Cookies with different flours

all-purpose flour, bread flour, cake flour

It has been a while since I put chocolate chip cookies on the weekly menu for everyone.  I have multiple types on the full menu, and this upcoming weekend one of them is on the weekly menu again.  These cookies, which I call chocolate chunk grand cookies, are one of my favorites ... obviously, or they wouldn't be on the menu.  After all, as everyone knows, I only cook what I really really like.  Well, these cookies are one of my favorites not just because they taste great and have an insane amount of chocolate in them but also because of something unusual in the ingredients.  They are made with a blend of cake flour and bread flour.  

Bread flour has a high protein content and cake flour a very low protein content.  All-purpose flour falls in between, but closer to bread flour than cake flour.   I find blending flours to be a fascinating experience.  Subtle changes in the ratios of flours can change a product markedly.  So mixing different types, trying different ratios, leaving out some flours (as in the lack of all-purpose flour in the chocolate chunk grand cookies), things like this are interesting to try.  

There are bakers who specialize in breads; just about all they do is bake breads of different types.  Hearing them expound on what different flours (and how they are handled in the mixing and kneading and rising processes) do to different baked goods is always informative and intriguing.  These people work with flours their whole lives and still say they are learning how to use them.  They are the personifications of humility in terms of recognizing what they know and how much more there is potentially to learn.

At any rate, I love making cookies with different types of flours.  The Swedish oatmeal cookies on my menu is another type of cookie that is not made with the usual all-purpose flour; instead, they contain only cake flour.  In both cases, the resulting difference relative to all-purpose flour is significant, at least to me anyway.

Sometimes I think it would be fun to take one thing and experiment with it for a week by varying the flours, trying it dozens of different ways, every day for a whole week, all day long.  However, there are so many other things I want to make that it would be impractical to do so.  But you never know when one day I might just wake up and say it's time to make something ten different ways just to see what happens.

Measurements

 

I like to prepare and measure ingredients sometimes the night before I am going to bake.  Tomorrow I have three batches of three different items I will be baking early so that friends and family can pick them up throughout the day.  Since I make everything as fresh as possible (as in same day as pickup) that means I'm sometimes up early for baking, and when I plan to be up early I often prep and measure the night before.  It's a great time saver.  It doesn't mean I get up later.  I still get up early but I can work in the kitchen at a more leisurely pace since I have trays of ingredients all ready to grab and mix.  All the plates and bowls of ingredients are labeled by weight and item, placed on trays, and stashed on high shelves or in the fridge.  By the time that baking is all done tomorrow morning I will feel like I've already been ultra-productive for the day, and I love that feeling.  That means if I really want to, I can just loaf around all day and not feel guilty in the least.

When I'm measuring out things, it can be quite exciting.  Perhaps that's not entirely true, but let me explain.  Sometimes I grab a block of butter and cut off a chunk, put it on a plate that is already on my kitchen scale, and lo and behold, the weight of the chunk in grams is exactly what I need for the recipe.  It doesn't happen every time, but as I accumulate more and more kitchen time as the years go by, I am often quite close on the first try when measuring all sorts of things.  Of course, when it happens that I get it exactly right on the first try, I immediately expect it to happen again ... and again ... and again.  It doesn't, but it's exciting to think that it could.  It almost becomes a game.

It's the only part of cooking and baking that I think can be treated like a game.  After all, trying to bake something faster is just not something that is feasible, so you can't race against your own best time.  What would do .... turn up the oven to 500 F and try to cook something in half the time?  You'd burn the outside, leave the inside raw, and have something totally inedible.  But at least ingredient measurements can be treated as a game .... if one wants to do that.  I don't actually really care all that much if I get the measurement perfect on the first try .... except when I actually do.  Does that make sense?  I simply mean that even the measuring process is just part of the overall ritual of baking, a ritual that is conducive to taking oneself out of the normal flow of activity in the world.  But when I get that first chunk of butter on the plate and it's exactly the right weight on the first try, I am eager to try it again and see if I can do it twice in a row.  And as soon as I measure out a second ingredient and get it close perhaps but not exact, I return to my non-game demeanor.  Now it's back to the ritual.  But the ritual is fine.  The ritual is grand.

