Curiouser and Curiouser...

It should come as no surprise by now that my curiosity regarding new foods and ingredients is relatively boundless. If I could have infinite storage space in my kitchen, I would inevitable fill every corner of that infinite space with odds and ends of bottles, boxes, cans, and bags of ingredients that I purchased because I wanted to see what they would be like, but never used again past the initial recipe that sparked my curiosity. After all, not every experiment is a success, and even recipes that are successful, like the posole I made when we first moved into our new apartment, leave leftover specialty ingredients like dried chiles that have no immediately obvious alternate application.

Still, I remain undeterred. When I saw a recipe for a British dessert relatively unknown here in the U.S. called "flapjacks" (no, they have nothing to do with pancakes besides being flat), I was intrigued despite the fact that it called for Lyle's Golden Syrup. Golden syrup is a form of inverted sugar, similar to honey in appearance and its mild flavor profile, but more related to molasses in terms of how it is produced. It is a popular sweetener in the U.K., but to find it here you usually have to track it down at an import store, unless you live near an exceptionally well-stocked mega-mart.

I set out to find some so that I could give these alternative flapjacks a try, and my search eventually led me to Fox and Obel, purveyors of all things gourmet and obscure, and a dangerous place for my pocketbook if ever there was one. Of course, they carried it and I brought home a bottle (along with several other pricey items I didn't really need), but it lingered on the shelves of my pantry for a while before I finally had the time and inclination to try the recipe.

Last weekend, I was bitten by the baking bug, and had skimmed my Pinterest board in search of something new to scratch off my to-do list. Unfortunately for me, there seem to be a lot of layer cake ideas there, which was more than I wanted to tackle without a specific occasion in mind, and every single other recipe that caught my eye required some ingredient that I didn't have in the house. It was a Saturday and Justin had taken the car to work in the burbs at his part-time job, so I was stuck in the house with nothing to bake. I was especially bummed that we were low on oats after our experiment with pumpkin oatmeal last month, because the flapjack recipe was suddenly, and strongly calling to me.

Though it was getting late in the month, I still hadn't baked a cookie recipe yet for February and I wanted to stay somewhat on course in terms of fulfilling my New Year's resolution. Flapjacks are kind of like a bar cookie, though I think they have more in common with Rice Krispie treats, which I wouldn't exactly classify as a cookie. Still, it was close enough for me.

So tonight, while we were out doing our weekly grocery shopping, I tossed a canister of Quaker Oats in my cart, and I was in business. Thankfully, like Rice Krispie treats, flapjacks are so quick and simple to make that I was able to tackle them on the same night that we went grocery shopping, and still make it to bed on time. You have to love a dessert that can be made in less than an hour!

Convenience means nothing, however, if the result is lackluster. Thankfully, these humble bars more than delivered in the flavor department. In fact, they were astonishingly good! The brown sugar and golden syrup conspired to add complex, caramel notes to the flapjacks, while the oats gained a rich, toasty flavor from their time in the oven. Justin and I easily could have eaten the whole pan, but we limited ourselves to one a piece. 

Now my conundrum is this: do I include the flapjack in my cookie lineup later this year? They are certainly delicious and unusual enough to merit inclusion. But are they really a cookie? At least I have ten months to think about it, and in the meantime, I strongly suspect that flapjacks will be making another appearance or two in my kitchen to help me figure it out.

British Flapjacks

adapted from Bon Appétit

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces
1/2 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup*
2 1/3 cups quick-cooking oats (not instant or old-fashioned)
Pinch of salt

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Butter 8x8x2-inch metal baking pan. Combine first 3 ingredients in heavy medium saucepan. Stir constantly over medium-low heat until butter melts, sugar dissolves, and mixture is smooth. Remove from heat. Add oats and salt; stir until coated. Transfer mixture to prepared pan and spread out in even layer.

Bake until top is golden (edges will be darker), about 25 minutes. Cool in pan on rack 5 minutes. Cut into 4 squares; cut each into 4 triangles (mixture will still be soft). Cool completely in pan before serving.

Positive Reinforcement...

I really try hard not to be too much of a nag. Nagging seems to come naturally to me, but basically every source of relationship wisdom in the world warns me of its deleterious effect on relationships, so I work hard to find other means of getting my way. Most of the time, I try to frame all my requests for cleaning and household chores in the sweetest way possible, or drop hints about how happy I would be if some project were to be completed. Luckily for me, Justin is very good at picking up on my subtlety, and I rarely have to advance to more aggressive forms of pressure, but occasionally I have to up my game.

