Another Win for Laziness: Chocolate Chip (Etc) Cookie Bars

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The first time, I made them because I needed something easy and transportable for a graduation party and I knew I wouldn't have time to wait for the butter in my freezer to soften, or to make multiple batches of drop cookies.  I googled 'melted butter cookie bars' and voila!  Bloggers to the rescue, as usual.

The recipe was super simple and I had all the ingredients, plus some pecans I thought would enhance the flavor of half the bars (we have a friend with a nut allergy so I wanted to leave half plain), and nobody was expecting cookies so the pressure was off.  I gave it a go and an hour later my companion and I were burning our fingers trying to 'test' the batch.

#chocolatechipcookiebars with pecans only on half (out of deference to our allergic brethren). #noms #baking #stuffourfaces #prettythings

A photo posted by Anne H. Putnam (@ahputnam) on May 23, 2015 at 3:38pm PDT

Once we were able to try a bite, we agreed: these things are good.  So good that I ate three that night, which is unusual for me – often when I bake something, no matter how tasty it is, I tire of it quickly and am obliged to convince someone else to eat the rest.  It's no coincidence that I favor tall boyfriends with hollow legs ;)

In this case, though, not only did I eat a bunch of the baked good in question but I also started thinking about making them again almost immediately upon leaving the party (I nearly brought home a couple bars but I stopped just short of embarrassing myself that much).  So when I was gifted two glass jars of Nutella from Italy and was antsy to use one as a wine glass, I knew exactly how to put the Nutella inside to good use.

The point is this: these bars are infinitely adaptable.  They were delicious with pecans, indulgent with Nutella, and likely would be even more toothsomely tasty with oats – that's my plan for next time!  In other words, make these.  As soon as humanly possible.

You're welcome.


Chocolate Chip (Etc) Cookie Bars
    Adapted for pecans/Nutella from Em's Bytes  
    (I doubled the recipe the first time and used an 8x13 pan – ain't nothin' wrong with twice the amount of this goodness)

Preheat oven to 350F/175C and grease an 8" pan, square or cake, whatever you have.
 
Mix together in a large bowl:
     1/2c (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
     1/4c sugar
     1/2c brown sugar

Beat in: 
     1 egg
     1 tsp vanilla
 
Add and stir until combined:
     1 c flour
     1 tsp baking powder
     1/4 tsp salt

Stir in:
     1c semi-sweet chocolate chips
     1c chopped pecans (optional – you can also place them on top of the dough once it's in the pan, if you fancy the look or want to limit their reach) 

Spread into prepared pan, pausing to top with blobs of Nutella if desired, and bake 20-25 minutes, or until golden brown. (Side note: mine never got as golden as I'd like, but I'm glad I pulled the first batch out when I did anyway, as they were getting close to dry.  I suggest using the cake tester method if in doubt, and remembering that gooey cookies are always better than dry.)

Let's Just Hope My Language Skills Are a Little More Authentic... Americanized Tiramisu and an Announcement!

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Things have been reeeeaaaaally quiet over here on the baking blog – lest you think I hadn't noticed my neglect, rest assured that it's been bugging me for weeks.  I started working full time in April and since then my free time has been less plentiful and often takes place outside the hours of good natural light so essential to food photography.  I also lived in an apartment with a shared kitchen stocked with other people's things, so I never knew what supplies I had to make a recipe.

None of this is an excuse, though.  I should have prioritized this blog more.  Baking makes me happy, as does blogging about it, but for some reason I haven't done either for the past few months.  It's been a rough year, but I'm finally starting to feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, which should mean more energy and time and love to put into baked goods.  The only catch is that I'm moving again, this time to Italy – I'll be living off savings and spending my days writing and yoga-ing and writing and hiking and writing.  Hopefully a new book will form in those months of having nothing on my plate but writing and pasta.  In which case, you may not see me here for a little bit longer.  That said, should I find myself in need of a break from the computer screen, which is pretty likely, and hiking isn't doing the trick, you can bet I'll share whatever concoction I whip up over there on this blog here – fair warning, though, I'm not bringing my nice camera, so it'll be all-iPhone pics, all the time.

I knew I wanted to share this big change in my life with all of you (especially those of you who have been SO patient while I post so erratically!), so when a recipe for tiramisu landed in my inbox, it seemed like serendipity; I decided (despite this disturbing typo in the recipe) that I wanted to make it to celebrate my upcoming move and announce it here on the blog that has seen me through so many changes in location and circumstance.  There were, as is customary in my life, a few things that went differently from the plan, but I got there in the end and the result was delicious – I can only hope my non-food-related life winds up so successful!

