Brown butter chocolate chip cookies

Chocolate chip cookies. That iconic cookie that is loved and raved about universally, and one that provokes the strongest personal responses and biases. Crisp vs chewy; giant vs dainty; nuts vs plain. A quick search on Google yielded 24,200,040 results which only shows how popular and divisive this humble cookie is! Every serious baker has got to have his own chocolate chip cookie recipe in his sleeves. Well, this is mine. I must qualify that statement because I always tweak the recipe slightly depending on what I have on hand - less nuts, no nuts, more chips, using a higher percentage of chocolate, etc. I suppose that's what makes this American cookie so endearing and endlessly creative - it's the fact that you can mix and match to suit your own taste.

With this in mind, this version sums up how I like my chocolate chip cookie: flat and crisp, with nuts, and loaded with the finest dark chocolate chips. I'm fully aware that in America, which is where this cookie originated, the majority of the people fancy the thick and chewy kind. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've always found that underbaked chewy centre rather challenging. Most American versions also contain an astonishing amount of sugars (white and brown) to attain crispiness/chewiness. In fact, it's impossible to recreate the traditional American cookie texture if you cut down on the sugar.

Darkest dark chocolate cookies

I received these Scharffenberger 99% chocolate and cocoa nibs in the post a few days ago. I had been wanting to have unsweetened chocolate for baking for some time since its high cocoa content gives me more room in eliminating sugar in the recipe. If you haven't figured out by now, I like my chocolate desserts very dark and minimally sweetened, but sadly a lot of recipes that require a whole egg foam or a meringue need a good amount of sugar for the foam to be stable. If I used a 70% chocolate in such a recipe, the dessert would end up too sweet for my taste. Much better, then, to use less chocolate quantitatively, but up the cocoa content to 99 or 100% so that you have complete control of how much sweetness you add!

I scratched my head looking for a good recipe to use these fruity and pretty acidic Scharffenberger unsweetened chocolate. I dug in my word document of recipes and was reminded of these very dark and quintessentially American chocolate cookies. They're unusual because they rely on beating whole eggs until they reach a stable foam before folding in melted unsweetened chocolate. A minimal amount of flour is then blended in along with more unsweetened chocolate chips. I saw versions of this cookie by David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich as well as Essence of Chocolate (by Scharffenberger). My version is based on Alice Medrich's with some amendments:

1. I'm using baking soda rather than baking powder to neutralise some of the acidity of all the unsweetened chocolate.


2. Since I've kept the sugar amount very low, it's difficult to keep the centre of the cookies moist and gooey. I came to think of these cookies as miniature cakes, and I use Shirley Corriher's technique for adding a little cream to flourless chocolate cakes to keep them moist. I therefore replaced some of the butter with cream. Use only butter if that's what you have on hand.

3. I also added some SP cake emulsifier to fight with the deflation that inevitably comes with folding chocolate into a whole egg foam. Your cookies will have less volume if you don't add SP, but the recipe doesn't use SP to start with. Worry not!

Black sesame cookies

No explanations needed I think: crunchy, moreish cookies bursting with the irresistable flavour of black sesames. Either toast the sesames yourself and grind them in a food processor after cooling, or buy ready-ground sesame powder.

World Peace Cookies, regional version

Et In Terra Pax Hominibus...

Those of you who are frequent visitors of food blogs might have heard of World Peace Cookies, a cookie that has captivated the hearts and minds of countless fellow bloggers and foodies all over the world. It is essentially a chocolate sablé (shortbread) studded with dark chocolate chips and fortified with sea salt - not your average sea salt, but the legendary fleur de sel ('flower of salt') from Britanny, France. It is hand-harvested by Breton women traditionally, and even in this day and age it is not mass-produced and is produced by small local enterprises. Fleur de sel is by and large used as a finishing salt - for sprinkling onto finished dishes - rather than merely making a dish salty. It has a finesse and purity in flavour that is quite difficult to describe when you taste it on its own, but wait till you taste it side-by-side with normal table salt and you will be shocked by how harsh the commercial stuff suddenly becomes.

World Peace Cookies are the creation of the great French pâtissier Pierre Hermé, who came up with the brilliant idea of pairing chocolate with salt in a cookie. The idea might raise some eyebrows in our day, but remember that the Aztecs didn't have 'sweet' chocolate at all, and it wasn't until chocolate was introduced to Europe that people started sweetening it with sugar. In recent years, chocolate with sea salt has been all the rage - chocolate with salted caramel, chocolate bars studded with sea salt, Ferran Adrià's famous toasted bread with dark chocolate and sea salt, etc.Whether or not Hermé was the first person to set the trend, the idea of adding fleur de sel to a chocolate cookie is truly a stroke of genius. Without the salt, they are moreish; with the salt, they are sublime.

Matcha green tea biscuits (and a latte)

Matcha craze

For the British people, tea is the tipple to turn to in times of crisis. Not that I've been experiencing any crisis personally, but there's definitely something hovering in the air this week as so much of the east coast of America is being affected by the Frankenstorm Sandy. Ohio state barely escaped from a direct onslaught by the storm, nevertheless the weather turned icy cold in the past few days and and has been unpleasantly damp, grey and depressing. I'm sure the sudden change in weather has got something to do with the hurricane that is wreaking so many people's lives right now. My thoughts are with those families out there whose lives are being turned upside down by this calamity.

Maybe I'm deluding myself, but I feel like it's because of the depressing weather that I got myself into a green tea craze lately. I revisited my green tea butter cake, made lots of green tea biscuits, and am sipping a cup of green tea latte right now as I'm writing at 2am. It's really comforting - I just hope that I will be able to fall asleep tonight!

The green tea biscuits that I make are the kind that you'd want to nibble on quietly with a cup of tea or whenever you want. They're not the kind of moreish baked goods that you want to stuff into your mouth until your stomach explodes, but they have a quiet presence and a pure taste of tea that lingers on your tongue subtly.

Biscuits VS Cookies (and two shortbreads)

Having lived in both the UK and the US, I'm constantly bewildered by the enormous differences between British and American English terminology. In my own field of music, I'm yet to come to terms with the American way of denoting note values - quarter notes, sixteenths, etc. In daily life, I still say dustbin rather than trash can, trolley rather than cart, socket rather than outlet. It goes without saying that I still ask my American friends occasionally for a rubber which always makes them burst out laughing. George Bernard Shaw's famous statement that 'England and America are two countries separated by a common language' really hits the nail on its head.

Since food is such an integral part of any culture, it is expected that British and American English would have very different vocabulary for food. The following are some of the new terminologies that I had to 'relearn' when I first came here three years ago:

 UK / US

rocket / arugula

swede / rutabaga

spring onions / scallions

crisps / chips

chips / French fries

treacle / molasses

icing sugar / confectioner's sugar
digestives / graham crackers

sultanas / raisins

muesli / granola

skimmed milk / non-fat milk

cling film / plastic wrap

cornflour / cornstarch

 etc...