This shortbread has such a short ingredient list that you might be tempted to overlook it. There’s no chocolate or vanilla. Not even eggs or baking powder/soda. There’s just flour, sugar, butter, and salt (and a secret flavoring agent).

Despite its simple nature, there’s an amazing number of things that can go wrong with shortbread: it comes out too plain, hard, dry, doughy, greasy, or stale-tasting. But you can’t mess up shortbread if you make olive cookies (scourtins) from the reputable French chef, Susan Loomis. The dough is crisp yet delicate. Every bite melts in your mouth. The olives don’t overpower the cookies, either. Whether you can taste it or not, every dessert has a pinch of salt to round out the flavors. In this case, the salt predominantly comes from the olives. (For more olive oil desserts, try making chocolate mousse, truffles, or gelato.)

The first time I made these cookies, they were supposed to be a birthday gift. Then I ate 10 in one sitting, and I eventually had to re-bake an entire batch. They were so addictive that I made about six more batches after that (as gifts, of course). They’re the most repeated dessert I’ve made all year.

Since the genius of these cookies is their unusual source of salt, I thought of another savory substitute: seaweed. I know vegetables don’t sound appetizing in cookies, but just think of seaweed as the complex version of sea salt.

When I thumbed through my pantry last night, I saw furikake (a mix of soy-glazed bonito flakes, sesame seeds, and nori) and thought, “Hey, why not? Fish come from the sea, too.” So I made two batches of cookies (which you should always do with this recipe, because you will run out!).

While the furikake tasted great in the raw dough (I loved the sweet-salty combo of the fish and the soy sauce), the fish flakes didn’t keep their crunchy texture, and the flavor became too distracting. It was still tasty, but I preferred the seaweed version.

PS-I conceptualized these cookies a long time ago, but that darn David Lebovitz scooped me. But my adaptation is different, as there’s a lot more seaweed but no egg. For another sweet-savory twist, I bet bacon would be good, and you could substitute some rendered bacon fat for the butter.

Seaweed Shortbread Cookies

This recipe doubles easily (trust me, you will need to double it), so you can munch on the cookies and still have some left for gifting. They stay delicious for weeks and hold up well in the mail.

Adapted from Susan Herrmann Loomis and The Traveler’s Lunchbox
Yield: about 34 cookies

1 stick unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup powdered sugar, sifted or 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, whizzed in a food processor until fine
1 Tablespoon roasted sesame oil (recommended brand: Kadoya)
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup crushed wakame flakes

Preheat oven to 350° F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or foil.

In a large bowl or the bowl of an electric mixer, cream the butter until it is soft and pale yellow. Mix in the sugar until blended, then drizzle in the sesame oil and mix until combined. Add the flour and the salt, and mix gently but thoroughly until the dough is smooth, then add the wakame flakes and mix until they are thoroughly incorporated into the dough.

With your hands, press the dough into the pan until it is 1/4-inch thick. Refrigerate the dough for at least 30 minutes, and up to 24 hours. Score the dough into rectangles with a knife.

Bake until the cookies are golden, about 15 minutes. Remove from oven and immediately cut the cookies while they are still hot. Cool on wire racks.

If you find that the middle pieces are still doughy, re-bake them in a preheated 300° F oven for about 10 minutes.

Variation: Substitute 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons bonito-flavored furikake for the arame seaweed. (Furikake is like rice confetti. It’s also a delicious seasoning for cold silken tofu, eggs, noodles, popcorn, and salad. If you want to make your own, Gourmet and Egullet have recipes.)

Photo: Willpowder.net

If making your own chocolate-hazelnut spread weren’t enough, check out Gourmet.com for some molecular magic. Chef Will Goldfarb demonstrates how tapioca maltodextrin turns this creamy spread into “soil.” He also provides a recipe for a Nutella knock-off, but I like mine better. My version is healthier and uses more common ingredients.

Photo: Ryan (Metrix X)

Too bad there’s not 12 days of Easter, because if you ate a different type of egg each day, it would take 12 days to explore Gourmet’s list of unconventional eggs. There’s iguana eggs, dove eggs (I don’t just mean the chocolate kind), and biggest, baddest egg of all. Do you dare try all of them?