That is where bribery comes in. For instance, Justin's parents have been asking him for months now to come back to their house and finish cleaning out his bedroom so they can use it as a guest room. Back when we moved in late January, Justin's room was in such a state that there simply wasn't time to deal with all of its contents, so he focused on what he would need to bring with him, and postponed dealing with all of his papers, mementos, and tchotchkes from the twenty-nine years he spent inhabiting the space. Understandably, however, now that he is gone, his parents want to reclaim the room.

We've made a couple trips over to their house in the last month for Justin to work on cleaning, but it didn't feel like we were making a lot of progress. So I came up with an idea for him to spend the night there over a weekend to work at chipping away at it, but Justin needed a little encouragement to sign on to my plan. So I promised him that if he went and made some serious headway, I would make him a special treat.

I had something in mind that I wanted to bake for him -- some apricot bar cookies I had seen in Baked Explorations when I was flipping through it and found his birthday cake. Since my man is a huge apricot fan, I predicted that he would love these bars, but I still wanted to wait for the right moment to come along to make them. They seemed like just the thing to reward him for a weekend of hard work, and provide some positive reinforcement for doing some cleaning and organizing.

I ended up making the bars today, before I sent him off for the weekend, because I didn't want to have the whole batch of bar cookies sitting around for him to eat by himself. Though it went against the doctrine of positive reinforcement to give him his reward before doing the work, I also wanted to share the bars with his family, to spread the love. Besides, I knew his family would appreciate them as well, since that's where he gets his apricot obsession. 

Like many Baked recipes, this one was a little unorthodox. It called for adding rosemary, an herb not typically associated with sweets, to a buttery shortbread base, then topping it with a layer of pureed dried apricots and honey, and finally, a crunchy layer of pecans and crumb topping. Though I could pick up on the rosemary right away, Justin was none the wiser. For him, it just added a special something that he couldn't quite put his finger on, though he knew he liked them. In fact, I think he was a little sad that he was being asked to share them.

For my part, though I don't love apricots in the same way that Justin does, I enjoyed these bars as well. The apricot filling was sticky and chewy, with a beautiful tartness. The rosemary added a woody fragrance that complimented the fruit surprisingly well, and the crumb topping drew everything together. They were truly exceptional, and a worthy incentive for Justin.

I'm not sharing the recipe, just because it was exceptionally lengthy, and it took most of an afternoon to complete. If you are interested, you can either pick up your own copy of Baked Explorations (I'm seriously contemplating adding it to my collection of Baked books myself), or pick it up from your local library like I did...

Bar None...

Every culture handles death differently, but one thing seems to be universal -- when someone passes on, people seek solace in food. Whenever someone has passed away in my family, we have been surrounded by an outpouring of food from friends and loved ones. Cakes, cookies, and casseroles poured in from every direction. So when I found out that my best friend, Lisa, had lost her grandfather, I did the only thing I could think of under the circumstances -- I baked.

I knew I wanted to stop by the shiva (sort of the Jewish equivalent of a wake, except that it lasts several days) in order to support my friend in her time of loss, and though I had never attended a shiva before, I knew that they were full of food. I felt strange about showing up empty handed, but I wasn't sure what I ought to bring. I had heard about people coordinating deli trays, bagels and lox, and other standard Jewish treats to bring to shivas, but none of those things were quite my style.

Baking seemed like the natural route for me, and cookies seemed like a portable, easy-to-eat option, so I poured through my significant collection of cookie books in search of ideas. Nothing really stood out to me, however. My options were somewhat limited, due to Lisa's food allergies, and I didn't want to make anything too unusual or challenging to the palate. Something comforting seemed more appropriate, so I finally settled upon some pumpkin chocolate chip bar cookies from my Pinterest queue, since few things are as comforting to me as the warm spices of fall.

The bars turned out rather more cake-like than I had anticipated. They reminded me of my favorite pumpkin chocolate chip muffins from my other best friend, Katherine, but baked flat and cut into squares. Though they were slightly more dense, and possessed of a higher chocolate-to-dough ratio, they were a perfect match in terms of flavor. These were a better option for sharing than the muffins, which are probably more food than someone would want to eat while socializing, so I think they were the best choice for this occasion.

