Perfecting Deliciousness

This is the time of year when I bake and bake.  The house smells delicious:  evergreen aromas mixed with the smell of baked goods!!  Delightful.

Over the years I have baked many things to give away and I guess my eureka moment occurred when I discovered Biscotti.  Here is a cookie that you don’t have to worry about going stale:  it’s meant to be hard and crunchy, great with coffee, ice-cream or by itself:  yum!   I make 3 different types this time of year and the first one up is Coconut.  The recipe can be doubled easily.  Notice there is no butter.  You might think that no cookie can be considered a cookie  without butter but this recipe is the exception.  This is also one of my favorite non-chocolate treats, so don’t be shy just because there is no chocolate.  I sometimes reject recipes because there is no chocolate, so I understand.  Enjoy!

Coconut Biscotti (adapted from Cooking Light)

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 cup sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 large eggs

1 cup flaked sweetened coconut

Combine flour, baking powder, salt and baking soda, stir with a whisk.

Place sugar, vanilla and eggs in large bowl and beat with a mixer until thick, about 2 minutes.

Add flour mixture and coconut and stir to combine.  The dough will be sticky.

Drop dough by heaping tablespoons  onto  cookie sheet lined with parchment paper until you have a rough log shape about 15 in. x 3 in.  Wet hands very slightly and push and pat dough into a somewhat smooth log, keeping the 15 in. x 3 in.  shape.  Refrigerator for an hour.

Put into preheated 300 degree oven and bake for about 40 minutes until log is golden.

Cool for about 20 minutes and transfer log  to a cutting board (using the parchment paper to help you).

Cut log into 1 inch slices and place upright onto an ungreased baking sheet.

Bake at 300 degrees for about 10 minutes.

Remove from baking sheet and cool completely.

Optional chocolate add in if you must (just kidding, these are excellent additions):  add 1/2 cup of mini chocolate chips to batter.  Or when cookie is cooled, dip into melted chocolate, either the bottom of cookie  or 1/2 of the cookie.  Make sure the chocolate is the best quality you can purchase, Ghirardelli is my option.  Cool completely.

Biscotti with mini-chips and no chips.

Biscotti dipped in chocolate.

Cookies:  I have a lot of recipes.  But my first choice for a drop cookie would be the chocolate chip.  I have made many of these too.  But my all time favorite is  a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from Bon Appetit .  It has more butter, more sugar, more flour:  it’s just MORE!  So when my husband and I were invited to a friend’s house for a very early dinner the next day, I volunteered to make dessert.   (among my close friends I am dubbed the Dessert Queen, sometimes bringing more than one to a function, because, well, I can!) I was running a little short on time and did not want to go out to get any special ingredients (though I am surely not opposed to doing this:  I have been known to go to Shoprite (which is right across the street) 3 times in one day: yikes!).

So I decided on my Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe because I always have the ingredients on hand for that.  But I had been baking all day, it was 4 p.m.  and making drop cookies was like, hmm and dinner too?  I could not make them the next day before we went because we already had other plans.  What to do?  I smiled to myself and thought of my childhood friends’ mother.    My friend was one of 8 children and her mother cooked and baked from scratch.  I loved that family, there was always something going on.  4 boys and 4 girls, how could there not be?  And I remember a recipe I had gotten from her for Chocolate Chip Sticks and being told  “It’s just a Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe in a pan:  you know, the lazy way out”.  The light bulb went on, the lazy way out indeed:  this woman had 8 kids and still baked!  Well I was going to be lazy too and proceeded to put my favorite recipe in a baking pan.  Delicious!  I recommend it highly and they can be cut anyway you like:  giant squares or skinny rectangles.  The drop way is excellent as well, when of course, you have more time!

Enjoy!

Chocolate Chip Cookies (adapted from Bon Appetit)

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter, room temperature

1 cup sugar

1 cup (packed) golden brown sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract (please make this real vanilla!)

6 oz.  of 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chips  by Ghirardelli

6 oz.  Milk Chocolate Chips by Ghirardelli

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Whisk flour, baking soda and salt in medium bowl.

Using an electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until light and fluffy.  Add sugar and brown sugar and beat until well blended.  Add eggs and vanilla and beat until mixture is creamy and well blended.  Gradually add flour mixture, beating until just blended and add chocolate chips until just combined.

For bar cookies, put dough into a 13 x 9 in. aluminum baking pan coated with cooking spray.  Press and spread into pan (the dough is dense) until evenly distributed and bake for 20-25 minutes.