Quality ingredients

 

a little green on a cloudy day

It has been a nice day here in Kansas City.  Not too hot, a bit too humid, though, but overall considering this is August, the weather has been mild.  In fact, looking ahead at the forecast for the next 10 days, it almost seems like autumn is trying to make an early appearance.  Every time fall starts, I lament the fact that once again I haven't managed to put in a permanent herb garden.  You'd think with the amount of time that I spend cooking it would be something that would have been done a long time ago.  But once again as summer is beginning to wind down I seem to have neglected that project.  Oh, well.  C'est la vie.

With every food I make, I try to use high quality ingredients.  There are some chocolates I simply will not procure because they won't be able to give the flavor and texture that I want in a certain dessert, for example.  When I find a specific excellent ingredient from a specific supplier, then I always try to use that.  It's a bit more expensive sometimes, but it's well worth it in the end.

Vanilla extract and vanilla beans are something that should always be high quality, in my opinion.  Not long ago, I ran dangerously low on vanilla extract.  If you know anything about good vanilla, you know how varied the quality of product is from different purveyors.  Anyway, I was using quite a bit of it as I as I was tweaking a couple recipes over and over again, and didn't realize how low I was.  No problem, I thought.  I'd get some more.  Well, then I found out that the place that made the brand I preferred to use was running way behind both in terms of shipping and also in terms of available product.  All this was due to the challenges that our current global health crisis has created.  I put my order in but knew I wouldn't be getting it for several days.  

What to do?  What to do?  I got a different brand from the my local grocery store.  They were also short of some of the better possible secondary choices.  I had to settle for a brand I had used a long long time ago, back in a day before I really knew very much about cooking with high quality ingredients.  It was pure vanilla extract, at least, not artificial.  However, when I put in this recipe that I was tweaking, it was amazing to taste the difference between this very inexpensive brand and my little-bit-pricier first choice for which I was waiting days.  I was not at all happy with this replacement for the usual vanilla I try to keep around, but what I was really amazed at was that I could taste such a clear distinction between the top-rate and the not-so-top-rate product.  First of all, it told me how much my own preferences had changed over the years.  Second, it really reinforced how much it matters to have a high quality ingredient for certain things.

Now, I don't think one has to pay top dollar for everything.  Granulated sugars, for example, I have found give pretty much the same result when you're working with a generic inexpensive brand compared to a heavily-marketed name brand.  And sometimes, the "house" brand that a grocery carries of some products are actually far superior to other more well-known name brands.  But when it comes to certain things -- vanilla, chocolate, butter, et al -- I always find it important to be very selective.

I was very glad when my vanilla extract order eventually arrived.  I placed another order right away so that I would have an extra bottle.  Now when I get down to one unopened bottle, it actually means I'm "out" and have to order more -- at least that's how I will think of it

Now after writing about that, I feel like going grocery shopping.  I don't know why, but I do.  Have a great evening, everyone.

Hot weather and lemon snack cake

A few days ago I wrote a blog post with "Cool weather...." in the title.  Today it's the opposite.  Hot and steamy are the forecast for this entire weekend here in KC.  We had rain overnight which was nice for the plants, but only added to the steamy for this afternoon.  C'est la vie.  Summer doesn't have much time left before it's over.  I'm looking forward to fall rains, shortening days, and heading towards all the end-of-the-year holidays.

A new item has been added to the full menu:  soft light lemon snack cake with raspberry sweet cream.  This cake is only mildly sweet and mildly lemony.  Sometimes I make things with really strong lemon flavor, such as my lemon poppy seed muffins and my lemon curds.  But this is a snack cake.  It's supposed to be gentle on the palate.  It's a nice simple cake that I pair with raspberry sweet cream.  It takes a lot of fresh raspberries to make this cream.  They reduce for a long time in the pan with a bit of sugar until they are ready to be strained so that I'm left with a highly concentrated raspberry liquid.  No seeds or pulp go into the cream, only the concentrated liquid.  And it gives a wonderful contrast to the light lemon of the cake.  A significant amount of whipped egg whites go into the cake but it's not quite a typical chiffon nor an angel food cake, and it's also not a normal flour cake.  It's somewhere in between.  And the raspberry cream is a perfect accompaniment.  

It's a great cake to have on a hot steamy day such as today.

