Recently in Desserts Category
The rain this morning forced me to cancel a hike with friends, and so I baked cookies for them instead. I was eager to taste the organic, reduced sugar fruit spreads Crofter's had given me, and knew that thumbprint cookies, their indentations designed to be filled with jam or jelly, would be a yummy way to try the preserves.
These cookies are a variation on the first thing I learned to bake. I was 6 years old, my grandmother was visiting, and I begged her to make her brown sugar thumbprint cookies- our name for them was Grandmother Cookies. She showed me how to mix the simple dough by hand, roll spoonfuls of it into rounds, and stick my finger into each to form an indentation- all great fun for a kid’s first attempt at baking. I now form the dough in an electric mixer, but still call these delightful morsels Grandmother Cookies.
Baking holiday cookies is a fun project for this cold and wet weekend. I warmed up my kitchen this morning with a big batch of tender rugelach. The contrast of a delicate unsweetened crust wrapped around a sweet nut filling has always made these bite-sized pastries impossible for me to resist. They take a little more work to form than simple drop cookies, such as chocolate chip or oatmeal, but they are so tasty with such an exquisitely fragile texture, every bite reminds me why I like to make them.
Mixing the butter and cream cheese dough the night before simplifies baking day. This morning I sprinkled the dough with nuts, sugar and spice, rolled it up into little rugs (the meaning of rugelach), and popped them in the oven. Within minutes, the cinnamon in the filling scented the house, and made me eager to taste the first batch.
To avoid the crowds of holiday shoppers and to give personal gifts, I have started preparing goodies in my kitchen. Today I boiled up a batch of Maple-Nut Pralines. It took me only half an hour to turn out a large batch of confections, and my house smells like maple sugaring time in Vermont.
Pralines are a New Orleans-style candy fashioned from sugar, cream, and pecans. I put my own flavor stamp on these sweets by replacing the standard white sugar with pure maple syrup, stirring in walnuts in addition to pecans, and adding a pinch of nutmeg for a festive touch.
I plan to concoct more candies and bake cookies all during December, and will post some of the recipes on this blog. They will be treats I have thought up over the years and enjoy making again and again. These recipes, and many more, can also be found in
Cooking at Home. I am going to thumb through the book again, to select a cookie to make for the friends I will be visiting this weekend.
LeeAnn was excited about the
pomegranate tart cherry juice she discovered at Whole Foods. It is 100% fresh-pressed organic juice, not reconstituted from concentrate, no sugar added. However, the bottle she gave me sat on the kitchen counter for a week because I like eating fresh fruit more than drinking juice.
When I returned home after brunch with girlfriends on Sunday, I found the path leading to our house covered with trimmed branches from our rosemary bushes, and my beau Steve in the kitchen, stirring rosemary syrup into the pomegranate cherry juice.
Steve is not a cook; he provides takeout sushi on my yoga nights, and grills anything that I have readied for the fire. I create our meals, and this is my preference. For dinner parties, I like to serve make-ahead desserts, thus four summers ago I purchased an ice cream maker to churn old fashioned peach ice cream. Steve was intrigued. Sorbets and lime pops are his favorite sweets, and he wondered if the machine would freeze sorbets. With a lemon sorbetto recipe from my files, he launched into his first culinary project.
The rain this morning forced me to cancel a hike with friends, and so I baked cookies for them instead. I was eager to taste the organic, reduced sugar fruit spreads Crofter's had given me, and knew that thumbprint cookies, their indentations designed to be filled with jam or jelly, would be a yummy way to try the preserves. 
To avoid the crowds of holiday shoppers and to give personal gifts, I have started preparing goodies in my kitchen. Today I boiled up a batch of Maple-Nut Pralines. It took me only half an hour to turn out a large batch of confections, and my house smells like maple sugaring time in Vermont. 
LeeAnn was excited about the pomegranate tart cherry juice she discovered at Whole Foods. It is 100% fresh-pressed organic juice, not reconstituted from concentrate, no sugar added. However, the bottle she gave me sat on the kitchen counter for a week because I like eating fresh fruit more than drinking juice.
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