It’s not because of my skill at baking, which can more accurately be described as the ability to read and generally follow instructions. This brownie is based on a great recipe from Smitten Kitchen who adapted it from another great recipe from Baked in Brooklyn. Eat anything from these justly celebrated dessert creators and you’ll probably bust out the superlatives too. Plus, it’s got a lot of butter in it, and we all know the important kitchen equation: butter = awesome.

But the brownie got me thinking more about the food we eat and how it’s produced. If you just want to skip ahead to learn how to make these brownies yourself, scroll all the way down.  But first, some brownie pondering…

***

Sitting at my crumb-covered kitchen table with a belly almost uncomfortably full of dessert and one hand still clutching a few chocolatey morsels, a surprising realization came to me: I almost never eat brownies made from scratch.

Do you? I’m curious. Think about it. Despite being a fan of brownies, I rarely buy them from bakeries.  Restaurants don’t often offer brownies on the dessert menu, and even if they do, I’m not likely to order something I can just as easily bake at home.  And that’s the thing – brownies are a homestyle, comfortable, familiar, fifties housewife/school bake sale kind of dessert.  A dessert that almost universally, at least in my world, came straight out of a box.

A brownie recipe from my childhood would look like this: pull the Betty Crocker box out of the cupboard. Pop the plastic bag of brownish powder, add an egg and some vegetable oil, stir in a big bowl, bake in a pan and cut into squares.  No need for complicated baking equipment, kitchen knowledge, or really any degree of thought or effort.

On the contrary, baking brownies from scratch takes not only a fair amount of time and effort but also a great deal more money.  I decided to make spiced brownies for the Rambling Cafe at Somerset House Design Fair over the holidays and found myself choosing between a box of brownie mix under £2 and the ingredients to make them myself for almost £8, which didn’t even include the flour and spices I already had in my cupboard.  Since we care about making good, real, food with high-quality ingredients at Rambling Restaurant and it fits into my general ethos of food and cooking, I went with the expensive choice. But I was annoyed that these were my options.  I’m willing to put in the work;  shouldn’t that save me money?

pause for brownie ogling.

I was chatting about this mid-brownie devouring with my friend Alexis, who mentioned that a roast chicken from her supermarket costs less than buying the whole raw chicken and taking several hours to season and roast it herself. Like so many pre-made items in our supermarkets at refrigerators these days, you have to be crazy to make it yourself. Or you just have to be willing to spend more money, take more time, and expend more effort. You have to love the process of cooking and appreciate the taste of homemade food and value the act of creating something yourself (and enjoy the kudos you get for preparing something delicious from scratch). Sure, sometimes the professionals do it way better, and that’s absolutely worth paying for. But too much of the time, you’re trading flavor, health, and taste for convenience and price. And all too often, the money you save reappears as hidden costs externalized in our health care system, the polluted state of our environment, serious issues with factory treatment of workers and animals, the little time spent enjoying the sharing and eating of food with people in your life, the disconnect with where our food comes from, and so many more problems associated with our current methods and industries of food production and consumption.

Michael Pollan, in books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, has written a great deal about the American food industry over the past century and how governmental systems were put into place with the goal of creating cheap calories so people could afford to eat. In addition, companies like General Mills (owner and creator of brand name Betty Crocker) produced convenience items that allowed people, almost exclusively women, to spend less time in the kitchen and more time pursuing their own careers or interests. It was a profitable enterprise for those huge conglomerates that arguably had the positive social benefit of achieving more gender equality in the home and workplace (I’d actually be very interested to research that exact connection). But these industrial methods also made high-calorie treats like brownies and chocolate chip cookies and french fries and microwave pizza widely accessible,  affordable and effortlessly replicable in your own home. Which, in turn, have contributed towards making people extremely unhealthy and so we find ourselves in the midst of this obesity crisis the United States and increasingly more Westernized countries face today.

Browsing a bookstore a few weeks ago, I flipped through a few pages of Michael Pollan’s new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (full review and commentary coming soon from Irene Bean!). One of the rules talks about the notion of treats and how we’d all consume a lot less junk food if we had to make it ourselves. Imagine how much work it takes to produce a french fry and how much less you’d eat them if you had to peel and slice potatoes, purchase and heat large quantities of oil, and risk first-degree burns instead of sidling up to the McDonald’s drive-thru. And you could probably cut down your brownie eating if you had to spend $10 on chocolate, eggs, sugar, and flour rather than $2 on a box of dehydrated chocolate mix.

Clearly this doesn’t make sense for plenty of people who have neither the time nor the money nor a general idea of ‘fun’ that includes two sticks of butter and a cupboard full of spices for experimentation. But it speaks to a way that perhaps we should all be eating, both for our own health and the health of our planet. New York Times writer Jane Brody covers this idea succinctly in her recent article on Pollan’s book, ‘Rules Worth Following, for Everyone’s Sake.’

