful and go slowly! Stream the rest of the milk into the eggs until they are incorporated together without incident.
Return egg/milk liquid to the saucepan on medium heat. Keep stirring!
The mixture will, after about 10 minutes, maybe slightly more, begin to thicken nicely. It should coat the back of a spoon and keep the line when you draw your finger across the back of the spoon.
Turn off the heat, but let the custard sit in the pot for a little while longer, until its cool. In my experience, this helps the vanilla flavor develop a little more.
When cool, strain through a fine mesh sieve to get out the pod and any little bits of curdled egg. Mix in the cream and vanilla, then pop it all in the fridge for a good rest - at least 4 hours. Sometimes I'll make it right away, but its always better when it sits in the fridge to mellow.
Run it through your machine according to manufacturer's instructions! Yea!

Ok, the trick now is to let the ice cream harden for about two hours in the freezer before layering with the Dulce de Leche. If the ice cream is not hard enough, the dulce will sink to the bottom, bummer. Once it is frozen, but still soft, layer the ice cream (about 1/3 of it at a time) with two good spoonfuls of the dulce between each layer. Take a long wooden spoon, and gently agitate it to mix it all up and get nice swirls. Don't get me wrong, this ice cream is great on its own, but don't you want ... THIS:

I think we both know the answer to that question.

Ice Cream Machine!

2009-06-08T20:40:00.001-07:00

So, my new ice cream machine attachment for the ol' stand mixer is basically the balls. Check it:

That's Strawberry Rhubarb Sorbet, easy as could be. After my trip to the farmer's market, I came home with many a stalk of delightfully, excellently pink rhubarb. All the people that I excitedly shook the hearty bundle at were wary of my "red celery" and were (to my confusion) just not as pleased as I was to find it for sale. Then I realized that I didn't even know what to do with it...

First, I made Rhubarb Soda, which is lovely (could be even better with champagne, just saying). It was sweet and tart, almost like a pink lemonade, very nice. Still, its tangy pink essence was incomplete without its sweet life-mate: strawberries. Ask Grandma, she'll agree with me. It was too hot to bake a pie, so I got my mitts on some frozen strawberries down at the supermarket and set to concocting a new late spring staple. Heads up: the time it takes to chill the mix in the end really makes a difference in your final texture. I learned the hard way, you shouldn't have to.

Strawberry Rhubarb Sorbet

5 fatty stalks of the reddest rhubarb you can find, cut up into uniform chunks (doesn't need to

be pretty)

2 cups of sugar

3 cups of water

1 pint of frozen strawberries, thawed, liquid reserved. Please use unsweetened if you can find them. I could only find strawbs with sugar added, so I cut out about 1/4 c. of the sugar

Zest of one plump lime

Pinch of salt

Pile the water, sugar, lime zest, reserved liquid from frozen strawberries, and rhubarb in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the sugar dissolves.
Let the mixture come to a boil, then turn down to a simmer.
Toss in the pinch of salt.
Cook for, like, ten minutes or so or until the rhubarb is a really unappealing brown mash, but the cooking liquid is bright pink
Strain, chill until cold to the touch (about 6 hours in the fridge)
Run it through your ice cream machine according to manufacturer's instructions. About halfway through the churn cycle, add your strawberry chunks.

Voilà! That was fun, wasn't it? Special thanks to Culinate where I found the recipe for Rhubarb Soda that inspired the sorbet.

Next time, proper ice cream! I'm working on a Gingersnap flavor ...

Orange and Almond Whole Wheat Madeleines

2009-05-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

Orange and Almond Whole Wheat Madeleines

Inspiration for these darn awesome cookies was from a total lack of other options, ha. I had accidentally bought a small package of whole wheat flour that needed using up around the same time I ran out of vanilla extract. The recipe itself is a spin on Dorie Greenspan's "Traditional Madeleines" from her indispensable book Baking: From my home to yours (available from your local library, where I've managed to not return mine for *ahem* 6 months or so). The regular madeleines straight from the book are great, but the whole wheat flour in this modified recipe lends an interesting, earthy texture without sacrificing buttery goodness. You might almost convince yourself its a health food ... or at least have cause tell your skinny friends that its whole wheat and watch them down half a plate. Cooking and schadenfreude, delicious.

Orange and Almond Whole Wheat Madeleines (modified from Dorie Greenspan's recipe for "Traditional Madeleines")

2/3 cup whole wheat flour

3/4 teaspoons baking powder

a wee pinch of salt

grated zest of half a large, preferably unwaxed, orange

1/2 cup sugar

2 large eggs, left to sit on the counter until room temperature

1 and 1/2 teaspoons of almond extract

3/4 stick unsalted butter, melted then cooled (but not solid again ... I usually do this first thing

before I start putting together anything else so it cools just right)

Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Any whole wheat bits left over in the sifter or sieve can just be mixed in by hand. Set aside for now.
In your stand mixer bowl or just a big bowl, rub the orange zest with the sugar using your fingertips. The sugar will get all orangey-smelling and awesome, this is good. No need to grate your fingers raw, but do make sure the sugar is a little moist (ugh, I hate that word).
Slap on your whisk attachment to the mixer or set up your hand mixer. I don't recommend doing this manually, it's just more trouble than it's worth.
Add the eggs to the sugar mixture, and whisk the crap out of it until the whole thing is pale, thick, and light. You'll be able to tell when it's just right at around 5 minutes on medium-high speed.
Whisk in the almond extract.
With a rubber spatula, delicately mix in the dry ingredients 1/3 at a time. When I'm feeling lazy, which is almost always, I just use the paddle attachment on my stand mixer set to "stir" for a few spins before adding the next little bit of flour. It works, trust.
Lastly, stir in the melted butter until incorporated. The batter will look a little greasy, but that's cool. Just make sure the batter is mixed through, scraping the sides and bottom well.
In the mixer bowl (it's good because usually they're metal, but whatever bowl is just fine), cover the batter with a slice of plastic wrap pressed to the top of the batter. Park it in the fridge for a minimum of four hours, but up to 48 hours. You could bake it right away, but that tasty little hump that's characteristic in our buttery little pals wouldn't form right. So worth the wait.
When you're ready to bake (finally), set your oven to a toasty 375 degrees.
Butter and flour your madeline pan (with regular AP flour if you have it), and fill each little compartment about 1/3 full (about 3/4 of a heartily rounded teaspoon). Don't worry about making the batter even, they spread in the oven rather quickly.
Bake for 8-10 minutes, depending on your oven. The madeleines will be dry to the touch, and golden on the edges. They burn quickly, so vigilance is rewarded until you get the hang of the timing.
After cooling in the pan for 5 minutes, pry out your prizes with a butter knife if they need coaxing. Lay out on a cooling rack or cookie sheet until warm.
EAT, but be warned that they're better same-day :)

Well, that was fun, wasn't it! For toppings, there's always a coat of powdered sugar, or some piped chocolate (so good). Serve these guys with a cup of tea, and prepare to garner the affection of all within proximity.

FIRST!

2009-05-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my shiny new blog! It is in this electronic tome that I will recount my various exploits and adventures in the kitchen. Usually, I will make a terrific mess and, hopefully, the matte flour glaze on the countertop will be well worth what comes out of the oven afterwards.