This is a serious dessert mousse, friends. A chocolate experience so rich, velvety and decadent, a few tablespoons is really all that any one person needs. I usually chuckle when I watch Mrs. Pastry eat chocolate bars, because she nibbles them like a mouse, savoring every tiny morsel. However even I — a man known to wolf chocolate bars down by the handful — eat this only incrementally, off the tip of a spoon.
READ ONTo add still more height to your already thick cookie, pretend baking guy Onofre set the oven a little too high that night, and turn the heat up to 400. This will firm the egg proteins on the outside of the dough ball faster, and bring spreading to a halt that much sooner. Of course […]
READ ONThis is a style of chocolate chip cookie most commonly produced at small, boutique bakeries, for reasons that have less to do with aesthetics than the way their operations run. That is to say, in bake shops you have people who mix dough, other people who handle dough and still others who bake dough — […]
READ ONMaking a chewy chocolate chip cookie is mostly about adding more activated gluten. So, if you want your cookies still chewier, make them with bread flour instead of the normal all-purpose. Increasing the proportion of brown sugar vis-à-vis white sugar will also add chew (plus an even deeper, richer flavor). Why? Well, molasses is gunky […]
READ ONHow do you show “chewy” in a photograph? I dunno. You’ll just have to trust me on this. The chewy chocolate chip cookie is probably the one I received the most requests for, and for good reason. Lots of chewing means more time to savor the chocolate-y, buttery, brown sugary glory that is Wakefield’s masterpiece. […]
READ ONTo achieve thinner cookies than I’ve done, melt the butter completely before adding it to the sugar mix. Then drop the oven temperature by about 25 degrees Fahrenheit to encourage melting and spreading before the egg proteins firm up. A higher fat European butter has a sharper melting point, and is a sure-fire way to […]
READ ONHere’s a variety that a lot of die-hard chocolate chip cookie lovers can’t live without: a thinnish, deeply caramelized cookie that goes crunch when you bite it. Delicious as it is, it certainly deviates from the Platonic ideal of the chocolate chip cookie as pictured on the Nestlé web site. The question is: what series […]
READ ONNot that you’d have any trouble finding it, of course, but for reference sake: here is the Rosetta Stone, the Dresden Codex if you will, of chocolate chip cookie recipes: 2 1/4 cups (11.25 ounces) all-purpose flour 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup (8 ounces or two sticks) butter, softened 3/4 cup […]
READ ONExceedingly simple, just the way I like it. Feels like it’s been an awfully long time coming, though, doesn’t it? First, let me thank several very talented pastry people who all wrote in with various tips on this dessert. They were all very much appreciated (though to be 100% honest, I went back to my […]
READ ONOne misconception about panna cotta is that it must always be served turned-out, standing on its own like a flan. That to me presents a fundamental problem, which is to say, too much gelatin. My personal feeling is that panna cotta needn’t be terribly firm, just enough to give it a silky and elegant mouthfeel. […]
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