So take a stand. Make those expensive, rich, chocolatey, effort-full, amazing brownies.  Shun the prepackaged and the processed in favor of the butter and the eggs and the chunks of good chocolate. They might take a bigger chunk out of your wallet, but you can feel good about making them. And most importantly…they just might be the best brownies of your life.

gratuitous brownie porn shot

Ridiculously Good Spiced Brownies With Almonds

Adapted from the Smitten Kitchen recipe who adapted it from another great recipe from Baked. I added a few more spices, took out some other ingredients I didn’t have around, got rid of an egg (my mom walked by while I was baking and said ’5 eggs? Do you really need 5 eggs?’ and I said…you know, probably not. And I didn’t miss it).  Feel free to play around with the spices depending on what you like and what you have in your cupboard.  Also, I only had chocolate with almonds in the kitchen, which I never would have bought but ended up being surprising little crunchy bites of toastiness.

What You Need:

1 and 1/4 cup flour
1tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp white pepper
12 ounces dark chocolate with almonds, or add separately if you want ‘em. Or walnuts. Whatever’s your bag, really.
1 cup (2 sticks yeeaaaah) butter, chopped into small chunks.
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract

What You Do:

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter the sides of a pan.

2. Mix the flour and all the spices in a bowl.

3. Stick the butter chunks and the chocolate chunks into a heatsafe bowl over a pot of boiling water. Stir every so often until the mixture becomes chocolatey smooth, so silky and fragrant that you could pour it into a chocolate fountain and jump in. Don’t though – you have brownies to make. Unless of course you’ve changed your priorities.

4. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the sugars. Once the mixture has cooled a bit, whisk the eggs in one at a time, trying not to overmix or the brownies will get cakey.

5. Fold the flour/spice mixture into the chocolate soupiness using a spatula.

6. Bake for about 30 minutes. Important note: contrary to what you might have learned back in the day from Betty Crocker about using a toothpick to test for doneness, you DO NOT want your toothpick to come out clean or your brownies will not be moist and fudgy. You want a few little crumbs on the toothpick. For an adorable illustration (complete with brownie-eating monster!) check out this drawing from the amazingly talented Claire Murray.  She’s got some other fantastic and whimsically illustrated recipes as well as some funny random drawings.

I wish I had a brownie monster friend to help me finish off the pan sometimes.  Eating way way way too many brownies is just a possible side effect of baking some of the best brownies you’ve ever eaten. Oh, and I’m still curious. When was the last time you ate a brownie from scratch?

i knew i was in a city of good eating when one of my first morning stumbles was into a shop called ‘cheeseland’ with wheels of emmenthaler the size of a monster truck tire or a dog bed for a large-ish golden retriever.  to give you a sense of scale, that wedge has a larger diameter than my kitchen table (not that you’ve seen my kitchen table, but it’s of a good size).  hellooo and welcome to amsterdam.

the reason for my cheese shop visit was thanks to a few days in holland hanging out with my friends rootster and flinner, two of my favorite people who live far away in chengdu, china, whom i clearly do not get to see often enough. these two party legends emailed and said ‘hey we’re going to be in amsterdam next week! come meet up!’ and i said ‘hmm….okay!’ and a week later found myself enjoying all of amsterdam’s myriad sources of entertainment.  i love living on a continent with affordable train travel, even when you live on an island. amazing.

since i got in on a fairly late train, my first real experience with amsterdam’s quality food came on a solo morning tour of the streets around our friend’s apartment near the central train station. i left root and flinner to catch up on sleep in a new time zone and ventured out to get coffee and munchies. and just so you know – it was 9am so i don’t mean that kind of coffee or that kind of munchies -  those came later in that day (remember mom, it’s legal there!). haarlemmerstraat, the street right outside our friend’s place must be some sort of gourmet thoroughfare because i visited two cheese shops, three bread and pastry shops, an olive oil store, a spanish and an italian delicatessen, a lebanese bakery, and two juice bars over the course of the trip.  i knew it was a good neighborhood when i immediately ran into this chocolate and sweets shop:

i may not know the exact translation of bonboncreaties but unlimited delicious is certainly speaking my language. they even had a signs for a new food fair in nearly every shop window. i’m seriously tempted to go back next weekend.  the beautifully crafted chocolates and cakes were gorgeous but i was in a savory mood so i continued on to kaasland in the top picture. i was enticed by the bright green color of the pesto cheese (in the very center of the photo) and the friendly dutch woman behind the counter recommended an amazing deeply flavored and almost caramelly aged gouda as a local specialty. i also purchased a warm loaf of brown bread and some fresh fruits and vegetables from the supermarket including tiny ripe strawberries and juicy sweet tomatoes.

the most amusing moment of the morning came when i tried to buy coffee to bring back to root and flinner. every shop on the street seemed to be a ‘coffeeshop,’ not actually a shop that sells coffee. i finally stopped in one with a large espresso machine in the back and asked the guy behind the counter if they sold takeaway coffee.  he smiled and handed me a brochure on ‘amsterdam coffee’ and said ‘this is what coffee means in amsterdam.’ right…i get that. but..how does one actually buy coffee? i finally discovered a place that not only served actual drinking coffee but produced its coffee with the incredible robot machine on the right. i want it to wiggle its espresso arms and go waaaalll-eeeeeee.

after stuffing ourselves with bread and cheese and veggies, we did a bit of wandering around the city’s beautiful cobblestoned streets, over shimmering canals and past ornately decorated old buildings and churches. root and i caught up on several years worth of talking, stumbled upon the red light district and tried our best not to get hit by bikes. here’s the two of us probably standing in the middle of a bike lane.

root being a fellow serious eater, it wasn’t too long before we were hungry again and returned to haarlemmerstraat to pick up more snacks. my favorite purchase was some of the best bread i’ve ever had, a flattish crunchy brick of mixed olives and sundried tomato:

we also couldn’t turn down these amazing pastries on display at vlaamsch broodhuys, which i believe means breadhouse (which has a lovely but totally unintelligible dutch website).

i was intrigued by the prune tarts in the center but ended up going for abrikozen, frambrozen, and rabarber frambozen (apricot, raspberry and rhubarb raspberry). the rhubarb was very good but a bit too dense and floury, the apricot was better but not quite there, and the raspberry was absolutely spectacular. tart, sweet, sugary perfection.

our last foodie visit on haarlemmerstraat the next day was a fantastic gourmet food store specializing in olive oil, vinegar, and mustards.  one wall consisted solely of huge metal canisters full of oils imported from spain, italy, france, and even a fair trade olive oil from palestine.

i picked up some peppery italian olive oil and we also succumbed to the siren call of some delicious olives and marinated purple artichokes. root and i also made a beeline back to the breadhouse for more olive and sundried tomato bread. i could graze on this street for ages.

i’ve got posts on some traditional amsterdam specialties coming up, as well as some items you may not want to let anywhere near your mouth. if you’re ever in amsterdam, make sure you visit the foodie paradise of haarlemmerstraat. i’ll even give you the addresses if you bring me back snacks…

***

Meeuwig & Zn (olive oil, mustard, vinegar, etc. shop)

Haarlemmerstraat 70
1013ET Amsterdam

Vlaamsch Broodhuys (amazing bread and pastries)

Haarlemmerstraat 108
1013EW Amsterdam

i’ve gotten a pretty quick schooling in american vs. british english since moving to london. trash = rubbish. bathroom = loo or toilet or ‘the ladies’. cell phone = mobile phone (had to make that conversion fast considering i run a business based on mobiles). and on the food side:  zucchini is courgette, arugula is rocket, eggplant is aubergine, cookie is biscuit, jello is jelly, and so on and so forth.

all this is a fun vocabulary game that i actually enjoy until the point that it MESSES WITH MY COOKIES. see, i went to the local grocer and purchased granulated sugar for my honey walnut cookies. because granulated sugar is granulated sugar, right? well, in fact, it’s not. what we in america bake with and call granulated sugar is called caster sugar in england. and what they call granulated sugar here in england are the massive boulder-like rocks that people stir into their coffee as sweetener.

i discovered this upon pouring a cup of allegedly granulated sugar into my honey walnut cookies and sticking a fingerful of batter in my mouth and finding it…crunchy. gritty. like someone had poured sand into my cookie dough. WTF england!?! i figured out the problem after googling around and finding this very helpful translation/glossary of US vs. UK kitchen terms.

the cookie dough was basically done, but luckily i hadn’t put in my only bag of walnuts in yet. rather than throw out the batter, i decided to just pour it into a baking tray and bake it anyway while redoing the recipe with the right kind of sugar. maybe the grittiness would make people think of beachy vacation summer picnics spread out on the sand or something.  except…after 10 minutes in the oven, the grittiness had disappeared and the honey cinnamon squares were golden brown, warm, and incredibly delicious. whaaat? confusing but awesome. the attempted linguistic sabotage of my cookies turned out to be a miraculous victory.  i’m not sure whether it was because of or in spite of the sugar issue, but regardless, these cookies are mighty tasty. like the essence of honey distilled in a chewy little package. and they’re even better filled with homemade cardamom ice cream as the sandwich of your dreams…

Honey Cinnamon Squares and/or Honey Walnut Cookies

(adapted from this recipe from CDKitchen)

What You Need:

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1/2 cup sugar. granulated, caster, whatever.

a gloppy slop of honey. like say a half cup.

1 egg

1 + 3/4 cup flour

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

about a cup of chopped walnuts

What You Do:

1. preheat the oven to 350º

2. beat together the butter and sugar, then add in the egg and honey. lots of honey is tasty.

3. mix all the dry powdery ingredients together and add to the wet mixture.

