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White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars

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I hope he wrecked his car, says The Child. I hope he goes to jail.

Don’t wish bad things, I tell her. When you send bad wishes into the world, they come back to you.

Wish him his karma, I tell her. Wish that he gets what he deserves.

Everyone does in the end, anyway.

She thinks this is a good plan, and makes her wishes.

We move on to other, more important things: she needs to bring snack to school for one of her classes. We are short on time (I just found out, she says. Tomorrow I need …). I dig through the cookbook shelf and find a book of the very easiest kind of cookies. Bar Cookies A to Z is no longer in print, though you can still get used copies on Amazon. It’s a fun little book and I’ve never had a bad cookie from it.

Instead of bar cookies, says The Child, we’ll make Behind Bar Cookies.

And so we did.

The cookie we chose was White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars, which I thought was just your basic Toll House bar cookie only with white chocolate. It isn’t. Half the white chocolate is melted, so the cookie tastes more like a white chocolate brownie; also, there is no baking powder or soda so the cookie base remains fairly dense.

The original recipe calls for raisins, which we omitted on the basis that raisins just don’t belong in chocolate chip anything. We’re pretty sure there’s a law about that and we’re law-abiding types. We omitted the nuts as well because we were unsure if any classmates had nut allergies. I felt the final cookie would have benefited from the added texture of the nuts; The Child thought they were perfect the way they were.

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White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars
 
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Ingredients
  • ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
  • 6 oz white chocolate (chopped or chips), divided
  • 3 large eggs
  • ⅔ cup sugar
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 1¼ cups AP flour
  • 4 oz bittersweet chocolate (chopped or chips)
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9-inch square pan.
  2. Heat the butter in a saucepan over low heat until melted. Remove from heat and add half the white chocolate; do not stir. Set aside.
  3. In a large bowl, beat the eggs with an electric mixer until frothy. Gradually add sugar and beat until the mixture is light, about 3 minutes.
  4. Beat in vanilla.
  5. Add the melted butter and white chocolate mixture along with the flour; stir to blend. Mix in remaining white chocolate and dark chocolate.
  6. Spread batter into prepared pan. Bake about 30 minutes, until the edges start to pull away from the pan. Cool at least 3 hours before cutting.
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Banana Coconut Muffins

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Yes, I know. This is my third banana muffin/banana bread recipe.

Indulge me.

The Child, it turns out, bought me a really nice muffin pan for Christmas, along with some cookie sheets. I already had some nice cookie sheets but I’m not complaining – having a lot can be handy. But my muffin pans were not good, and the pan selected by The Child – well, it is a very good pan, thick aluminum with big cups for big muffins. The only thing to do, then, was to make muffins.

I had some overripe bananas – I usually do, which is why I so often make banana bread. But not long after Christmas, I ran across a copy of The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion in a used bookstore. I’ve heard wonderful things about King Arthur recipes from numerous people recently, so I bought the book.  It contained yet another recipe for banana muffins – completely different from both Fannie Farmer’s Banana Bread and Biloxi Banana Bread.

The King Arthur book contains a base muffin recipe, and then a list of ingredient combinations that can be added in to make whatever muffins you like. It is a spectacular recipe – yes, spectacular – because the muffins rise beautifully, yet have a fine, moist crumb.

The bananas are not mashed and blended into the batter the way they usually are, but rather diced finely and mixed in with the coconut at the end. I wondered if this might result in less of a banana taste in the muffins, but it really didn’t. I loved the added flavor and texture of the coconut, but it could easily be omitted if one didn’t care for coconut.

Banana Coconut Muffins

Banana Coconut Muffins
 
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Serves: 16
Ingredients
  • 3½ cups unbleached all-purpose or cake flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • 2 bananas, diced finely
  • 1½ cups shredded unsweetened coconut
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F and lightly grease 16 muffin cups or use paper liners.
  2. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
  3. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together with a handheld or stand mixer until light and fluffy. Scrape down the bowl to make sure all the butter is incorporated, then add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
  4. Add the vanilla and sour cream and mix until incorporated.
  5. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low-speed just until the batter is smooth. Add diced bananas and coconut and stir just to incorporate.
  6. Fill the muffin tins and bake for 18 to 24 minutes or until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean.
  7. Remove the muffins from the oven, cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then remove the muffins from the pan to finish cooling on a rack. Muffins left in the pan to cool the entire time will become tough from steaming.
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This is my contribution to Weekend Cooking, hosted by Beth Fish Reads. Why not swing by and see what other simple pleasures await?

Aunt Hattie’s Cookies

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Valentine’s Day rolls around, and no surprise – I don’t even really notice. Valentine’s Day, in my universe, consists of me buying things for other people, or rationalizing why it’s a made-up holiday – a Hallmark holiday – thus justifying for someone else why there will be no dinner, no flowers, no whatever.

Except of course if you think about it, every holiday really is made up in some way, and that fact doesn’t make Christmas gifts any less appreciated.

For The Child, though, it’s different. She’s still in school, and although her classmates are no longer exchanging Spongebob Valentines, they still do things. She still wants to do things for everyone in her class – meaning her grade level. Which means she has 36 Valentine things to produce.

We decide on heart-shaped cookies, and go to the store and buy a heart-shaped cutter and some gift bags.

I have an old recipe that I’ve never made, that was passed by my great-great Aunt Hattie to my great-Aunt Kate and from her to me, with promises that it was the best sugar cookie recipe I’d ever make. I’ve been meaning to make those cookies for ages. Both my Aunts have passed and I think of them often and with love, and probably for that reason no occasion has seemed special enough to try out those cookies.

But we needed a sugar cookie recipe to make heart-shaped cookies, so I decided we’d try Aunt Hattie’s recipe. I had visions of us rolling out the dough and cutting heart shapes, but when we got home with our new cookie cutter and actually looked at the recipe,  it turned out it wasn’t that kind of cookie at all.

Roll it into balls, read the instructions, then roll the balls in sugar.

Since by now I had my heart set on finally making these cookies, The Child and I agreed not to lay aside the recipe, but instead, to lay aside the new cookie cutter. I mixed the dough, and she rolled the little balls in coarse confetti-colored sugar.

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They were wonderful straight out of the oven – sweet and chewy and mellow from the corn syrup, with a pleasing bit of crunch from the sugar. They looked pretty in the little cellophane gift bags tied with a red ribbon, all by themselves.

And though most of them were gone – distributed quickly to classmates, there were a few leftovers for me to enjoy on Valentine’s Day.

 

Aunt Hattie's Cookies
 
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Ingredients
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ¾ cup shortening
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 egg
  • ¼ cup white Karo Syrup
  • 1 tsp vanilla
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
  2. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
  3. Mix dry ingredients and set aside.
  4. Mix remaining ingredients until blended. Add dry ingredients.
  5. Roll pieces of dough into balls about the size of a cherry.
  6. Roll the balls of dough in sugar.
  7. Bake cookies for 8-10 minutes, cool on racks.
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