Baking Days 4 and 5: Chalky pastries, divine brownies
Baking Day 4 was a bit of a failure. Despite being moderately busy, I still tried to squeeze in Half-Moon Pastries filled with Chocolate and Apricot Jam, from Marcella Hazan's cookbook Marcella Says. We didn't have apricot jam, so I substituted raspberry.
They were ...underwhelming. Chalky. Bland. I'm fairly sure I made them correctly, but they just leave something to be desired. The pastry dough reminds me of biscotti for its heavy, floury flavor. The insides are pleasantly gooey and decadent, but you have to work through the dense exterior to get to the good stuff. I noticed my mom surreptitiously licking the chocolate centers out, and then placing the doughy remains on the side of her plate. They were not well received. I tried to defend them by proposing that they might go well with a nice espresso at breakfast, but nobody seemed to be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This seems to be a recipe created for people who don't like pastries much. That ain't us.
To redeem myself, today I decided to stick with a classic: gooey, rich brownies. I did my homework this time by scouring through all the four-fork recipes on Epicurious, reading the comments and then combining two recipes into one.
Thank god, it worked. The primary recipe I used was from Alice Medrich's BitterSweet, a cookbook I often skimmed while working at Ramekins. The recipe calls for high-quality cocoa, and by a bizarre miracle my parents had a box of Valrhona cocoa in their cupboard. You start the batter by mixing butter, sugar, salt and cocoa in a bowl over simmering water. It makes an incredibly gorgeous, pitch-black sludge, reminding me in color and texture of my recent mud bath in Calistoga. Here are the ingredients, and then the resulting sludge:
As I stirred, I entertained a brief fantasy of taking a bath made from Vahlrona cocoa, butter and sugar. Is this deranged in any way? Isn't there a whole Hershey spa somewhere in Pennsylvania? I made two changes to the Medrich recipe: I baked them for 33 minutes instead of 25, and I added two teaspoons of cinnamon. The result is a small pan of incredibly rich, decadent, black brownies.
They were ...underwhelming. Chalky. Bland. I'm fairly sure I made them correctly, but they just leave something to be desired. The pastry dough reminds me of biscotti for its heavy, floury flavor. The insides are pleasantly gooey and decadent, but you have to work through the dense exterior to get to the good stuff. I noticed my mom surreptitiously licking the chocolate centers out, and then placing the doughy remains on the side of her plate. They were not well received. I tried to defend them by proposing that they might go well with a nice espresso at breakfast, but nobody seemed to be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This seems to be a recipe created for people who don't like pastries much. That ain't us.
To redeem myself, today I decided to stick with a classic: gooey, rich brownies. I did my homework this time by scouring through all the four-fork recipes on Epicurious, reading the comments and then combining two recipes into one.
Thank god, it worked. The primary recipe I used was from Alice Medrich's BitterSweet, a cookbook I often skimmed while working at Ramekins. The recipe calls for high-quality cocoa, and by a bizarre miracle my parents had a box of Valrhona cocoa in their cupboard. You start the batter by mixing butter, sugar, salt and cocoa in a bowl over simmering water. It makes an incredibly gorgeous, pitch-black sludge, reminding me in color and texture of my recent mud bath in Calistoga. Here are the ingredients, and then the resulting sludge:
As I stirred, I entertained a brief fantasy of taking a bath made from Vahlrona cocoa, butter and sugar. Is this deranged in any way? Isn't there a whole Hershey spa somewhere in Pennsylvania? I made two changes to the Medrich recipe: I baked them for 33 minutes instead of 25, and I added two teaspoons of cinnamon. The result is a small pan of incredibly rich, decadent, black brownies.
posted by cindym at 7:24 PM
2 Comments:
Cindy,
Those brownies look amazing. My mouth is totally watering right now...
i must say, they were tasty. if you want my version of the recipe, it's here:
http://www.foodelicious.com/recipes/archives/000020.html
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