Though the occasion for making these bars was unfortunate, I'm happy to have this recipe in my arsenal. Katherine's muffins will always be first in my heart, because they remind me of her, but it's  nice to have something similar to whip up if I want to share more easily with others. Of course, I'm not always feeling magnanimous -- sometimes I want to keep my muffins to myself...

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars

adapted from Bake at 350

2 c. all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon ginger

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon allspice

1/8 teaspoon cloves

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon coarse salt

1 c. unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 1/4 c. sugar

1 egg

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 c. pumpkin puree

12 oz. chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 and line a 9"x13" pan with tin foil.

1. Whisk together the flour, spices, baking soda and salt.

2. Cream together the butter and sugar in a stand mixer on medium-high until smooth. Beat in the egg and vanilla. Beat in the pumpkin puree (it will look curdled -- do not worry).

3. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low just until combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.

4. Using an offset spatula (or the back of a spoon), spread the batter into the prepared pan. Bake for about 35-40 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool completely in the pan.

Tied Up In Knots...

Much as I have been branching out lately into pies, tarts, cakes, and ice creams since we moved north, I can never really stray too far from my first love -- cookies. I'm always on the lookout for something new to capture my fancy, which is actually increasingly difficult these days, given the sheer volume of flavor combinations I've already tried in cookie form at this point. Still, the combination of salty and sweet together never ceases to be a font of inspiration for me, and when I spotted these pretzel and peanut-topped blondies in an old issue of Bon Appétit when I was purging my cooking magazine stash earlier this year, I quickly added them to my queue. 

Pretzels have long been a favorite dessert fixture of mine since I unexpectedly encountered them pressed into the top of some chocolate chip cookies at a restaurant that my family used to frequent when I was in high school. I'd always liked chocolate-covered pretzels, so the pairing didn't seem completely bizarre to me, but I had never though of pretzels as an ingredient for baked goods before that point. I was a little devastated when that restaurant closed, but now that I've got a kitchen of my own, I'm free to experiment with tossing pretzels into whatever strikes my fancy, including that chocolate-covered pretzel pie I baked back on Pi Day.

Plus, pretzels are something I tend to keep around the house these days. Since a over-enthusiastic binge on Cheetos and Doritos back when we first moved in together led to an unwelcome expansion of both mine and Justin's waistlines, I've banned all salty snack foods in the house with the exception of pretzels and the occasional bag of tortilla chips, which don't seem to pose the same threat to our collective willpower. I'm not sure that turning our "healthful" snack choice into an indulgent dessert is exactly helping our caloric intake, but having pretzels on hand certainly made this recipe a more attractive candidate.

Despite the burn I suffered while making salted butter caramel a couple weeks ago, I do think I'm becoming more confident with making caramel, as I breezed through that portion of the recipe rather effortlessly. My only real problem with the recipe, as written, was that it called for far too many peanuts (nearly four cups!), and not enough pretzels for my taste. The result was a barely-there layer of blondie (perhaps the best showcase for browned butter that I've yet to encounter in a dessert, however), that was dwarfed by over an inch of nuts. The pretzels faded into the background, which was a shame, given the salty kick and delightfully crispy texture they imparted. I've changed the recipe below to reflect a ratio that I think would work much better.

In the end, these "cookies" felt more like a candy bar, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Given that a certain family member of mine who shall remain nameless nurses a near-addiction level obsession with peanuts, it's very likely I'll be making these again, though I'd prefer a higher ratio of caramel-to-nuts. It's pretty clear that I'm having a salty-sweet moment right now, and there's no end in sight...

Butterscotch Blondie Bars with Peanut-Pretzel Caramel 

adapted from Bon Appétit

Blondie

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter
2 c. light brown sugar, firmly packed
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Peanut-Pretzel Caramel

2 1/2 c. roasted peanuts (I would use a combination of salted and unsalted)
2 c. sugar
1/4 c. honey
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/2 c. heavy cream
2 c. thin twisted pretzels, coarsely crushed

For Blondie:

Preheat oven to 350°. 
1. Line baking pane with parchment paper, leaving a 1" overhang on long sides of pan. Whisk flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl; set aside. Stir butter in a medium skillet over medium heat until browned bits form at bottom of pan 7–8 minutes. Transfer to a medium bowl. 
2. Add brown sugar. Using an electric mixer, beat until well combined and mixture resembles wet sand, 2–3 minutes. Add eggs and vanilla; beat until fluffy and well combined, about 2 minutes. Add dry ingredients; beat until smooth (batter will be thick). Using an offset or regular spatula, evenly spread batter in prepared pan.

