Messy but good.

CHOCOLATE COOKIES

4 oz. semisweet chocolate

1/4 c. butter

4 eggs

1 1/2 c. granulated sugar

1 3/4 c. flour

1/2 c. cocoa powder

2 t. baking powder

pinch salt

1/4-1/2 c. powdered sugar

Get yourself a double boiler situation going. Put in your semisweet chocolate and butter. Combine and melt together. Mix eggs and granulated sugar together until light in color and thickened. Add your sort of cooled chocolate butter mix. Combine with a wooden spoon.

Add your dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Put some sort of wrap or cover on the bowl and refrigerate the mess until more like a cookie dough. This usually is about 2 hours. It is going to be more like a brownie batter at the start.

Turn oven to 350. Once it is to the point where you can work little cookie balls, pull from fridge and work into said little cookie balls. Enrobe in powdered sugar. Now you are in it. Work quickly so that each ball does not absorb powdered sugar. You want the cookies to flatten and maintain an inkling of their enrobement. Place each cookie ball on a prepared baking sheet. Bake until they flatten out a bit and begin to take on a sort of crackled top. About 12 minutes depending your oven. They will still be a bit soft to the touch right when you take them from the oven. This is great because they still have some flattening and firming to do. They will sort it out on their own once out of oven and on a cooling rack.

One more pumpkin recipe for the road.

This is a big bakery recipe that I have tried to scale down. But this is as small as I have gotten it to where it still yields a good batch. It makes about 3 loaves of bread. Unfortunately, for this batch of it I only had enough butter to make 1/4 of this amount…and the results were less than impressive. Scaling down from this batch amount is not very consistent in results.

PUMPKIN BREAD

12 T. unsalted butter

2 c. sugar

4 eggs

2/3 c. orange juice

2 c. pumpkin

3 1/3 c. flour

1/2 t. baking powder

2 t. baking soda

1/2 t. salt

1 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. cloves

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add egg one at a time, mixing after each addition. Scrape down bowl. Add orange juice and pumpkin and mix at low speed or by hand until just incorporated. Sift dry ingredients into bowl and add pumpkin mixture to the dry ingredients and stir.

Prepare 3 loaf pans by greasing and putting a small rectangle of parchment at the base of each tin. Divide batter among the 3 tins. Bake at 375 for almost an hour. It may seem slightly unbaked as you pull it out of the oven, but will set up over the next couple hours. Just make sure that a tester comes out clean when deciding to take them out of the oven.

Here I confess my love for pumpkin.

These are from when I lived in Bend, Oregon years ago. When I was young, spry and had good eyes and knees, there was this place called A Cup of Magic. We went there pretty much every morning in the summer. I would fuel up here on a purist’s dream cinnamon role and black coffee. Then I cycled on up the road and spent my days as a summer camp counselor.

In the fall when I would go back to work at the bakery down the road from this coffee shop, I would sneak away on my break (from baking in a bakery to another bakery) to get some pumpkin cookies from Cup of Magic.

These are my best re-creation of these delightful pumpkin delicacies. Enjoy.

PUMPKIN CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

1/4 c. unsalted or vegan butter

1/2 c. granulated sugar

Flax egg or chicken egg

1 1/4 c. all purpose flour

1/2 c. pumpkin purée

1/2 t. baking powder

1/2 t. baking soda

pinch of salt

1/2 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. ground nutmeg

1/2 c. chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

In a stand mixer, combine sugar and fat until light in color and fluffy. Add your egg and blend to incorporate. Add your dry ingredients and mix briefly. Add pumpkin puree and mix until almost blended (some evidence of flour should still exist). Pumpkin can be very tricky because it can go from incorporated to overmixed and gummy real quick. Add your chips and then just do a couple rotations of paddle to get them into the crowd

Scoop out in desired shape onto parchment lined baking sheet. You may choose to lightly smoosh (industry term) them into actual flattened cookie structure. Or keep them in their naturally scooped state for a more pumpkin dumpling (pumplings) product.

