I’m not a huge hazelnut fan, so I’m not a huge Nutella fan either.  But Mike is, and so when I saw a recipe from David Lebovitz on making your own, I decided I had to try.

It’s an interesting recipe.  As written, it calls for hazelnuts and almonds, some milk and milk powder, a bit of honey, and two kinds of chocolate.  For the first batch, I made it exactly as the recipe suggested. 

Start by roasting the nuts.  Remember to keep a close eye on them – by the time they start to smell roasted, they’re probably starting to burn.  You can do them in the oven, and time them carefully, but I’ve also had good luck toasting nuts in a cast iron pan on the stovetop.

Once they’re toasted, knock off any of the skin that comes off easily.  The recipe suggests rolling them in a tea towel, but I didn’t have much luck getting that to work.  I just rubbed them between my fingers and got most of the skins off.

Toss them in the food processor:

And grind them up as fine as your food processor will grind them.  I ran mine until it started to heat up, let it cool down, and ran it again.  I never did get it incredibly fine, but I have an old food processor. 

Chop up the chocolate, and melt it. I used the microwave, 30 seconds at a time.  I actually own a double-boiler, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I used it.  Microwaves are so perfect for melting chocolate.

Add the melted chocolate to the nut mixture and pulse to combine. 

Mix up the milk, the milk powder, and the honey, and warm it to a boil in a saucepan.  I couldn’t find whole milk powder, so I just used the nonfat milk powder I had in the pantry.  Add the warm milk to the food processor, and run it until everything is combined. 

I poured it into jars because it looks pretty.  I didn’t attempt to seal them or anything, I just put lids on them and put them in the fridge.

So that’s the recipe as written.  What seems more interesting is all the things you could do with the basic recipe.  If you don’t like hazelnuts, it would be fantastic with peanuts or cashews.  You could make it darker with a greater percentage of dark chocolate, or lighter with less.  I think as long as you stick to 1 2/3 cups nuts and around 11 or 12 ounces of chocolate, it should work fine with any nut and any chocolate.  You could even do a white version with macadamia nuts and a white chocolate.  Then you could swirl it with a darker version…

The perfect recipes are the ones that give you a framework and then step back and give you space to make your own.

( see the recipe )

I like sandwich cookies, and I make quite a few of them.  Somehow, they seem a step up from “regular” cookies, but they don’t require painstaking decorations like fancy iced cookies.

I’ve done chocolate sandwich cookies before (using this recipe) but they don’t usually survive long enough to get pictures. 

This recipe is from the Martha Stewart’s Cookiesbook.  Why that one?  Because I was flipping through the book looking for something inspiring, and I hadn’t tried this recipe before.

It’s another standard cookie recipe – beat the butter and sugar, add an egg, add the dry ingredients.  There’s nothing unusual or difficult about it.

The dough gets scooped out onto a baking sheet.  I have a set of cookie scoops, and I used the smallest one here.  It’s easy to end up with monstrously big sandwich cookies, so I start small.  If you don’t have a cookie scoop, you can use a spoon, but make sure you get them close to the same size, or you’ll have to sort them out after they bake.

Once they’re all scooped out, dip the bottom of a glass in sugar, then press them down flat.  If you have a fancy glass with ridges on the bottom, you can use that and transfer the pattern.  I don’t, so I just used a plastic tumbler.  Some of the sugar will transfer, so re-dip the glass for every cookie. 

Bake.  Keep a close eye on them – with chocolate cookies, you can’t see the color change when they’re getting close to done, so it’s easy to burn them. 

Let them cool.  They need to be room temperature before you fill them – if they’re even a little warm, the heat from the cookies will melt the filling and you’ll have a mess.

While they’re cooling, mix up the filling.  The recipe calls for half butter and half shortening.  You can play with that proportion as long as you keep the total to one cup – more butter and it’ll be richer, but less butter and more shortening will make it more authentic.  Same thing with the vanilla – if you used a double-strength vanilla extract or vanilla paste it will be better, if you use less then a teaspoon it will taste more like Oreo filling.

Put the filling in a piping bag, and pipe less then you think it needs onto one cookie.  Press another on top.  It’s easy to over-fill them, so I always err on the side of less filling and add more if I think they need it.  If you don’t want to get out the piping bag, you can use a spoon, but I think piping is actually easier.

You can do all sorts of variations – some people roll them in sprinkles to decorate them, or you can play with different flavors in the filling. 

Personally, I just enjoy them with a cold glass of milk. They don’t need anything else.

( see the recipe )

I had people over for Christmas treats last weekend, and my next few posts are going to be about all the cookies and pies I made. 

Today, though, is about fruitcake.

