Happy Birthday Marilyn

Here's all I want to say about it.

If you need an easy, fancy-looking cake.

Or a dessert to pair with mid-summer strawberries.

Or if you need TWO mixing bowls to wipe clean with a spoon, your fingers, or a fresh strawberry.

David Lebovitz has a damn good chocolate cake recipe for you.

An unexpected love affair with Filbert.

The recipe sounded, felt, smelled, looked, tasted like poetry.

Warm, roasted hazelnuts rolling free of their skins in a clean kitchen towel, milk chocolate flakes melted by hot cream, sweet, nutty milk stirred into a custard, every step was a beautiful, satisfying aroma of things to come.

Engaging in some light reading with The Perfect Scoop, my dad bookmarked the recipe for gianduja gelato.

I might have passed over it, favoring fruit flavors in this late summer season, and preferring bitter dark chocolates to the creamy milks.

It may be the best ice cream I've ever eaten.

But please, disregard the instruction to "discard the hazelnuts" after infusing the milk with the roasted, ground nuts. They can be put back in the oven, covered with the milky, sugary residue, and roasted until they become the perfect crispy topping to sprinkle over the thick, rich, smooth gianduja gelato.

The sweet deliciousness of mass murder

Jews are notorious for kvetching about the trials and tribulations of being Jewish. Everyone is always ostracizing them, banishing them, trying to obliterate them from the face of the earth - it's a rough legacy. Most of the well-known Jewish holidays celebrate situations where one of these scenarios was narrowly avoided - rather solemn occasions that extol the extraordinary survival abilities of the Chosen People.

So it makes sense that a holiday where no Jewish people were harmed in any way is a little less formal. That a holiday where the Jews not only saved themselves from their oppressor, but got to exact revenge as well is a cause for joyous, raucous celebration. That a holiday where the Jews got to turn mass murder around and slaughter someone else for a change demands lots of noise, hundreds of cookies, and copious alcohol consumption. And the Torah itself demands generations of joy and celebration, so much that even most rabbis - even Orthodox rabbis - will allow congregants to dress in drag for one day out of the year.

That day is Purim, and I may have gone a bit overboard on the cookies this year.

When I called my friend Julia to discuss hamantaschen dough, we both managed to recommend the same recipe to each other - one that we'd both made and discussed the year before. We like it because of the butter (many hamantaschen recipes, on account of being kosher, are made with oil which is probably why so many Jews don't like hamantaschen) and also because of the funny little drawing of Haman with the hamantaschen hat. It's unclear how many cookies the dough recipe makes, since they can be different sizes, but I multiplied it by six (the photo below) and then made another double batch, and it made approximately a million cookies.

We made two different sizes of cookies, and forgot to count, so I don't have a very clear estimate. But I had about 17 or 18 people who all ate quite a few cookies, and managed to get through maybe half of them. Maybe. Next time, for the same number of people, I'd quadruple the dough recipe and count on some leftovers.

The cookies are filled - traditionally with fruit or poppy seeds - and there's a lot of lovely recipes floating around. Variety is always good, so we made quite a few.

This prune recipe is filled with additions, making it less like something your grandma might eat to stay regular and more like something delicious.

I used this apricot recipe as a base, and added some raisins and candied ginger (about half a cup of each) for a little kick. Next time I'd skip the raisins and add more ginger, although as someone inclined to eat large chunks of candied ginger on a regular basis, that could be a personal preference.

A lot of people really like chocolate, and if you're someone who finds that a little dull and also has something of a ginger fixation, it's quite easy to add some pieces of candied ginger to this basic chocolate recipe. Or just dip some ginger in the chocolate and eat it without the cookie. That's okay too.

I also cut some apples into slices, covered them in sugar and cinnamon, and then cooked them in a pan. Cut into small pieces (not puréed) they made a nice turn-over sort of cookie

You can also use any sort of premade jam - the apple-beet hamantaschen were surprisingly sweet and delicious. And the lemon curd was my favorite store-bought flavor. 

