Spicy Ginger Cookies

I was looking for a contrasting cookie to go with my "Christmas assortment" this year when I happened upon the recipe for Gingerbread Snowflakes in The Gourmet Cookbook (2004). These cookies are not very sweet, easy to make (you don't have to take out the mixer) and sturdy. This means that you can box them up and send them halfway around the world and they will hold up very nicely. Plus, I think they'll be impervious to kids grabbing and slathering them with icing straight from the tube. The recipe suggested icing them with royal icing, the egg white-based decorating icing, which I didn't do. Subsequently, the the first sheet of cookies didn't seem quite sweet enough, so I sprinkled the rest with granulated sugar. In the future, I might press on some coarse sugar crystals for a prettier cookie. These are a very straightforward kind of cookie.

Ingredients

2/3 cup molasses (not robust)
2/3 cup packed dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, cut into tablespoon bits
1 large egg
3 3/4 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Move oven racks to upper and lower thirds of the oven and preheat to 325 F.
Mix together molasses, brown sugar and spices in a large saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. My brown sugar was extremely hard but softened up eventually with the molasses and heat.

Stir in the baking soda. Now watch out - the mixture looks innocuous but will foam up to double its volume.


Add butter 3 pieces at a time and stir until melted fully each time.


Then add the eggs and stir. Add the salt and 3 3/4 cups of flour and mix completely to form what looks like gingerbread modelling clay.
Now at this point, the Gourmet recipe recommended kneading the dough until soft and easy to handle, while dusting with the remaining 1/4 cup of flour. I did knead the dough but did not require any extra flour. The dough handled very easily without the extra flour. Halve the dough, wrap one half in plastic wrap and keep at room temperature.
Roll out the remaining dough on a flour-dusted surface if required ( I didn't need extra flour) into a 14-inch round. Stamp out as many cookies as possible with cookie cutters. For my part, I found that I could fit a huge amount of stars in one round of rolling and cutting.
An offset spatula (pictured above) really comes in handy here for transferring cut cookies to the cookie sheet. As well, I find it useful to leave as much of the dough around the cut cookie as possible while transferring the cookie; this preserves the cut edge of the cookie and prevents it from getting too squashed while you are moving the uncooked cookie to the baking sheet.
Grease up your cookie sheet; my mother swears by bacon fat poured into a clean Campbell's soup tin, but I like to use the paper or foil the butter for the recipe was wrapped in. This is an efficient way to use up the tiny bits of butter still clinging to the wrapper. Transfer the uncooked cookies to 2 cookie sheets.
Put one pan of cookies on the top rack and the second pan to the bottom rack. Bake for 5-6 minutes, then switch positions and bake for 5-6 minutes more. Transfer cookies to racks to cool. Roll out remaining dough scraps and make more cookies. These cookies are crisp, dark, and full of warm spices that would snuggle up nicely beside a plate of buttery vanilla shortbread on a day when its freezing outside.

Pumpkin Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce

My friend Sarah, for some strange reason, loves getting up at 7 am, cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner from scratch, and feeding us, useless friend sad sacks who do nothing other than buy a couple of pints of ice cream and beer for dinner. She is truly a gem of a friend, one who must be savoured and held up as a prime example of a great pal. Her menus are always homey with a slight twist so that you never feel cheated of a traditional meal but are still startled ever so slightly out of your Thanksgiving rut before you settle comfortably back, relishing every bit. My ghostly longing for pumpkin pie was completely exorcised by this dessert, which is mainly wads of soft, spicy and custardy bread doused in caramel. It is incredibly, richly good. I also really think you should buy a pint of very creamy vanilla ice cream to melt over the top and steal bits of cold cream into your mouth along with the pumpkin-soaked bread. This recipe, with slight adaptation, comes from the Epicurious website.

Bread pudding
2 cups half and half
1 15-ounce can pure pumpkin
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
10 cups 1/2-inch cubes egg bread (about 10-ounces)
1/2 cup raisins

I actually baked a sweet egg bread in my bread maker for this recipe, since I knew I would have a hard time finding a nice challah-like bread at my grocery store. Overkill? Probably. But, honestly, it's really easy to bake up a loaf in a bread machine and it tastes so much better than those strange plastic loaves most of us have to deal with at the grocery store (as Nigella would say).

