Chocolate Chip Cookies

I love to make cookies that impress, but quite honestly I have yet to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. I want to make cookies like they sell at Levain… seriously how insane does that cookie look?


Now, I know that is a dark chocolate peanut butter chip cookie but the picture does the best justice to their unbelievable, Throwdown with Bobby Flay winning cookies. It’s huge, fluffy, perfectly underdone, and just begging for a glass of cold milk.

Oreo Cheesecake Brownies

So a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of two days off for Shavuot (remind me never to leave my job!). What does Shavuot have to do with this brownie recipe you ask? Well, it all started when I was bragging to my cousin Marcy (the family Super Jew) about my days off for some holiday celebrating the Torah. She told me I was supposed to eat cheesecake. All of a sudden Shavuot became my kind of holiday! I bought lots of cream cheese and prepared to make my very first cheesecake. But, I didn’t have a springform pan and I really had to go dress shopping, so cheesecake just wasn’t in the cards. Instead, I got creative. And, with a little help from Jessica, Oreo cheesecake brownies were born.

The recipe comes from the Joy of Cooking. But I had tons of cream cheese to get rid of. And Oreos I really didn’t want in my house. So, we doubled up on the cheesecake portion and added cookies into the mix. The results were well received.

Happy belated Shavuot (I give you all permission to celebrate holidays that involve cheesecake, I surely celebrate holidays that involve Cadbury Eggs)

Black & White Cookies

Maybe it’s because my parents both grew up in Brooklyn, maybe it’s because as a child the black & white cookie was enormous and thus exciting, or maybe it’s because they stare me down at every local deli, bodega or market in NYC; but whatever the reason, the black and white cookie is truly a NY staple.

William Grimes of the NY Times said “Today's black-and-white cannot compare with the black-and-whites of yesteryear, of course, just as no mayor will ever be as good as La Guardia and no team as beloved as the Dodgers. It is now the stuff of legend, even though a truly impartial adult judge might say that, as cookies go, the black-and-white is nothing special. That argument does not get very far in New York.”

Pizza Pizza!

I found white whole wheat flour at the market tonight, which I’d been looking for, so decided to put it to use. White whole wheat flour is produced from white wheat (instead of red wheat) and has a lighter quality which makes it great for baking and cooking. For my dough, I used one-third white flour, one-third regular whole wheat flour, and one-third white whole wheat… it came out great – not too dense and wheaty, but it still felt healthy.

I grew up ordering half white pizza so that my family could eat regular pizza and I could avoid icky tomatoes!! Eventually, I learned to eat tomato sauce – maybe spending a semester in Italy helped. However, I still love white pizza (and still hate tomatoes, yes dad, even those “delicious” cherry tomatoes you grow). Anyway, since I’m the chef, I opted for a white pizza in the style of the Greek pizza from Spiritus in P-town - fresh mozzarella, feta, red onion and olives (but sadly forgot spinach!).

I don’t have a pizza stone, or a barbeque, so I cooked my pizza on a regular old cookie sheet and it came out just fine. But, feel free to fancy it up if you have the proper equipment.

In the meantime, a Sunday night with homemade pizza and a Red Sox win… “so good, so good, so good!”

Apple Muffins

I was really in the mood for a muffin yesterday but never got around to getting one… so, of course I made some today. I don’t know about you, but whenever I make muffins they come out kind of wimpy. I decided I really wanted to try to go for that bakery-like dome shape. I tried googling a bit to see what I could come up with. Here are my thoughts…

The most prevalent comment I could find was that it’s important to fill the muffin tins, like really fill them, maybe even over-fill them. Why do recipes always say to fill the tins two-thirds of the way? Silly. Go for it. Fill those babies up.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

If you know me at all, you know I love any excuse for baked goods… Valentine’s day was no excuse. And red velvet screams valentine’s day to me. I had never had a red velvet cupcake until I moved to Manhattan and for some reason, maybe all the cupcake chains, red velvet seemed to be everywhere. I fell in love… but I must admit, having it again recently I decided it’s really just an excuse for delicious cream cheese frosting. The cake is kind of mediocre. It has a good texture but the flavor is average. I think I might prefer a really good chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting instead…. There’s always next time.

Until then, happy belated valentine’s day!

Homemade Oreos

I have had my eye on a homemade oreo recipe on Smitten Kitchen for months. Deb, the author of Smitten Kitchen, suggests that this recipe falls into the “you’ve been warned” category because once you make these you will have to make them a million times as everyone will love them and request them. I’m okay with that!

I grew up with an actual cookie jar that was almost always filled with oreos. We had a two cookie rule in our house so sometimes the oreos would even get stale – tragic. These days I don’t have oreos in my house unless they come in a 100-calorie pack and we all know those aren’t even close to the real thing. I have the feeling this version will get shared, and devoured before they get stale…

Happy dunking!