Gooey Pesach Blondies

These were a huge hit. I underbaked these so that the center was gooey. The edges could be cut and served in squares, but the center had to be served warm, in scoops like a runny chip cake. Someone said that it reminded him of pecan pie.

Passover Dessert: Chocolate Mistakes

This cookies were an accident. I was making a cookie recipe which called for just cocoa, powdered sugar and egg whites, with some chopped nuts folded in. I must have gotten distracted when measuring out the powdered sugar because the batter was just too dry. So, I added in the yolks that I had separated out from the whites. Then the batter was too runny. So added in a packet of ground nuts.

I baked the cookies, but most of them ran into each other, so I had to cut them into squares. The whole thing looked a bit like a mess, but tasted almost just like boxed chometz brownies. They had that chewy texture, with the thin  crackly top. So, all in all, this is a mistake I would make again, but I would either bake them as bar cookies, or space the cookies further apart so they wouldn’t run into each other.

Chocolate Chunk Mandel Bread and Pistachio Blueberry Mandel Bread

Dueling Mandel Bread: Baba’s Chocolate Chip v. Bubbe’s Pistachio Blueberry

My mother and I baked mandel bread to use up the last bit of our flour. My mother made a variation on my grandmother’s recipe and I played around with a recipe from Locke Hughes’s Baba, Daye Glassman.

And I finally used up the last of my flour!

The results: the pistachio blueberry mandel bread had a zingier flavor (from the dried fruit and orange zest and juice), but the chocolate chip mandelbread had an especially nice melt-in-your-mouth texture–dry but not too hard.

Strudel Rugelach Mandel Bread: Strugelachbrodt?

I had leftover apricot lekvar and I used it to make a cookie that is a cross between strudel, rugelach and mandelbrodt. It is an adaption of a recipe for Date and Walnut Rolls, from Tzurit Or’s bakery Tatte Fine Cookies & Cakes in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Healthier Shtreimel Cookies: Blythe Danner’s Macrobiotic Thumbprints with Chocolate Filling

In 2006, Woman’s Day magazine published  Blythe Danner’s recipe for macrobiotic thumbprint cookies. I tore out and saved the recipe but never got around to making it. Well, not until now, that is (I had to use up the barley flour I bought to make my sister-in-law these other cookies). The recipe for thumbprint cookies that is online now is a little different from the recipe that was published in Woman’s Day–I guess Blythe Danner has changed how she makes the cookies.

I made a slight change. Instead of baking the cookies filled with jam, I filled them after baking with ganache to make a healthier version of those Stella D’oro Swiss Fudge cookies (AKA Shtreimel Cookies). Some cookies I filled with cherry jam and then topped the jam with ganache.