3. Bake blondie until golden brown, edges pull away from sides of pan, and tester inserted into the center comes out with a few moist crumbs attached, 20–25 minutes. Let cool completely in pan on a wire rack.

For Caramel:

Preheat oven to 350°. 
1. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Spread peanuts over sheet in an even layer. Bake, stirring frequently, until golden brown and fragrant, 5–7 minutes. Set aside. 
2. Stir sugar and 1/2 cup water in a large saucepan over medium-low heat until sugar dissolves. Increase heat; boil without stirring, occasionally swirling pan and brushing down sides with a wet pastry brush, until caramel is deep amber, 12–15 minutes. Add honey; return to a boil, stirring often, about 1 minute longer. Add butter; stir until blended. Add cream (mixture will bubble vigorously); whisk until smooth. Stir in peanuts and pretzels. Pour over cooled blondie. Chill until cool, about 30 minutes. 
3. Run a knife around short sides of pan to release blondie. Using parchment-paper overhang, lift from pan. Cut lengthwise into 4 strips. Cut each strip crosswise into 10 bars.

How Sweet It Is...

The record will show that I need very little excuse to bake. I'll bake at the drop of the hat, just because I feel like doing it, and because, as I mentioned last week, it helps relieve stress for me. However, having a raison d'être for creating my baked goods does give me a certain creative spark. If I'm baking for a specific occasion, like Justin's birthday, to take a recent example, or my yearly Cookie Bonanza, I try to push myself to go the extra mile.

Accordingly, when my turn came around again on the Cake Day roster at work, I started making grandiose plans. I've been bookmarking cake recipes like crazy ever since my success with Justin's birthday cake, and I'd been looking for an opportunity to try my hand at it again with a large enough audience to properly consume the end product. Cake Day would provide just the opportunity I was looking for. Alas, my dreams of towering layer cake perfection were not to be this week. I ended up having too much on my plate this weekend between fixing up our new place and making dinner for Justin's parents' Sunday night to get a proper head start on an elaborate Cake Day tour de force. That particular aspiration will have to simmer on the back burner for a while.

Instead, I turned once more to my old friend, Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats to Bake and Share, and selected a new recipe, just to give my skills a bit of a stretch at the very least. Having loved the Macadamia-Maple Sticky Bars I baked with Katherine in May, I'd been curious about Martha's recipe for pecan bars ever since, wondering if they could possibly live up to the recipe I'd already tried. Plus, pecan bars are reminiscent of pecan pie, which is a typical Thanksgiving treat, so I could make a nod to seasonality without baking yet another pumpkin dessert, which have been dominating the Cake Day offerings since the start of fall.

I've long been enamored with the idea of pecan pie, as it combines three things that ought to be delicious -- pecans, caramel-y filling, and pie crust, but more often than not, it's an overly sweet mess. I know pecans are expensive, but that's no excuse for a pecan pie to be 90% corn syrupy goo. These bar cookies resolve that problem by spreading a thin layer of nuts and honey-based caramel over a crisp shortbread base. There actually could have been a few more nuts, as they were a little sparse for my liking, but there was just enough filling to tie the whole thing together without it becoming overwhelming.

Overall, the bars went over well with the Cake Day crowd, and I was happy with how they turned out, even if I'd rather have baked an actual cake. The pecan bars were, however, not nearly as good as the Macadamia-Maple Sticky Bars, so I think I'll look to those again if I'm looking to make a caramel-nut flavored cookie. They're still in the top five of baked goods to come out of my kitchen this year, and while I'm glad to have satisfied my curiosity about Martha's pecan bars, I'll be sticking with what works from now on.

Pecan Bars

adapted from Martha Stewart

18 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

3/4 c. light brown sugar, firmly packed

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 c. all-purpose flour

8 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 c. light brown sugar, firmly packed

6 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 tablespoons heavy cream

1/4 teaspoon salt

8 oz pecan halves

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 375.

1. To make the crust: In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, mix butter and brown sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add salt, and mix to combine. Add flour 1 cup at a time, on medium speed, mixing until fully incorporated after each addition. Continue mixing until the dough begins to come together in large clumps.