My favorite way to use chicken eggs is in flourless chocolate cookies and Valrhona chocolate pavlova.

Speaking of Easter food, I heard through the grapevine that Peeps are very good toasted, because they have an extra layer of crunchy sugar. Why not take it further and make Peep s’mores with bittersweet chocolate? I was going to try them and report back, but I couldn’t justify buying a whole pack of Peeps just to make one s’more. (I don’t eat Peeps otherwise. They’re too sweet.) I’m just putting it out there: if you have too many Peeps, try making some “sandwiches.”

I love potatoes so much that if I were to list the ways I eat them, I would sound a lot like Bubba in Forrest Gump:

Anyway, like I was sayin’, potatoes are the fruit of the earth. You can fry them, bake them, boil them. There’s uh, potato salad, mashed potatoes, screaming potatoes, potato pancakes, potato bread, potato dumplings, potato sticks (my Mom prepares the best version with green onions!), potato gratin, criss-cut fries, cream of potato soup, potato curry and potato cake. That—that’s about it.

By cake, I don’t mean latkes. I mean dessert. Mashed potatoes make moist bread, like Nutella babka, but I’d never tried it in cake. I wanted to add it to a favorite chocolate cake recipe, but I wasn’t sure whether it would replace the fat or the flour (because it’s creamy and starchy). Off to the Internet I searched. Some recipes had virtually no chocolate, while others had too much butter. This one, from I Love Chocolate, seemed the most reasonable. Since I didn’t have the Dutch-process cocoa it called for, I used natural cocoa and tinkered with the leavening. Besides, I think natural cocoa has a more complex flavor.

The resulting cake was light and moist. I didn’t think it was chocolatey enough, but maybe it’s because I forgot to add the vanilla. Paired with vegan chocolate frosting, this cake will cause tasters to do a double double-take. It’s an unusual dessert for St. Patrick’s Day, because it doesn’t scream green (or Guinness). If you really want to go green though, Gourmet.com has plenty of ideas, like apple celery granita. (Dang it, just click on the link because I built this slideshow while fighting a cold.)

Irish Chocolate-Potato Cake

Cake adapted from Stephanie Zonis. Frosting adapted from More Great Good Dairy-Free Desserts Naturally by Fran Costigan.

For cake:
2 medium or 1 large potato (to make 1 cup hot, unseasoned mashed potatoes)
2 tsp instant espresso or coffee granules, dissolved in 1 cup hot water
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3/4 cup unsweetened natural cocoa powder (not Dutch-processed)
2 tsp plus a pinch of baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick plus 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
2 cups granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 large eggs

For frosting:
(Makes 2 cups, enough to fill and frost one 9-inch two-layer cake)
Tofu frosting without chocolate is too watery and beany for my tastes. This one, which resembles mousse, is a keeper.

1 (12.3-ounce) aseptic box firm silken tofu (recommended brand: Morinu)
1 tablespoon plus 1 tsp canola oil
1/3 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
1 heaping tsp vanilla extract
6 ounces (about 1 cup) semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, melted
1-3 tablespoons chocolate, vanilla, or plain soymilk, if needed

Equipment: potato ricer/food mill or a fine-mesh sieve, food processor, 9-inch round cake pan, serrated knife, icing spatula

Make mashed potatoes: Boil or steam the potatoes until fork tender, about 15 minutes. When the potatoes are cool enough to handle, peel off the skin. Pass the potatoes through a potato ricer/food mill. Or mash them with a fork and push the mixture through a fine-mesh sieve to get rid of the lumps. (You can make the mashed potatoes a couple days ahead of time.)

Make cake: Position a rack to center of the oven; preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 9-inch round pan with butter. Lightly flour the pan, knocking out any excess flour; set aside.

Place mashed potatoes into a medium bowl. With a small whisk, gradually stir in coffee to form a smooth mixture; do not beat mixture excessively. Cool to lukewarm.

Meanwhile, sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt. Set aside.

In large bowl, combine the butter, sugar and vanilla with an electric mixer. Beat at a low speed to blend, then beat 2 minutes at medium speed, scraping down bowl and beater(s) with rubber spatula once or twice. Add eggs, 2 at a time, beating in at a low speed until blended. Scrape bowl and beater(s) with rubber spatula. Increase mixer speed to medium; beat 1 minute.