Blogged in the Nick of Time: Easter Baking Experiments

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Last weekend, my brother's girlfriend (and my friend) Rachel and I did an Easter crafting day, where we made ridiculously cute magnets to gift to family members in their Easter baskets – we also decided that this weekend we would do even more crafting, this time in the form of baking.  She set her heart on making these super cute fluffy chick cookies, with a further lamb variation of her own invention, while I chose the much easier-looking (if frequently warned-against) bunny bread rolls that have been all over Pinterest of late.  I bought frozen parkerhouse rolls and she showed up in Napa with all her many ingredients in hand, and right after a boozy brunch and a wee wander we came back to the house and got to work.

And by 'got to work', I mean that I pulled some rolls out to defrost and she got started on the first of six or seven relatively involved steps.  This post is going to be mostly photos, with a bit of description alongside, but since (spoiler alert) Rachel's recipe turned out to be a bust and mine is little more than a set of vague instructions, there will be more links and tips than actual directions here, in case you want to recreate anything.

Adventures in Baking in Other People's Kitchens: Blueberry Olive Oil Cake

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Baking at my parents' house is always a bit of a...complicated adventure.  Whereas I'd slowly and methodically built up a system in the London home where I lived for four years – I knew which specialty pans and ingredients I did and didn't have, and what stocks were low in the baking cupboard – living here in someone else's house, and especially working in someone else's kitchen, has really been a challenge.  I never know what ingredients we have, in what quantities, and in what state of freshness (the other day I used molasses with a 'best before' in 2012, which is actually really recent for my mom's cupboards – it was fine).  And while the double oven gas Viking range is amazing, the rest of the supplies are sketchy at best: we have a mini muffin pan and a popover pan, but no normal muffin tins; a heart-shaped silicone cake pan but no loaf pans; and one usable cookie sheet.  One.

So when I offered to bake something with the blueberries that were lingering on their last legs in the fancy fridge drawers a few weeks ago, I figured it would be an experiment.  I wasn't really prepared for just how many things I would need to change, but I was at least ready to be flexible.  And thank goodness for that!

Easy Friendships and Easier Dessert: Pistachio and Blueberry Biscotti

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I have a great girlfriend in London who is that wonderful combination of nice (without being too nice), hilarious (without being too catty), and understanding (without letting me get away with too much moaning), and best of all, she gets along famously with the BF.  Instead of glazing over the way I do when he talks about medicine too much or tells a story for a little too long, she is always rapt and encouraging – is it any wonder he loves her almost as much as I do?

Given how awesome this friend of mine is, of course she has a standing invitation to our flat for dinner, and when she moved a mere 20 minute walk down the road the invitation was reiterated with even more vehemence.  Now, unfortunately, she's a very busy gal, so we don't have her over as much as we'd like, but she does come round relatively often, and when she does I always make sure we finish the meal with something sweet and satisfying, and preferably something that packs well so I can send her home with a doggie bag.

Leftover Egg Yolks? Make Sugar Cookies!

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I'm off to San Francisco in an hour, for a nice long visit with friends and family (I finally get to meet my first niece!) and a wee vacay, but I wanted to get a quicky post in before I disappear for a week or two.

So, remember that promise I made in the meringue post about a use for the leftover yolks?  Well, I'm going to deliver!  These sugar cookies are easy and quick, and best of all, they use egg yolks in place of whole eggs, which is not only convenient but also delicious and rich and chewy.

Signs of Growing Up: My First Meringues

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I had a bunch of girlfriends over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and one of them (whom I nonetheless love very much) is a serial dieter.  Not in a fad-diet kind of way, more in a oh-no-I-shouldn't kind of way.  It makes me sad, since I show my love through sugar and butter, but I was determined not to either a) do without dessert at my dinner party or b) make her watch everyone else eat pound cake while she tried not to salivate.  I did a bit of research, skipped a lot of recipes that involved Splenda or other unnatural ingredients (no offense to people who use that stuff, but I always find I can taste the difference, and anyway my dieter-friend is a bit of a purist), and wound up back at Joy the Baker, where I reacquainted myself with a recipe I'd bookmarked weeks before, for vanilla bean and cocoa nib meringues.

Quick AND Good-for-you: Quinoa and 'Stuff' Salad

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One of the most difficult things about eating healthily is the time, energy, and money it requires.  I know it's worth it – we all know that – and the bf and I are lucky enough to usually have the time (if not always the money), but some people have half an hour at best in which to assemble a meal, and often that's simply not long enough to prep and cook something truly healthy.  So we fall back on ready meals or eating out, telling ourselves it'll be 'just this once' and then falling into patterns that are, if not unhealthy (after all, frozen fish cakes aren't exactly on par with McDonald's), not as healthy as they could be.