4. if you’re making the squares, just pour the dough into a greased baking pan. easy peasy.

5. if you’re making the cookies, add the walnuts and then place mini dough balls on a greased baking sheet.

6. for the cookies, bake about 8-10 minutes. the squares probably need a few minutes longer, but they’re really good a little soft and chewy in the center.

yummy.

the simple lemon rosemary cookie above was born out of pure laziness. thought process: what else is in the house besides the basic cookie ingredients?

1. potatoes.  meh…can do better.

2. pasta. not useful.

2. lemons! good.

3. ham. baaaad.

4. a plastic tray of plants masquerading as a ‘garden’ with oregano, basil, sage, rosemary and thyme. yes, perhaps we can do something with this.

the result? lemon rosemary cookies, most delicious in sandwich form with homemade vanilla ice cream from foodrambler.

Lemon Rosemary Cookies

What You Need:

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 + 1/2 cup brown sugar

3/4 cup unsalted butter

1 egg

1 tbsp lemon juice

1/2 tsp lemon zest

1 small sprig rosemary

What You Do:

1. mix all the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, salt) in a big mixing bowl. oh yeah, and preheat the oven. standard 350º  should work.

2. chop the rosemary into tiny bits and mix in.

3. mix the butter and sugar together and add to the dry ingredients. i believe this is the ‘accepted way’ to combine ingredients, although i’m quite honestly not sure why. sometimes i just put all the ingredients in a bowl in no particular order and it turns out pretty tasty. do as you like.

4.  add the lemon juice and zest. the measurements are pretty inexact (shocker), i basically used the juice and zest of half a small lemon. no need to bother with those little spoons that are so annoying to clean unless it’ll make you feel better.

5. mix it all up into a tasty dough. after all, if the dough tastes good, the cookies will be good. just don’t eat it all before baking. i may have been known to do that…

6. pinch off some tiny balls (that’s kind of a dirty sentence), place on a greased baking sheet, and flatten slightly. bake for 8-10 minutes, keeping an eye out so they don’t overcook.

7. once out of the oven and cooled down, either stuff with ice cream for ice cream sandwiches or just stuff your face.

my apologies if you prefer your recipes very precise and detailed. but i don’t bake that way, so i figure it makes no sense to have recipes like that. there is certainly a science to many baking processes that i don’t understand at all and i’m sure are quite useful and important. after all, cook’s illustrated has built an empire (in my hometown of brookline, mass!) out of the fine-tuning and perfecting of recipes and people pay dearly for them. that’s all well and good for certain dishes i think, but is often very creatively stifling and restrictive. the rampant non-following of recipes always seems to turn out okay for me. so all i’m saying (and feel free not to listen) is that you shouldn’t stress about following directions too carefully. baking should be fun. and most importantly, so should eating what you’ve baked. woohoo!

i think i may be possessed by a cookie demon. this cookie demon worms its way into my brain and convinces me that it’s a good idea to make a trio of ice cream sandwiches for dessert at rambling restaurant. i listen to this cookie demon and then i find myself experimentally baking 3 kinds of cookies for 3 kinds of ice cream sandwiches (each requiring 2 cookies)  for 19 diners last night. all of which, including screwups and overspicing and um-let-me-try-another-one-of-those-to-make-sure-it’s-good adds up to…almost 200 cookies baked in the last 4 days. damn you cookie demon!

luckily, i happen to like cookies (duh). if you don’t like cookies, you have your own demons.  i also enjoyed the excuse to play around with new recipes and have an automatic tester audience.  it did make me slightly nervous that these cookies were for paying customers and therefore needed to be really good. but most of all, i was very happy to have an automatic set of mouths to feed these cookies to. if i bake by myself,  there’s a possibility i will consume all the fruits of my labor and that’s never good. although let’s be honest – i definitely ate a lot of cookies this week.  so many cookies that at certain points i kind of wanted to toss my cookies.

sorry. that’s gross. but true.

the resulting outpouring from my kitchen is the above photo taken right before dessert service in the rambling restaurant kitchen. i particularly like weird experimental cookie flavors, so i was happy to have total creative freedom to bake whatever kinds of cookies i wanted. i pondered on long bus rides and walks along the thames (all in the name of work- i don’t just meander along dreamily mid-afternoon and fantasize about baking…at least not on a regular basis) and came up with three flavors: chocolate cayenne pepper, lemon rosemary, and cinnamon honey walnut.  the chocolate cayenne would go with the  ginger ice cream i slaved over made and chef foodrambler would make two other ice creams.

so.  we’ll start with the chocolate cayenne pepper. i made about 6 batches with varying levels of cayenne pepper. i am currently a bit obsessed with spicy desserts and cocktails – had a great jalapeno tequila recently in nyc – and have to check myself with my tendency to dump in a lot of spice to get a really strong kick.  while baking and sampling a disgusting amount of cookie, i found that too much cayenne didn’t make the cookie much hotter since cayenne isn’t super spicy but more of a slow burn at the finish. more importantly, the extra cayenne added a dry and lightly burnt flavor and detracted from the rich chocolateyness of the cocoa powder. a good exercise in restraint for me. as you can see to the right, i also tried sprinkling the pepper on top of the cookie before baking. i loved the color contrast of the burnished dark gold cayenne  and rich brown chocolatey cookie, but the pepper disappeared during baking and overdid the cayenne taste so i left that step out.

here’s the final recipe, adapted from this chocolate sugar cookie recipe from the beautiful smitten kitchen blog. i am smitten with her recipes and photography and someday hope to take such lovely photos (and own such lovely photography equipment).