At lowest speed, add sifted dry ingredients in 3 additions and mashed potato-coffee mixture in two additions, beginning and ending with dry ingredients and beating after each addition just until blended. Scrape bowl and beater(s) occasionally with rubber spatula. Batter may still appear curdled after all ingredients have been added.

Pour batter into prepared pan and spread evenly. Bake in preheated oven about 1 hr, rotating pan 180 degrees during baking. Cake is done when toothpick inserted near center emerges with a few moist crumbs still clinging to it. Remove to cooling rack.

During baking, cake center will rise higher than edges, but center will fall slightly as cake cools. Cool completely before frosting. Store at room temperature, covered airtight, for up to 3 days; freeze for longer storage.

Make frosting: Combine the drained tofu, oil, and salt in a food processor, and process about 1 minute until pureed. Use a rubber spatula to clean the sides of the bowl and add the sugar, cocoa, and vanilla. Process 1 to 2 minutes, until the tofu mixture is smooth.

Add the melted chocolate and pulse the processor three or four times to incorporate. Process 1 to 2 minutes until the mixture is very creamy. Refrigerate in the processor for 20 minutes. The cream may need to chill for 1 to 6 hours in order for it to become firm enough to spread.

The degree of firmness will determine the amount of soy milk needed to create the final texture. It should be thick but easy to spread. Dip an icing spatula into the cream to test to the texture. If the cream is too stiff to use, add 3 tablespoons of the soy milk and process 1 minute. Add more soy milk, 1 tablespoon at a time as needed. When the cream is ready to use, spoon it into a bowl and begin to assemble the cake.

Frost the cake: With a serrated knife, level off the top of the cake. Cut the cake into two even layers. (Need more detailed instructions?) Cover one layer with frosting, then add the top layer. Frost the top and sides.

Before you think I’ve gone nuts for pairing chocolate with garlic again, I have an excuse. These cookies were a birthday present for my roommate, who loves garlic. She stores several cups of garlic in the fridge and even pre-minces it so it’ll be ready when the moment strikes.

Since my idea of a gift always involves sugar, I made garlic brittle chocolate chip cookies, inspired from the Gilded Fork. The garlic is pre-cooked and added to caramelized sugar, so it has a sweet, nutty flavor. If you’ve ever had roasted garlic, you know that garlic loses its bite after a long period of cooking.

Because I’m a sucker for new recipes, I made the cookie dough from a free review copy of Elizabeth Falkner’s Demolition Desserts. The first chapter is devoted to chocolate chip cookies. (The premise sounds better than it is. I was hoping for a chocolate chip cookie primer, giving us variations on chewy, cakey and crisp cookies, like Alton Brown did so well in Good Eats. Elizabeth’s chapter is a compilation of really different cookies, like traditional chocolate chip and chocolate-chocolate chip, without such a thorough explanation.)

I’m too lazy to type out the recipe, but Rachael Ray’s recipe is similar. Just make these changes: add half a batch of crumbled garlic brittle (no nuts, please!), use 3 Tbsp more flour, reverse the ratio of granulated and brown sugar, add 1/4 tsp baking powder, refrigerate the dough for at least 30 min. before baking, and bake 1-inch balls for 13-17 min. (rotating the pans from top to bottom and front to back after 7 min.). Got that?

These cookies didn’t turn out, and it had nothing to do with the garlic (they didn’t taste nasty, but I don’t think the garlic was necessary). They were as thin as credit cards and extremely floppy. The dough didn’t seem to cook.