Cool completely and cut into squares or rectangles in size of your choice.

For drop cookies, weigh out 1-1/2 oz.  pieces of dough, roll into a nice ball and place 6 on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake for 8 minutes, turn pan and bake for 3 more minutes, until slightly golden.  Let cool on pan for about 5 minutes before transferring to a rack to cool completely.

Just a note about the chocolate chips:  The mix of very dark chocolate and milk chocolate is really quite delicious.  You might say, why not semi-sweet?  Well, it’s just not delicious enough!  The semi-sweet Ghirardelli chocolate chips are smaller and I like BIG chocolate chips and you just don’t get the same taste with just semi-sweet.  And Ghirardelli is the best quality chip available to me.

For the past 30 years (yikes, that might divulge my age somehow) I have been making these refrigerator rolls for Thanksgiving.  Since it is rapidly approaching,  I thought it might be appropriate to share this recipe with you now.

I started making this recipe in my early twenties.  It all began, this bread making thing, in Albany.  I had graduated from college, found a job, found an apartment and by the end of the summer, had more time on my hands:  boredom set in.  Somehow, I thought of bread making.  I had never made bread before,  so I thought, ok,  Challenge: Make bread ! Maybe I could sell it!  Make some extra money! The selling part was not a good idea, soon to be squashed by the first guy that responded to my classified ad (yuck).  But the bread making continued.

By October, I had moved back home, started figuring out what I was going to do next, worked and continued to bake bread.  I also was collecting recipes from my Mom that I thought would make a good mini-cookbook for myself, and this was one of them.  It came from a very early edition of the Good Housekeeping Cookbook (and sorry to say is no longer in print).  So at my parent’s home, I made this recipe many times, tweaking and adjusting the recipe as I went along.

The following August I transferred to a new college to pursue horticulture as a degree.  At school I joined the Horticultural Club and helped  re-invigorate the Hort Feast (a symbolic annual feast celebrating the year-end harvest).  For that years feast I decided to make the Refrigerator Rolls.  After the  feast, I brought some leftover rolls to my future husband (he had no idea about that one!! haha) and he proclaimed: “You make the best buns!”

The tradition of making the rolls for Thanksgiving began, when my husband’s family joined my family for Thanksgiving at my parent’s house.  My parents were quite the hosts and those times were so good!   I wanted to make something exceptional to commemorate this special day together and made the rolls.  Everyone loved them and now anticipate them every  year!

So since you still have a little time before the big day,  consider making these.  But be prepared for people to beg you to make them again, and again!  Enjoy!

Refrigerator Rolls De Luxe

1 package rapid rise yeast (this is important, make sure you get)

½ cup warm water

1 cup softened butter

¾ sugar

1 cup unseasoned Yukon Gold hot mashed potatoes (3 medium or 1 very large) make sure very soft and mashed, otherwise get lumps in your rolls

1 cup cold water

1-1/2 tsp. salt

6 cups Bread flour (no more – and dough WILL be sticky)

In large bowl, sprinkle yeast onto warm water.  Stir until dissolved.

Stir in butter, sugar, potatoes then cold water, salt and about 2 cups of flour.

If using a dough hook, attach it now.  If not, keep on adding flour (6 cups total) until its combined, then place dough on a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic. (same if using a dough hook, ~ 5 minutes at the lowest setting)  It will be sticky, but adding more flour makes the rolls dry, in my opinion.

Place dough in buttered bowl, and then turn so that all surfaces are buttery. Cover  with buttered pan top.

Place dough in cold oven, (if you share your oven, put up a sign:  Dough Rising – Do not use oven!) put shallow pan under bread on lower rack, and add hot water to pan, so the condition of the oven is warm and draft free, perfect for bread to rise.  It will take 3-3-1/2 hour or more for it to double depending on the humidity of the day and how cold it is that day.  Be patient.

When dough has doubled, pinch off 1-3/4  oz.  pieces, roll them in your hands to form a ball and place in a greased muffin tin.  (I use light-colored aluminum pans – I find that they bake better that way, but if all you have are dark pans just watch them carefully). The recipe should make 36 rolls.  You can make the rolls bigger just try to make them the same size so they will all cook the same.

Let the rolls double, approximately 1 hour and then bake at 375 degrees for 12-15 minutes.  Yum.

I do not put them in the refrigerator like the recipe says but you can certainly do that.

