Category Archives: Baking

Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks

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Road tripping ain’t what it used to be, friends.

Gone are our lazy days of puttering down the coast, of long lunches with spectacular views, of starting and stopping and pitching camp where and when we like.

We’re all business now.  It’s I-5 all the way from Seattle to Northern California, aggressive packing of PB&J fixings so we don’t need long lunches, and hardly noticing the view because of the song and dance I’m doing in the back seat to entertain the girls.

That’s right, we packed the whole family into the minivan (which I like to call the “Man Van” now, both to distance myself from it and to convey to J how sexy it is for him to take the kids to swimming lessons).  And we drove all afternoon and night, and much of the next day, and lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that we did in the car to entertain three children aged 1, 3, and 5: made a list of things to do, read books, sang songs, colored, napped, watched a video, ate snacks, played peek-a-boo, and let the baby pull out an entire package of floss.

Here is something we did not do in the car: eat these chocolately granola treats.  We meant to, we really did.  Hannah said they were road food and I’m inclined to agree, but once I made them we had to taste one and then, wow, another, and they were so crispy and chocolately and then it was the next day and J was asking me to please take a photo of the things already so he could keep eating them and just like that…gone, as fast as the miles roll by when you’re having a good time out there on the road.

Continue reading Crispy Chocolate-Granola Haystacks (click for recipe)

Mushroom and Olive Pizza

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We haven’t made a pizza on this blog in a dog’s age.  Too hot to turn on the oven, you say?  Not in Seattle.  It’s 63 degrees outside at the moment.  Once it gets up to 70 I’ll try to work up my nerve to start making pizzas on the grill instead–any tips for me in advance?

But first, this.  A mushroom and olive pizza has a special place in my heart.  Growing up, my dad (and sometimes my mom as well, but mostly my dad on nights when my mom was elsewhere) would take us kids out to a local pizza parlor.  Red pleather, arcade games, a window where you could watch the guys toss dough and pile on toppings.  We always got a mushroom and olive pizza and a pitcher of ice-cold root beer.  It was, in the parlance of the day, so awesome.

This isn’t your ’80s pizza-parlor mushroom and olive pizza–not because that pizza wasn’t righteous, but because I am a creature of habit and make my homemade pizza with a thin crust.  And because I buy kalamata olives in bulk instead of canned black olives.  And because I usually saute my mushrooms before adding them to pizza.  But you could totally serve this pizza with an ice-cold root beer.  That would still be rad. Continue reading Mushroom and Olive Pizza (click for recipe)

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Chocolate is woefully under-represented on this blog compared to the role it plays in my life.  I’d say I eat chocolate almost every day, sometimes in moderation and sometimes, frankly, not.  But most of the chocolate I eat these days is in pure, unadulterated bar form.  I don’t bake with it much anymore because, in a perplexing twist of fate, I have a child who doesn’t like chocolate.  She spits out a cookie, face twisted in disgust, if she finds an errant chocolate chip in her mouth.  It’s unfathomable to me, but I work with it and mostly bake without chocolate.

So when I make something chocolate, I like to go all-out. These cookies are all-out. Are you still mulling over what nice thing to do for your dad for Fathers Day?  Skip down to the ingredients list and start baking.

The brookies (brownies+cookies=brookies) recipe on this site is one of my favorite chocolate cookie recipes. This is the other.  Those are chewy; these are a decadent, chocolatey, crumbly sable, packed with chunks of chopped bittersweet chocolate.  The recipe comes from French pastry chef Pierre Hermé, Dorie Greenspan published in her book Baking: From My Home to Yours, and I found it via The Splendid Table.  Thank goodness.

The only warning I will offer is this: the dough can be quite crumbly, and if it is too crumbly it will be difficult to slice into cookies.  I have read that using high-quality cocoa powder makes the dough easier to handle, but I used up some decidedly low-quality cocoa powder this time and the cookies came out fine.  If your dough is truly too crumbly to form into logs, stir in a spoonful of milk and the dough will come right together.  You’ll lose a tiny bit of the light, sandy texture, but the cookies will still be delicious. Continue reading Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies (click for recipe)

Granola Cookie Bars

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are June, July, and August).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

There’s something about environmentally-unfriendly single-serving packaged snacks that children find irresistible.  Maybe it’s the “all mine” factor, or the satisfying crinkle of those little bags, but it’s hard to compete with a store-bought granola bar for my kids’ affection in the snack category.

These bars did the trick partly because they were fun and hands-on to make, and partly because they’re basically cookies.  Mmm, cookies.  This recipe, from Good to the Grain, was a great starting point–chewy, sweet and oaty–but I expect to do a little experimentation in the future to find a granola bar that comes closer to being a healthy kid snack.  On the other hand, these would make a great hiking snack if you actually needed a sugar boost, and I quite enjoyed them as an afternoon sweet alongside a cup of tea.  We’ll just be calling them “cookies” from now on.