Lessons learned:

• When adding hard candy to cookie dough batter, reduce the sugar in the dough accordingly. Elizabeth’s dough had 3/4 cup more sugar than the Gilded Fork recipe. Too much sugar prevents the dough from setting up. You’ll burn the sugar before the dough looks “done.”
• When adding hard candy to cookie dough batter, line the cookie sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat. I used foil, and the brittle (which turned to liquid) stuck to the sheets. I wouldn’t recommend greased foil, because that makes the dough spread more. No waxed paper either, unless you like the taste of candles.
• To prevent dough from spreading, refrigerate it till firm. Elizabeth’s recipe said to refrigerate the dough for 30 min., but even after that, my dough was still soft.
• Corn syrup creates a pliant, chewy cookie. I found this out because the brittle had a little corn syrup. Finally, the secret to chewy cookies is revealed!
• For the deepest flavored brittle, cook the sugar just before it burns. My caramel never registered hot enough to reach the “hard crack” stage, so I kept cooking it. I only pulled it off the heat right when I smelled a little of it burning. Luckily, I got a smoky, molasses flavored brittle that’s worth replicating.
• Grey sea salt rocks. I sprinkled the top of my brittle with the grey salt rather than mixing in table salt. The best grey salt from Guérande in Brittany, France is harvested with naturally occurring minerals. It has a deep, almost smoky flavor. The large, irregular crystals melt on your tongue slowly, so you get an extra POP. I like it so much that from now on, I’ll add it to all my cookie doughs. That’s saying a lot, because I’m not a huge fan of salt. At $8 a pound, it’s seems frou frou compared to a 50-cent can of Morton’s. But if you use a teaspoon here and there, that one-pound canister will last you a while. Much of grey salt’s “flavor” comes from the shape of the crystals, so think of it as a finishing salt. The last thing you want to do is toss it in soup and let it dissolve.

The idea of brittle in cookies is promising, but this recipe needs some work. Next time, I’ll use cacao nibs instead. No more garlic and chocolate for me. If you’re feeling adventurous, maybe diced fried bacon would go well in the brittle, too.

I say this as a half jest. Today I made garlic-flavored chocolate (no really, I made it from cocoa beans, sugar and vanilla), and incidentally Danielle at Habeas Brulee is hosting a one-time food blogging event, “Yes, of course you can pair garlic with that!” Danielle thinks garlic goes well with hazelnuts and wants to explore other combinations.

Why not chocolate and garlic, then? “…garlic tends to do very well, super well, with things that are oily (olive oil), fat (cream, pine nuts) or acidic (lemon),” writes a commenter on her blog. Chocolate is oily and fatty (and sometimes acidic), so this could work. Plus, Marianne’s in Santa Cruz, Calif., makes chocolate-garlic ice cream.

Today when I attended a chocolate making seminar through the NY Metro Discover Chocolate Meetup, a brave soul put raw garlic in the finished candies. I didn’t dare try a piece — its pungency lingered in the room even after it was eaten — but why don’t you try some and let me know how it goes?

If you would like to make chocolate from the beans themselves, here’s the approximate recipe we used today.

Chocolate-Covered Garlic

Ingredients:
3 pounds whole cacao beans, in their shells
2 cups sugar
1 vanilla bean
1 cup dried whole milk powder
1/2 cup cocoa butter
A couple cloves minced garlic
A couple pinches chile powder

Special equipment:
Roasting pan
Crankandstein cocoa mill
Blow dryer
Broom and dustpan
Champion juicer
Food processor
Wet grinder
Chocolate molds

1. Roast beans in a preheated 425F oven for 30-35 minutes, or until they become fragrant and reach an internal temperature of 260F.
2. Crack the shells by running the beans through a Crankandstein. (If you don’t have this machinery, crack the beans by hand and discard the shells. Skip the next step.)
3. Transfer the beans and the shells to a large roasting pan. Take the pan outside or in your bath tub. Hold a blow dryer a couple feet away and aim directly down, blowing away the shells. You will still have small pieces of shells left; that’s okay. Don’t forget to sweep the leftover shells on the floor.
4. Liquefy the beans by running them through a juicer. You now have cocoa liquor.
5. Combine the sugar and vanilla bean in a food processor and grind for a couple minutes, or until the sugar turn into a powder.
6. Turn on the wet grinder and add the cocoa liquor. Add the sugar mixture, milk powder and crumbled cocoa butter. Let the machine run for 24 hours. This step is called conching, which will refine the texture and flavor of the chocolate.
7. Temper the chocolate and fill the molds halfway full. Sprinkle garlic and chile powder over the melted chocolate and fill the remainder of the mold with the chocolate. Vigorously tap the molds on your counter to even out the surface and get rid of air bubbles.
8. Refrigerate the chocolate for 10 min., or until set. To release the chocolate, flip the mold upside down and tap the surface with your fingers.