Cool weather and molasses cookies with lemon

one of the older trees in my yard, very very tall

 

What a week we are having in Kansas City.  In all the years I have lived here, I can not remember an August with a stretch of days such as we have had this week in terms of mild weather.  This morning at 10:30 AM, the thermometer showed the temperature to still be under 70 F.  The last two days, the early morning temperatures were in the 50s.  I suppose there is a still a chance for some hot weather, but at this point if we roast for a few days, it's no big deal as it will be short-lived.

molasses cookies with lemon

I have had a productive week during this cool August beginning.  Another new item has been added to the full menu:  molasses cookies with lemon... yum.  

These are typical molasses cookies except for the lemon zest.  Flour, baking soda, salt, allspice, ginger and other spices, are all whisked together to make for easier uniform mixing with what is to come.  These dry ingredients are put aside for now.  Then European-style butter, already warmed to room temperature, is creamed for a bit before brown sugar and molasses are added.  And now all of that is mixed at medium speed on the blender for a few minutes.  Just let it sit and let the mixer do it's work.  An egg is added, but this addition will not be mixed for long, a minute at most.  Just get it thoroughly combined.  We don't want to create any more aeration at this point.  The batter is rather liquidy now and is ready for the dry ingredients which are added and mixed on the lowest possible speed just until it all disappears into the full mixture.  Then at the very end, the zest of two lemons is added and slowly mixed in.  Why add the zest at the end?  I've experimented with adding it earlier, and I just like doing it at the end.  It always seems to me that by putting it in late instead of early, the effect is slightly more pronounced.  But that might all be in my head, too, as the difference is so small.  Nevertheless, I always add it at the end.  However, I am careful not to mix it too much longer since the flour has already been incorporated.  

Now the dough has to chill for a while before individual portions are weighed so that each ball of dough will be the same size.  Flatten them just a bit with the bottom of a sugar-coated mug, and 12 minutes later you have fresh cookies out of the oven.  But they can't be touched yet.  No, no, no.  Molasses cookies are much too soft when warm.  They need to cool completely and then they will be just right, soft with a bit of chew.

These are a simple cookie to make, compared to some, and they are warm and spiced, and the lemon zest lightens the deep dark of the molasses just a bit.  People who try these usually can't identify the lemon specifically, but they can tell something else is there offsetting the molasses and spices.

I like taking cookies and adding something unexpected to them sometimes.  Often the combination is good, and sometimes not as much as hoped.  But it's interesting to experiment.  These came about one day quite some time ago when I happened to have a few balls of dough left from a molasses cookie recipe I was playing around with, and I just imagined what I might do with them since I didn't need any more cookies at that moment.  Something made me think of lemon zest, and as I almost always have fresh lemons on hand it was an easy experiment to consider.  They came out pretty nice, though I adjusted the levels of some of the spices in order to create a flavor combination that seemed more balanced to me.  And now I love these.

How boring life would be without experimenting on something once in a while.  Yeah, this wasn't a major experiment, but it gave a nice result that I've enjoyed many many times.  And now that they are on the full menu, I'll put them out in a weekly rotation soon and I hope you will try them, too.    

Blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla

blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla

I added a new item to the full menu this weekend:  blueberry mini cakes with lemon sugar and vanilla.  I love blueberries in muffins, and these are a sort of hybrid of muffin and cupcake.  I've been tinkering with this for a long time, working to get it just right.  I wanted a certain texture and a very specific balance of flavors, and I wanted them to be visually appealing but also relaxed and homestyle in appearance.  

Over the last few months, I have used a lot of pints of fresh blueberries in order to develop these into exactly what I wanted.  How many?  Let's just say it was dozens.  I experimented with both fresh and wild blueberries.  I tinkered with mixing by hand and also mixing by machine at various speeds.  I tested out different sizes and different cooking temperatures.  You get the idea.....

What was really nice in all this was that even the versions that weren't quite was I was looking for were very yummy.  So I got to sample lots and lots of these over the last while.  It was a terrible job ... NOT!  That's one of the nice things about making food, i.e., even when something doesn't go just right, it still might be pretty good to eat. 

That being said, I was glad when I nailed down the version with the exact mixing process, the specific ingredient ratios, and the cooking time and temperature.  Why?  Because I am ready to devote more time to some other foods that have been pushed aside while I obsessed over these like Ahab over the whale.  When I got the final version, I made three batches on three consecutive days. That allowed me to see that the same process worked every time, and it allowed me to sample the final version under different scenarios:  1, when I was very hungry; 2, when I wasn't hungry at all; and 3, well, no, I guess there were only two, but the third day allowed me to do one final check.