Cayenne Pepper Chocolate Cookies

What You Need:

1 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder for baking

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 and  1/2 cups brown sugar

10 tbsp unsalted butter, best if room temperature

1 egg

1 and 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

What You Do:

1. preheat the oven to 375º (or so…i still don’t really understand how to use my english stove).

2.  mix all the dry ingredients – flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt, cayenne pepper, baking soda and powder – in a big mixing bowl.

3. mix in the butter (i highly recommend thinking ahead long enough to ensure your butter is room temperature, it will make your life way easier) and the egg to make a tasty cookie dough.  if you’ve got a food processor or electric mixer, your life will also be way easier. if not, your biceps will get bigger. i have done a lot of arm exercises this week.

4. grab tiny balls of dough and flatten slightly on a cookie sheet or two, then bake for about 8 minutes. these cookies bake really fast and taste much better soft and slightly undercooked in my opinion, so watch very carefully or use a timer like a smart person. this is knowledge gained through unpleasant experience. out of approximately 12 trays of cookies, i threw out 2 because i forgot i had cookies in the oven and they ended up all too hard. burnt cookies = not good.

5. stick in your mouth. wait for the slow burn of cayenne and the slow realization of awesomeness. enjoy!

i’ve been bewitched by food porn in the form of ice cream sandwiches. back in boston last week, i snatched the last issue of gourmet from my house and spent parts of a long car ride and a plane trip devouring articles on chinese bbq in canada, mentally planning an extended stay at an organic farm outside beijing, and fantasizing about caramel. i was particularly attracted to the idea of homemade ice cream sandwiches, as depicted on the magazine cover to the right which entices me with its summery colors like a party dress at a bash in the hamptons with lusciously rich desserts from swanky catering companies. to drive the point home, there’s a huge section on homemade ice cream. and as if to prove the power of visual stimulation, there is currently homemade ice cream in my freezer right now. it’s slowly edging its way to the crystallization phase and then i will jump on it and break up those crystals, because i don’t have an ice cream maker. although in case you’re wondering, my birthday was last week and i am still accepting presents.

i tried to rationalize the purchase of an ice cream maker to myself, but it makes no sense because a) i’m not sure how long i’m going to be in london so i shouldn’t purchase large kitchen appliances; b) i am not currently drawing a salary, which should also preclude me from purchasing expensive kitchen appliances; and c) what if i buy the ice cream maker and it ends up in the yuppie graveyard? that’s a phrase popularized by my friend jessica, which refers to inanely expensive and largely superfluous kitchen appliances designed for a single task which generally end up suffering a pathetically lonely existence in the yuppie graveyard of the nether regions of your dusty pantry. exhibit A for the yuppie graveyard: the jimmy buffett margaritaville frozen concoction maker. really? you’re going to spend $300 to make ‘perfect frosty drinks’ with your own salt rimmer? by comparison, the ice cream maker is an immensely useful kitchen necessity! or so i tried to convince myself. i even went so far as to make my case to flatmate/colleague/roommate/partner chris, who gently reminded me that people somehow made ice cream before the discovery of electricity and so can i. although did people make frozen daiquiris before there were automated frosty drink makers? i’m not so sure.

sooo. back to the ice cream. at least i’ve got a freezer, suckers! by suckers i mean those pre-electricity cooks who had to use an icebox or…snow…or…baby jesus tears…um, how did they make ice cream back then? i suppose that, unless you had access to big blocks of ice, you just had to (gasp!) not make ice cream. man, let’s give it up for electricity. thanks electricity, for helping me make ice cream even without an appliance intended for that specific purpose. because thanks to the highly food-pornographic and informative blog of david lebovitz, author of the perfect scoop and undeniable homemade ice cream expert, i now know how to make ice cream without an ice cream maker. fabulous.

next came the dilemma of what kind of ice cream to make. i’m into interesting ice cream flavors – when my friends go vanilla i choose salted caramel, when they opt for chocolate  i’m all ‘secret breakfast‘ – but i’m also lazy, so i was happy to remember a big hunk of ginger already chilling (literally! ha!) in the freezer.  serendipitously, there’s a recipe for white chocolate and ginger ice cream on david’s blog so i left out the chocolate and did my best to recreate the magic. otherwise the recipe is nearly identical, so you can just read it there.

and…the results? well, you’ll just have to be patient. or rather, i had to be very patient. here’s  an approximate rundown of how the ice cream by hand process went.

thursday:

7pm – begin Operation: Ice Cream Without Ice Cream Maker

8pm – ginger blanched, cream and milk mixture steeped

9pm – sugar and egg whites added, mixture heated, custard created and in freezer.