Variations:
Shortcut version: Sprinkle minced garlic on top of dark chocolate and eat.

Poor cottage cheese is the butt of all jokes (no pun intended). It’s seen as tasteless diet food, yet no one wants to be called "cottage cheese thighs." Maida Heatter’s Book of Great American Desserts should have changed all that. She discovered that pureed cottage cheese becomes as smooth and elegant as sour cream.

In Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts, Alice Medrich makes sublime tiramisu and cheesecake with "Maida’s Cream." I don’t even bother with the full-fat versions anymore. Since pureed cottage cheese can stand in for mascarpone cheese, cream cheese and sour cream, I wondered if its richness could translate to ice cream.

Since simple is often best, I substituted the pureed cheese for the strained yogurt in David Lebovitz’s plain frozen yogurt recipe. I added some oil (since cottage cheese is lean) and a splash of vodka to keep it scoopable. The end result was really pure tasting and luscious. It’s less tart than plain frozen yogurt, so it’s more amenable to add-ins, like chocolate.

It’s best eaten two hours after it’s made, or else it gets rock hard. There’s a couple ways to remedy this issue: use more sugar, prepare a custard base (try substituting 2 cups of pureed cottage cheese for the cream) or let the cold ice cream sit on your counter for a good 15 minutes.

Cottage Cheese Ice Cream

recipe based on techniques from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great American Desserts, The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz and The Cake Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

3 cups (681 g) 1% low-fat, no salt added cottage cheese
3/4 to 1 cup (150 to 200g) sugar, depending on your sweet tooth
1 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
1 1/2 Tbsp oil
1 1/2 Tbsp vodka

1. In a food processor or blender, combine all ingredients and blend for 3-5 minutes, being sure to scrape down the sides with a spatula a couple times. It’s important not to cheat on the processing time, or else the cheese won’t get perfectly smooth. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Harden it in the freezer for a couple hours, and then eat it all!

Variation: To make fruit-swirled ice cream, have ready 1/4 cup of your favorite preserves. After the ice cream is done churning, drop a tablespoon of preserves to the bottom of the storage container. Drop spoonfuls of preserves between layers of ice cream. Don’t stir too much, or you’ll lose the swirls.

Note: Try to get cottage cheese without additives, like gums or starches. I like the no-salt added variety, or else it’s too salty for dessert (do you really need 15% of your daily sodium in one serving?). The shorter the ingredient list, the better. Friendship makes great tasting, all-natural cottage cheese, although the curds are too firm to get perfectly smooth.

Don’t you hate it when cookbooks, magazines and blogs have lovely pictures of food that you can’t make at home? I assure you, not everything I make is pretty or delicious. I only reserve the best recipes for this blog, but now I’ll take you into my mishaps through this new column: Don’t try this at home. I won’t post the recipes in the recipe index because they’re so bad, but sometimes you can learn as much from your mistakes as your successes.

A while back, I received a free sample of True Blue blueberry juice. The name implied that it’s 100% pure blueberry juice. It was a great concept and tasted like real berries, but it was made from blueberry and grape juice concentrates, plus added sugar. It might as well been called “reconstituted blueberry-blended cocktail.” The selling point was also the antioxidants, but you have to drink two cups of juice (220 calories) to get the same amount of antioxidants as 1/2 cup of blueberries. No thanks. I’d rather eat a pint of blueberries for the same amount of calories and get the extra fiber. And if I’m thirsty, I’ll just drink water.

Hoping to rid myself of 32 pounds of juice (aren’t you proud that I carried it all to my door?), I boiled down several cups into a concentrated syrup. I wanted to see if it was possible to make sorbet only out of fruit juice. Since sorbets are 25-30% sugar by weight*, and the juice only had 12% sugar, I reduced it over several hours. Then I added a little lime juice to brighten up the flavors. After I froze everything, an unappetizing syrup leached out from the sorbet. It was a tell-tale sign that it had too much sugar. Either my calculations were wrong, or the liquid kept evaporating as it cooled. Also, the sorbet didn’t taste like blueberries anymore. It was astringent and drying, like grape juice. So no, you can’t make sorbet only out of fruit juice, for reasons that I’ll get into later.

