afternoons in tablespoons

November 14th, 2009

home is a place for punkin pie

I miss my family sometimes. You see, most of them still live in Northern California, and what with my being holed up in Brooklyn with student loans to pay off and a pay cut to deal with, I don’t get to visit them nearly as much as I would like. But sometimes, Kenan has things to do in San Francisco, which means that we get to take a nice little trip out there to sling comics and gallivant in the hills and sip wine and stuff. Which is exactly what we did, just a couple weeks ago.

As I believe I’ve mentioned, one of my favorite things about going home and spending time with my family is hanging out in the kitchen, talking and snacking and baking and cooking. Almost all of my favorite childhood memories are centered in the kitchen, whether they are of sitting at the table recovering from the yearly Thanksgiving stomach-violence, or rolling out dough and filling pie pans with fruit and custard, or stirring big batches of chili, or sipping tea and staring out the window at the backyard. So most of the time, when I think about going home, I inevitably start scheming about all of the things we’ll get to bake (and eat!).

But this time, we somehow managed to spend almost no time at all in the kitchen. Granted, we did get to visit the most amazing fish and sea beasties I’ve ever seen, and we got to sit on a comfy couch and sample amazing wine at a beautiful vineyard, and we got to eat treats at the most awesomest of San Francisco bakeries, and we got to gaze up at really freakin’ tall trees, and we got to pick expensive pumpkins and eat delicious cheese at a cute little farm, but between getting to and from all of those awesome places, we didn’t get to do any baking or cooking at all. We even bought the pumpkins at the farm for the express purpose of making pumpkin pie, but when we got home we were sleepy, so we took a nap instead. Which is, incidentally, also what home is about, so I’m not too terribly bummed about it.

brooklyn thanksgiving, with pilgrim hats and everything

The day after we got home from California, we got an e-mail from Emily, informing us that she would be hosting a (quite early) Thanksgiving dinner at her apartment because many of her friends would be out of town for actual Thanksgiving. Although we were still recovering from jet-lag and adjusting to being back home, we jumped at the opportunity. I mean, come on; who doesn’t love an excuse to eat delicious, delicious food and hang out with a whole passel of incredible folks in a cozy little apartment? And because pumpkin pie is probably one of my favorite things ever, I volunteered to bring some to the feast.

So, I know I’ve used several of Tartine’s recipes before, but eating their amazing food when we were in California was so inspiring and scrumptious that I felt it only fitting to use their pumpkin pie recipe for Emily’s Thanksgiving. The ingredient list included the standard cast of players: pumpkin, eggs, cream, sugar, a bit of booze, and spices. And their tart dough is, of course, basic and beautiful: flour, butter, and salt.

I started out in the morning. Tartine suggests doing the tart dough in a food processor, which I highly recommend: it’s quick, it’s thorough, and it involves almost no handling of the dough, which makes for a more tender, flakier crust in the final product. After that was finished and the dough had chilled in the fridge for a couple hours, I rolled the dough out. The fat in pie dough begins to melt as soon as it starts to warm up, so it’s important to work quickly to ensure that it stays cool while you’re rolling it out and shaping it. I then put the dough in a pan and cut the edges with a knife. After that I chilled the dough again, in the pan, in preparation for partially baking it. Tartine calls for pie weights, which are a seriously good idea, but I don’t have any, so I used another, smaller pan to weigh down the dough. This didn’t come out quite as well as I had planned – the dough shrank up a bit – but it was definitely an acceptable fix in a pinch. After I’d set the crust down to cool, it was time to get to work on the filling, which is really a snap.

The recipe calls for two cups of pumpkin puree, which is about 1/4 of a cup more than what’s in a standard 15 ounce can. This was a bit frustrating, because it meant that I had to use two cans and then have quite a bit of leftover puree for which I had no use, but no matter. I mixed in some sugar, the spices, a bit of booze, and some vanilla, and then poured the whole lot into the partially baked shell… and ended up with a lot of filling in the bowl when the pie was filled. As in, almost enough for a second pie. Part of this was probably due to my shell having shrunk up a bit, leaving less room for filling, but in any case, I tossed the rest in a second pie pan with no shell and called it pumpkin custard.

