Black Bottom Pie

When I was little, we frequented a restaurant called The Pie Plate. I loved to get pies topped with as much meringue as possible, but my mom's favorite was Black Bottom Pie:
The pie consists of a graham cracker crust spread with a layer of chocolate and filled with a vanilla custard.

The first step was smashing up graham crackers...

and blending together nuts with some flour, sugar and spice:

I mixed these together and added melted butter to make the crust:

Once the crust was baked, I made my chocolate layer - in this case, a chocolate ganache:

While that hardened in the crust, I put together the first part of my custard filling, a pastry cream that consisted of milk, cornstarch, sugar, vanilla and butter, whisked in after the cream is cooked:

Once the pastry cream and the chocolate were well cooled, I whipped some  heavy cream to lighten the texture of the chilled pastry cream:

And once those ingredients were combined, I poured the filling into the crust and tried to muster the patience to wait a full three hours for the filling to set!

Bread I Like: Spudnuts Doughnuts in Los Angeles

Happy National Doughnut Day!

If you're in the Los Angeles area, I will encourage you to visit my favorite doughnut shop - Spudnuts!
Spudnuts in conveniently (maybe too conveniently) located near where I stay in Los Angeles, and I stopped in one day a few months back to try their famous doughnuts, made with potato. 

Now I stop in to buy a box full whenever I can find an excuse to bring doughnuts anywhere:
And the fine lady above seems to always slip in a few extras!

The doughnuts to the left of the chocolate frosted are the signature potato doughnuts, but as you can see, there is immense variety and tastiness available:
Where will you get your doughnut(s) today?

Brownies

When I'm making brownies I sometimes find it hard to pour the batter into the pan and bake it, rather than spooning the entire bowl straight into my mouth:
I use several brownie recipes, but this is the oldest of the bunch. I came across it in high school, and have committed it to memory so I can make a quick sweet treat whenever the need arises.

It starts with eggs - you beat them and beat them, and then add sugar. You transform them from this (appropriate to throw in a pan and scramble):

To this - a thick, foamy brownie base:

Then you just add in a mixture of melted chocolate and butter, and a touch of vanilla:

And a bit of flour:

Once these brownies bake and cool, the top cracks and collapses down to a layer of dense, fudgy brownies:

Cranberry Celebration Bread

After my last run-in with a braided loaf of bread, I wanted to make another, hopefully more beautiful than the last. I decided to try the Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Loaf from "The Breadbaker's Apprentice:"

I was a little low on cranberries and am not a huge walnut fan, so after checking my stores of fruits and nuts, I decided to use cranberries, apricots and pecans:

The dough for this loaf is very similar to challah - it is enriched with eggs and a bit of sugar. You can see that I spread plenty of flour on my counter as the dough looked a bit sticky to me before I even started kneading:

Once the dough was kneaded it took a bit more work to distribute all of the chopped nuts and fruit:

I worked it all in and let it rise, and then split the dough for the two braids:

Here are the two braids before I combined them into one loaf and let them rise for baking:

And fresh out of the oven! 

Cookies for a Crowd

If it seems like I've been making a lot of cookies lately...well, I have:

I had to apply some strategy to make three batches of cookies in one go. First, I lined up bowls for wet and dry ingredients and measured out the common items, like flour, butter and leavening:
I labeled the above bowls and set the ones I wasn't using to the side as I put together the doughs one by one.

When the doughs were finished I wrapped them in plastic wrap and put them in the fridge while I cleaned the kitchen a bit so I would have room to scoop out dough and wash the cookie sheets as they came out of the oven:

I also made a batch of brownies to go with the cookies. While the brownies were in the oven, I started measuring out cookie dough:

My reward at the end of the day was a taste of each cookie and a delicious smell in my apartment!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I had a kid's cookbook when I was little that had a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. In that recipe, I was directed to melt butter in the microwave (supervised by a parent, of course) and then mix sugar and brown sugar in, instead of creaming them. The results prompted my mother to grab a bag of chocolate chips and teach me to use the classic toll house cookie recipe.
Above you can see my flour mixed with leavening next to a bowl of butter waiting to be creamed with the sugar and brown sugar.

Here you can see the texture of the dough after creaming and before I mix in the eggs:

Once the eggs and dry ingredients are mixed in, all you need are chocolate chips (and nuts, if you choose). I added milk chocolate chips this time:

I like these when they are just cool enough to not burn your tongue:

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

My favorite oatmeal cookie recipe comes to me from a very reliable source - the underside of the quaker oats lid:

Like most cookies recipes, you start by creaming the butter and sugar, and adding eggs to that mixture. The secret ingredient, cinnamon, is on display in the bowl of flour to the left:

The dough with all of the flour incorporated:

The only thing left is to add in the oats and raisins:

I love the irregular shapes that come out of these cookies even when I use a scoop to portion out my dough - the sticky part of the dough can barely hold all of the clumps together: