Chèvre Blondies

I told you we're nuts for all things goat. (Wait until you see the post planned for early next week!) I don't know if we're moving public opinion, but I do know that we've got some terrific restaurant events planned in the near future--a goat dinner in Philadelphia, one in Boston. I can't wait!

Before all that, I thought I'd share this gorgeous snack/dessert with you. It's from, yep, the goat book. (Got your copy yet? Click here.) This recipe is a great chance to get all goaty and still come out with, well, a blondie.

A decidedly American treat, blondies may have been the original brownie--although the exact details of culinary history are pretty smeared. Still, it's thought that this delicate cake with chocolate chips may have been the precursor to its more chocolaty cohort. (There's already a chocolate chèvre brownie on this blog, a recipe so fine that it was picked up by Fine Cooking as a found favorite. Check it out here.)

I'd like to give you some tips about baking, so let's just get right to it.

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Chow Videos

I don't know if you've seen these yet, but I thought I'd share them here. These are two of the goaty videos we went out to California to shoot for chow.com back in April. Bruce is up first with cajeta.

If you haven't made cajeta, you just don't know what you're missing. The whole recipe's in our GOAT tome, of course. (Here.) There it comes with lots of snarky asides from, well, me. In the video, he's on his own. (How does he do it?) No matter, you've got to make cajeta. It's that good.

And then here I am, making goat cheese truffles. Did you know you can make ganache with chèvre? Yep. Brace yourself.

So there we are. Except I'm a little peeved. Bruce's video got picked up by TV Guide. Shoot. It's always been my dream to be in TV Guide. Or something like that.

Goat Cheese Brownies

It's here: the official publication date for the first-ever, all-goat book--meat, milk, and cheese! If you want to know the butchering schematics for goat and then a whole heckuva lot beyond--like how goat cheese is made, how goat milk differs from all other mammal milks, why it's considered the "universal" mammal's milk, how there's a whole cheesy world beyond creamy chèvre--this is the book for you.

Bruce and I are so thrilled. And thrilled so much is in the works for the book. Crazy. We'll be teaching at Central Markets across Texas in May, introducing my fellow Lone-Star-ites to the pleasures of all things goaty. We're heading out to California in a few weeks to be a part of the Third Annual Goat Festival at the Ferry Terminal Market (4/16) and do a signing at Omnivore Books--as well as shoot a few TV episodes and some tips for CHOW. And much more to come.

Such a reaction is probably inevitable. Goat meat is the world's most consumed meat. And goat milk is the world's most drunk dairy. (Although more cow milk is drunk per annum in sheer poundage, more people drink goat milk than cow milk.) Yet this global animal has escaped factory farming. If you want to go local, go goat. Or if you simply want to experience a whole new culinary horizon--and how many times can you say that?--go goat. Click here to get your copy of this first-ever book--with perhaps the best introductory line I've ever written for a cookbook: "I lied while wearing make-up." I'll just leave it there and let you imagine what comes next. (By the way, it's being simultaneously published in Canada, Great Britain, and many other countries. Check your local booksellers' websites--or the amazon site for your country.)

But for now, I wanted to celebrate with a blog-only goat recipe: fudgy, buck brownies made with creamy fresh goat cheese.

I realize I'm on a bit of a brownie kick as of late (see here and here and here), but I can't help myself. I wanted to give the readers of this blog an exclusive, something not found in the book, a thank-you as it were for being one of the hundreds (sometimes even thousands) of daily subscribers and unique visitors to this site. I realize I don't garner a lot of comments, but I see you in the stats--and I wanted to thank you in some way. So here goes.

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Lunchbox Brownies

I'll let you in on one of the secrets of our process, one that has led to twenty books now: every time Bruce and I have written a cookbook, we've tried to strike a balance. Yes, among the number of ingredients--he, the chef, is always for way more than I, the writer. And yes, among our tastes--there are two of us here and one is more butter (I'm raising my hand) while the other is more olive oil.

But mostly, we try to come up with a "median recipe"--that is, the recipe that's the center of the book: not too far one way or the other, not too complicated, but not simple either. We build from there with recipes more complex and more simple. But we always begin by trying to figure out the balance point.

Maybe that's why the students in Bruce's knitting class are so excited about these brownies. They were the median point in our all-brownie book, THE ULTIMATE BROWNIE BOOK. A whole book about brownies? You bet!

These brownies travel well, store well, are a cross between the dense fudge ones and the airier cake ones. The median. And apparently a reason to get excited.

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Whoopie Pie Cake, Part 2

Last time, we did the two layers for our Whoopie Pie Cake, a big ol' layer cake modeled after that Southern favorite, whoopie pies. If you want to check out that post, click here.

In this second post, we'll finish the cake with a luscious layer of Italian meringue. That is, a cooked meringue (as opposed to a Swiss meringue, an uncooked meringue, the sort that often goes on top of meringue pie in North America). Professional pastry chefs love an Italian meringue--it's that sticky white meringue you sometimes find on top of lemon tarts in France and in French bakeries stateside.

No, we're not filling this behemoth with marshmallow fluff. We're doing it old school. I assure you, the effort will pay off.

So on to the meringue!

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Whoopie Pie Cake, Part 1

You may know that I lead--more like, corral--the book group discussion at the Norfolk, Connecticut, library on select Fridays. Here's our room, ready for the group last week, the fire roaring for these cold winter days. Sort of a New England dream, no? We were set to discuss David Mitchell's THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET, an utterly sublime book, to be savored slowly. (If you want to know more about the group, check out our website here.)

Every time, I bring a treat of some kind. This time, a Whoopie Pie Cake, one of Bruce's original creations for THE ULTIMATE COOK BOOK, our 900-recipe tome. That's the cake right there on the table. It's a layer cake designed to mimick the Southern favorite--dense layers of chocolate cake with a creamy, luscious Italian meringue (no, not Marshmallow Fluff) center.

It was such a hit that I thought I'd share the recipe with you. I wish I could share the cake-- it was certainly a show-stopper. But here goes. I'm going to do this one in two posts. The chocolate layers first.

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Buttermilk Blondies

It's hard to beat blondies. Cake + chocolate chips. Buttery. Not quite as dense as brownies. Better crumb. Did I mention chocolate?

They may also have been the first brownies. That sort of culinary trivia is hard to decipher, so many competing claims without proper documentation--but it appears that the "original" recipes for these bar cookies were for what we now call "blondies." Later, cocoa was added, then the chocolate was melted, and so came about the brownie.

No matter. It's a great American treat. Especially with buttermilk. And one little secret Bruce threw in.

Here come the blondies.

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Brown Sugar Brownies

For us, the process of writing a cookbook involves finding the middle ground.

It's ever the dream, no? I once had a discussion once with a sommelier who told me that he tries to gauge the middle bottle of wine and then build the list out from there in both directions. (Unfortunately, he thought the middle bottle ran about $90US. Ah, well!) 

When Bruce and I write cookbooks, we also try to figure out that illusive middle. Which recipe stakes it out--and which then have the freedom to break it?

We believe the middle ground is made up of three things: taste, effort, and cost. To give you a little peak into the behind-the-scenes thinking in our latest book, REAL FOOD HAS CURVES, the seven-step plan to get off processed food, we staked out the middle ground with the oven-fried fish fillets, the ones included in the discussion about effort v. cost in our food choices, found in chapter 2, "Make Informed Choices."

We later included far easier and less costly recipes (like the no-cook peach salsa) and more difficult, challenging ones (like the Mapo Dofou--which you can also find on this blog here).

That process is perhaps nowhere more evident than in The Ultimate Brownie Book. So many people have their notion of brownies: there's the caky camp and the fudgy camp, for one thing. So we first sat down to try to find something that fell right in the middle, all other brownies moving out to the edges. And believe me, there some out on the edges. Like the caky brownies made with a can of Coca-Cola, a riff on my Cousin Wilma Faye's "co'-cola cake." (Yes, I had a cousin named Wilma Faye. Doesn't everybody?) Or like the fudgy Sour Cream Brownies. Crazy. Barely holding together in the pan. One minute less baking time and you could use them as an ice cream topping.

So here's the middle ground of brownies, a little bit cakey, a little bit fudgy, with only one kind of chocolate not three or four, certainly indulgent as a treat but not too much so, a little decadent but certainly not too much so.

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Coffee Chocolate Sour Cream Cupcakes, Part 1

Cakey or fudgy? That's always a question when it comes to chocolate, right? And each side has its many embattlements, its many defenders.

If you've read enough of this blog, you know I'm all about the crunch. So you might think I was a cakey kind of guy: the little edges that have a bit of crunch.

Except no, I'm all about the fudgy, moist consistency. Which could explain my devotion to thick, rich chocolate pudding. Or these cupcakes. Today, we're going to make them. Tomorrow, we'll frost them.

So off to it!

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Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 2

It's a great day to keep making our candied cherries. You've got the fondant ready, right? If not, check it out here. It's fairly easy to make. Just don't substitute the packaged stuff for icings and frostings.

In fact, don't willy-nilly substitute much in tested recipes, especially in baking. A little here and there is fine. (Readers of this blog have repeatedly commented on successful substitutions to these recipes--and with good reason, too.) But too much and disaster lurks.

I once spent a whole evening teaching a rather hapless cook how to make a pie crust so she could take pies to work for a company function. We did it over and over again. I left her confident of her skill. I called her later that week to ask her how it went. "Terrible," she said. "Your recipe doesn't work."

Um, no. I'm a Southerner. Reconstructed, but still. . . . Listen, I KNOW pie crusts. My recipe is my grandmother's and my mother's. Don't even think about questioning it.

So I questioned her. Turns out, she'd run out of flour and then substituted corn starch.

"They're both white," she reasoned, still trying to pin it on me.

Sigh.

OK, off to making the cherries.

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