Do you have a granola bar recipe you like?  Do tell.

Continue reading Granola Cookie Bars (click for recipe)

Honey-Almond Granola with Orange Zest

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I have a confession.

I did it.  You guys, I bought a minivan.  A beat-up old minivan, of course, because we’re just going to beat it up more and I don’t event want a minivan anyway, but there it is.  And it’s unarguably a minivan.  It has about a zillion cupholders and fits carseats galore and I am going to have to practice obsessively to be able to look cool casually spinning the wheel with one hand while I effortlessly parallel park the hulking monster.

Oh, who I am kidding, I will never look cool again.  I’ll be driving a minivan. (To be clear, YOU look cool in YOUR minivan, of course.  This is not about YOU.)

I don’t think of myself as the minivan type, obviously.  But I hear that lots of people fall in love once they have one of these large, convenient, family-friendly vehicles.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

I do think of myself as the granola type.  This one is no crisp, salty maple-y Olive Oil Granola, or buttery, delicate Walnut and Currant Granola.  This one is health food.  It’s almost aggressively crunchy, barely sweetened with juice and honey, and has no oil whatsoever.  It bakes into addictive crunchy clumps that you will probably find yourself eating by the handful each time you pass the jar.  That’s ok, it’s super healthy.

I’m going to eat this granola in my Birkenstocks while I pretend that my minivan is a 1960’s VW bus. Continue reading Honey-Almond Granola with Orange Zest (click for recipe)

Soft Rye Pretzels

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Let’s start with this: I’m not at all above feeding my kids a box of mac and cheese, or declaring that it’s leftover night and wishing everyone good luck, or piling us all into the car to go out for ramen.  But I do try to make dinner for my family with some frequency.

Do you know this nice blog called “Dinner: A Love Story“?  I was just introduced to it recently.  It’s all about feeding your family dinner every night and of course they have a new cookbook (who doesn’t these days?), apparently full of recipes and strategies for feeding a family of picky eaters without going crazy.  I should probably get that cookbook.

But in the meantime I thought I’d share a tip of my own.  One of the ways in which I manage to get dinner on the table on a regular basis is by using the term “dinner” fairly loosely.  Some examples: breakfast for dinner?  Sure.  Sandwiches?  If necessary.  Tonight’s dinner?  These pretzels.  The girls gleefully chose their own dips (peanut butter, rhubarb jam, and applesauce), and the grown-ups had theirs with a sweet grainy mustard.  I made a pot of that great turnip soup soup as well, but it was certainly the accompaniment to the pretzels and not the other way around.It’s a little time-consuming to make pretzels (you boil these in a baking-soda bath in addition to letting them rise twice), but it was a fun project to do with the girls and the resulting pretzels were very good.  They have just the right combination of crispy bottom and chewy center, with a little tang that I assumed was from the rye flour, but Kim Boyce tells me is from the baking soda instead.  This recipe is adapted from Boyce’s Good to the Grain cookbook, which I want to cook from front to back after having started with those Rhubarb-Strawberry Cornmeal Tarts recently.

There’s a great-looking recipe for graham crackers, do you think I’ll be able to get away with calling those dinner? Continue reading Soft Rye Pretzels (click for recipe)

Potato and Rosemary Foccacia with (or without) Black Garlic

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Have you ever heard of black garlic?  I hadn’t until last week, when I happened across a small new bin tucked in with the mushrooms at my local co-op.  The sign said “fermented black garlic.”  What?  The employees in the produce section were enthusiastic in recommending it but vague about exactly what it was.  It looked like garlic, but was slightly collapsed and shrunken, and smelled like a sweet, lightly garlic-flavored soy sauce.  It smelled good.  Into my basket it went. Later I found that wikipedia link above and determined that I had purchased either a traditional Asian ingredient or a new-fangled food entrepreneur’s invention from California, or maybe some combination (see here for the California producer’s description of how the “magic” fermentation process occurs “behind the closed doors of our patented machine”).  Apparently this stuff is all umami and antioxidants and a darling of the food cognoscenti, of which group I am not a member, so that explains why I had never heard of it.

Finding a new vegetable is a big deal for a serious eater.  A new taste experience on the horizon!  I started researching how to make the most of my intriguing head of garlic.  In the end, I didn’t find a recipe that called to me, so I adapted a potato and rosemary focaccia recipe from Food and Wine, which had in turn adapted it from a Daniel Boulud recipe.

I made two medium-sized focaccias, and I used half a head of black garlic to flavor one of them.  I roasted thinly-sliced potatoes with olive oil, rosemary, and a couple of minced cloves of black garlic, then I layered more sliced cloves of black garlic onto the potato-topped bread before baking it.  I was a little worried that I might have overdone it with all that garlic.  (The other focaccia was topped only with rosemary-roasted potato slices as a delicious control group.)So hey, it’s good bread.  But the garlic flavor is quite mild, and in my opinion the black garlic’s flavor, at least as I prepared it, doesn’t live up to the bold promise of its alluring scent and striking appearance.  But I like strong flavors, and the unexpectedly delicate garlic flavor may be a plus in your book rather than a disappointment.  In any case, the midnight-black cloves certainly lend dramatic flair.

Here’s the important question: what should I do with the remaining cloves of black garlic?  Have you used it in a preparation that you liked?  Do you have some off-the-wall inspiration to share?  I’ll give it another go.

Continue reading Potato and Rosemary Foccacia with (or without) Black Garlic (click for recipe)

Rhubarb-Strawberry Cornmeal Tarts with Ginger and Orange Zest

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There are plenty of good reasons to make friends with your neighbors.  You can always borrow a cup of sugar, they’re conveniently close for impromptu cocktail parties or afternoon barbeques, and you can share a lawnmower.  (What, not everyone shares a lawnmower with their neighbors?  Well, maybe you all mow more than twice a year.)

We are lucky enough to have the kind of neighbors who, in addition to all of the benefits above, sometimes drop by with treats.  Recently it was a dish of petal-pink tender baked rhubarb, barely sweet and redolent of orange zest and ginger.  I know, right?

I admit to eating a few stalks straight from the dish with my fingers, and heaping spoonfuls made their way into bowls of yogurt for breakfast.  But I have a new cookbook, Good to the Grain, and it has a picture on the cover of some mighty handsome little single-serving rhubarb tarts.  I couldn’t resist cooking the remaining rhubarb down into a jam with fragrant strawberries and baking them into delicate and delicious free-form tarts.  They’re like the biggest, best jam-filled cookie you’ve ever had.  We shared them with the neighbors, of course.Strawberry Rhubarb Tart

Continue reading Rhubarb-Strawberry Cornmeal Tarts with Ginger and Orange Zest (click for recipe)

Whole Wheat Yogurt Sandwich Bread, or, Why We Still Have a Breadmaker

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There was a period in my life when I had three or four breadmakers.  All used, of course, as a breadmaker is the sort of appliance that seems to wander around in search of a home.  You probably know a couple people trying to give away bread machines they got for their wedding 15 years ago and never used, and they’re always on Craig’s List for $5, and they carom around on Freecycle like nobody’s business.

So anyway, a few years ago I somehow came into possession of a breadmaker.  I hadn’t used one in years.  I used it once or twice with, you know, breadmaker-type results, and then it broke.  Suddenly I keenly felt its absence.  I couldn’t find the same model so I got a different one, and then I did find the same model so I got that too, and maybe I even got a third before I came to my senses, discarded the broken one, and gave the surplus breadmakers away.  Phew.

I will say this for my breadmaker: it makes a reliable whole wheat sandwich bread when we run out of the store-bought stuff.  And what else do I want it for, really?  I usually buy 100% whole grain sandwich bread because I have not found a 100% whole wheat recipe that works in my breadmaker.  (Do you have one?  Please, please share!)  This recipe, straight from the Breadman manual, has been my go-to breadmaker loaf for years.  It is moist with a sturdy crumb and a nice crust and it slices just right for sandwiches.  You can get it going the night before and have a hot loaf waiting in the morning.  It’s worth keeping a breadmaker around for (but just one).

Continue Reading Whole Wheat Yogurt Sandwich Bread (click for recipe)

Blueberry Lemon Cornmeal Pancakes (Vegan)

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Let’s just get something out of the way: I am not posting this recipe because these pancakes are the easiest-to-flip pancakes in the world.  (They’re not.)  I’m posting it because they’re some of the more delicious pancakes I’ve ever eaten.  (They are.)  And with Mothers Day coming up on Sunday, you just might want a special pancake recipe up your sleeve.  Sweet with juicy blueberries, a bit of crunch from the cornmeal and crispy edge, lemon zest singing the high note.  You can make them even if you’re not brunching with your mom, you know.

A word about vegan pancakes, and vegan baking in general, really: I used to always think in terms of how to “replace” the eggs in recipes, but Isa Chandra Moskowitz & her Post Punk Kitchen empire have changed that for me.  I don’t get the science, I just follow the recipes, but hey, they work.  (Have you baked out of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World?)  This recipe is from her book Veganomicon.

Back to the pancakes.  Give them room, people.  The batter is thin, and it spreads quite a bit. If I had a nonstick pan, I would have used it here, but I don’t.  Instead, I oiled my seasoned cast iron griddle well and waited until the pancakes were well-browned and released (more) easily with the help of a thin metal spatula.  It’s a fine line between well-browned and burnt, however, so keep a close eye as that pivotal moment approaches.  And if a pancake buckles as you scoop it up, just flip it and smooth it back out on the other side.

Continue reading Blueberry Lemon Cornmeal Pancakes (click for recipe)