9:45pm – open freezer. check ice cream. still liquid. stir. replace in freezer. lick spoon and taste delicious gingery creaminess that is decadently rich and eggy but nowhere near ice cream consistency. wait 30 minutes.

10:15pm – repeat previous step. ice cream marginally less liquid. should still be referred to as just cream.

10:45pm – ditto.

11:15pm – ditto.

11:45pm – ditto.

this continued until past 3am, at which point  the thought actually went through my jet-lagged and hazy head: ‘wouldn’t it be nice if there was a machine that could do this?’

AHAHAHA. isn’t that ironic.

friday:

check freezer. ice cream suspended somewhere in the grey area between liquid and frozen. stir when possible to break up ice crystals. realize that tiny british refrigerator with freezer that could more be accurately described as ‘ice-encrusted shelf’ might not quite reach the appropriate temperature to make homemade ice cream. think to self, maybe this was a dumb idea.

saturday:

spend all day out of the house. return home late, check freezer and…the ice cream is sbsolutely amazing.  a little goopy, texturally resembling soft serve more than a true scoop that could hold its own on a hard cone.  but the flavor is incredible – intense, sublime cold creaminess with a tiny ginger kick, like rolling around on a huge white bed piled high with super soft downy duvets and airy pillow clouds in a chilly sugar-frosted winter wonderland. in a word, heavenly.

sadly, none of these photos come close to doing the ice cream justice.  next steps after the lottery winning and the ice cream maker purchase will be acquisition of a digital SLR and some good lighting. and i vow that none of these items will end up in the yuppie graveyard.

thanks to david lebovitz for how to make ice cream without an ice cream maker and ginger ice cream recipe. superb.

suppose you’ve made a delicious meringue. suppose you then have six egg yolks, tragically separated from their egg white counterparts, sitting forlornly on your kitchen counter and hoping not to be wasted. what to do?

the obvious answer:  you make cookies! i actually think that answer applies to many different scenarios, but maybe that’s just me. anyway, in a valiant attempt to save the extra egg yolks, i went for a little baking experimentation. i decided to throw together all the usual cookie suspects – butter, sugar, flour – and add the extra egg yolks and see what happened. a little poking around in the kitchen cupboards resulted in the addition of nutmeg and allspice for added flavor and an orange in the fridge was also requesting to be consumed and zested. and as soon as the cookie dough circles were baking, i noticed a big bag of pecans next to the oven so i pulled the cookies back out and pressed the halves on top for an additional flavor dimension and some visual excitement.
the result?  super easy orange spice pecan shortbread cookies, also known as the perfect way to use up your extra egg yolks. i’m calling them shortbread because they came out of the oven with a certain density that i associate with those brick-like butter cookies.  the hardness is due to the lack of egg whites, which are often used to lighten recipes or make airy confections like the pavlova. but  since this was just an on-the-spot creation, the recipe proportions are pretty vague. if you wanted a lighter or softer cookie,  you could experiment with the dough consistency or include some actual egg whites,  but these shortbreads actually turned out pretty tasty. almost worth making meringue just to follow up with cookies. or do both at the same time! you can never have too many desserts…

Orange Spice Pecan Shortbread Cookies

What You Need:

6 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

4 tbsp butter

1 cup flour

1 pinch nutmeg

1 pinch allspice

orange zest

the juice from half a small orange (2 tbsp or so, i’m guessing)

pecan halves

What To Do:

1. cream the butter and sugar together and add the egg yolks. mix in the flour until you’ve got a good workable dough of normal cookie consistency. full disclosure: i’ll admit i was just playing around with proportions and didn’t write anything down. if the cookie dough doesn’t taste good enough to scoop right out of the mixing bowl into your mouth, you should probably adjust accordingly.

2. add in the spices, the orange zest and the juice. adjust for dough consistency and spice level, or add in other spices of your choice. cinnamon would be good too…

3. form dough into circles and place on a cookie sheet. i happened to have a mini muffin tin at hand so i ended up with flat little muffin top circles. place pecan halves on top before baking so they get that toasty roasty flavor (that’s a technical term).

4. bake at 350 for 10 minutes or so.