Tartine’s pie comes out pretty light; the filling is sort of a bright, golden, yellowy orange instead of the darker, browner color I usually expect to see on pumpkin pies. It smelled amazing, and the crust had just the right color and texture. The only problem was that, of course, everything had taken a bit longer than I’d planned, and it was time for dinner, and we had two very hot dishes to get across Greenpoint. We were able to wrap them up sufficiently, and then it was just a matter of guarding the poor defenseless little pies from babies and clumsy people on the bus (quite a feat, considering that I am one of the aforementioned clumsy people). And then we arrived at Emily’s place, and everything was pleasant and wonderful. Sarah had made top hats for the top hat-inclined, and little pilgrim bonnets, for those who wanted to get a little bit of the crucible in them. All of the food was seriously tasty, and we played bingo and drank too much wine and just generally had a really good time. To be perfectly honest, by the time we got around to dessert I was far too sated to really pay attention to how my pie tasted, but if my hazy recollections are anywhere near the mark, it was pretty swell. The crust was tender and toothsome (I would have liked it a bit more crispy, but it was still pleasant), and the filling was… good. Not great. It had a bit of a strange taste to it – maybe too much ground clove, or not enough sugar, or something, but I wasn’t entirely taken with it. Nevertheless, most of the people I asked seemed to have really enjoyed it, so I didn’t beat myself up about it.

pumpkin pie, redux

But luckily, a few days later, I was able to give the pie a second whirl. I had another pie’s worth of dough just sitting in the fridge, and there was no way I was gonna just let it go to waste, especially when I had another jumbo can of pumpkin lying about in my cupboard. This time, however, I decided to try a different recipe. I’ve recently become a big fan of Pithy and Cleaver, and they just happened to have a pumpkin pie recipe that looked super delicious. And boozy: half a cup of booze in the filling for one pie, to be exact.

I rolled out the dough and got it in the pie pan and then laid it in the fridge, but because I was using a smaller pan (8″ instead of 9″), I had a bit of dough left over. I thought it would be fun to do a little pumpkin free-form tart, so I rolled the rest of the dough out into a little round and stuck that in the fridge, too. After I’d mixed the filling and filled the first pie, I put some more pumpkin puree (about a 1/2 cup) in the leftover filling, just enough so that it had the right consistency to not ooze all out of the tart dough when it was baking. Then I folded it up and placed both of ‘em in the oven. After about an hour of baking, they had both turned a lovely, rust-orange color, and the crusts had gotten nice and flaky. I was especially enamored with the little free-form tart; I’ve never seen such a cute little pie! And they tasted amazing, the both of them. Definitely a bit boozy, but the flavor of the alcohol (rum, in this case) was a nice foil for the creaminess of the filling. We were definitely two happy, pie-filled little scrubs.

pumpkin pie

get your filling and get your recipes around the bend

Posted by girlcate in custards, pies & tarts | 2 notes ≈

October 29th, 2009

apple crisp, and a birthday

Let me tell you a story: After I graduated from college, I moved to France for a little while, to teach English and find my bearings in the big, scary world outside of the college bubble. When I was getting ready to make my triumphant return to the states, I decided that I would try living in New York (I’m originally from Northern California). So I packed my bags and came straight here, after two panicked and bewildering days wandering around in Charles de Gaulle. I had lined up a place to stay in Manhattan while I looked for a job and an apartment, but for various reasons, that situation didn’t work out, and I very quickly found myself homeless, jobless, and broke in a gigantic, expensive, and unfamiliar city.

That’s where Kenan came in. You see, I had met Kenan a few days before I became a wandering urchin. Although he didn’t really know me, and although he was also broke and barely had any space of his own, Kenan graciously, kindly, sweetly (and perhaps crazily) offered me a place to stay while I figured things out. And because I had nothing to offer in return other than my ability to wield a whisk, I baked for him and his accommodating roommates to thank them, and to calm my nerves while I sent out cover letters and went on countless interviews. Luckily for me, everything worked out: Kenan made sure that I took care of myself, I found a job, we eventually found an apartment of our own, and everyone got delicious treats. I mean, the guy even made me this site, not to mention the fact that he’s responsible for all the pretty pictures around these parts. In any case, a year and a half and many adventures later, we’re the happiest little scrubs Greenpoint has to offer.