So keep an eye out and you'll see them on a weekly menu coming up soon.  And now on to a few other things including a new cookie, a spiced flatbread, a cake with lemon, and many other things.    

Chocolate chips versus raisins

a beautiful grass from my garden - I don't remember the name

Today I have been making blueberry mini-cakes and chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.  Blueberries are great in just about anything, in my opinion.  I love to make blueberry reductions and spread them over things, just a simple concoction of blueberries and a very small amount of sugar that is heated up and simmered for quite a while until the juices have released, the skins have softened, and then all of that reduces to a smaller thicker portion.  Great stuff.

Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips

Now as to the chocolate chip oatmeal cookies ... actually the original recipe calls for raisins.  However, I always replace raisins with chocolate chips in cookies.  I have to admit that I have never been able to develop a liking for raisins, neither the flavor nor the texture.  In fact, I always melodramatically ask the same question of people (rhetorically, of course):  "How can anyone do that to a grape?"

To take a grape, a marvelous product of nature, and dry it out, wrinkle it up, and change the flavor and texture so thoroughly, well, I just can't figure it out.  I know, I know, many people love to gobble raisins like jelly beans for a snack.  But I would much rather stick with the original grape.

So ... anytime a cookie calls for raisins, chocolate chips are substituted.  Of course, I have to find the right chocolate chip.  They are not all created equal.  Chocolate chips that are often found in my kitchen include Valrhona, Michel Cluizel, Cacao Barry, and smaller amounts of Ghirardelli and sometimes Guittard.  A few others make their way from time to time.  Yes, I know a couple favorites that are found in many kitchens are not included (I won't mention their names, although they start with "N" and "H"), but there it is .... they are not among my favorites.

As we are heading past the mid-point of summer, I am looking forward to putting in my fall order of chocolate.  It's always fun to replenish my stocks and pick a few new varieties to try out.  And especially to start thinking about cooler weather and hot chocolate.

Well, it's time to pull the blueberry mini-cakes out of the oven.  The aroma is rich and fruity, and I can hardly wait to taste them.

Have a great evening, everyone!

First aroma

rudbeckia

There is a moment when one is baking that is exquisite.  OK, maybe that's hyperbolic to use such a term, but it is a moment that I look forward to every time I put something in the oven.  This past weekend I made brownies.  Brownies are incredible, of course ... is there anyone who doesn't think that?  Even before they go into the oven, they are incredible.  The batter has a fantastic taste and texture.  The batter even looks wonderful sitting in the pan before the baking has started.  But then you put them in the oven and you wait.  And for several minutes, you just wait.  I often use those minutes to tidy up the kitchen, wash the utensils and bowls and wipe down the countertop.  Or sit down and play a blitz game of chess online.

brownie batter

And then, after some minutes, you get that first faint aroma of brownies coming from the oven and then it strengthens and seems to surround you.  It doesn't happen right away.  It takes several minutes.  But when it comes, it seems to fill the kitchen very quickly and leaves no doubt that something amazing will soon be pulled from the oven.

That moment of the first aroma of something baking is akin to watching the first snowflake of winter settle to the ground, or hearing the first crack of the bat on opening day of spring baseball, or watching the opening scene of a movie you've been waiting all year to see.  It is singular.  It is there for just that moment and then it blends into the rest of time and becomes part of the flow of time instead of being a moment that exists by itself.

That is an "exquisite" moment.

Solutions

speculoos

Cooking is a combination of things.  It's utilitarian.  It's peace-inducing (at least for me). And it's creative.  The creativity comes not just in coming up with tasty combinations of flavors and textures, and so forth, but also in finding interesting ways to do things.

For instance, the speculoos in the photos above.... I could cut them using standard cookie cutters or biscuit cutters, but I choose instead to cut them using a pizza wheel.  I really enjoy doing that.  It's fun, it allows for creating unusual and whimsical shapes, spontaneous and unique.  And it's so easy and very very quick to do.  Certain cookies I would never dream of using a pizza wheel to cut.  I love making round frosted vanilla sugar cookies, and for me part of the allure is that perfect roundness with that layer of frosting on top that is not quite round since it's applied by hand and hence has inconsistencies from cookie to cookie.  So that combination of very round versus not quite round I find interesting and fun to do do.  It's a creative combination of perfection and imperfection. And I love imperfection.  I always like to say that perfection is a commodity too often sought.    