Caramel sauce
1 1/4 cups (packed) dark brown sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup whipping cream

For bread pudding: Preheat oven to 350°F. Whisk half and half, pumpkin, dark brown sugar, eggs, ginger, allspice, cloves, cinnamon and vanilla extract in large bowl to blend. Fold in bread cubes. Stir in golden raisins. Transfer mixture to 11x7-inch glass baking dish. Let stand 15 minutes.

Bake pumpkin bread pudding until tester inserted into center comes out clean, about 40 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare caramel sauce: Whisk brown sugar and butter in heavy medium saucepan over medium heat until butter melts. Whisk in cream and stir until sugar dissolves and sauce is smooth, about 3 minutes. I actually cooked the sauce for much longer, maybe 10 minutes. It thickened a little more but seemed relatively unaffected.

Serve warm with caramel sauce.

Rugelach

I am not Jewish. I never met anyone Jewish till I was 20, and I never tasted rugelach until I was 29. Still, I feel that home cooking is as good as a newspaper for glimpsing into a culture, and rugelach beckoned to me. They are slightly tart, tender pastry twists encircling fillings as varied as raisin, apricot, walnut and chocolate. It's strange making food that you know other people are intimately familiar with. They know how much filling to put inside, how to shape them, and how long to bake them. I was in the dark, except for the lost memory of the rugelach I tasted, and some pictures I pulled up on my computer. Rugelach, however, seemed to be a very forgiving type of holiday food. No matter my lack of knowledge, they rolled out agreeably, encased the filling with aplomb, and baked up flaky, golden, and in abundance. This recipe is one for date-walnut rugelach pulled from the Epicurious website. I made two batches of dough. For the first batch, I omitted the walnuts because my husband is allergic to them and substituted additional dates instead. I also reduced the sugar because dates are quite sweet enough and added extra vanilla because I like the fragrance. For the second batch, I became more fanciful: I used a filling of raspberry jam, grated orange peel and almond extract, then dipped the tops in orange sugar. For my part, I liked the date ones the best: they were mildly tart and tender, but with a mysterious, evocative and ancient flavor.

Dough:
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Confectioners' sugar for rolling dough
For the dough, I softened the butter in the microwave - ten seconds per stick (make sure they're wrapped in paper). Don't put the butter right in the center; the microwave will melt a hole right down the middle. The Epicurious recipe instructed me to sift the flour before measuring, but who has time for that kind of thing? I added my flour unsifted. As well, the Epicurious recipe said to mix up the dough in a food processor, but I don't have one. I used my mixer instead to cream the butter and cream cheese together, then added the flour and salt. After you're done mixing up your dough, shape it into a log, wrap it in plastic wrap, and stick it in the fridge for at least 4 hours and up to 1 day.

Filling 1 (for 1 batch of dough):
12 ounces pitted dates (about 1 3/4 cups) 1/4 cup granulated sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon vanilla

Finely chop dates, stir in sugar, cinnamon and vanilla till well combined.

Cinnamon sugar topping:
1/2 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon

Mix together sugar and cinnamon.

Filling 2 (for 1 batch of dough):
1 cup raspberry jam (mine had seeds)
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 teaspoon almond extract
Grated peel from half an orange

Mix together all ingredients.

Orange sugar topping:
1/2 cup sugar
Grated peel from half an orange

Mix together sugar and orange peel.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove dough from refrigerator and cut into 8 equal pieces. Dust your work surface and rolling pin with confectioners' sugar and roll out one piece into an 8-inch round. It takes a while for the dough to warm up sufficiently enough to roll out easily, so be patient. Cut the circle into 8 wedges. Now grab 1/4 cup of date filling or 2 tablespoons raspberry jam and distribute evenly around the circle, 1 inch from the outer edge.

Above: Unrolled date rugelach

Above: Unrolled raspberry rugelach

Roll up each wedge from the outer edge to the point to make a tiny croissant. I was supposed to turn under the outside edges to enclose the filling, but I forgot and some of the jam spilled out while baking. Oh well. Dip the tops of the rolls in the sugar topping and line up in satisfying rows on your cookie sheet. Now bake your rugelach by first putting your cookie sheet in the lower third of the oven for 7 to 10 minutes. Then transfer the cookie sheet to the top third of the oven for 7 to 10 minutes. Transfer to racks to cool completely. These also freeze very well, so stash some away for when unexpected guests stop by around teatime.