2. Press dough about 1/4-inch thick into a 9-by-13-by-1-inch baking pan lined with parchment paper. Prick the pastry with the tines of a fork. Chill until firm, about 20 minutes. Bake until golden brown, 18 to 20 minutes. Transfer pan to a wire rack to cool completely

3. Reduce oven to 325 degrees. To make the filling: Place butter, brown sugar, honey, granulated sugar, heavy cream, and salt in a medium saucepan over high heat. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly until mixture coats the back of a spoon, about 1 minute. Remove pan from heat; stir in nuts and vanilla.

4. Pour filling onto the cooled crust. Bake until filling bubbles, 15 to 20 minutes. Carefully transfer pan to a wire rack to cool completely. Run a paring knife around edges of the pan, and pull parchment to remove to a cutting board. Peel off the parchment, leaving the pastry filling side up. Use a sharp knife to cut into 1-by-3-inch bars. Store in an airtight container up to 1 week.

No Holds Barred...

People often like to say that cooking is an art, and baking is a science. Cooking is more forgiving; you rely on your instincts to add a bit of this and a bit of that to balance flavors and create the kind of dish you're looking for. Baking is exact; chemicals interact in certain ways to create lift, tenderness, and moisture. If you're going to start making substitutions in your baked goods, you better know what you're doing, or you'll more than likely end up with something too bland, too dry, too dense, too tough, or some other kind of wrong. This is often the problem encountered by people trying to create their own reduced-fat recipes for cakes and cookies. It doesn't help that you can't taste as you go along -- the baking process alone transforms a dough or batter so greatly that it's often impossible to predict how the finished product will taste until it is done.

The need for precision is actually one of the primary things I like about baking. If you start with a decent recipe, if you follow everything exactly, you end up with a reasonably tasty end result. There's something reassuring about that to me. I can control how well I measure my ingredients, how long I mix a dough, and how long I leave something in the oven. When everything else in my life feels like it is veering wildly out of control, baking is often where I turn as a source of solace.

I'm more than a little overwhelmed about the prospect of my upcoming move. Change is ultimately good, and I am definitely excited to be creating a home to share with the man I love, but I seriously have a TON of stuff. All those belongings need to be sorted, purged, and packed. It feels like an insurmountable amount to accomplish, though I know I will tackle it eventually. I'm also facing a dizzying amount of decisions about paint, furniture, and decorating. I do love that sort of thing, and I've long been looking forward to designing a space that is properly mine, but that doesn't make it any less stressful. Generally speaking, I just feel like I have a lot on my plate right now.

That's why I felt that familiar urge to bake something tonight. I grabbed Martha's reliable tome off the shelf and flipped through it till I found a recipe that called for melted butter, so I wouldn't have to wait for it to come to room temperature before I could get started -- the baking needed to happen now. Blondies aren't necessarily my favorite, but I had all the ingredients on hand and they would come together quickly, so I opted for Martha's Brown-Butter Toffee Blondies. 

I've had mixed results with brown butter in the past and I kind of don't understand what the big deal about it is, other than that it makes your kitchen smell ungodly amazing when you make it. I don't really pick up on the flavor of it in the finished cookies, but it did produce perhaps the most fragrant cookie dough I've ever made, so that could be worth the effort unto itself. Thankfully, the finished cookies turned out to be chewy in texture, rather than the "cakey and tender" promised by Martha. I really prefer chewy as a cookie texture any day. Even with one and half teaspoons of salt, I felt the recipe could have used more, but then again, I've always been a fan of the salty/sweet interplay in my baked goods. 

Really though, the cookies being tasty wasn't the point. I felt better after baking them, so the experience was more about the therapeutic value of the process than the end result for me. I'm sure, however, that the coworkers who will benefit from them at the office will readily endorse my chosen form of therapy...

Brown-Butter Toffee Blondies

adapted from Martha Stewart

1 1/4 c. unsalted butter

2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 c. light brown sugar, firmly packed

1/2 c. granulated sugar

3 large eggs

2 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 c. chopped walnuts

1 c. toffee bits

Preheat oven to 350.

1. Spray a 9x13 inch baking pan with Pam. Line the pan with parchment paper, and spray with Pam with Flour.

2. In a saucepan over medium heat, cook the butter until it turns golden brown and smells like toasted hazelnuts; remove from heat, and let cool. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl and set aside.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine browned butter and both sugars; stir with a wooden spoon until combined. Attach bowl to mixer; add eggs. Using the paddle attachment, beat on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add vanilla, and beat to combine. Add flour mixture, walnuts, and toffee bits. Mix until thoroughly combined, and pour into prepared pan.