For me, creative and interesting ways of doing things often result from simply trying to find solutions to something that is not quite what I want, or to something that is more work than I feel it should be.  

Once up on a time I used to pour honey into a tablespoon and then empty that into a mixing bowl, often a bowl filled with what would shortly become bread dough.  I like a few different types of bread that have a little bit of honey in them, sometimes in place of sugar, sometimes in addition to sugar.  Anyway ... when I would pour the honey out, it would always cling to the tablespoon and I felt compelled to work at getting every little bit out that I could while the honey worked counter to that and tried to cling to the spoon.  Then I discovered that if I dipped the spoon in vegetable oil before filling it with honey, the coating of the oil made the honey slip completely off the spoon, leaving very little residue behind.  I have always found that to be very satisfying, to know that the exact amount I'm measuring out is going into the bowl with no real effort on my part to make it happen.

It's very satisfying to look around the kitchen for solutions to things like that.  If I find a way to do something that does not require buying yet another tool or gadget, that's something rewarding to me on multiple levels.  That being said, sometimes solutions are few in number.  I love using garlic and my garlic press is the best tool I can think of to crush that garlic, release the outer husk, and give me an easy way to put garlic in things without resorting to dicing into smaller and smaller bits or smashing it with the side of a knife or the bottom of a mug, neither of which pulverizes the garlic in the same way that a press will.  When I think about what I spent to procure a good garlic press, it seems out of proportion sometimes with respect to how restricted the use of this tool is.  Perhaps there are other ways to use this tool, but so far I haven't discovered them.  It's a garlic tool and only a garlic tool. 

That's OK, though.  I also find it tremendously satisfying to crush garlic cloves in that press.  I don't know why, but I do.   

Combinations

brownie batter

Sometimes I go to the kitchen and check out the contents of the fridge and the pantry, looking at meal leftovers, or a single tortilla left in a bag, or a small quantity of cream remaining from a quart, and I think about what I can do with them in combination.  I'm one of those people who hates to see anything go to waste.  That doesn't mean everything has to be eaten, though, because as long as I attempt to create something new with bits and pieces and small portions of things, well, then I'm happy, even if that something new is not tasty or even near palatable.  "Not even near palatable" rarely happens, though, because honestly most foods in combination with each other are probably going to be edible, even it not a gourmet creation.  

I've accidentally created new types of wraps by taking that last tortilla left in a bag (that might not be eaten otherwise) and warming it up and then filling it with leftover leaves of lettuce and sautéed vegetables and grated cheese and chopped boiled eggs, or any number of things in combination.  There are so many possibilities that just don't show up in a recipe book, that are sometimes simply the product of spur-of-the-moment inspiration (or sometimes even bored inspiration).

This past weekend, I made lots of brown sugar fudge brownies that went out the door to family and friends.  Cookie doughs are always tasty, as are cake batters, and brownie batters are amazingly delicious right out of the bowl without any cooking, especially if they have chopped up chocolate in them.  As I was preparing brownie batter this past weekend I was left with the enviable job of cleaning up the bowl afterwards with a nice silicone spatula (not a "silicon spatula", that would be something totally different) that allowed me to scrape the sides clean.  The dregs of the yummy brownie batter on the spatula made quite a nice little snack in the wee hours of the morning while the sun was just starting to illuminate the neighborhood.  (See, even just thinking about that brownie batter makes me wax pseudo-rhapsodic!)

As I sat there working on that batter-covered spatula, I wondered if one could frost a cake with brownie batter, and I imagined a deep dark chocolate three-layer cake with loads of rich batter in between the layers and a thick layer of batter on top with grated white chocolate sprinkled over like snow.  That's an interesting sounding combination.  I know that chocolate pudding on a refrigerated cake is pretty darn good.  But brownie batter?  I have no idea how it would taste, how the combination of textures would work, or whether the brownie batter would completely overwhelm the chocolate cake.  But it seems to me it might be worth trying sometime.  Although if it doesn't work, then I've wasted an entire chocolate cake and an entire batch of brownies, and that would be a shame.  But the idea sounds nice to me.  Does it sound nice to anyone else?

Have a great week, everyone!