Seriously, I don’t know what to call these. But I wanted to tell you about them because they’re yummy and SO easy and I would have eaten a whole pan myself but fortunately I sent some off to school with the kids.
Anyway, they need a name.
Here’s why….
I made this yesterday for Easter brunch at my cousin’s house.
I’d been asked to make this coffee cake, but I didn’t have pears or pecans, and I felt rebellious, so I decided to make something different. But still a coffee cake.
I sort of made it up as I went along. I started with a recipe for an apple cake using ricotta cheese that I found online, and then I changed a bunch of things and ended up with this.
Fortunately I took notes.
My awesome niece, Natalie, is here today, and we’ve selected a Chocolate Pound Cake as our Chocolate Baked Good of Choice.
One of the nicest things, so far, about cooking my way through Dorie’s Around My French Table with the wonderful French Fridays with Dorie gang is that I usually have all or most of the ingredients already on hand. It’s so nice! Take this double chocolate mousse cake. I didn’t need to get anything for it. The ingredient list is very short – chocolate, eggs, sugar, coffee, butter, salt. That’s IT.
And it’s a good thing, because I made this, along with last week’s gnocchi, last Wednesday, which was A Day Of Much Snow in these parts, and no one was going anywhere.
The other day I was talking to my sister about the cookie baking status here (feel like I haven’t done enough yet, despite the boxes and boxes of cookies stacked in the dining room), and I asked her if there was anything in particular, cookie-wise, that she would like.
Yes, when time permits, I do requests.
The last time Natalie was here (not this most recent time, but the time before that), she’d found a few recipes she wanted to try, but either we didn’t have enough time or I didn’t have all the right ingredients.
Anyway, when plans were in the works to have a weekend of baking recently, Natalie asked if we could make brownies.
So we did.
Bill had asked me to make some biscotti for a colleague (long story), so I did that earlier in the week. Bill had requested almond biscotti with white chocolate chips, so I made that, it came out fine, etc.
But I'm not really a huge fan of white chocolate, though I used it and liked it in the Lemon Biscotti with Candied Ginger and White Chocolate Chips that I made a while back.
I wanted real chocolate. Dark chocolate.
This week's TWD monster cookie recipe was chosen by Mary of Popsicles and Sandy Feet, and you can find it on page 86 of Dorie's Baking: From My Home to Yours. You know, every now and then I feel like I should just bow out gracefully from the Tuesdays with Dorie gang, citing my lack of regular posting. I don't think I've done more than 2 recipes per month in ages. Lots of reasons, lots of excuses, good days, bad days, and so on. But then I bake something and participate and feel a part of a community and I think okay, I can do this. I really don't want to quit.
Especially when we get to bake fabulous cookies like these.
I know, it's an incredibly long post title. But it's also an incredibly good cake and deserving of such a lengthy intro.
Something had to be done. We've been picking zucchini on a daily basis now, and so far we've been using everything in savory dishes…grilled zucchini, for example. But there's only so many times a week (or a day) we want to eat it after a while, so I said I'd make zucchini bread to use up some of the excess.