4. Bake until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 35 to 40 minutes (do not overbake). Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before pulling out of pan onto a cutting board. Peel off parchment paper; cut blondies as desired.

Pucker Up...

As a general rule of thumb, I do not much enjoy being outside, especially in the summer when the weather is hot and sticky. I'm not exactly sure how people survived in the days before air conditioning, but I'm happy to have been born into the era of central air. Otherwise, I would have had to pursue science as a career track, so I could spend my life engaged in research in Antarctica.

Nevertheless, for some reason, I really enjoy picnics. I loved them when I was little, and my mom would fill up a cooler with special treats, pack up an old Native American blanket she'd purchased long before I was born, and take me to the park to eat and play. In college, my friends and I made a tradition of having a picnic every year, often in old, dilapidated cemeteries around St. Louis. I've tried to maintain that tradition on my own, and I've been moderately successful with making it to Grant Park for an annual alfresco dining experience. Justin and I even went on a picnic on our second date.

Tomorrow, I'm meeting Mireya, Natasha, and Natasha's family for my annual pilgrimage to the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park for a free concert, so it seemed only right to combine a picnic with the evening's events. Naturally, I assumed responsibility for dessert production, but with my self-imposed moratorium on Martha Stewart, I had to look elsewhere for inspiration. I settled on a recipe I'd bookmarked from one of my favorite food sites, Serious Eats. They have a seemingly ever-expanding roster of authors contributing there, and have recently launched a dessert-focused subsection called "Sweets," where I'd spotted a recipe for Lemon Ginger Bars. Since I've become a convert to the ease of baking bar cookies, I was saving this recipe for just the right occasion.

As it turns out, Natasha is a huge fan of ginger (I've used her as a guinea pig for my last two ginger-centric baking experiments), and Justin loves lemon, so I figured this picnic gathering was the perfect opportunity to test this recipe. Despite making a rookie mistake when I turned the bars out of their baking pan that resulted in them shattering into a dozen or so irregular shards, the resulting cookie shrapnel turned out delicious, if somewhat unattractive by my usual standards. Not being a fan of lemon myself, I preferred the bits that had less glaze, as the bars themselves have a subtle hint of lemon flavor from the included zest, while the majority of the lemon punch comes from the topping. The cookies are warm from the ginger, with an occasional kick from the chunks of crystallized ginger, in addition to being pleasantly soft and buttery.

Besides being quite tasty (which is hard for me to admit, as a self-identifying hater of lemon-flavored desserts), this recipe came together quickly, which I also appreciated. They'll definitely be a strong contender for the citrus cookie category in this year's Cookie Bonanza come December. Until then, consider giving them a try of your own.


Lemon Ginger Bars
adapted from Nick Malgieri

Bars
2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
3/4 c. sugar
2 tablespoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 large egg
1/4 c. crystallized ginger, finely chopped
2 tablespoons honey
2 teaspoons lemon zest

Lemon Glaze
2 c. powdered sugar, sifted
3 tablespoons freshly-squeezed lemon juice, plus extra if needed

Preheat oven to 375. Line a 9x13-inch jelly roll pan with foil and spray with Pam.
1. Mix the flour, sugar, ginger, and baking powder in a medium bowl.
2. Melt the butter in a glass container in the microwave, and immediately add to the dry ingredients. Use a rubber spatula to stir into a smooth, shiny dough. Add the egg, crystallized ginger, honey, and lemon zest, beating vigorously until smooth.
3. Press the dough into the prepared pan, smoothing the surface with the palms of your hands.
4. Bake the bars until well-risen, golden brown, and firm, about 20-25 minutes.
5. While the bars are baking, combine the lemon juice and powdered sugar. Add additional lemon juice to thin to a spreadable consistency, if needed.
6. As soon as the bars are baked, remove from the oven. Place a cooling rack on top of the pan and invert, removing the foil. Pour the glaze over the bars, spreading to coat, and allow to cool completely before cutting into 2-inch squares.

Sticky Sweet...

Good things come to those who wait. And I don't just say that because I technically baked these cookies with Katherine on Monday night, the first evening she was in town, and didn't get around to blogging about them now. I say that mostly because I've been waiting to bake these cookies basically ever since I first got my copy of Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats to Bake and Share three years ago. The recipe, and accompanying photo, for Macadamia-Maple Sticky bars practically leapt off the page at me and screamed, "BAKE ME!!!" At the time, I'd never baked a bar cookie and wasn't even particularly fond of them as a genre, (though I've since overcome that aversion), but the pairing of my beloved maple flavoring with chewy caramel, crunchy nuts, and buttery shortbread, was too much to pass up.

However, due to no fault of my own, pass on it I did. You see, the recipe calls for maple sugar, which I had an endlessly difficult time locating in the Midwest. It's a far more common ingredient on the East Coast, where they manufacture maple syrup and other maple products, but around here, it's either considered a gourmet ingredient or a health food -- an alternative for those who turn up their nose at refined sugar. (Honestly though, I haven't the faintest idea how you could argue that maple sugar is somehow more natural than white sugar; both products undergo quite a bit of refinement to make it to the shelf. Chemically, it's composed of sucrose, just like white sugar. I don't understand health food folks.)

In the past three years, I managed to locate maple sugar exactly once, at Fox & Obel, my favorite gourmet food shop, but it was too expensive at the time for me to justify purchasing it for one recipe. When I went back, resolved to purchase it despite the expense, I found they no longer stocked it. I tried looking at Whole Foods, but every time I remembered to check, it was sold out. However, just when I was starting to consider the recipe a lost cause, Katherine asked if she could bring me some maple sugar as a hostess gift when she came to visit me last week. She'd originally wanted to bring maple syrup, but as a liquid, it never would have made it on the plane, and maple sugar seemed like the next best thing for bringing me a piece of the Northeast. Of course, given my struggles, I readily agreed.

Since an embarrassing percentage of my freezer space is given to nuts that I've found on sale and saved for later baking experiments (it's entirely possible that I may have been a squirrel in a previous life), I had all the other ingredients I needed to make these bars on hand, and I thought it would be nice to bake them with Katherine, not only because she provided the crucial missing ingredient, but because we always enjoyed baking together when we used to be roommates. It turned out to be the perfect project for us, as I prefer cookie baking, and Katherine has recently developed an interest in candy making.

Ultimately, the cookies turned out perfectly. In a rookie move, I failed to read the recipe carefully and ended up adding an extra half-teaspoon of salt to the cookie base, but ultimately, I think the extra saltiness added a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the topping. These bars, though messy to eat, are by far, the best cookies to come out of my kitchen since the rugelach I made in March. I took the leftovers with me to Grandma's house over the weekend, where they even garnered her approval. In fact, I think she ate three of them herself. Given that Grandma Betsy has always been the baker in the family, perhaps this is a sign that the student is slowly becoming the master after all...

Star Wars references aside, I think you need to make these cookies. They do sell maple sugar on the internet, and now that I know this recipe is a keeper, I'll be buying it online in the future once I use up the rest of my gift from Katherine. It'll be so worth it!


Macadamia-Maple Sticky Bars
adapted from Martha Stewart

1/2 c. plus 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 c. coarsely chopped macadamia nuts, toasted
1/4 c. plus 3 tablespoons light brown sugar
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup
1/4 c. plus 1 1/2 teaspoons maple sugar
2 tablespoons light corn syrup
3 tablespoons heavy cream

Preheat oven to 350.
1. Butter a 8 inch square baking pan; line with parchment paper, allowing 2-inch overhang on two sides. Butter lining (not overhang).
2. Whisk together flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 cup nuts in a bowl.
3. Put 1/2 c. butter and 1/4 c. brown sugar into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment; mix on medium speed until pale and fluffy. Mix in flour mixture and 1 teaspoon maple syrup. Press dough evenly into bottom of prepared pan. Refrigerate 30 minutes.
4. Bake until set in center and pale golden, 22 to 25 minutes. Transfer to wire rack; let cool slightly.
5. Put remaining 6 tablespoons butter and 1/2 c. nuts into a small saucepan. Cook over medium-high heat stirring constantly, until butter is very foamy and nuts are fragrant, 2 to 3 minutes. Add remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, 3 tablespoons brown sugar, 1 teaspoon maple syrup, maple sugar, corn syrup, and cream. Boil, stirring constantly, 2 minutes.
6. Spread over crust. Let cool completely. Run a knife around non-parchment sides; life out of dish using overhang. Cut into 16 2-inch squares. Bars can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature up to 3 days.

Raising the Bar...