So why am I telling you this, you ask? Well, you see, a couple weeks ago, it was Kenan’s birthday, and of course, I had to make something celebratory. When I think about birthday desserts, I think layered cakes and the like, but Kenan is a much, much bigger fan of fruit things, and apple crisp in particular. And my favorite gets what he wants, so apple crisp it was gonna be.

apple picking!

As I said, I’m a Northern Californian by birth, so there were innumerable fruits and vegetables in season at all times while I was growing up. But pretty much the only apples around were either in Gravenstein orchards or were primarily used for making apple juice. Sure, you could go pick a few apples in the fall, but it just wasn’t as much of a thing as it is here on the East coast. Add to that the fact that I could eat apples all day, every day, forever, and you’ll appreciate my extreme excitement when Kenan suggested that we go to New Jersey the day before his birthday to do some apple picking.

With Kenan’s mom and stepdad in tow, we went to Eastmont Orchards, and oh my goodness, I’ve never seen so many apple trees, or so many different kinds of apples in one place. It was a crowded day, and there were plenty of screaming children and obstinately aimless suburbanites crowding the rows, but we managed to find some gorgeous Crispins, Ida Reds, Staymans and Fujis for our baking adventures. We also made a stop at Delicious Orchards to get some life-changing apple cider donuts. And so, apples and donuts and other supplies in hand, we headed back to Brooklyn, dodging crazies on the train and trying not to bang up the apples too badly.

i want crisp in the afternoon

Ladies and gentlemen, there is a raging debate going on in the apple crisp baking community. And by raging debate, I mean that there are a couple different variations on it, and I am decidedly in favor of one over the other. You see, some apple crisps are sorta granola-y: baked apples topped with a crunchy mixture that seems to be mostly oats and brown sugar. While I’m not one to turn my nose up at any dessert (my sweet tooth is equal opportunity), I just don’t really care for those kinds of crisps. I mean, if I want to eat granola (and quite often, I do), I’ll just sprinkle a bit over some fruit and be done with it. But what I strongly prefer to bake, and happen to think are more enjoyable as dessert, are heftier, richer crisps: I like toppings that hold together somewhat when they’re scooped out of the pan – somewhere in between a biscuity texture and a crumbly mess, I suppose. So I chose an Ina Garten recipe that looked like it had those qualities.

Apple crisp is so lovely; simple, elegant, and prepared with the most basic of ingredients: flour, butter, brown sugar, spices, and, of course, apples. The only time-intensive step is coring and slicing the fruit. Most recipes will tell you to pare the apples entirely, but I love the texture and flavor of the skins, so I leave the skin on about 15-20% of the time; just enough to give things a crunch without making it all too rubbery. I also prefer to use two or three different varieties of apple, because they cook down at different rates and add further to the consistency of the baked product. For this crisp, I used three or four Staymans (crunchy, tart), one gigantuous (yes) Crispin (crisp, semi-sweet), and three or four Ida Reds (sweeter, a bit soft, somewhat like a Red Delicious), all of which added up to about five pounds. After paring, coring and chopping, I mixed the fruit together with some brown sugar, spices, salt, lemon juice, and a bit of bourbon (the booze was not called for in the recipe, but I thought it would be a nice addition). Then I mixed butter with some sugar, flour, oats, and a few more spices. Ina Garten suggests using a mixer, which I did, but I think I would have been better off with a food processor: it involves less handling of the batter, and probably would have been quicker. Anyhow, then I spread the filling in a casserole dish, sprinkled everything with a thick layer of topping, and dropped that sucker in the oven.

…And then we waited. Ms. Garten says the baking takes an hour, but my crisp wasn’t ready for maybe an hour and twenty. I think this was likely a problem with my oven; we live in a new building, where everything looks fancy but is secretly a cheap, tawdry version of an actually nice thing (hello, Magic Chef), so it’s possible that the oven was just being wonky. At any rate, the thing finally got all golden and, well, crispy on top, and filled our home with the glorious smells of apples and flour and butter.

friends eat, friends drink, friends are nice.

After we’d waited for the crisp to cool down, we headed to Diamond, where we were meeting some folks to celebrate Kenan’s jour de naissance. We got started on the crisp right away, and I was really quite pleased. The topping was buttery and crumbly and the apples had a lovely texture. I would make a couple slight adjustments next time, however: the filling was a bit too sweet, so I would lower the amount of sugar, and the topping was not quite as toothsome as I would have liked, so I think I would use a slightly lower ratio of flour to oats. But all in all, it was quite lovely, and no one seemed to have any complaints. And so, over pints of beer and generous servings of crisp and whipped cream, we joked and pontificated and bantered late into the night, and I thought quietly to myself that I really am very, very lucky to have a Kenan.

apple crisp

apples and sugar and oats and recipes, oh my, yonder

Posted by girlcate in cobblers & crisps, fruit | 7 notes ≈

October 11th, 2009

goodbye gourmet double chocolate coconut cookies

Okay, so I’ve never actually had a subscription to Gourmet, but I’ve always wanted one. As the Times said this week, Gourmet was kinda like the New Yorker of food magazines: erudite, fancy, well-researched and well-edited. I always pick up a copy when I’m traveling, and I leaf through issues at bookstores, looking wistfully at all the scrumptious things I have yet to bake, and all the beautiful places I’ll probably never go. Oh, well. They have a great number of Gourmet’s recipes up on Epicurious, so I suppose there will still be at least one way in which to revel in the glory of things past.

So as I was mourning the loss of my imagined possible future subscription to Gourmet, I thought it would be a fitting farewell to bake something from the magazine. And as luck would have it, Kenan was hosting a drawing night, so I would have an apartment full of starving, broke-ass cartoonists on which to foist my baked wares. I was looking for something fairly simple, as it’s been a crazy couple of weeks, and I was tired and stressed out. I settled on a double chocolate chip cookie recipe. Gourmet calls for dried sour cherries, but I couldn’t find any in the Union Square Whole Foods. I’m sure they had them, but I was hungry and frustrated and claustrophobic and really just wanted to get the heck out of Manhattan, so I gave up and grabbed some shredded coconut instead.

twice the butter! twice the drawing!

Once I was home, after braving the epic line at the store and the L to G transfer, I got to work. The recipe is pretty much just your basic drop cookie with some nice little flourishes: butter, brown sugar, milk chocolate chips, Dutch-process cocoa powder, toasted pecans, and sour cherries (in lieu of which, as I mentioned above, I used shredded coconut). I started creaming the butter with the brown sugar and very quickly noticed something was not quite right: the butter just wouldn’t get fluffy, no matter how much I whipped it. I knew that wasn’t normal, but I chalked it up to the butter having been a bit too cool and moved on. I added the eggs, and still, the mixture was just too thick, and was starting to make my arm feel like it was going to fall off.

It was then that I realized I had added way, way too much butter. You see, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 sticks, but I, in my frazzled post-work, post-grocery shopping state, read it as 1 1/2 cups, which is, you know, twice as much. Oopsie daisy. It was kinda too late to scratch the whole thing and start over, so I added the rest of the ingredients and threw the first tray in the oven, thinking, “how bad can it be, really? Butter makes everything more delicious”. Well, I’ll tell you, dear ones: the cookies smelled amazing, all butter and chocolate and yum. But they spread all over the pan, because there was too much fat and not enough other stuff, and they couldn’t hold together to save their lives. I tasted one, and I thought I was going to die, both from pure buttery deliciousness and from clogged arteries. I was afraid that they weren’t salvageable, but I tried doubling the rest of the ingredients and mixing them separately before adding them to the already prepared batter. I knew that the proportions would be off because I had already made a batch, and I also knew that the chemistry wouldn’t be quite right because the order in which the ingredients were added was messed up, but I wanted to give it a try so as to not have entirely wasted all the (expensive!) nice ingredients bought specially for this occasion. I whipped two more eggs with the brown sugar and then folded in the dry ingredients, more chocolate chips, coconut and pecans. I mixed that together as best as I could with a spoon, but it was all too thick, so… I did the rest of the mixing with my hands. Unorthodox? Yes. Possibly unsanitary? Well, I washed my hands, but yes. Fun? Absolutely. After finally getting it all to meld together, I put a second tray in the oven, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t be a complete waste.

And you know what? They were fantastic. Heavenly, almost. Okay, so probably my expectations were lowered because I had made a huge mistake, but really, I swear, they were good. I was feeling a bit iffy about the milk chocolate chips, because in general I’m a strictly bittersweet kinda lady, but the creaminess of the chips blended perfectly with the richness of the cocoa powder, and the coconut and pecans made for a subtle and pleasing texture. I had two of ‘em instead of eating dinner, which seemed like a good idea at the time but which I cannot in good conscience advise if you’re looking to avoid a sugar hangover. And these cookies probably could be even better if I hadn’t screwed up the proportions. I’ll have to try them again soon to test this hypothesis.

So yeah. Crisis averted. Cookies baked. Artists fed. Now let’s all go take a nap, eh?

double chocolate coconut cookies

get the recipe and soothe your sorrows with some chocolate, below the fold

Posted by girlcate in chocolate, cookies | 2 notes ≈

September 30th, 2009

4-layer flourless chocolate cake.

It’s been a time for serious baking, friends and neighbors. One of my (now former) work colleagues, Sarah, was leaving the law firm to move to the Bahamas and get married and stuff, and there was to be a party so we could all say our goodbyes. Dessert’s kinda become my thing around the office (what else would I do with all the leftovers?), so I asked Sarah if she would like me to make anything sweet to bring to the festivities. At first she mentioned black forest cake, which I’d never heard of and sounded exciting, but then she remembered that one of her good friends who would be in attendance that night has celiac disease. So instead, she requested some sort of flourless something. I’d made Tartine’s chocolate souffle cake on Memorial day, and it was fantastic, but I felt it would be fun to try something new and exciting.

For inspiration, I turned to smittenkitchen, with whom I’ve recently become quite obsessed; the lady makes some super delicious food, and she’s funny to boot. And one of the recipes that I’d been drooling over for a few days prior to my conversation with Sarah was a certain flourless chocolate (expletive) cake. So yeah, okay, this is in the same vein of Tartine’s thing, but it had four layers and no butter (“healthy,” you know?) and involved freezing the layers and making filling and stuff, and it just looked like it would be a rollicking good time.

four layers, two pans, two batches, phew.

On the morning of the party I went out and bought the ingredients: a shocking number of eggs (a dozen!), 12 ounces of chocolate, some heavy whipping cream, and some Dutch-process cocoa powder.** Then it was time to get down to cakeness. I realized straight off that there was no way I was going to be able to whip 12 egg whites in my tiny little Brooklyn apartment-sized mixing bowls, so I decided to do the thing in two separate batches. Luckily, I started this whole process relatively early in the morning, which made the time issue (see below) slightly less stressful than it otherwise would have been. Another small glitch was that I didn’t have 9-inch cake pans. I borrowed some from Boots, but they were a bit flared at the sides and I was scared of that making an already delicate cake into a crumbly nightmare. So I went ahead and used my 8-inch pans (which made for slightly thicker layers than smittenkitchen describes), hoping that nothing entirely awful would happen as a result.

Anyhow, I started with the first batch, all nervous and excited. I melted the chocolate with a bit of water and set it aside to cool. Then came the egg part, which is probably my favorite step in any recipe, because eggs are magic and I love them (I was vegan for quite a while, and I’m still always a little surprised and excited that I get to eat eggs now). I whipped six yolks with some sugar until they formed a fluffy, shiny, sticky, joyful ribbon. Then I folded the chocolate into that mess, which was lovely to behold. Then I whipped the whites until they held soft peaks and added the rest of the sugar and a bit of salt and whipped it some more until the mixture was glossy and stiff and stuff. Then I folded the whites into the yolk-chocolate mixture (again, beautiful) and poured the batter into the pans and baked until the tops were dry and transferred the pans to cooling racks after dusting them with a hearty layer of cocoa powder. After getting them out of the pans, cooled and into some plastic wrap, I placed the first two layers in the freezer.

And then I started all over again. As always seems to be the case, the cake was easier the second time round: I knew what was coming next, I timed everything correctly, and I was more efficient at doing the things that were a bit tricky. After I’d gotten all the layers wrapped up and in the chill box, it was time to get started on the next stage of my adventure.

** Note: In case you’re wondering (as I was) what the deal is with Dutch-process cocoa powder and why it’s different than other cocoa powder, apparently the thing is that the powder is alkalized, which neutralizes the acids in the cocoa and stops it from reacting with baking soda. The process of alkalizing the cocoa also gives it a less bitter and more delicate taste, which makes it less likely to overpower the other flavors in whatever it is you might be baking. Neat, eh?

the brooklyn-chelsea-brooklyn-jersey-chelsea cake shuffle

As soon as I had promised Sarah that I would bring something sweet to her party, I realized that I was going to have a somewhat problematic scheduling pinch. You see, Kenan’s grandmother recently turned 90 (90 years old, people!), and we were expected in New Jersey for her surprise party on Saturday from 5 to 8. But Sarah’s party was in Chelsea, on the same day, starting at 7. Very tricky. And then there was also a question of how I was going to transport a towering and delicate four-layer cake from Brooklyn to Chelsea without it all going smash.

I very quickly realized that it would be impossible to get the cake safely to Chelsea if it had already been constructed, so my only option was to somehow get the layers there first and then make the filling and put it all together when we arrived from the party in Jersey. I called the person hosting the party and he agreed to store the cake and the filling ingredients in his apartment until my arrival. So I went and dropped everything off, and then Kenan and I quickly got showered and dressed presentably and hitched a ride down to Jersey. The party was lovely and sweet, and tiny little Nana was so excited and happy, and when we’d said our goodbyes, we drove back and we made it to Chelsea by 9.

dropping crumbs in a fancy apartment.

The party was in full swing when we walked in. People were schmoozing, mixing drinks and eating delicious cheese, and pretty much everyone looked like they were having a great time. I got started on assembling the cake right away, slightly intimidated by their gorgeous and extremely well-appointed kitchen. The host cleared off some counter space and kindly provided me with a mixing bowl and a hand mixer. The filling consists of some heavy cream, some confectioner’s sugar, and Gran Marnier. It whipped up beautifully, thanks to the mixer, which turned out to be incredible (Sunbeam: who knew?). Because they’d been frozen for so long, the layers were easy to handle and flip around, which made my job a lot easier, but there was no way to stop stray crumbs and drifts of cocoa powder from dropping onto the counter and the floor. I was, of course, planning on tidying up after myself once the cake had been served, but someone beat me to it by getting down on the floor and wiping up the bits of fallen cake. This was all a bit stressful: I was a bit tipsy from the birthday party, I hadn’t tasted the cake or the filling yet, everything was loud and distracting, we were a couple of under-dressed Brooklyn scrubs in a fancy apartment, and there was a middle-aged man crawling about on the floor below me, cleaning up after my mess.

But after I’d finally gotten all the layers together and topped the thing with the last of the filling (it looked quite elegant, I must say), everything was okay. There was a champagne toast, and everyone seemed to really enjoy the cake. I didn’t really get to eat much of it, because we’d just had dinner and I was full and distracted, but the bite that I did have was crazy good. The cake was melty and floaty and not too rich, the filling was heavenly and perfectly flavored with Gran Marnier, and the combination of the two was decidedly luscious. And most importantly, of course, Sarah (and her gluten-free friend) loved it.

Seriously: phew.

smitten kitchen’s four-layer flourless chocolate cake

get the recipe: make some chocolate, make some layers, below the fold

Posted by girlcate in cakes, chocolate | 4 notes ≈

September 20th, 2009

variations on a theme of messy cookie cake.

You’re in for a treat, folks, because this week, you will know the glory that is messy cookie cake.

