Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

Dan & I have been invited to a Cinco De Mayo party being thrown by our next door neighbor, Mary - a wonderful Octogenarian who was the first person to introduce herself to us when we moved in, and makes afternoons working in the yard much more fun (if perhaps less productive, since she & I end up talking for hours).

This is our second year attending, and we decided to take something a little more thematic than we did last year. Dan discovered the blog Chocolate Chipped this week, and in particular a post about Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies. The post is actually a reference to the original post at Coconut & Lime - where you can find the recipe featured in those posts.

I was at first going to try to replicate those cookies... but then decided to go out on my own, be a bit more adventurous, and try my hand at creating my own recipe. I started with the 1-2-3 Cookie Dough recipe (courtesy of Ratio), then scaled it up and added chocolate, coffee powder and spices to create a simple, yet striking chocolate cookie with a bit of heat.

Dan's Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies
8 oz brown sugar
16 oz unsalted butter
24 oz all purpose flour
1 Tbpsn cinnamon
2 tspn cayenne
1 tspn fine ground black pepper
12 oz bittersweet chocolate chips
1 tspn instant coffee powder

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line two cookie sheets with parchment or silicon baking mats. In a mixer, combine the sugar and butter. Meanwhile, sift together the flour, cinnamon, cayenne, and pepper. (If you don't have fine ground black pepper, use a mortar to grind your pepper into a fine powder.) In a double boiler, melt the chocolate chips with the coffee powder, until smooth. Add 1 cup of the flour mixture to the chocolate, and stir until combined. Add the chocolate mixture to the butter/sugar mixture and then add the remaining flour, one cup at a time, just until all combined. Make 1 inch balls of dough and press them down onto the cookie sheet to the desired thickness, leaving an inch between each cookie. The cookies will spread only a bit. Alternately, roll the dough up in waxed paper or plastic wrap to create a log, then cut to the desired thicknesses. Bake for 15 minutes, then cool for 5 minutes before putting on a cooling rack. To retain moist texture, store as soon as cooled in a sealed container.

This makes about 5 dozen cookies - so scale back the quantities if you only want to make a dozen, or so. Also, the amount of cayenne and black pepper makes these a bit spicy, so you could scale those back in relation to the other ingredients... but that kinda spoils the point of the cookies, doesn't it?

Spicy Thai Curry Mac & Cheese

We put Mac & Cheese on the menu tonight, but on my walk home from work I had an idea for a cookbook that made me want to try something new with the recipe.



I'm reading a book called Will Write for Food, which I bought with the aim of improving my ability to write about the food I eat. It covers a variety of areas of food writing, from restaurant reviews to food history journalism, to writing recipes and cookbooks. Since I'm a complete cookbook addict, there's a kernel of desire inside me that would love to self publish a cookbook. A recent chapter I read talked about how to decide topics for writing, including cookbooks, and the bottom line is specificity is key to appealing to a specific demographic and standing out among the thousands of cookbooks on the market.



With that in mind, I was thinking about our meal plan for tonight, and how Mac & Cheese has got to be one of the top 5 classic American comfort foods - and making the same version again and again is a bit boring. So I thought about what international cuisines I could fuse with it to add some spice (either figuratively, or literally), and how a American Comfort Fusion cookbook might be a good angle for me (Steal the idea and I'll hunt you down).

The last batch of Mac & Cheese I made included a bunch of chili powder, which was great, but not very specific. After our great meal from Thai Recipe last night, I was inspired to create a mac & cheese that combined flavors from Thai cuisine (chilis, coconut milk, and curry) with the American classic.

Having spiced up Mac & Cheese already, I wasn't worried about chilies. My biggest fear was combining cheese with curry and coconut milk. Thankfully, Dan bought a variety of cheeses for me to choose from, including white cheddar and gruyere. I hoped the nuttiness of the gruyere would combine well with the coconut milk, and that the curry flavor would be mild enough to let the other flavors shine through. My official recipe tester (Dan) was very pleased with the results, which seemed to successfully meld the two cuisines to create something new. The curry and coconut flavors were fairly mild, but still noticable, and the chilis lended the dish good heat, though not so much as to distract from the gooey texture or the flavor combinations.

