Month: September 2008

I wasn’t going to do Dorie this week. You know, the whole fruit thing. But yesterday was my mother’s birthday — and the first day of fall — so I figured that was a good enough reason to bake, even if there was fruit involved.

Unfortunately, I decided this after I had been to the farmers market on Saturday morning. Fortunately, I had bought nectarines. So I made Dimply Nectarine Cake. And it was good.

I made it Sunday night, because the recipe said the cake was moister the next day, and moist sounded good.

Because the nectarines were considerably larger than plums, I cut them into quarters rather than halves. Oh, and I left out the orange zest, because I didn’t have any oranges, and the cardomom, just because. Other than that, I made it as written.

Everyone really liked it. My mother and I had it plain, but it was apparently also good with ginger preserves (#1 Son):

and Greek yogurt (Husband):

and raspberry jelly (#2 Son, but no photo).

This was a good buffet-type cake: not too sweet, probably excellent with coffee. It wasn’t anything jaw-droppingly spectacular, but it’s an excellent recipe to have on hand when you need something a little unusual and not too labor-intensive.

If you’d like to try it yourself, Michelle will post the recipe over at Bake-En. And if you’d like to see the myriad variations that all the other TWD bakers come up with, check out the blog roll at Tuesdays With Dorie.

I’m late! I always get these posts done by 8 a.m. on Tuesday (well, usually over the weekend, with an automatic post at 8 a.m. on Tuesday). But it was a rough few days around here. I apologize to my thousands of early-bird readers who were disappointed this morning.

This week’s recipe was Chocolate Chunkers, chosen by Claudia of Fool for Food; she’ll have the recipe (in both English and German, most likely!) if you want to try them yourself.

I made these cookies in a rush, which is never a good way to do anything, on Friday morning before a picnic. There were going to be lots of people there, including lots of kids, and I thought it would be nice to have lots of people to eat these things, because otherwise we were going to wind up eating way, way, way too many.

The recipe calls for raisins. Anyone who has read more than a couple of my posts can predict that I left those out, much to the chagrin of #1 Son. I made half as written (using milk chocolate rather than white, because I forgot to buy white, and because I like milk better), except without the raisins, and added shredded sweetened coconut to the other half. Everything’s better with coconut, right?

Turns out, not these cookies. They were great without the coconut, really amazing, and just good with it.

They taste like little brownies, rich and moist and oh-so-chocolatey. All of four of us loved them, and all four of us preferred the non-coconut version (which didn’t prevent us from eating the coconut ones too, mind you!).

These were by far my favorite Dorie cookies so far.

With coconut:

And without:

Try them both ways. See which you prefer.

If you want to see what everyone else did with these, check them out at Tuesdays With Dorie.

Rough week here. But I couldn’t skip Dorie, now, could I? So I made the batter on Friday, amidst all the other goings-on, and managed to bake one batch of 12 before dinner. But that was it.

We ate a few after dinner on Friday, when they were meant to be our special Friday dessert, but we were all so tired by the time dinner was done that the sense of ceremony was lost.

And I didn’t have time to bake on Saturday, either. Once again, #1 Son to the rescue. He pointed out, quite rightly, that the batter was once again delicious. And that he had not been terribly impressed by the cookies. And that we had most of a carton of vanilla ice cream in the freezer, which had been intended to go with the cookies for Friday dessert.

The logical conclusion: Chocolate Whopper Malted Drops Dough Ice Cream!

The batter had been sitting in the fridge overnight, so it was pretty solid. I portioned it out into ice cream-appropriate bits and froze it for a couple of hours. Then I softened the ice cream in the food processor, à la the Chocolate-Banded Ice Cream Torte. Then I combined the two and stuck the result back in the freezer to harden.

It was a very good thing.

Comments on the cookies were as follows:

#1 Son: No depth of flavor — it didn’t taste like a malted-milk cookie. The Whoppers didn’t come through. But the dough was excellent, like chocolate frosting.

#2 Son: They’re just chocolate — you don’t really get anything else out of them.

Husband: I liked the soft and chewy texture, but the taste wasn’t particularly complex or interesting.

But everyone loved the batter in the ice cream, especially with Ovaltine sprinkled on top!

If you want to see what everyone else did with the actual cookies, head on over to Tuesdays With Dorie. And if you want to try them yourself, either as cookies or as batter — complete with raw eggs! — check out the recipe at Confessions of a Tangerine Tart (or, even better, buy the book!).

I’ve been making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for years, the ones from the Quaker Oats box. Everyone loves them, and I get requests for them from people I haven’t seen for months at a time. They’re really good.

All that is prelude to my saying that this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was for peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, taking mine just a bit further flavorwise. #2 Son helped out this time, making the batter completely on his own.

I refrigerated the batter for about three hours, and then scooped it out with my lovely little cookie scoop. (The batter, by the way, was really good. We ate more than was strictly a good idea.)

Baked them. Ate one. Wow. Warm chocolate chip cookies are one of the little pleasures of life.

But I couldn’t leave well enough alone. All the other TWD bakers have inspired me to push everything just a little further.

So I slapped some vanilla ice cream between a couple of cookies, and let me tell you, that was incredible.

I would have eaten most of the cookies myself, along with most of the ice cream, but luckily I had two extra 16-year-old boys here overnight (in addition to the usual one), and they polished off the couple of dozen cookies and nearly half a gallon of ice cream that were left after dinner.

But I would have.

Check out how far all the other TWD bakers pushed this recipe, and if you want to try it yourself, head on over to Proceed With Caution, where Stefany will have it all typed up for you.