Author: Lillian

I have an oven again! My amazing father-in-law came to stay overnight (to attend #1 Son’s Civil Air Patrol promotion ceremony), and he fixed it right up for me.

This week’s TWD recipe was for sugar cookies, and I was up in the air about whether or not to make them. I like my cookies a bit more interesting than plain old sugar cookies, and I knew I wasn’t going to do the whole rolling-cutting-decorating thing. So I raised the issue with the family, and as usual, they were goofing around:

Me: They’re just plain sugar cookies. What could we have with them?
#2 Son: Ganache!
Husband: Vanilla ganache!
#2 Son: Coffee ganache!

(I won’t transcribe #1 Son’s contribution. Sufficeth to say, it was unappetizing.)

They were playing off each other, and nothing constructive ever gets done when they do that.

But I made the cookies. And I made the ganache.

The dough came together easily, like all of Dorie’s doughs so far. I doubled the recipe, because it’s always good to have some cookie dough in the freezer; I made two disks for rolling and two logs for slicing. No additions to the recipe, because I wasn’t sure what I’d be doing with the cookies themselves. (As it turns out, #2 Son and a friend are going to roll them out and decorate them, so I have to soften up those two logs and reshape them into disks!)

The dough rolled out easily. It cut easily. It baked in exactly the amount of time the recipe indicated. And the cookies were fine. They were sugar cookies.

I guess my problem is that sugar cookies are ubiquitous. There’s nothing special about them; they’re just those cookies that are always around. These were good sugar cookies, certainly. And with some emendation — some chocolate or cinnamon or coconut (or a combo!) added to the dough, or something on top — I bet they’d have been really good. But alone, they were kind of plain. (Which is not their fault, certainly. It just muted my enjoyment.)

The family agreed, so I won’t bother quoting them all individually.

I made four kinds of ganache, in deference to the whims of my family and my indecisiveness: vanilla, coffee, chocolate, and mocha. For vanilla and coffee, I used Ghirardelli white chocolate chips and cream (with some vanilla paste and a shot of espresso in the appropriate bowls). For the chocolate, Ghirardelli bittersweet chips and cream. And for the mocha, Trader Joe’s Belgian milk chocolate (chopped but not terribly finely) and cream and espresso.

Lessons learned:

1. Chocolate chips, especially white chocolate chips, melt terribly.
2. 2 ounces of chocolate to 1 ounce of cream is not enough to make a thick ganache; there will be spoons involved.
3. I really need a light box.

The ganache was yummy, if runny, and it worked well with the cookies. (The mocha was the best.)

All in all, it was a nice dessert. Just nothing to write home about.

I know there will be some amazing variations among the other TWD bakers; check them out. And if you want the recipe, head on over to Küchenlatein, where Ulrike (who chose these for us this week) will lay it out for you. (And you can practice your German! We’re so multilingual lately!)

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!)