After I had backed the first batch of chocolate chip cookies, M got me a Holiday Baking magazine from Cooks Illustrated, which had many interesting baking recipes. I made lebkuchen, flourless chocolate cake, coffee cake, and macaroons. It was a whirlwind of cooking, baking, and eating these past two weeks, but I’ll focus on the baking here, since I actually have pictures of some baked goods. The dinners were consumed so quickly that bones and dirty dishes were all that remained by the time I remembered to take pictures. So let’s get started.
The chocolate chip cookie came from America’s test Kitchen Family Cookbook. The pages aren’t the best, as I had to protect the ones in use with sheet protectors, but the recipes have almost always worked out nicely. There’s a heavy duty version so I would recommend that if you don’t already have a copy on your shelf. These cookies are soft in the middle and they’re roughly 3 inches in diameter so a single cookie makes for a good snack.
These German spice-nut cookies were quite good and chocked full of nuts. I didn’t put on the icing, as I generally don’t like my cookies too sweet, and gave some of them out to friends. True to the magazine, many thought there was ginger in the cookies, but really they were tasting the cardamon. The hazelnuts and almonds were toasted, cooled, and processed the night before to save on time.
The next item I worked on was a pecan sour cream coffee cake, which was actually really easy to make. The streusel was a fun addition and everyone seemed to like it. My sis got me this bundt cake holder for Christmas so it was rather timely. the cake holder also worked well for the chocolate cake, but there certainly was a height limitation to the size of cake you can put into the holder. It would be fair to say that a chiffon cake might not fit.
cross section of the coffee cake.
The next item I made was a flourless chocolate cake. It was made with Khalua and an assortment of bittersweet chocolate that was left over from our experiment. We had been trying out a couple of different chocolate bars from 65% to 80% cocoa. The cake was cool when we ate it, having come out of the cool room, so we weren’t eating room temperature cake. In any case, it was like eating fudge, so I wonder if I had not folded in the whipped eggs and the melted chocolate properly. It was not as cakey as I would prefer.
Last but not least, I made macaroons, which was an interesting adventure. I had to be careful with the recipe as the almod flour was pricey, as I could only find organic at Loblaws. Later on I found almond flour at Bulk Barn, which was more economic. The recipe produced only 20 macaroons, so it was a lot of work for little output. The macaroons were a little chewy, and the the buttercream was not as smooth as I’d like. I tried blending in the butter cream by hand, but it has been too long since I last whipped anything by hand. My mixer bowls were in the wash so I thought I’d give the manual work a try. I was only able to get roundish cookies after a half dozen oblongs. Anyway, I was starting to get the hang of piping by the third column, but I had problems getting a consistent cookie size and height. They baked out quite nicely, and packed into a box was loads of fun to give out. I could experiment with reducing the sugar as well as softer egg whites to reduce chewiness.
8 Macaroons in a box.
