smitten kitchen

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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As it turns out, the last days of October don’t awaken in me a desire to fly around on my broom, don a “sexy” nurse/maid/fireman outfit or even gorge myself on candy. Nope, according to a quick glance at my archives, apparently when Halloween approaches all I can think about is reinterpreting Rice Krispie Treats.

Unfortunately, I don’t seem to choose my recipes very well. Last year’s Peanut Butter Crispy Bars were delicious, but had structural issues that irked me. And two years ago, I fell prey to a Caramelized Brown Butter Rice Krispie Treat that was all sorts of a styrofoam-textured disaster. Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to get them out of my head, so this year I decided I would conquer them once and for all. It helped that I knew exactly what went wrong the original dud of a clearly-untested recipe (hm, do I sound bitter?): the cereal to marshmallow ratio was unfeasibly high, more than double that of the original recipe and — small detail — marshmallows don’t caramelize very well, and should you succeed in getting them to, they don’t cool back down to anything gooey or soft. What a travesty.

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As it turns out, but should be really no surprise to anyone who has been following along at home, I’m not the most sane person. You see, it wasn’t enough that I baked Cheesecake-Marbled Brownies last week in hopes to win the hearts and minds of labor and delivery nurses, I became suddenly and inexplicably worried that some of them may not enjoy chocolate or cheesecake, and preoccupied myself with providing an alternative. So, to review: I have no interest in such practical things as cooking and freezing meals that will tide us over through those weeks when we have no time to cook, but I will spend my last remaining hours in the kitchen menu-planning food gifts. Totally normal, Deb. No really!

But judge away if you must, fact is, this absurd panic is a win-win for everyone. Hospital staff will have no chance against my baked goods racket, and I got to conquer snickerdoodles — a task I consider years overdue — at home (and yes, had enough leftover to briefly contemplate not sharing them at all) and you can too. Need a deal sweetener? These are perfect snickerdoodles: slightly cakey, crackly surface-d and just enough cinnamon to make your home smell like the heavens descended and landed right smack in the middle of the kitchen.

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Rumor has it that pregnancy doesn’t just lead to swollen ankles, an insatiable need for peanut butter and a belly that causes what I will have to assume are otherwise polite people to ask if you’re having twins. Rumor has it that pregnancy quite often leads to teacup humans, and those teacup human need to be “delivered” from one world to another. Oh my god, I am going to have to birth a baby, aren’t I?!

Fortunately for all of us, this is not the kind of blog where I would subject you to the details of delivery, in part because I plug my ears and say “la la I can’t hear you” when anyone brings them to my attention and in part because I’m in the practice of encouraging appetites and well… you know.

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Some of you have asked me to share what kind of cooking I’ve been doing to stash in the freezer and hopefully tide us over for the coming storm (T-minus 22 days, not that anyone is counting). I know it’s common, in a fit of impatient nesting, for soon-to-be mamas to tuck away pans of enchiladas and lasagnas and meatballs and other hearty, freezable fare so that they don’t starve in those early weeks when the baby demands constant surveillance (okay, cooing), but despite understanding the logic behind this, I should confess: I’m prepping nothing.

At least one of the reasons I’ve decided to ignore sound advice to cook and stash while I can is that food could not be easier to come by around here. Hummus platter with fava bean stews, pirogis and borscht and/or Tom Collichio-crafted sandwiches arrive so quickly after you call, we’ve become convinced that they’re actually preparing in our building’s basement and you don’t even want to know how many Thai and sushi restaurants there are per block around here (at least two). Plus, both of our families live within an hour of the city and (Hi Mom! Hi Alex’s Mom!) our moms are not only good cooks, but have vowed to keep us from starving. Wasn’t that sweet of them?

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