Spicy Thai Curry Mac & Cheese
3/4 cup panko bread crumbs
2 Tbspn melted butter
8 oz macaroni
2 Tbspn butter
1 clove garlic, minced
6 small dried red chilis, chopped
1 Tbspn all purpose flour
salt & pepper to taste
1/4 tspn curry powder
1 1/2 cups coconut milk
1 cup white cheddar
1 cup cup gruyere

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 2 qt casserole dish. Place panko bread crumbs into a small bowl and mix well with melted butter. Set aside. Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, or until al dente. Drain well, shaking off as much residual water as possible, then place into prepared casserole dish. While pasta is cooking, melt 2 Tbspn butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Stir in garlic and peppers and cook until garlic begins to brown (about 2 minutes). Stir in flour, pepper, salt, and curry powder until incorporated, then pour in coconut milk and bring to a simmer. Simmer, stirring constantly until the mixture has thickened (about 10 minutes). Take the mixture off the heat and stir in the cheeses until melted. Pour cheese sauce over the pasta, then sprinkle evenly with buttered bread crumbs. Bake (uncovered) until the top is golden and bubbly, about 20 minutes.

Honey Oat Blackberry Muffins

As I've been baking breakfast muffins and bread once a week (at least), I've started playing a bit with the recipes. This week, I used blackberries picked from the yard, and wanted to play around with the recipe to see if I could use honey instead of sugar to increase the local nature of them without them being too gooey, replace one egg with flax powder to reduce the fat while retaining the structure, swap out half the all purpose flour for whole wheat flour to add fiber, and kick up the amount of fruit a bit to showcase the berries and make the muffins more moist.

It's probably not smart of me to experiment with so much at once, but I felt pretty confident in everything but the honey - having played around with whole wheat flour and flax powder in the past. Thankfully, they turned out great - and I think I actually improved the recipe. Here's this week's variation:

Honey Oat Blackberry Muffins
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 Tbspn baking powder
1 tspn salt
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup water
1 tspn Flax Seed Powder
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 cup milk
1/2 cup honey
2 eggs
2 cups blackberries
1/4 cup rolled oats

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt into a bowl. Add 1/2 cup brown sugar and stir to blend. Combine water and flax powder. Add melted butter, milk, honey, and eggs. Stir into dry mixture just barely. Fold in berries very lightly, just until the dry and wet mixtures blend and the fruit is distributed. Spoon into a well-greased or paper lined muffin tin (each of the 12 depressions will be filled to just more than full). Sprinkle tops rolled oats. Bake for 20 minutes. Makes a dozen muffins.

Mai Tai Cupcakes

This morning, I woke up thinking that this afternoon is my fortnightly team social, and it may just be my turn to bring something. After my Margarita cupcakes a couple weeks back, my mind went to work on a new recipe, using what was in the house. I bought an entire case of Cherry Chip cake mix about a year ago, because Dan's sister loves it, and still have a bunch of boxes around. Starting with cherry as my first ingredient, I somehow realized I could add orange, pineapple, lime, almond, and rum flavors to create a cupcake that tastes like a Mai Tai - which is one of my favorite drinks. They turned out better than the Margarita cupcakes, mostly because you could really taste the booze, and seemed to be successful (most people ate 2). I thought the flavor was pretty darn close to sipping a real Mai Tai, right down to the rum 'floater' on top, in the form of icing. The only problem with them is that they're not much to look at, owing to the lack of a gorgeous dollop of frosting on top, so I may need to adjust the recipe to make them prettier.

But my next cupcake cocktail recipe attempt will be a pina colada (a request from my coworker Anne).

Mai Tai Cupcakes
1 box of Cherry Chip Cake Mix
3 Eggs
1/3 cup mashed banana
6 oz of pineapple juice
1 Tbspn lime juice
1 tspn orange extract
1/2 tspn almond extract
1/4 cup + 2 Tbspn Dark Rum

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Put all ingredients into a mixer and blend until smooth. Distribute batter evenly between 2 lined cupcake pans (to make ~24 cupcakes). Bake for 20 minutes, then cool.

1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup Dark Rum

Mix sugar and rum to create a glaze. Pour on cupcakes just before serving. Best flavor is attained by biting through the entire cupcake, top to bottom, to get the taste of rum followed by the fruity finish.