5. congratulate yourself for having successfully not thrown out perfectly good egg yolks. you wanted an excuse to eat more butter and sugar anyway, didn’t you?

i’ve always been meh about meringues. the texture’s so dry and chalky and the taste so overly sweet that it felt like a dried out hardened marshmallow left to die a lonely death on the arid plains of some forbodingly airless planet. actually, now that i think about it, meringues resemble astronaut ice cream, but less awesome because they don’t come from the science museum or exist in space.

but… all of a sudden, the meringue has new meaning! i’ve always been a sucker for desserts involving fruit and cream and  i have recently become acquainted with the fabulous and apparently sort of retro dessert known as the pavlova.  oh, the pavlova – named for the ballerina anna pavlova and invented somewhere down under (both australia and new zealand claim ownership) – it elevates the lowly meringue to a shining pedestal for a magical combination of pure whipped cream and fresh ripe berries. no longer dry and chalky, the cream adds a light and airy feeling to offset the brittle meringue and the juices bursting forth from the fruit. no longer marshmallowy sweet, the unsugared cream and tartness of the berries temper the intense sweetness of the meringue to perfection.  hooray! the meringue has returned with a vengeance.

so yes. pavlova. we were first introduced during dinner at frizzante and our relationship was sealed after our second encounter  at rambling restaurant. my initial intoxication for this triple threat of a dessert has turned to a bit of an obsession,  so i decided it was time to make my own. i started with this recipe from Joy of Baking, added some ginger for spice and flavor and kept the whipped cream unadorned with additives.  these instructions are relatively similar to their very useful recipe (thanks joyofbaking!) but this is a pretty simple version in my own words. important parts are bolded, everything else is either an actually useful side note or an entirely useless personal musing.  enjoy!

Pavlova! aka Ginger Meringue with Fresh Whipped Cream and Berries

What You Need

note: this makes one fairly large meringue. i increased recipe by 1/2 because i have a tendency to overestimate stomach capacity, and it made two shallow small pie-sized meringues.

4 egg whites

1  cup sugar

1 tsp powdered ginger

1  tsp white vinegar

1/2 tbsp cornstarch

1 cup heavy whipping cream

lots of berries! i love raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, and blueblerries, but feel free to use whatever fruit you like

What You Do

1. separate the egg yolks from the whites and whip with a mixer until the liquid turns to foamy clouds that form light peaks when you pull out the mixing tools. in case you’ve never split yolks and whites before, there are two good ways to do so.  a) break the egg and use the two shell pieces as cups to transfer the yolk back and forth as the white spills out into a bowl. if a piece of shell falls into the bowl, use one of the shell cups to scoop it up  because the shell piece will bond to the rest of the shell and be way easier to pick up than doing so by hand. b) just learned this one – break the egg into a separate bowl and scoop up the yolk using your hand as a shovel. detach any clingy white bits between your fingers or with the help of your other hand.

2. preheat the oven to 300 º. the other recipe says 250 degrees but i’m impatient and have places to be, so i did 300 degrees for less time. it worked out fine. combine the ginger and sugar. the joy of baking recipe gives the helpful hint that it’s easier to use finely ground sugar or grind regular sugar in a food processor beforehand so you don’t have to wait as long for the crystals to dissolve.

3. mix the ginger and sugar, little by little, into the egg white mixture using the electric mixer. you want a smooth and not gritty meringue, so make sure all the sugar is fully absorbed. whip the mixture until it has enough weight and texture to form elaborate poufy designs in the mixing bowl (or until it ‘forms stiff peaks’ as they say in the baking world). you also should be able to flip the bowl upside down and have nothing spill out.  magic!

4. fold in the vinegar and cornstarch until fully integrated, then  scoop the meringue in a circle onto parchment paper. leave a depression in the center to hold your cream and fruit.  i used a pie tin since i didn’t have any parchment paper, which meant a little scraping out of the tin. however,  it also meant portability to transport said pavlovas in multiple directions around the state of massachusetts. so useful.

5.  bake for about 45 minutes or until the outside gets all dry, hard, and crackly. let the meringue cool completely.

6. while it’s baking, use the electric mixer to whip the heavy cream into a deliciously airy yet squidgy bowl of yumminess. it’s so much better than whipped cream in a bottle, which has lots of scary chemicals (although potential for small moments of illicit fun).  if you want, add some powdered sugar and/or vanilla extract for flavor, but i think the meringue and fruit add enough sweetness so it’s not necessary.

7. once the meringue has cooled, spoon your orgasmically delicious whipped cream on top in a big lovely pile. i often have the thought, especially when bored mid-flight, that it would be great to jump around on big clouds that would support my weight like a trampoline and not let me fall several miles to a very unpleasant death. similarly, it would be really freaking awesome to frolic around in a big lovely pile of fresh whipped cream. hmm. this is actually somewhat more realistic than the first option. let the planning commence…

8. now the fun part! depending on your current mood and aesthetic inclination, either artfully arrange your berries into a beautiful complex pattern or dump the whole lot onto the cream in a messy pile of awesome.