As much as I love to bake cookies (and if the 30 posts tagged "cookies" here is any indicator, that would be a whole heck of a lot), I must admit that I am not a equal cookie opportunist. Indeed, there is one type of cookie that I never make -- bar cookies. Although many fantastic bakers, my grandma included, prefer bars for their speed and simplicity, for me, a cookie isn't a cookie unless it's shaped and baked as its own separate entity. This adds considerable time and effort to the baking process, as only 10-12 cookies fit on a sheet at a given time, so they must be baked in multiple batches. Bar cookies, however, are baked all at once and cut into single portion sizes, which makes them much faster. Although adding a bar cookie to my Cookie Bonanza lineup would free up time to dedicate to something else, I had still never really entertained the idea until this week.

Recently, I had traveled to Whole Foods in search of short-grain brown rice in their bulk section. I'd already torn off a bag, but was unable to locate the grain I was looking for, despite the presence of copious more obscure items. Feeling guilty about wasting a plastic bag at the bastion of sustainability, I looked around for something else to find when I located crystallized ginger at a price per pound that was lower than what I had paid for the tiny glass jar I'd previously had in my pantry. I picked up a pound for the heck of it, figuring I'd find some sort of Christmas cookie recipe to use it in.

The crystallized ginger sat in its baggie in the cabinet for a week, until I needed a treat to bring along to a picnic I was going to today. However, given the time restrictions of my over-scheduled weekend, I needed something I could bake in advance on Friday night that would hold up until Sunday. Drawn, as ever, to Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats To Bake and to Share for inspiration, I found a recipe for Iced Hermits, a bar cookie that hails from the East Coast, that were originally baked by sailors' wives for their husbands to take on long voyages. Not only did they have a good shelf life, the recipe called for crystallized ginger; my mind was made up.


I did make one major change to the recipe -- I substituted dried apples for Martha's suggestion of raisins. For me, raisins are a food I would rather eat plain than as an ingredient in something else. If I ever encounter them in a baked good, I always pick them out. To top the bars, I followed Martha's instructions to the letter, icing them with a drizzle of brown sugar glaze (which was so tasty even I liked it, and I almost always find glazes and icings to be cloyingly sweet), and a sprinkling of additional crystallized ginger. Annoyingly, the extra ginger did not adhere well to the icing at all, making the cookies messy and difficult to transport. Also, I found the ginger flavor in the cookies to be a little overpowering, so I resolved to leave the extra ginger off the cookies the next go around.

And there will almost certainly be another go around for these cookies, which received an overwhelmingly positive response from everyone I shared them with. Granted, some of them were avowed fans of ginger, but once I brushed the surplus ginger off, even I liked the spicy punch of these cookies. The make-in-advance capability for this recipe also gives it definite appeal for the holiday season. In my experience, the longer the cookies sat, the softer and more intensely flavored they became. I think I might have found this year's spice cookie for my giveaway...


Iced Hermits

adapted from Martha Stewart

For bars:

1/2 c. unsalted butter, softened

1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 tablespoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon cloves

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/8 teaspoon mace

3/4 c. dried apples, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

1/2 c. candied ginger, cut into 1/4 inch pieces

1/4 c. unsulfured molasses

1 large egg plus 1 large egg yolk

1 1/4 c. packed dark brown sugar

For icing:

1/4 c. packed light brown sugar

2 tablespoons milk, plus more if needed

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 c. powdered sugar, sifted, plus more if needed

1. Make bars: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 10-by-15-inch rimmed baking sheet with Pam. Line bottom with parchment paper, and spray parchment; set aside. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, ground ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt, pepper, cloves, and mace in a medium bowl; set aside.

2. Put butter in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Beat on medium speed until smooth. Add sugar; mix until pale and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Mix in egg and yolk, and molasses. Reduce speed to low; gradually mix in flour mixture. Mix in 1/2 cup candied ginger and the dried apples.
3. With moistened hands, spread dough evenly onto prepared baking sheet. Bake, rotating sheet halfway through, until firm, 18 to 22 minutes. Let cool completely in baking sheet on a wire rack.
4. Make icing: Put brown sugar, milk, and butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until butter has melted and sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat; whisk in vanilla and confectioners sugar. If icing is too thick to drizzle, stir in more milk, a teaspoon at a time. If icing is too thin, stir in more confectioners sugar, a teaspoon at a time. Let cool slightly.
5. Drizzle bars with icing. Let stand until icing has set, about 15 minutes. Cut into 2-inch squares. Bars can be stored in single layers in airtight containers at room temperature up to 5 days.