smitten kitchen » Passover

chocolate caramel crack(ers)

deb — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 01:34:24 +0000

Yes, crack. As in "made with crackers", as in "crackly like toffee" but also in reference to the addictive nature of this stuff. I may make what seems like an elaborate cake a week these days, I might bake my own icebox wafers and fill and frost my cupcakes but these things right here? They're the thing everyone asks for by name, and they take almost no time to make.

Thus, despite that fact that this recipe is incredibly easy to find elsewhere on the web, it only seems right to give it a home here as well. Because if there was one person out there that hasn't made it yet that makes it after reading this, my work here will be done.

You start with a foil and parchment-lined baking sheet, a fantastic thing if you, like me, hate doing dishes. (And seriously, if you don't hate doing dishes, who are you? And would you like to come over?) You lay out the cracker of your choice -- for this week's festivities, we used matzo but, trust me, if you try it with Saltine crackers, it just might blow your mind -- in a single sheet, make a quick brown sugar caramel and bake it onto the crackers for a few minutes. Hot from the oven, you drop chocolate chips on top and when they've softened a minute later, spread them into a thin layer. Sprinkling it with sea salt or toasted, chopped nuts is optional, all that matters is that you share with me.

Oh, and this can be our little secret, but you might consider not putting all of the crack(ers) out when your friends and family come over. Because it might just disappear before you get any, and then you'll wake up the next morning, well, fiending and regretful that you didn't get any, with no choice but to make some more. Don't say these didn't come with a warning label.

One year ago: Lemon Yogurt Anything Cake

Two years ago: Potato Rosemary Bread

chewy amaretti cookies

deb — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:35:44 +0000

We're starting the long and brutal process of packing up our apartment, brutal because as I am sure you know, the longer you live somewhere, the more uh, "stuff" you accumulate and forget about. We've lived here over four years, the longest I've lived anywhere besides my parents house, which means that weeding through our belongings is part "so that's where my Tonic CD went!" (he swears he was joking) and part "you had a recipe binder?"

Oh right, I did. Remember those dark days before the internet, when curious cooks actually had to clip recipes from newspapers and magazines, and keeping those clippings organized in some sort of book or box? Nope, me neither. Going through this binder is fascinating for me as I see what kind of recipe hopes I'd had ten years ago -- a surprising amount I've actually gotten to. And of course there are things that I completely forgot about, like almond cookies that are made with only three ingredients (okay, four, I added salt).

Seeing as my family is a bunch of marzipan junkies, the fact that one of the ingredients is almond paste demanded that I test these, pronto. Plus, lacking flour, they should be perfect for Passover (or they will be until someone in the comments tells me that there's an ingredient that is not Kosher for Passover and yes, this is pretty much the system I use to check on these things) and gluten-free and seriously, might these cookies save the world, too? (Nope, sorry, got that covered.)

But I'll let you decide.

Passover, previously: 17 Flourless Dessert Ideas + Chocolate Walnut Cookies, Almond Cake with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote and Matzo Ball Soup

One year ago: Shaker Lemon Pie

almond cake with strawberry-rhubarb compote

deb — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:27:14 +0000

Remember those 17 flourless/Passover-friendly desserts? Did you wonder why one would make a list that numbered, say, 17 and not some easily identifiable round number such as 20? I mean, once you’ve gotten to 17, are those last three so difficult, so clearly going to push a blogger over the edge that it simply cannot be done? No, you don’t think about this? Well, lucky you.

But the list was indeed 20 to begin with, but I nixed* three because although they had very little flour in them and the odds were that it could be replaced with matzo meal with little melodrama, I didn’t want to wing it and accidentally ruin every one of your seders with my misplaced confidence. (So much for saving us all some melodrama.) Yet I’ve been staring down the Gâteau aux Amandes with Strawberry-Rhubarb Compote from Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook for months now–a fairly simple cake with what I hoped would be a very intense almond flavor.

