Double-Cherry Streusel Bars

I saw these bars when I was flipping through one of those little cookbooks that you pick up in the grocery store. I have no idea when this particular cookbook was purchased. Both my husband and I would pick up these sorts of things at the store. When we got married, we found that we had quite a few duplicates. I don’t remember buying this one, so maybe it was one that my husband bought. At any rate, these looked really great. My husband likes cherries so I thought I would give these a try.

These are an oat crumble bar with a cherry filling. I didn’t even need to use my mixer for these. I assembled everything together while I was making dinner, and it didn’t even take that long. My 10 x 15 inch baking pan had fairly shallow sides. I used to have a pan with true 1 inch sides, but I have no idea where that pan has gone. I was worried that it wouldn’t work, but I figured that this wouldn’t spill over too badly. I used a mixture of dried cherries and cranberries, since I didn’t have a full cup of dried cherries. The original recipe also had a chocolate drizzle, but I didn’t think it needed any more sweetness.

These were simple to put together and did just fine in the pan that I had. They do need to cool quite a while before cutting. I let them cool for 2 hours and there were still a little too warm to cut. They really are soft and fairly delicate until they are cool. Boy, these are really sweet! I have a pretty high tolerance for sweet and these are almost too much. Maybe the chocolate drizzle would add another layer of flavor, or maybe it would be even sweeter. They have a good pronounced cherry flavor, which I like. They are a little greasy on the bottom, so I think that you could get by using less butter. Overall they are pretty good.

2 cups water

1 cup dried cherries or cranberries, chopped

2 cups oats

1-1/2 cups flour

1-1/2 cups brown sugar, packed

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

1 cup butter

½ cup coarsely chopped sliced almonds

24 oz. cherry preserves

1 teaspoon lemon zest

Bring the 2 cups water to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the dried cherries and allow to steep for 10 minutes. Drain completely and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking powder and baking soda in a large bowl. Cut in the butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Reserve one cup of the crumbs. Stir the chopped almonds into the reserved crumbs and set aside.

Press the remaining crumb mixture into an ungreased 10 x 15 inch baking pan. Bake for 12 minutes.

While the crust is baking, combine the dried cherries, cherry preserves and lemon zest. Once the crust has come out of the oven, top with the cherry mixture. Sprinkle with the remaining crumb/almond mixture. Bake for an additional 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Allow to cool completely before cutting into bars.

Recipe from Better Homes and Garden Homemade Cookies

Chipster-Topped Brownies

Beth of Supplicious picked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: Chipster-Topped Brownies. I’ve been excited to make these all month! Cookies are my thing and this recipe is brownie batter topped with chocolate chip cookie batter. Sound great, doesn’t it? My husband loves chocolate chip cookies but I rarely make them since I want to try different things for my blog. These were perfect since I could make the chocolate chip cookies while making something a bit more unusual.

These are fairly straight-forward: the brownie batter is a nice chocolately combo and then the chocolate chip cookie dough is a fairly basic recipe. They took a little time to put together since you are basically making two complete recipes. Luckily I have two bowls for my mixer so I didn’t have to wash bowls in between. I think the hardest part of the recipe was spreading the cookie batter on top of the brownie batter. The recipe tells you to drop the cookie dough by spoonfuls over the brownie batter and then spread carefully, but that didn’t really work. I ended up taking pieces of dough and flattening it and then tried to piece the dough to cover the batter completely. This worked eventually, but was fairly tedious.

These bake for nearly an hour, and it is a bit difficult to know when they are completely done. The cookie dough was definitely baked through, but the brownies seemed like they needed to bake more. I baked them a couple minutes more than the recipe called for and hoped that they would be done. When I cut the brownies, they were a little under baked. The top cracked a lot, and then the brownie layer was gooey. Not hopelessly gooey, but a bit undone. They taste really good, but I think that you can taste the brownie a lot more than the chocolate chip cookie. I’m not sure how you would get the brownies baked enough without completely drying out the cookie topping.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 94 and 95.

Honey Sugar Cookies

Wow, what a week this has been! I can’t believe it is already Friday. I always try to plan ahead but it just seems like nothing this week happened as planned. Work was busy, my husband was sick part of the week, lots going on. I don’t even think I did my regular grocery shopping this week. We’ve been scrounging for things to have for dinner and we’ve had more than our share of take out this week.