Above: Baked Date Rugelach

Above: Baked Raspberry Orange Rugelach

The Cheese Board Cookbook

I love cookbooks - mostly as a nice thing to read before drifting off to sleep. When I was a kid, I used to keep The Joy of Cooking beside my pillow and dreamed of dressing squirrels and angels on horseback (oysters wrapped in bacon on toast rounds). I generally did not use my cookbooks for actual cooking, but relied instead on the cook-as-artist's method of inspiration drawn from cookbooks plus constant tasting. One day, however, my husband bought me The Cheeseboard cookbook "The Cheese Board Collective Works". For those who have never heard of The Cheeseboard Collective, it is a worker-owned and -operated bakery, pizzeria, and cheese shop in Berkeley, California in which all members have equal decision-making power. Sadly, I have never been to The Cheeseboard, which is strange because I live maybe forty minutes away. In lieu of eating at The Cheeseboard, I have found that The Cheeseboard Cookbook is a superior cookbook. Everything I have cooked from it tastes unbelievably delicious. The chocolate chip scones are gigantic, flaky, buttery, and studded with bitter bits of chocolate. My cousin keeps asking for the corn cherry scones, which are slightly sweet, crispy with cornmeal, and tender within from buttermilk. Their recipe for sourdough starter worked like a dream for me, despite starting my culture with white whole wheat flour instead of organic rye flour. The baguettes were beautifully sour and chewy, with large holes and a very thick deep brown crust. The piece de resistance was when I used some of the master sourdough dough to make their tomato pizza with lemon zest. The mozzarella formed a thick chewy layer under the meaty plum tomatoes, set off by a thinly browned crust of mozzarella and crumbles of feta over top. After it came out of the oven, I brushed the crust with garlic oil and shaved lemon zest over top. In addition, I shaved Asiago cheese and crumbled fresh thyme instead of cilantro over all. I did this because I dislike cilantro in my food unless it is Indian or Mexican. I then squeezed fresh lemon juice on the pizza and served it with lemon wedges on the side. My husband gave it the highest compliment: he proclaimed it the best pizza he had ever tasted. And it truly was: a sour, chewy, crisp crust with sweet tomatoes, melted salty cheese, briny lemon and earthy herbs. It was the utmost compliment coming from a fella who would normally take a slice of Hawaiian pizza any day.

Caramel Rice Krispie Marshmallow Beasts

In high school, my best friend's mom was the best cook and a crack baker. She made the best school lunches - tomato AND mushroom soup, the creamiest Kraft Dinner - that's Kraft macaroni and cheese, and boiled hot dogs. All this while watching The Flintstones on their cushy beige velvet couch. I'm not sure why her soups tasted so good, since our moms all cooked the same Campbell's soup for lunches. It had something to do with the old balloon whisk and whole milk she mixed hers up with. One day she popped open her Tupperware container and gave me a gigantic marshmallow bristling with Rice Krispies. I bit into its belly gingerly. The taste was like sweet, smooth and crisp, with a deeply golden milk flavor surrounding a sweet puff of nothing. They were the product of unwrapping a pound of Kraft caramels and melting a can of condensed milk into them, then coating marshmallows with the caramel and rolling them around in a plate of Rice Krispies. I never forgot that milky caramel flavor, so I dipped and rolled a batch. They are a bit fussy to make, but they freeze well and are delicious beasts indeed.


1 16 oz. package of large marshmallows (stash them in the freezer overnight for easier dipping)
1 16 oz. package of caramels (Kraft, which come in 16 oz. bags, or Brach's, which come in 11 oz. bags. I think Brach's caramels have a richer, milkier taste)
1 14 oz. can of condensed milk
1/4 c. butter
Rice Krispies to coat (about half of an 18 oz. box)

Stick some Rice Krispies into a container with high sides. I used a loaf pan, which preventing cereal escaping all over the floor. Stash the caramels, condensed milk, and butter in a smallish saucepan that is deep enough for dipping and melt over low heat.

It's difficult to stir at first but make the effort as the mixture burns easily. When the caramel is completely liquid, switch the heat to the minimum and give it a stir once in a while in between dips. Plunge in a marshmallow and worry it around with a fork to coat it, then fish it out and let the caramel drip between the tines. My first attempt was to impale the marshmallow on a skewer, which was really difficult to remove after dipping.

Drop the caramel-coated marshmallow onto your Rice Krispies and use a second clean fork to move it around and coat it fully with cereal. Then place your marshmallow beast onto a cookie sheet lined with wax paper, and continue till the marshmallows are gone. To freeze, place them onto a cookie sheet lined with wax paper, and stick in the freezer till hard. Then pop into freezer bags for stealthy sweetness later.