But perhaps my biggest stroke of genius was picking up a container of dates and a few blood oranges at the store. I didn't have any specific plans for them, but cooked together with a little orange juice and some sugar, they made by far my favorite flavor of the day.

I didn't pay much attention to amounts, but I think it would be hard to go wrong with this combination. The orange balances the sweet of the dates, the juice adds enough liquid to soften everything before it goes in the food processor, and the sugar - well, it may not have even been necessary. Depends on your blood orange. Mine was a little sour, so I added a little sugar.

Cooked together for ten minutes or so, and then puréed, this one almost didn't get turned into cookies. It's one of those flavors that makes you lose track of the world for a second as it hits your tongue - just enough kick to shock your taste buds into action, not enough tart to ever stop eating it.

It's also real pretty.

And then all that's left is to fold the cookies into little triangles (really mash down those tips too - they like to come undone in the oven), bake them until their edges are golden, and eat all your mistakes (and most of the blood orange-date filled ones) to hide the evidence.

Make sure to coerce some friends into helping you fold - particularly if you've vastly overestimated how many cookies you need. Remember to feed them before the party starts. And after forcing 24 cups of flour into the standing mixer, you may need to change your shirt.

Then have a drink and retell the glorious story of Esther, how the Torah asks us to remember with joy and celebration the time the Jewish people triumphed over evil by using the tools of mass murder and sexual coercion, and how an evil man's hat inspired fruit-filled deliciousness for generations and generations of drunken, costumed Jews and their slightly confused goy friends.

There may have been some goyim this year who went home with the idea that Mordecai ordered Esther to organize a ménage â trois with Haman and the king in order to save her people, which isn't quite canon, but these things happen when the Torah tells you to drink yourself to confusion.

Happy Purim!

Oatmeal isn't health food in this house.

One of my favorite, simple, everyday cookie recipes is an adaptation from The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, one of my regular kitchen references that I highly recommend. The recipe is her Oatmeal Currant Cookies, a grainy, crispy cookie with, I imagine, chewy, wet currants to set off the texture. Probably. But I've never actually made the recipe as it's set down on paper - partly because I've never had dried currants around, and partly because the minute I made it with semisweet/bittersweet chocolate chips (just no milk chocolate please) in place of the currants I realized that I'd found the ideal oatmeal chocolate chip cookie.

 

The trick to getting that oatmeal flavor without the chewy, dense chunks of oatmeal that so many people (although not me!) eschew is simple: Waters puts the oats in a blender to make a grainy oat flour.

But that isn't the only think that makes these cookies the perfect vehicle for chocolate chips. Blending the oats allows Waters to make a crispy oatmeal cookie by mixing baking soda with boiling water in equal proportions to act as a leavening agent. I'm rather deficient in my knowledge of food chemistry, but somehow it's this step that results in the extreme crispiness of the cookie.

There's probably a lot of debate in kitchens, internet forums, and playgrounds everywhere over whether chocolate chip cookies should be crispy or chewy, but I'll always side with the crisp in nearly any dessert, and especially a chocolate chip cookie. The balance of crunchy cookie and melted chocolate is pure baking zen.

And the dough is such a lovely, textured, grainy brown.

I made these cookies for the first monthly soup club (spearheaded by Dan) as a basic, easy, no-supermarket-trip-necessary contribution. Digging around the shelves of my kitchen to figure out what I had on hand turned up a jar of sour cherries, bought in a moment of grief and desperation last year after Purim, when I'd so much wanted to make hamantaschen with sour cherry filling and hadn't been able to find any form of the fruits, and then a month later come across a jar in a Polish market I happened to be eating kielbasa in. The jar had sat through the summer months when fresh sour cherries had made a big show at the farmers' markets, and, with Purim coming around again soon, its presence in my cupboard was tickling at the back of my mind. Plus it's huge and takes up a lot of room.

So, since I'd never made the original currant cookie, I decided I might as well add some cherries to the recipe.

