smitten kitchen

I was sure that I’d blinked and a whole month had passed since we last spoke, but apparently I dropped in on Friday to discuss peas. It was my birthday and I was double-fisting tissues and hoping the DayQuil would kick in soon. Fortunately, it got better from there, with my awesome husband stealthily making plans to send the baby to his grandparents while he plotted what has to have been the most fun party since our wedding. There’s been a new dress, a new camera, new measuring cups and a new tooth, countless formats of cheese, innumerable sinks of dishes and full nights of sleep, plural. Is it any wonder that I hardly remember five days ago?

There were also some cherries. I had great plans for them, the possibilities for kitchen craftiness seemed endless. But then, I ate them all. Look at them. Can you blame me? Sometimes it’s just wrong to meddle with something that arrives needing no intervention.

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I made us some cookies.

It started as a quest for a Passover dessert that could be made in advance, if, say, you were the type of person who may or may not have (I admit nothing) invited eight people over for a Passover seder 48 hours after returning from a week-long sojourn on the open sea and wanted to get a head start on cooking.

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I’m clearly some sort of grinch, because when I think of flourless chocolate cakes I imagine giant discs of truffle so dense and overly rich that even a sliver of somehow feels excessive, the kind of throwaway dessert restaurants bust out when they’ve got no better ideas. “Add a couple out-of-season, eerily red raspberries and a tuft of whipped cream from a can and it will, without fail, sell,” I imagine sinister managers instructing kitchen staff. Like I said, I’m a total pill.

However, when the same flourless chocolate cake is treated like a soufflé — eggs separated, yolks beaten until ribbony and whites whipped until weightless, then gently folded in — and then placed anywhere in my proximity, all bets are off. Because what it does is magical; what was once weighted is lifted off the plate. The top puffs and shatters a little, like a meringue, a meringue with butter. It manages to be both the lightest, barely-there wisp of cake and the most unabashedly rich chocolate fix. Yes, at once.

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People who really, really love chocolate are dubious about cocoa. Even if you buy the most resplendent cocoa in the world, baking things with it that taste as rich as treats with bars of 70% is a rarity. Thus, if you’d told me about a killer recipe for cocoa brownies a couple weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed you, but since then, two things have happened.

The first is that I had one. It was a tiny square, scattered among little tears of homemade marshmallows, near a puddle of homemade hot fudge sauce and carousel-ed around a cocoa nib buckwheat panna cotta at 10 Downing last week that nothing short of blew my mind because did you know that the opposite of sweet in the world of chocolate needn’t necessarily be bitter? Sometimes it’s just not very sweet, period, so you can really taste the chocolate. It was awesome*, all of it.

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I seem to be on a bit of a coffee kick these days — Exhibit A being Alex’s Espresso Chiffon birthday cake with Fudge Frosting and Exhibit B being Thanksgiving’s ridiculous Cappucino Fudge Cheesecake. I’m sure that’s it just coincidence that the coffee kick began just as the number of hours I slept each night decreased, which also coincided with me getting weepy with joy when I wrapped my fingers around my first coffee of the day each morning afternoon. Amazing how you can drink something your whole life but it then all of the sudden one day it becomes a transcendent experience, you know?

Nevertheless my fascination with the intersection of coffee and toffee goes back much longer than that, at least as far as the Espresso Chocolate Shortbread Cookies I made two years ago, and realized that the only thing that could make it more delicious would be to use a chocolate that had toffee bits in it. When Alex brought home Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch this week, I was again reminded of this amazing thing that happens when the buttery, tangy caramelized flavor of toffee contrasts the bitter edginess of espresso, and decided at once to combine the two in one espresso-soaked candy.

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