So for the first rise, put them in the refrigerator and cover with plastic wrap BUT when ready to bake, make sure the dough is not cold anymore before you start shaping them into rolls.

Some thoughts:

To make them in time for the holiday, make them ahead of time, they freeze beautifully.  6 rolls/piece of heavy duty aluminum foil, wrap like a present & put in plastic bag.

When almost ready to serve, take out of plastic bag and put into preheated 400 degree oven for 10 – 20 minutes until soft and fragrant.

This is my inspiration for this blog,  finding the perfect vanilla cake.  I decided to approach it as logically as I could: different vanilla cakes with 2 or three different ingredients to make them special, from sources that were excellent. The first was Best Yellow Layer Cake by Smitten Kitchen (one of MY favorite blogs), Magnolia Bakery’s Vanilla Birthday Cake and Frosting  (Magnolia’s being one of the most famous bakeries around) and Rose’s Favorite Yellow Layer Cake (Rose Levy Beranbaum the authority on cake and who wrote the Cake Bible, this recipe is from her website).

Smitten Kitchen’s cake had sour cream, cake flour and just egg yolks, Magnolia’s had self rising flour (something I never use, but was curious about) and milk, and Rose’s cake had sour cream, cake flour and just egg yolks.  Rose’s cake also mixed very differently:  adding the butter and egg yolks last instead of my usual butter/eggs/sugar first until light and fluffy and then adding alternately dry and wet ingredients until just mixed.  So the baking and tasting began.  I made all 3 in one day, this was very exciting, I felt like a test kitchen!  After I was finished I knew which one I liked but I was curious on what other people might think.

My auto mechanic is right down the road and several times I have brought him Pound Cake or Coffee  Cake because he’s been so helpful to us.  I decided to use him and his employees (all of whom are male)  as a testing ground during their coffee break and brought them 1/2 of each cake labeling them A, B, and C. They were more than happy to help me out, of course!  I told them to be honest and let me know which one they liked.  The next day I got the results:  boy was I surprised.!  They liked C the best; B second and A the worst ( which they said seemed a bit burnt, though my mechanic liked it best) Very interesting.

I was also keeping my daughter (who lives and works in Boston) informed of all that was going on and decided after this first test that I would send her and her co-workers (all female) 1/2 of each cake as well, labeled the same (A,B & C) to see what they thought!  I also told my daughter to save some of each for her fiance so he could taste test as well.  So I packed the cakes up as carefully as I could and sent them UPS to arrive the next day. The next day, after lunch, my daughter told me they had received the cakes and all agreed that they liked Cake A the best!  Then she took them home where her fiance declared that he too liked A the best!

I concluded that I liked A the best as well.  Cake A was the Perfect Vanilla Cake.  Not to keep you in suspense any further:  Cake A was Best Yellow Layer Cake by Smitten Kitchen!!  Below is the recipe.  I also encourage you to go on her site as well.  She is an excellent writer and she tests her recipes very thoroughly.  Enjoy!!

Best Yellow Layer Cake (adapted from www.smittenkitchen.com)

Yield: Two 9-inch round cakes.

4 cups plus 2 tablespoons (480 grams) cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons (10 grams) baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon (5 grams) table salt
2 sticks (1 cup, 1/2 pound or 225 grams) butter, softened
2 cups (400 grams) sugar
2 teaspoons (10 ml) pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 cups buttermilk (475 ml), well-shaken

Preheat oven to 350°F. Cut circles of parchment paper or waxed paper to fit  two 9-inch round cake pans.  Spray pans with canola oil, put waxed paper onto pans.  Spray pan again with canola oil.  Put a small amount of flour in each pan, and shake the pan carefully until it is evenly coated with flour, including the sides.  Tap out excess.  (If you can, to speed this process up, you can also just spray with a flour/butter mixture, available in most bakery sections of grocery stores.  The parchment paper or waxed paper still needs to be used.)

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. Put eggs and vanilla in another small bowl.  In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer at medium speed until pale, light and fluffy.  Add eggs with vanilla,  1 at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. At low speed, beat in buttermilk  alternately with flour mixture in 3 batches, until just incorporated.

Spread batter evenly in cake pans. Bake until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 30 to 40 minutes.  (try 30 min first:  every oven is different) Cool in pan on a rack 10 minutes, then run a knife around edge of pan. Invert onto rack and discard parchment, then cool completely, about 1 hour.