I make fruitcake every year, using the Good Eats Free Range Fruitcake recipe.  It’s really very good, but it’s a little alcoholic for my friends with kids, and sometimes it just doesn’t feel like fruitcake without terrifyingly-red candied cherries:

But I’m also not a fan of fruitcakes that contain nothing but raisins and Scary Candied Fruit.  So I was going to skip making fruitcake altogether this year.  Then I saw this Chocolate Cherry Fruitcake from King Arthur.  It looked like the solution to all my issues – it had real fruit and nuts, it had candied cherries, and who can complain about the addition of chocolate?  My only worry was the "Jammy Bits", but they had a free-shipping special, and I figured it was worth a try.

When I got the box, they turned out to be just like little tiny fruit-flavored gumdrops.  I have a good recipe for fruit-flavored gumdrops, so next time I’ll just make my own. 

The fruitcake went together easy enough.  It said to soak the dried cherries in brandy, rum, or water, but apple cider would have worked just as well and added more flavor then water.  Once the dried cherries were soaked, the rest of the batter ingredients went in the stand mixer – butter, sugar, baking powder, salt, and vanilla and almond extract first, then 3 eggs. 

Then the flour got mixed in, alternating with the milk.  Once the batter was done, I mixed in the fruit, nuts, and chocolate by hand.  I’ve had trouble in the past with the mixer being too violent and breaking up chocolate chips, and I wanted them whole.

I used two baking pans – a 8×4 and a 10xsomething loaf pan, because that’s what I had.  They both took about the same time to bake – just over an hour.

I had some trouble getting them out of the pans – next time I’ll line them with parchment paper, at least on the bottoms, to make it easier.

Once they were cool, I brushed them with simple syrup (one part water, one part sugar, cook until the sugar is dissolved, then cool).  I brushed them with one more coat just before serving.

I was impressed.  The chocolate made it different enough to be interesting, and I thought the ratio of real fruit to candied fruit was just right.  It had just enough batter to hold all the fruit together.  I had been tempted to toss some cinnamon in the batter, but it didn’t need it – the fruit carried it just fine on it’s own.

I’ll make it again. Next time, in the little paper pans so I can give them out as last-minute gifts.  Because fruitcake doesn’t have to be awful!

( see the recipe )

I’m not a big Halloween person.  My neighborhood is mostly retirees, so in the 3.5 years I’ve lived there, I’ve never had a kid come by trick-or-treating.  Sometimes I buy candy just in case, but mostly I just ignore the entire holiday. 

On the other hand, I rarely ignore easy-to-make snack recipes.  So when I saw these bars on You Are What You Eat…or Reheat, I couldn’t pass them up. 

I’ve done a million recipes like these.  My mother used to make them with jelly in the middle (called Oatmeal Jelly Bars, of course).  I’ve seen them with peanut butter in the oatmeal crust and jelly in the middle.  But I’d never seen  a version with chocolate and Reese’s Pieces before.

The crust is a basic oatmeal bar crust – flour, melted butter, brown sugar, and oatmeal, some nuts if you like them.  About half of it gets pressed into the bottom of a 13×9. 

For the filling, melt a cup of chocolate chips and some butter in a can of Eagle Brand.  I’m tempted to call it a ganache, but I suspect there’s a Foodie Law against using “ganache” and “Eagle Brand” in the same paragraph, so I won’t.

Pour the chocolate over the crust, sprinkle with the Reese’s Pieces and the rest of the crust mixture, and bake for about half an hour.  That’s it.

This is what you get:

Perfect fall munchie food.  I wouldn’t make these all the time – they have an awful lot of processed stuff in them – but they’d make a great quick treat for an office Halloween party.

( see the recipe )

Like everyone else in the 80′s, I grew up repurposing cereal into snacks and desserts.  Rice Krispy bars, Chex Mix in a million variations, and chocolate-covered cereal and pretzel mixes.    I’ve grown out of most of them -although I do have a great browned-butter Rice Krispy treat recipe – but this one I’ve kept around. 

I put the Special K in my biggest mixing bowl while the sugar/peanut butter/corn syrup comes to a boil.  Then pour the syrup over the cereal, being very careful not to spill it – it’s both hot and sticky, so if you get it on your skin, it will cause burns fast. 

Mix it up to get all the cereal coated, and then press it into a buttered pan.  I butter the pan first, then pour in the cereal mixture, then butter my fingers to press it down until it’s firmly packed.  You could also butter a piece of parchment paper and press down on that, if you don’t want to get your fingers greasy.

Then melt the chocolate and butterscotch chips – this is my mother’s recipe, so it says to use a double-boiler, but I just melt them in the microwave.  Put them in for 30 seconds, stir, and repeat until they’re melted.  When I’m feeling particularly decadent, I double the topping and use one entire bag each of chocolate and butterscotch chips.

Put them in the fridge to set, but take them out before you plan to cut them.  At room temperature, they’re gooey and wonderful.  Straight out of the fridge, they tend to be a bit hard to cut (or bite), but I eat them that way occasionally too.

( see the recipe )