And they were fine. Not dried, as the currants are, so the flavor didn't come through the cookie very strongly (note to self: find dried sour cherries before Purim) and the wetness of the fruit made the cookies behave a little strangely: they spread more and the texture was a little off. So I think in the future I'll stick with using just chocolate chips.

But they did all get eaten.

Tiramisu has the same number of syllables as hallelujah.

When I was an undergrad I used to take long, five hour bus-to-train trips to Davis, CA where my boyfriend was a student. I loved the train rides, which go through some of the most beautiful landscapes in California, and which allowed me lots of time to do homework, particularly once they started offering wireless internet.

Relaxing and productive! Davis, on the other hand, as a little farm/university town located south of Sacramento, was often rather bland, flat, and hot as all hell. Summers were particularly bad, and we spent a lot of time seeking air conditioning and eating meals that required little or no cooking. One summer, for reasons I've forgotten, we got on an Italian kick and started frequenting the little town's surprisingly abundant Italian restaurants. And we formed a love affair with tiramisu. The cold, sweet, filling dessert was the perfect remedy for the nasty heat that we were suffering through. But somehow, although each restaurant had a different take, with varying amounts of rum and coffee and chocolate, none seemed exactly right.  So we decided to learn its creamy, delicious secrets.

And I realize it's winter now, but Keith is in town, and I'd promised another friend tiramisu over the summer and never got around to it.

It's a surprisingly easy thing to make - there's only a tiny bit of actual cooking, and the most difficult part of the whole process is getting the layers of ladyfingers to fit right.

I can't remember where the basis of this recipe comes from - or whether there was a single original recipe at all - although I do remember that I use significantly more rum than any recipe I read called for. The eggs, sugar, chocolate, and three different types of dairy are pretty standard though.

I halved the recipe when I took these photographs, not something I recommend (whipped cream whips a lot better the more you have, and why would you ever want less tiramisu?), but certainly doable if you, like me, can only find three eggs.

Some recipes incorporate the egg whites as well, or combine the Mascarpone and cream layers, or have complicated temperature instructions probably to prevent salmonella poisoning (thanks Joy of Cooking), so it's a rather versatile dessert and you can mess with it as you like. As long as every single ingredient is unhealthy and full of either fat or sugar (or both), you're probably doing fine.

The only cooking in the process is a custard - it takes a couple of minutes, cooks the eggs, and then promptly goes in the fridge to cool completely.

After that, it's just about making layers.

 

They won't be very neat, but that's okay, because you're going to cover the entire thing in cocoa powder (or grated baking chocolate, depending on what's in your kitchen). You're actually going to cover the entire thing in cocoa powder twice. That's how you know it's good.

An added benefit of making this in winter - one which had not occurred to me in California - is that carrying it to your friend's house in the snow is an excellent way to chill the it!

Tiramisu

In a medium saucepan, mix together:

6 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

Whisk in:

2/3 cup milk

and cook over medium heat, stirring, until the mixture boils. Boil for one minute, remove from heat, and chill, tightly covered, in the refrigerator, for an hour (or until completely cooled).

In a medium bowl beat until stiff peaks form:

1 1/4 cup heavy cream

1/2 ts vanilla

[optional: a little additional rum]

Stir into chilled yolk mixture until smooth:

1 lb Mascarpone cheese

In a small bowl, combine:

1/2 cup strong-brewed coffee/espresso

4 tb rum

In a 7x11 dish (or something of a similar size, with sides at least 3 inches tall) arrange in a layer:

12ish ladyfingers [You will make two layers, so you need about 24 total. Exact numbers depend on the size and shape of your dish, and how many you eat during the assembly process.]

Drizzle half of the coffee mixture over the ladyfingers [if you like really mushy desserts you can double the coffee in the recipe, and make sure the ladyfingers are really soaked.]. Spread half the mascarpone custard mix over the ladyfingers, then half the whipped cream. Cover with a thick layer of

unsweetened cocoa powder

Repeat the layers, cover, and refrigerate until ready to serve.