But there's a way to make healthy meals much faster, without always relying on completely prepared dishes: using some pre-cooked ingredients to make food that's almost from-scratch.  Apparently, some lady named Sandra Lee has sort of hit upon this (not the healthy part, though, from what I hear) in a show called Semi-Homemade.  But my version is much less terrifying: roast chickens from the supermarket, shredded up to make chicken noodle soup; pre-chopped onions and pre-peeled garlic cloves to make your pasta prep go faster; and this latest discovery, pre-cooked quinoa.

Buon Natale di Roma!

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Ciao, tutti!  I'm on a much-needed vacation in Rome right now, but I couldn't neglect the blog during the bakingest season of the year, so I'm leaving you with this recipe for fabulously easy, majorly impressive homemade biscotti.

I made these guys for a dinner party back in early November (more on that to come, as it was my first time doing a full-on dinner for a vegetarian-inclusive crowd), and everyone was so surprised to hear that I'd baked them from scratch.  I just brushed off the oohs and aahs with a shrug: no biggie.

A Pretty Little Snack: Dairy-Free Blueberry Corn Muffins

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I made these little beauties for a group of friends who came over the evening after I got back to London from Thanksgiving – in other words, I made these muffins, and the other snacks I'd promised (thank god for truffle salt and hardboiled eggs) in a haze of jetlag and exhaustion after a full day of work. 

I wasn't expecting much from them; I threw the ingredients together based loosely on a basic muffin recipe and the random ingredients we had in our cupboard, and I was more than a little worried that they'd turn out strange.  But lo and behold, they came out looking fabulous (if I do say so meself)!

The 'Other' Thanksgiving Dessert: Apple Crisp

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You guys already know I'm obsessed with pumpkin, and especially with my family's pumpkin pie.  So of course when I was home in San Francisco for Thanksgiving I ate a ton of the stuff.  But what you don't know is that there's another dessert my family serves every year, and it's not pecan pie (we do serve that sometimes, in which case it's a third option) – it simply has to be something fruity.

'scuse the iphone pics – didn't bring the big camera home.*

My mom and her sisters, the current matriarchs of our big, female-dominated clan, aren't super big on sweets.  They're salt folk, and they often skip dessert altogether on Thanksgiving, preferring to eat a slice of pumpkin pie at 6am the next day, for 'breakfast' (my mom never eats breakfast, besides these rare morning-after occurrences).  So if there's going to be another dessert on their table, they require it to be something a bit less sweet, less rich, more fruit-based, and that usually means an apple crisp.

Trust Me on This One: Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies

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Okay, first things first, I need to acknowledge the elephant in the room: these pics.  They're not so good...and there aren't very many of them.  This post is unlikely to get past the guards at Foodgawker, or be pinned on Pinterest, or be bookmarked solely for the beauty of the photos.  For that reason, I've been putting off writing this post.  But then, on a long and awkward train journey to Edinburgh, I ate the last of these cookies, and I decided I couldn't let the photos hold me back anymore – the world needs to know about these chewy gems.

I'm not even kidding.  These cookies are that good.  They can make a squished train ride bearable, a cold day feel nostalgically wintry, and a loved one forgive a stress-related slight.  They're magic, and they're so easy.

A First Time for Everything: 2-Hour Whole Wheat Bagels

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I've always wanted to make bagels, but every time I thought I was up for it I either balked at all the steps or had a yeasted-things-disaster just before I was planning to make them and got too intimidated.  It seems like such a process: all that kneading and rising, then more rising and resting, then the shaping, and to top it all off they have to be boiled before they're baked??  WTF.

 

But then, last weekend, I found myself with nothing interesting to do (the bf was off with his study buddy) and some extra whole wheat flour on my hands (not literally, that part comes later), and I came across this recipe for bagels in two hours.  Yes, two hours, start to finish!  It seemed too good to be true, but I was bored and I figured I'd give it a shot.

For Real This Time: Momofuku Compost Cookies

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Okay, so I know I already waxed lyrical about the wonders of the Momofuku method as a base for my favorite cookie ever, but I did also (finally) try the recipe as it's meant to be made: with all sorts of weird, shouldn't-that-be-savory things stuffed into it.  And I wanted to share my experience.