My husband knew that we had a couple of different types of honey in the cupboard and he came across this recipe. I’ve made a couple of different recipes from Baking Blonde’s Weblog, and I’ve always had good results. This is a very simple recipe, so I figured the taste of the honey would shine through. You have to be careful when baking with honey, since it burns so easily. I sometimes make peanut butter and honey cookies, where you replace the sugar with honey, and those are great, but burn if they bake just a moment too long. I decided to bake these less than the recommended time and I ended up taking them out of the oven at 13 minutes rather than the recommended 15-18 minutes.

The dough for these cookies is very, very soft. I mixed the flour mainly by hand, because I was worried that the mixer would overmix the dough. My cookies don’t look like the photo on Baking Blonde’s site, mine are flatter. In fact, they look a lot like Nilla Wafers. They are super soft when you take them out of the oven, but I gauged doneness by the browning on the edges of the cookies. I don’t think that you would want to bake these too long. The honey flavor remains strong in these cookies. I used blackberry honey, and I would be interested to try this with other types of honey.

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup honey

1/4 cup sugar

1 1/2 cups flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

Additional sugar (for rolling)

Preheat oven to 300. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

In a mixing bowl combine flour, soda, and salt. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the honey and cream well. Slowly add the flour mixture and mix until just incorporated. Finish by hand if needed. Do not over mix the dough.

Chill dough for 10 minutes.

Drop dough by rounded spoonfuls into bowl of sugar and roll to coat. Place on prepared baking sheet and bake for 13-15 minutes until edged are golden and set. Allow to cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to rack to cool completely.

Recipe from Baking Blonde’s Weblog

Fresh Mango Bread

Kelly of Baking with the Boys selected this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: Fresh Mango Bread. See Kelly’s blog for the complete recipe. This month’s Tuesdays with Dorie picks have been really varied and it has been nice to try different things. This was a fairly standard quick bread recipe with the addition of fresh mango.

I know that mangoes are in season, but I didn’t end up using fresh mango. I haven’t had the best of luck with mangoes in the past. I can recall making a cake with a mango filling. It took forever for me to peel and dice a couple of mangoes. And then when the cake was served, people commented on the nice orange filling. I had taken all the time to cut up the mangoes and then you couldn’t really taste that they were mangoes. So I decided to just skip the stress and I used some precut mango that I found in the produce section. It looked pretty good so I thought that it would work well for this bread.

This recipe comes together very quickly, and I didn’t even have to use my mixer. You combine the dry ingredients and then add the egg/oil mixture and then add the goodies: in this case mango and raisins. I used regular raisins since I was out of golden raisins but I think that they taste about the same. Some of the other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers had commented that the ginger was too strong, so I decided to omit the ginger. I baked mine for a couple minutes extra, since it didn’t quite seem done after an hour and a half. I did end up tenting the loaf with foil since it was already browning quickly after just 30 minutes. I’m glad that I did, otherwise it would have gotten way too dark.

This is really nice bread! The cinnamon has a nice flavor and the chunks of mango have good flavor. I don’t think that the mango flavor is that strong, but it’s still good. The bread isn’t too sweet and is nice and chewy around the edges. I don’t think the spices are overpowering, but I did omit the ginger and that would have made for a very different flavor. I’m really glad I tried this recipe. My husband suggested trying this with pineapple instead of mango, and I think that would be really good.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 45.

Tartest Lemon Tart

Babette of Babette Feasts picked this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe: Tartest Lemon Tart. I love lemon and I was really excited to make this. Instead of making one big tart, I made eight smaller tarts, each 3-1/2”. For the complete recipe, visit Babette’s blog.

This tart causes quite a bit of chatter among the Tuesdays with Dorie bloggers. Was this tart too tart? Others mentioned that they were worried about the tart being bitter. This recipe calls for 1-1/2 lemons, which you thinly slice and then process in a blender. So you are using all of the lemon, including the pith which can be very bitter. I read some different pieces of advice, and I ended up blanching the lemons to mellow them out. I also didn’t use the ends of the lemons since that was where you had the greatest percentage of pith.

I made the dough and I had a little extra left. I wasn’t exactly sure what the equivalent to a 9” tart would be, but 8 smaller tarts was almost the same amount of dough. You make the filling in a blender, and my blender isn’t so good as I think I almost burned out the motor! You combine the lemon and sugar and then add in melted butter and heavy cream. I figured that I had blended the mixture enough, but there were still a few tiny chunks of lemon left. I had extra filling left over, I suppose I could have filled the tarts more but it was really hard to tell what was enough.

I was really unsure how long to bake these, since my tarts were so much smaller. I followed the recipe as written, baking at 325 degrees for 20 minutes and then increase the temperature and bake for 25-30 more minutes. I checked after the second twenty minutes and it seemed like they were done, so I took them out of the oven to cool. They had puffed up quite a bit, but none had spilled over the sides. They weren’t as puffy after they had cooled.

I wasn’t sure how lemony these would be, or whether they would be bitter. They had a nice lemon flavor but they weren’t that strong or really all that tart. I was surprised. They were a touch bitter, which came through as an aftertaste. Maybe blanching the lemons took too much flavor away. I don’t really know. I have a feeling that the lemons you used made all of the difference. Some lemons are really tart and others aren’t so much. I’m happy either way, as this is a very nice refreshing dessert, perfect for spring.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 336

Sheet Cake Brownies

I always take cookies to work on Friday. I usually try to make a fairly big batch since there are quite a few people at work to share with. This Friday is a bit of an unusual day, and there aren’t as many people at work. So what do I do? I pick the recipe that makes just a ton of cookies. Not very good planning on my part! I’m sure those who are at work (myself included) will enjoy these.

I love making bar cookies. When I first started baking, I got “hired” to bake cookies for my company’s yearly meeting. I was fairly young and this was pretty exciting for me. I decided to make several kinds of bar cookies. Some of those I have made for this blog, including the Salted Peanut Chews and the Rocky Road Fudge Bars . Sometimes I miss those days, since that was when I first discovered my joy of baking. It seems like I had a lot more time to explore new recipes. Now I often choose recipes based on whether or not I have enough time to get everything together before bedtime. When did I get so old?

These were surprisingly quick to make. From start to finish, these took about 40 minutes total. The brownies come together almost as quickly and easily as a box mix and you make the icing the last couple of minutes of the brownie baking time. It does dirty up quite a few dishes; I had to wash my large saucepan in order to make the icing. I guess they assume that you have several large saucepans lying about, which I don’t. The most challenging aspect of making these is waiting for the bars to cool enough to cut!

I used dark chocolate cocoa powder in this recipe, which is different from the Dutch-processed cocoa that is specified in the original recipe. This gave the brownies and deep, dark color, which I really like. These smelled super chocolaty while I was making them. They cut easily, but were soft so they didn’t cut super cleanly. I would absolutely let these cool completely before cutting, or it will be a struggle.

These could definitely be served as a cake rather than a bar cookie. They have a good chocolate flavor and the icing adds a nice sweetness. The toasted pecans add a wonderful crunch, and it’s really nice to have that contrast in texture. I think these wouldn’t be as good without the nuts, since the brownies are so soft. They are quite addictive, and if you give yourself the chance, you may find yourself just nibbling away.

2 cups flour

2 cups sugar

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

2 eggs

2 egg yolks

2 teaspoons vanilla

¼ cup sour cream

8 oz. semisweet chocolate

4 tablespoons butter

¾ cup vegetable oil

¾ cup water

½ cup cocoa powder

Icing

8 tablespoons butter

½ cup heavy cream

½ cup cocoa powder

1 tablespoon light corn syrup

3 cups powdered sugar

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 cup toasted pecans, chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter an 18” x 13” rimmed cookie sheet.

Combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. In another bowl, combine eggs, egg yolks, vanilla, and sour cream. Combine the chocolate, butter, vegetable oil, water, and cocoa powder in a saucepan. Heat over medium, stirring occasionally, until smooth. Stir the chocolate mixture into the flour mixture, and then stir in the egg mixture. Pour into the baking pan and bake for 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

About 5 minutes before the cake is done, start the icing. Combine the butter, heavy cream, cocoa powder, and corn syrup in a large saucepan. Heat over medium until smooth and combined. Remove from the heat and stir in the powdered sugar and vanilla. Immediately pour the icing over the brownies (which you have just taken out of the oven) and spread to cover. Sprinkle with the pecans. Allow to cool to room temperature and then refrigerate until the icing is set. Cut into squares.

Recipe from The Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2009