While the sorbet sat in my freezer (who wants to eat sticky, fast-melting sorbet?), I made another frozen dessert from Florence Fabricant’s shiso granita recipe in the New York Times. I substituted one bunch of leftover cilantro, since it’s a close cousin of shiso. After I froze it, it looked as appetizing as wheatgrass juice. It tasted like Mexican salsa gone bad. Plus, it wasn’t sweet enough.

Here I had two desserts: one with too much sugar and one with too little. Voila, I combined them and made them semi-edible. I wouldn’t recommend that you do the same though.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t put cilantro in dessert. Ever.
• Don’t boil fruit juice for long periods of time. The delicate flavors will disappear, while the less desirable ones will get stronger.
• If you want to make sorbet out of fruit juice, you need to add sugar rather than boil it to death.
• Liquids evaporate as they cool. If you measure one cup of hot liquid and think, “Perfect! That’s the right amount!” you’ll have considerably less when you actually use it.

*Source: San Francisco Chronicle

How fine fat is! The same ingredient that makes dessert delicious goes straight to the pooch beneath my wannabe six-pack. I want to make my cake and eat it too, so I experiment with ways to make dessert healthier.

The oldest trick in low-fat baking is to replace half of the butter or oil with applesauce. Besides being moist, applesauce contains sugar, which tenderizes dough. Applesauce works beautifully in quick breads and spice cakes but not so well in pound cakes and pie crusts, where butter is crucial to the flavor or flakiness. Applesauce also doesn’t fare as well in cookies. It contains too much moisture, so cookies get cakey, and you lose the crisp edges.

There are a couple ways to get around the applesauce conundrum. For cookies, you can omit up to half the butter because they’re so rich already. I usually leave out 1/3 or 1/4 just to be safe. Or, you can use a different fat substitute to mimic the texture you want.

Other cultures have long known that pureed beans are sumptuously smooth. Good Israeli hummus, for example, is as rich as butter. I’d take The Hummus Place’s signature dish over foie gras any day. The Chinese and Japanese add sugar to pureed beans, nestling it inside pastries.

As seen in the black-eyed susan cake, pureed beans are actually a pretty good fat substitute. If you don’t believe me, scientific experiments have shown that pureed white beans can replace up to half the fat (by weight) in cookies and brownies. To take advantage of the beans’ smooth texture, I used them in a fudgy brownie recipe.

Brownies come in several varieties: fudgy, cakey and chewy. I generally prefer them chewy, because they most closely resemble the boxed mixes I grew up on. Alice Medrich has a divine, low-fat, chewy brownie recipe in Chocolate and the Art of Low-Fat Desserts and Cookies and Brownies. Chewy brownies use cocoa powder, which has great flavor, but they’re missing cocoa butter: that magical ingredient that melts in your mouth.

If I’m feeling decadent, I switch my loyalty to fudgy brownies, which are chocolate in “cake” form. Purists insist that real brownies have no baking powder or soda, just plenty of chocolate, eggs for leavening, and enough flour to hold it all together.

My favorite fudgy recipe has a whopping 12 ounces of chocolate, three sticks of butter, three cups of sugar, six eggs and just over a cup of flour. If there ever was a poster child to use bean puree as a fat substitute, this was it. In this adapted recipe from The Farm of Beverly Hills, melt the chocolate and one and a half sticks of butter over a double boiler. Then, whisk in six ounces of white bean puree and the eggs. Add the cake flour, cocoa powder, sugar and salt and bake. The recipe says it yields 20 brownies, but I got 36 small but very rich brownies.

The end result was very moist, smooth and delicate. It was so delicate, in fact, that you could probably get away with using all-purpose flour. They did not taste beany or like they were reduced fat. I noticed less buttery flavor, but only because I had eaten the regular brownies before. Anyone else would not be able to detect the secret ingredient.

How to Make White Bean Puree:

If starting from scratch, soak dry cannellini, great northern, or white kidney beans with water by at least two inches. Cover and let stand for up to 24 hours; refrigerate if the kitchen is very warm. Soaking is optional, but it can save anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour of cooking time. To cook the beans, drain them and cover with water to cover by two inches. Bring to a boil over high heat. Skim off the foam that rises to the surface. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, stirring occasionally until they are very soft. Unsoaked cannellinis take about 30 minutes; great northerns and white kidney beans take one to 1 1/2 hours. Dry beans will swell to about three times their original size.

Measure out six ounces, or about 1 1/3 cup of cooked beans. If you are using canned beans, rinse them thoroughly to get rid of excess salt. Puree in a blender or food processor until smooth. You should have 3/4 cup of puree.

Notes/tips:

• The salt is very important in this recipe to give off that buttery flavor.
• Whisk the eggs in just to combine. Do not beat them, as the extra air will make the brownies cakey (which is fine if you like cakey brownies, but there are lower calorie recipes for that!).
• To make one cup of cake flour, subtract 2 Tbsp from one cup of all-purpose flour. Then add 2 Tbsp of cornstarch. Some say that cornstarch makes baked goods taste chalky, but I can’t detect it in such small quanities. If you despise cornstarch, just subtract the 2 Tbsp of all-purpose flour and don’t add anything else. In this recipe, you can get away with not doing any substitutions, if you like.
• To set the crust and leave the interior creamy, Alice Medrich developed the “Steve ritual.” After baking the brownies, immediately dunk the pan in an ice bath. Do not attempt with a glass pan; the sudden drop it in temperature will cause it to crack.
• These brownies will only be as good as the chocolate you use. Save your chocolate chips for cookies, and do not under any circumstances use Hershey’s. I’m not saying you have to go all out with Valrhona, but I used a mid-range chocolate from Jacques Torres.
• Silicone pans are stick resistant but not non-stick. Be sure to grease them.

Joe is driving East at 60 miles per hour. Andy is driving in the same direction at 70 miles per hour. If Andy started one hour after Joe, how long will it take for them to meet?

The only test that I failed in school was for word problems. Maybe it’s because I think too much and make them more complicated than they are. Or maybe it’s because I don’t see their practical application and don’t care about the question. Unless the question were, “How do I re-create my favorite chocolate sorbet?” then I could get serious.

As noted in my gelato post, Ciao Bella Gelato makes unbelievably rich chocolate sorbet. It is creamy and rich like ice cream, but there is no dairy, so it’s virtually fat-free.

In my quest to make this sorbet at home, I looked at the ingredient list/nutrition information and deduced a recipe.

Not only does the ingredient list tell you what to use, but it also tells you how much. Everything is listed in descending order by weight. For example, there is more water than rum extract.

Since it’s such a short list, the 31 grams of sugar listed is essentially granulated sugar. 31 grams x 4 servings = 124 grams for one batch. The dietary fiber gives a clue as to how much cocoa/chocolate is involved: one tablespoon of cocoa has 2 grams of fiber, according to Nutrition Data. There’s also corn syrup, vanilla, rum extract, but they’re listed at the bottom of the ingredients, so their presence is minute. I guessed how much there was based on other sorbet recipes I’ve seen. The chocolate liquor (unsweetened chocolate) gave me some trouble, because there’s no way the sorbet could be low-fat if there were more chocolate than cocoa powder. I made an estimated guess, then subtracted the weight of the ingredients from the total weight to yield the amount of water. I came up with this preliminary recipe:

Boy, was this CHOCOLATE sorbet. The flavor was very intense, and it didn’t freeze solid. It melted as quickly as Frosty the Snowman in the Mojave dessert. I used too much sugar and liquor, which keeps frozen desserts soft. Part of the problem is that the supermarket’s “light corn syrup” actually contains high-fructose corn syrup, which is sweeter.

Rather than tweak my recipe (guessing the amount of cocoa liquor gave me a headache!), I tried an Ultimate Ice Cream Book recipe for my second attempt. Here is the recipe, courtesy of Recipe Link. It had a better flavor but was still a little icy. (I don’t have an ice cream maker, so I froze the mixture in ice cube trays and broke it up in a food processor.)

For my third attempt, I just bought a pint at Whole Foods. It was the best $4 I spent.

Resources:

The Ultimate Ice Cream Book: Over 500 Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, Drinks, And More