Bake for 15 minutes or so. Depends on how greedy you were with your scoops. Then you eat them.

I first fell in love with this cake when I was in Italy a long time ago. They sold it in packaging and stores that made it seem like the Italian equivalent of Twinkies. But no matter. I was hooked.

PLUM CAKE

5 oz. unsalted butter (one stick is close enough)

5 oz. brown sugar

2 eggs

10 oz. flour (pastry is best here)

.25 oz. baking powder (about 3 t.)

1/2 t. cinnamon

1/4 t. salt

9 oz. (in weight, not volume) milk, this works out to be roughly 1.5 cups.

1 lb. plums, halved and pitted

Cream butter and sugar in a mixer with paddle attachment. Scrape down and remix until it is light in color and is not forming a ball in the bowl. Add eggs one at a time, mixing slowly after each addition. Add dry ingredients and briefly mix. Remove from mixer and fold in milk by hand. This is helpful because the sugar and butter tend to hold up on walls of bowl if you use the paddle to do this part. Make sure to fold until you have an even cakelike batter.

Pour into prepared cake round or square pan. Add your plum halves facing up. Bake at 400 for about 35 minutes. Until a cake tester comes out clean. Slice and enjoy.

Cakies. The best of a birthday cake in cookie form. They also are like birthday cake batter ice cream. They are a confused dessert.

YELLOW CAKE COOKIES

1/3 c. butter

1/2 c. sugar

1 egg

3/4 t. baking powder

1 T. cornstarch

1/4 t. turmeric

pinch of salt

1 1/3 c. all purpose flour

1 1/4 c. almond flour

2 T. milk

1/4-1/3 c. sprinkles

Turn on that oven to 350 degrees. That’s F to you and me, kids.

Cream together butter and sugar with paddle attachment until light yellow in color. Add egg and mix on low. Scrape sides and remix if needed.

Add dry ingredients and mix on low. If too dry, add milk. Once the mix is almost fully incorporated and looks like it will scoop into little cookie cake hybrids, add your sprinkles and briefly mix.

Scoop using an ice cream scoop onto parchment lined cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes or so. They should puff up a little because they are not sure if they are a cookie or a cake.

No oven needed. These are swell little things to keep around in a big bowl in the fridge. Or well hidden from any chocolate inclined house dwellers.

PRO TIP: A sprinkle of pink or sea salt right on top of these before you chill them is also a delightful addition.

These can be made with any sort of nut butter you can get your hands on. PB is a classic and almond has a nice sweet and mellow twist. Roasted, salted, chunky…all these descriptors of said nut butter are totally invited to this party.

Nut Butter Cups

8 oz chocolate (chips or chunks or even broken up bar is fine…semi-sweet, dark, you pick your poison)

1/4-1/3 c. nut butter

3 +/- T powdered sugar

Set out about a dozen mini muffin liners in a mini muffin tin or just really close together on a baking sheet or surface that can be moved into freezer.

Melt chunked up chocolate in a double boiler over low/medium heat. Make sure to stir and don’t let that chocolate burn.

While the chocolate is melting, mix the nut butter and powdered sugar into a sort of pliable dough. You may need to add more nut butter if it is too dry or more sugar if it is too wet. You want a sweet filling, but not overly so. And you want the mixture to be able to form a ball in your hands easily.

Add about a 1/2 t of the melted chocolate to each liner. Then, with a small spatula or finger, swirl the chocolate so that it comes up the sides of the paper liner. This seems tedious and slightly unnecessary but if you skip this, you will end up with messy nut butter sandwiches that just ooze out of hardened chocolate. Not the worst thing, but we can do better.

Roll the nut butter mixture into medium sized marbles. Slightly squish each nutty marble and deposit one in each prepared liner. This is what the chocolate was meant to do.

Top each cup with more chocolate so that it covers the little nut coin.

Pop in the freezer for about 30 minutes or so. Store in the fridge or just eat the whole lot. No one is watching.