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Still no oven, and so no baking. But these cookies look delicious (especially the chocolate variation!), so please go check out everyone else’s!

I make pies every year for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Always the Chocolate Silk Pie from The Mystic Seaport Cookbook, by Lillian Langseth-Christensen, which is stunningly good. (See recipe at the bottom of this post). And always a pecan pie. I’ve tried various recipes over the years, including chocolate versions. Most have been good, but not sublime.

This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe is a combination of pumpkin and pecan pies, with a layer of pumpkin topped by a layer of pecan.

I made my own crust. I swear I did. It came together beautifully in the food processor and rolled out like a dream. (And I really hate rolling out dough.) My latest crisis is that my oven died. (Well, to be technically correct, the bulb in the oven light cracked, and when we attempted to remove it, it shattered. So we can’t get the base out, and we decided the safest thing was just to unplug the damn thing. So now I have to light the burners with a match, and the oven is verboten.

So I made this beautiful crust, and then I put it in this little counter-top convection oven I got through Freecycle. I tested the oven first, making mini-versions of Dorie’s Favorite Pecan Pie (best pie on the planet, and my new go-to pecan pie recipe) and a test version of the rolls I was going to bake for Thanksgiving. Both worked fine. But the full-size pie crust — complete with aluminum foil and pie weights — was a complete disaster. It melted and shrank down in the plate, and I had to toss the whole thing.

So this beautiful Thanksgiving Twofer Pie is nestled snugly in a store-bought frozen crust. Mea culpa.

So while Husband went to the store for the crust, I mixed the pumpkin half and the pecan half. Easy as pie, as they say. Then we carted everything next door to my very obliging neighbor’s house, where I assembled the pie and stuck it in her oven. I gave it 10 minutes at 450 (although I have no idea whether the oven was even close to accurate; it’s in a rental apartment and doesn’t get much use) and then 45 at 350. The knife came out clean, but I was dubious: I can never tell when pies are done; it’s the bane of my holiday baking life.

Looked pretty, though.

This pie was not a hit with us on Thanksgiving. No one had more than a bite or two. To be fair, none of us particularly likes pumpkin pie, either, and we all love pecan. Herewith, the verdicts:

Husband: I actually prefer it to straight pumpkin pie, because I think the pecans add a nice meaty kind of flavor, but it’s not great overall.

#1 Son: I did not like it. The pecans were sort of a nonentity; there was a certain sweetness to them in the pie, but they didn’t really add anything. It felt very typical. For me, not a win. Additionally, it kind of looked like baby food in a pie crust, kind of brown and globby. It’s really unappealing.

#2 Son: This is the first pie that you made that I really didn’t like. I couldn’t taste the pecans at all, and the pumpkin was kind of weird tasting.

There was, needless to say, quite a bit left over, and we brought it home with us from the in-laws’. We arrived home around 5 on Friday evening, and pie was on the dinner menu. It proved more popular this time around:

Husband, second day: I still didn’t like it.

#1 Son: When I tried it again later, it was actually very tasty. The pecan removed the elements of pumpkin pie I didn’t like. The presentation was still awful.

#2 Son: Chilled, it tastes a lot better. It could be because I haven’t eaten anything else before it. The cold pecans are really good with the cold pumpkin.

Check out how the hundreds of other TWD bakers fared with the Thanksgiving Twofer at Tuesdays With Dorie, and if you want to try it yourself, Vibi over at La Casserole Carrée has the recipe (and a chance to practice your French, if you’d like, although it’s not necessary!). Happy Thanksgiving!

And if you want to try the chocolate pie I made (which is completely gone, as always!), here it is:

Chocolate Silk Pie (from The Mystic Seaport Cookbook, by Lillian Langseth-Christensen)

1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
1 baked pie shell (I use a Keebler graham crust; shhh — don’t tell anyone)
1 cup heavy cream, whipped
1/2 cup shaved chocolate curls (you can use a carrot peeler)

Cream butter and sugar. Add chocolate and vanilla and mix well. Add eggs, one at a time, beating on high for 5 minutes after each. Spoon into crust and level. Chill until set. When set, top with whipped cream and shaved chocolate, making it look as pretty as you’d like.