A couple of weeks ago, the bf's brother came to stay with us on his way to a year abroad in China, and I thought it might be nice to give him and his friend a good old American cookie send-off.  I wanted to make a batch of my chocolate cherry cookies, but I also wanted to try the real Compost Cookies of lore.  So I made the dough up until the additions bit, split it in half, and did one batch of choc-cherry and one with potato chips, pretzels, and chocolate chunks.  You can see the bits here:

Topsy Turvy Cravings: Pear Upside-Down Cake

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I don't know why I always seem to make things out of season.  It's not intentional, but I do seem to crave certain foods more when everybody else in the world is ignoring them – maybe it's my affection for the underdog!

Anyway, for whatever reason last week I got a mad craving for pear upside-down cake.  I've never made an upside-down cake, and the most common one seems to be pineapple, which I'm not a big fan of (in things. I love it fresh), so it didn't make sense that I would want this specific baked good, but there you have it.  I'm just a slave to my cravings (and no, I'm most certainly NOT pregnant).

Making a great thing even better: Momofuku-esque Chocolate Cherry Cookies

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There are times when you think a recipe just can't get any better.  It's gone beyond 'tried and true' to be a real favorite, not just a go-to but something people talk about for days after the product of said recipe is gone.  The ingenious combination of chocolate chips, oats, and dried cherries in a cookie is one of those recipes for me.  People never expect it, and they always rave about it once they've tried it.

But then.  I tried something new with it.  I know, blasphemy, but I was curious!  For months, I've been watching other bloggers try the Momofuku Milk Bar Compost Cookie recipe, and I keep wanting to try it but we never have the required snack foods lying around (mostly because on the rare occasions that we do, I eat them all before I can think of doing anything else with them).  But last week, I really wanted to bake something special for my porter – who'd saved me in a really horrible, ambulance-requiring moment – and I decided on my awesome cherry chocolate cookies, with a Momofuku twist.

American as Blueberry Pie

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I made my first fruit pie last weekend.  Oh, I've made pies before, but usually I limit myself to pumpkin and then move on to cakes and cookies.  In the States, it's pretty easy to make a pie: buy pre-made crust, line pie dish, fill pie, bake.  But over here, good sweet pie crust is really hard to come by, so making a pie means making pastry, and we all know how I feel about that...

Nonetheless, this being spring and all, I got it into my head that I wanted to make a blueberry pie.  We invited the work girls over for dinner, and I planned a menu of Italian Wild Boar Stew with Taleggio Polenta and a big side salad, then got to planning the piece de resistance: my pie.  I thought if I could just get the crust sorted, I'd be golden. And after much huffing and puffing and mess (and a premature nervous breakdown), I had what looked like a decent crust!

Just sweet enough: Vanilla Bean Cake

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There's a magical place back in my hometown of San Francisco.  There's wine for two dollars, amazing pre-made salads, and scrumptious frozen foods.  But the best thing Trader Joe's sells are the sweeties: rich, indulgent, massive bars of chocolate, salty-sweet mini peanut butter cups, and a boxed vanilla cake mix that's to die for.

Yup, I said it.  A boxed mix that's to die for.  It's fragrant and moist and vanilla-y without being too sweet, and it's one of the reasons I so rarely bake when I'm home– why tamper with something so delicious and easy?

Oh, oh, it's magic, you know!

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Newsflash: I love love love an easy meal.  I'm honestly one of the laziest cooks I know.  I love to turn out something fabulous, but I hate the time/sweat/tears that go into some creations.  Which is one reason the bf does most of the savory cooking – baking (at least the kind I favor) is much less about prep time and focus than it is about throwing stuff together and chucking it in the oven, then having a nice chin-wag and a cup of tea with a friend (or watching The Real Housewives of NYC).

But that's exactly what I love so so much about this pot roast.  It makes use of our slow-cooker, which, due to space restrictions, sits on a high shelf in our kitchen and therefore rarely gets used.  But oh, man, is that thing ever awesome!  It operates like an oven, without heating up the house all day.  It sits on the counter and does magical things to meat and veg, and in 9 hours you come back from work/class/gallivanting and dinner is served!  Seriously.  Magical.

Is there anything cinnamon doesn't improve? Chocolate-Chip-Cinnamon-Sugar Cookie Bars

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Sometimes, I'm hit with a stroke of genius.

And then, more often than not, I fail to execute my genius perfectly...and my fabulous idea turns out...not as fabulous as I'd envisioned.

BUT, sometimes, even though it's not what I expected, it's still delicious, if crumbly/messy, and the bf still eats it all.  This was one of those times, and thank goodness for that because wasted chocolate chip cookie dough is a travesty.