9. eat! and most importantly, save some for me!

hello and welcome to an indomitable fortress of megacake, a towering and impenetrable wall of chocolate, caramel, and shortbread. just try to scale those sugary heights….i dare you.

perhaps you are thinking, what is this remarkably tasty looking wall of dessert? and furthermore, who is that shady looking figure up in the corner?

the answers can all be traced back to a debaucherous night of fun in the kitchen thanks to the breadman competition.  the entire story, complete with photos, can be found here but the short version is that kell and i entered a photo competition involving a little breadman dude from a bakery stall in soho. intrigued by the possibilities, we entertained ourselves for several hours creating several scenes involving two unsuspecting breadpeople – a fiery breadperson sacrifice and a bondage in the breadroom panorama – both made exclusively with edible items. i didn’t include one of my favorite photos in the original breadman post,  so i’ll include it now for additional visual explanation.

the breadman is LITERALLY ON FIRE. ouch. so anyway, we took the photos, put them up on facebook, people voted and we won this month’s prize! woohoo! our prize was a megacake  – a massive four pounds plus of our choice of brownie or the excitingly named millionaire’s squares.  since kell went back to florence ages ago, i had to make the difficult choice myself and went with the chocolate-and-caramel-drenched shortbread.  here’s tommy and chris, two of the lovely breadmen from the breadman stall, showing off the ginormous megacake:

why is it called millionaire’s squares or millionaire’s shortbread?  because it’s rich as all hell? because it’s calorically wealthy? because it’s money, baby? who knows.  according to chris they call it caramel slice back in australia, but that’s not nearly as fun.

i lugged the kilo and a half of cake around central london for several hours looking for a venue for our upcoming go game (come play! it’s for a good cause) and it was quite a workout. however, all the calories burned were immediately negated by a few bites of the intensely sweet, rich and crumbly megacake.  and just in case you were wondering,  i didn’t eat the megacake myself. my gluttony does know some bounds. instead, i gave away bite-size pieces to random strangers while dressed as a naughty wizard at a recent harry potter screening.

you know. like you do.

if my keyboard shorts out from all the drool slowly dripping from my mouth, i fully blame canteen and this ridiculous apricot cobbler.  good lord. this dessert is amazing. warm jammy apricot, fluffy sweet breadiness and your very own mini pitcher of creamy custard. mmmmmmmm. as if things can’t get any better, i spy a neal’s yard dairy cheese plate behind it….

i’ve had a wonderful deluge of visitors over the past few weeks (christine, ant, mom, aunt julia and uncle dick, lexi, sarah, peter, drewstew, becky, and dan…whew!) and our major tourist activity has been eating our way across the city. i enjoy forcefully disabusing people of the all-too-common belief that england has terrible food by shoving something amazing in their mouths.  the old spitalfields market location of canteen turned out to be the perfect restaurant to put this tragically untrue myth to rest once and for all, seeing as their motto is ‘great british food.’ but just how great it was even surprised me too.

i shared a number of great international meals with my aunt, uncle, and cousins this week – spanish tapas, indian curry – and this meal at canteen was a thorough exploration of all things british.  canteen does a lot of updated and improved classic dishes like a rich leek, mushroom, and celeriac pie and a nice fish and chips with breadcrumbs instead of batter. i had a tomato, mint, and caper bread salad – simple, fresh, and texturally satisfying with slightly soggy yet still crunchy chunks of bread.

you can see the cute little booklet on ‘great british food’ that had all kinds of helpful and informative bits on canteen’s menu and practices. i love that they use all free-range and additive free meat and follow a nose-to-tail philosophy of using the whole animal. i  also appreciate their attention to sustainable and environmentally responsible fishing, purchasing their fish directly from small day boats depending on what’s available.  but really, i am mostly feeling the need to gush about their dessert menu. besides the apricot cobbler and the cheese plate, we had a rhubarb compote with fresh strawberries and cream and granola. i was disappointed we didn’t have room for the brit-tastic banoffee pie, eton mess, or treacle tart but i’m sure they’ll be just as good when i go back as soon as possible to try the rest of the menu.

funny enough, i didn’t even know what an eton mess was until just now, but turns out it’s my new favorite dessert.  i’ve had slightly less ‘messy’ versions of this meringue, strawberries, and cream combo at both rambling restaurant and frizzante and i’m obsessed.

canteen is almost disgustingly accomplished – their cocktails are fabulous,  the sleek and modern design is impressive, and apparently, they’ve won awards for their breakfast.  they’re like the homecoming queen/straight A student/star athlete you love to hate. except i think i just love canteen. and i loved having my family here too:

on a totally unrelated note but on the subject of awesomeness, i saw this walking home from canteen and i MUST have it. it’s a sleeping bag. it’s a down jumpsuit. it’s amazing. i have been talking about making one of these for about 10 years now and here it is in REAL LIFE.

in case you’re wondering, my birthday is in two weeks. buy me a down jumpsuit and some eton mess and i am yours forever.