It’s chocolate heaven.

And as a bonus, here’s my dog, Brava, who is loving my father-in-law’s acre of grass:

I love chocolate. I really love chocolate. Chocolate candy, chocolate frosting, chocolate sorbet, chocolate pudding, hot chocolate. But oddly, I’m less fond of chocolate cake (and chocolate ice cream). Go figure. So when I looked at this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe I figured I’d love the ganache, but the cake would be kind of eh.

Now, Friday was a bit tense around here. Errands took insanely long, and there was this chicken to be disjointed. (See Friday’s post if you care.) So I kind of rushed the cupcakes into the oven, and as part of that ill-conceived rushing I failed to read the entire recipe before starting. So everything was mixed exactly right, including the dry ingredients (which you never want to do until right before the cake goes into the oven, of course), when I discovered I needed 2 ounces of bittersweet chocolate, melted and cooled.

Oops.

So there was a bit of a delay, and the chocolate (when it went in) was perhaps not quite as cooled as the term “cooled” might imply.

I don’t know if that actually affected anything, although #1 Son issued all sorts of dire warnings about melted butter and screwed-up texture.

So I baked the cupcakes and cooled them, and when they were cool I stuck a cake decorator into the top and gave each one a shot of Marshmallow Fluff. (The recipe suggests doing that from the bottom, but then I’d have to have taken them out of the cupcakes papers, and I didn’t wanna.) The ganache (the yummy, yummy ganache) covered the Fluff completely, and so it came as a lovely surprise when the family bit in. We had some Edy’s cherry chocolate chip ice cream alongside, which was the perfect complement.

The verdicts?

Husband: Structurally, they were just gorgeous. That ganache on top was lustrous. I don’t think the Fluff added much to the taste, but it was a great throwback to cream-filled Tastykakes. The cupcake itself was really good.
#1 Son: They were good. The Fluff was kind of a nonentity, but it was fun. The flavor was good, but a little blunt, not a whole lot of depth or subtlety. It was good with the cherry ice cream.
#2 Son: The ganache was really good, very melt-in-your-mouth. The cupcake was good. It was delightfully cakey, and the Marshmallow Fluff was a pleasant surprise.

I thought the cake was dry — I never really like cake. It’s just an icing delivery system. The Fluff moistened it up quite a bit. And the ganache, as previously mentioned, was yummy.

The cupcakes looked pretty, and if I ever for some reason needed chocolate cupcakes, I’d certainly consider using these.

f you want to see what all the other TWD bloggers did with this recipe, check out the blogroll. And if you want to try them yourself (use the Fluff, or maybe some pastry cream or even jelly!), Clara will have the recipe here. (It’s not too late to make them for Halloween!)

The first cookbook I bought as a semi-adult was The Mystic Seaport Cookbook by Lillian Langseth-Christensen. It’s out of print now, but Amazon has 27 used copies. (Husband, then Boyfriend, and I bought it on our first road trip together, to Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. I guess it says something about us that that’s where we chose for our first road trip.)

I haven’t used it much over the years, although at least twice a year I make its Chocolate Silk Pie, which is, without exaggeration or hyperbole, the best pie in the world. But one thing I used to make fairly frequently and haven’t for many years is  the Chicken Pie with Cheese Crust. Husband and I both remember it fondly, although #1 Son doesn’t remember it at all, which tells you how long it’s been since I’ve made it. So when I decided to make it this week, I was worried: Would it live up to our memories, or were we going to be disappointed and lose yet another piece of our youth?

I won’t keep you in suspense: It was every bit as good as we remembered: chunks of chicken and potatoes immersed in an amazing gravy. It’s the apotheosis of comfort food. (And it’s even better cold. #1 Son just came in and hugged me in gratitude because he had a bite now that it’s been sitting for a couple of hours.)

I had a farmers market chicken in the freezer, so I defrosted that overnight, dreading the job of disjointing it for the pot. And then this morning at Trader Joe’s, I noticed whole kosher chickens, already helpfully disjointed and wrapped in cellophane. I’ll remember for the next time.

The morning got away from me yet again, and we wound up not getting home from all the errands till 2. #1 Son generously offered to stay home from his teen group meeting in the city to help me, and I happily took him up on it. (Somewhat to his chagrin, I think, but he was great about it.) So I handed him the chicken and a few knives and told him to go at it, and go at it he did. The learning curve was steep, but in the end I had a bunch of chicken pieces in my four-quart pot.

And then began the four-hour process of making this stew. I will type up the recipe tomorrow, but I wanted to get this published before a whole week went by again (as it did before I published last week’s Friday entry, which despite its date was actually published about 10 minutes ago.

I had forgotten how long and labor-intensive this is. I suppose it’s like giving birth — if women remembered what it was like, every child would be an only child. I’m going to make notes in the book this time, so we won’t wind up eating at 7:30 next time.

And if you’re having anything with gravy, there must be biscuits. I have discovered Heather’s Buttermilk Biscuits, the Only Right Way, and she’s not kidding. If you’re going to make biscuits, make these. Light, fluffy, perfect.

Dessert was once again Dorie. Tune in Tuesday for details!

This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Lenox Almond Biscotti, and we liked them a lot. They were softer than the biscotti I’m used to, the kind you have to dunk into coffee or risk breaking your teeth. There’s cornmeal in them, which gives them an interesting texture, and lots of almond extract. I was actually worried about using so much, because most recipes call for just a quarter or half teaspoon, but it worked, and it worked well.

I had some bananas quickly heading toward rot, so I made David Lebovitz‘s Roasted Banana Ice Cream (from Perfect Scoop; if you make ice cream at home, you must acquire this book) to go with the biscotti. We also had some caramel sauce left over from last week’s TWD adventure.

I did not write this post on Saturday, as I usually do (we spent the day in Manhattan! it was fun!), so I don’t have a full family interview this time. (Two are still asleep; one’s getting ready to go to work.) I’ll try to fill in their opinions later,

I did ask #1 Son for his pithy quote last night:

#1 Son: Good almond flavor, chewy texture. Not at all like the biscotti you get in coffee shops, which are as hard as rocks.

Update:

Husband: They were a little uneven in terms of their texture, but very tasty. They were brittle on the ends and little toothier in the middle. I prefer them that way, actually. And they were really delicious.

#2 Son: I liked how they were slightly chewy and the almond flavor. They were very good with the ice cream.

So these are a keeper. If you want to try them yourself, head on over to Canela and Comino, where Gretchen has the recipe and quite a few delicious-looking variations. And check out what all the other TWD bloggers did with these at Tuesdays With Dorie. You’ll see all kinds of creative changes to this recipe, I predict.

This week’s TWD recipe is Crème Brûlée. It needs a blowtorch. Much to the dismay of #1 Son, who has been looking for an excuse to make crème brûlée for well over a year now, I could not justify spending $32 for a blowtorch at Wegman’s last week, and Target doesn’t carry them.

However, now that I’m writing this I finally went to the Tuesdays With Dorie page and read all the comments there, and it turns out I could have found a much cheaper torch had I shopped around a bit (I hate shopping), and that I could have caramelized the sugar under the broiler instead. But I didn’t, and it’s too late now. Sorry, #1 Son. It also turns out I could have made something else from Baking: From My Home to Yours. Anything I wanted! And had a good excuse!!! But again, I failed.

So, if you want to read about some yummy and no doubt gorgeous crème brûlée, check out all the other TWD bloggers. And if you happen to have a blowtorch and want to try it yourself, the recipe will be posted at Mevrouw Cupcake.