What is it, you ask? I’ll tell you, but you have to realize that the end result is so much more wonderful than you can imagine just by reading the description: it’s basically a cake made out of chocolate chip cookie dough and a sweet cream cheese sauce. As a child, it was one of my favorite things in my mom’s arsenal of sweet treats, and as an adult, it’s the dessert I request every time I go home to visit. When warm, and eaten with a glass of ice-cold milk, this cake is sugary-chocolatey nirvana. It is a part of my childhood. Also, it’s freakin’ delicious. Are you ready?

messy cookie cake classic (and soup!)

Last weekend, Emily finally hosted another one of her renowned, long-awaited soup nights (for which Kenan drew the invitation). And oh man, were we excited, because Emily’s lovely apartment, a whole slew of terrific people, and hot bowls of fantastic soup all make for a truly enjoyable evening. And of course, I couldn’t help but bring along a batch of something sweet to offset all the savory deliciousness. As the first few hints of fall have just started to creep in around the corners of the city, making everything breezy and brisk and amazing, something comforting and cozy seemed like it would fit the bill perfectly. And as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more comforting or cozy than a nice chunk of messy cookie cake on a cool evening.

Okay, so I know I’m making this cake sound like it’s the best thing in the world ever (I think it is; you’re perfectly welcome to disagree, but you would be wrong), but one of the things about messy cookie cake that truly is awesome is that it is super simple to prepare. All you need are the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, some cream cheese, and a bit of milk.

I went out to fetch supplies, and then returned to the apartment, excited at the prospect of giving my favorite childhood dessert a proper introduction to the East coast. As I mentioned, messy cookie cake is quite straightforward. For the cookie base, I used a variation on an Alton Brown recipe, but really, any chocolate chip cookie recipe will do. The dough base is made just the way cookie dough is always made: sift the dry ingredients separately; whip the butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until they’re fluffy and light colored; add the dry ingredients to the wet; and then gently stir in the chocolate chips. Then, you warm up the cream cheese with the milk and some sugar until they form a creamy sauce. When the sauce is ready, the dough is dropped in bits into the bottom of a baking pan and the sauce is drizzled over it. After it’s baked for about an hour, the top is golden brown and slightly crispy, the cream cheese is caramelized around the edges, and your whole apartment smells like your oven is radiating pure glee. Needless to say, it was really quite difficult for me to keep myself from eating the cake before we got to the party.

Soup nights are always so much fun: a small Brooklyn apartment stuffed to the gills with hungry people; good wine; good company; and loads of scrumptious soup. On this particular night, the soup menu included a tomato-bacon-white bean soup and probably the best corn chowder I’ve ever tasted. Also on the overloaded food table were scads of cheese, bread, vegetables, and other snacks and sweets (I wasn’t the only one with that idea). The messy cookie cake was fluffy and sweet and caramely and chocolatey – I think one of the best I’ve ever made. It was also a hit, and my friend Kelly even pointed out to me that it was not unlike a bar cookie, which I had never noticed before. And so, after we’d stuffed ourselves silly with desserts and appetizers and soup (not necessarily in that order), we waddled home through the night, relishing the beginning of our favorite season.

cookiemuffins.

And if you thought we were done here, you were wrong, because Kenan and I also got a call from Boots last weekend, inviting us over to dinner and requesting some messy cookie cake. We never pass up an opportunity to eat Boots’ delightful food, and I never pass up on opportunity to make (and eat!) messy cookie cake twice in one weekend, so we told her we’d be over in a flash.

But that night, at Coach n’ Boots’ place, there was a small problem: Coach was using their casserole dish to make his famous Crybaby Mac, and the only other baking pan Boots had was a muffin tin. So I threw caution to the wind and decided, for the first time ever, to make messy cookie muffins. Sounds risky, I know, but I am a baker both of science and of faith, and also I had a feeling that they would turn out all right. And in fact, they were quite delectable. Each little muffin guy had the coveted crispy-caramelized edge of messy cookie cake, and their smallness ensured that you wouldn’t get a tummy ache because you took too big of a piece. We ate them with relish, even though we were completely full (two nights in a row!) from Coach’s mac, and snuggled up on the couch watching This American Life. Really, who could ask for a cozier picture?

!messy cookie cake!

messier, cookier, cakier, recipes, after the jump

Posted by girlcate in cakes, chocolate, cookies | 4 notes ≈