Yay! No fruit! (Or, to be precise, no identifiable bits of fruit!) This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie pick (courtesy of Ashlee of A Year In The Kitchen; head on over there if you’d like the recipe) had a much subtler fruit presence than most of the recent recipes. It’s essentially a banana pound cake; half of the batter is mixed with chocolate, then the yellow and brown batters are swirled to make a lovely marble cake.

My ongoing issue with loaf pans (9×5? 8×4? who knows?) led to this being baked in one of those disposable aluminum pans, whose label said quite clearly that it was 8×4 (and was bought for that very reason). But no, when measured (alas, too late), it turned out to be 7×3. There was spillage. (Which wasn’t terrible, because I scraped it up off the foil I had presciently put under the pan and ate it!)

So the finished cake was not the prettiest thing I ever made (although Sunday’s challah may have been), and I don’t think it was entirely baked in the middle. But it was delicious, especially drizzled with homemade chocolate syrup. Husband said it seemed more like a quick bread than a pound cake, but he’s insane. It wasn’t entirely pound cake-y, but I think that’s because it didn’t bake long enough.

A lot of comments on the TWD site mentioned that their batter was too runny for good marbling. I don’t know why that would be; mine was quite thick. (The photo is terrible — I enlisted #1 Son to shoot it, and there’s really no natural light in my kitchen — but it does show the consistency of the batter.)

The finished product was moist and dense and banana-y and chocolate-y and really all you could ask for in a cake. This one’s a keeper. Go and make it. Now. And check out everyone else’s versions at Tuesdays With Dorie.

We usually have a semi-fancy Friday dinner, our version of a Sabbath dinner. This week, because #2 Son was coming home from camp on Saturday, I postponed it. Then I remembered that #1 Son was going to a concert on Saturday, so I postponed it again. Which brings us to Sunday.

I often bake something for Sunday breakfast, and the presence of some Nova lox in the fridge reminded me that it’s been a while since I made bagels. I keep trying various recipes, seeking the überbagel — the mythical perfection that probably exists nowhere but in my mind. Today’s was pretty good, though; I got it here. I modified it a bit (thanks to the comments on the site), mixing a sponge the night before and adding brown sugar to the boiling water. The bagels were good, chewy and dense and almost right. I would make this recipe again, but next time I’ll make the dough and shape the bagels and let them sit in the fridge overnight like that — I think that might provide the last bit of awesome to the crust.

So then came the challah, for which I’ve also tried many recipes. This time I went for my reliable standard, from George Greenstein’s Secrets of a Jewish Baker (the original edition). I don’t know what the copyright issues are with posting recipes from a book; can anyone out there enlighten me? If it’s legal, I’d be glad to share. I must have been having a good day, because the loaves came out absolutely beautiful. (And the bread tasted pretty darn good, too!)

And then there was dessert, which was this week’s TWD. More on that on Tuesday!

Susan over at She’s Becoming DoughMESStic had the idea to get a few blogging bakers to send yummy things to her cousin’s unit in Iraq. Apparently, she underestimated the willingness of this slice of the blogging community to bake for a good cause (or a bad cause, or, really, no cause at all). The one-time thing has turned into a project, Operation Baking GALS (Give a Little Support). Check out the website, and feel free to join in.

Despite the name, my 16-year-old future Marine #1 Son offered to help out with this project. We chose two Dorie recipes (of course!): Oatmeal Spice Shortbreads and Brown Sugar-Pecan Shortbreads (although, necessity being the mother of substitution, ours are Brown Sugar-Almond Shortbreads). I wanted to stay away from chocolate and anything too crumbly, and I thought shortbread would survive the weeklong journey to the desert. I hope I was right.

So he made the dough and I baked it, and today we packed up five dozen cookies and sent them off. The whole packing/shipping thing was more involved than I realized, although had I actually thought about it a bit I would have realized it would be complex.

No matter. It was good, and we’ll do it again.