... Read the rest of almond cake with strawberry-rhubarb compote on smittenkitchen.com

17 flourless dessert ideas

deb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:43:55 +0000

Every year, I see Passover-friendly recipes that frighten me: Brick-like honey cakes; “sponge” cakes that still haunt my mother, who was got these in lieu of birthday cakes most years growing up with the bad luck of an April birthday; dinner rolls that my father likens to “hockey pucks” and macaroons that nobody (besides me) likes. And every year, I wonder: what ever happened to impossible-to-hate flourless chocolate cakes and truffles? Desserts lifted with egg whites? Ground nuts instead of flour? Do people even realize that one of the most popular peanut butter cookies on earth has exactly no flour in it?

Well, you know what I say? This year in Dessert Epiphany. I promise to stop ranting from this point forward and instead use this post as a repository for the kinds of Passover desserts that you’d be proud to bring to dinner. And for those of you who do not celebrate Passover, fear not, matzo meal only shows up in one of these recipes, and even there, only in a crust. In short: you don’t need the reminder of 40 years in the dessert to find an excuse to make these, but if you ask me, it’s a good reason as any.

For example, did you know that Payard–yes, that Payard–makes a Flourless Chocolate Walnut Cookie? It’s in his new book, Chocolate Ephiphany which New York Magazine gave us a preview of yesterday. I tried them out last night, and oh, an epiphany they were, and then some. I know what you’re thinking: just like chocolate meringues! Yet, they’re not–the egg whites are not whipped, just whisked with powdered sugar (a recipe for Passover-friendly powdered sugar is below) and really good cocoa. It couldn’t be easier, and it is gluten-free, dairy-free and a one-bowl (plus a cutting board) recipe to boot.

... Read the rest of 17 flourless dessert ideas on smittenkitchen.com

matzo ball soup

deb — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:08:59 +0000

A confession: In spite of my current, ongoing, seeming-like-it-will-never-ever-end condition, I don’t like traditional chicken soup. Obviously, boasting such sacrilege, I am undeserving of your sympathy. Obviously, this is why, four days in, I am still on the sofa on my second box of tissues, chugging down my 20th Brita pitcher of water, my nose as red as a rail-thin starlet at 4 a.m., the bitterness of having a SuperBowl party of one only slightly mitigated by the fact that the Giants triumph–I do not embrace everyones’ grandmother’s sworn-by home remedy.

Honestly, it’s not all chicken soup that I do not like; it’s just the stuff I can normally get. Those short noodles? I can never get them on my spoon! Those bits of chicken? Always overcooked. Those carrot specks? They’re just mush. I’ve tried X Deli’s and Y Market’s and Z Restaurant’s and they always disappoint, namely because these three ingredients were never meant to be cooked for the same amount of time, nor kept warm for hours on end, which is why I was given no choice this weekend but to take the matter into my own hand and make my favorite variety of chicken soup: matzo ball soup.

... Read the rest of matzo ball soup on smittenkitchen.com

gluten-free chocolate financiers

deb — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:11:23 +0000

A firm believer in the jinx-ing gods, I always pause before I say these kinds of things, but I have a pretty good life both out- and inside of the kitchen. Food is my friend. The only things holding me back from eating everything and anything in the whole world are, in descending order, my pickiness and my waistband. I don’t know what it means to have food make me consistently sick. (Well, except Spaghetti Carbonara. But that story for a different time, or on second thought, never.) I scour ingredient lists because I don’t trust them, but not because my life could depend on it. I can eat all of the bread, pasta and cake, glorious cake that I want. And it is these things I have been thinking about since I dug into Gluten-Free Girl this weekend, the new book by the food blogosphere’s own Shauna James Ahern, someone I had the fortune to meet, along with her Chef, Danny, and other friends last weekend.

I first learned about celiac disease from an old coworker who had it. “What do you mean you don’t eat no cookies?” I would joke in mock-Aunt Toula tone because it was just that absurd to me that he would be the only person in our whole department to not eat my baked goods with glee. It came back on my radar through my friend Joc’s coworkers, Kim and Kelly and their site, Celiac Chicks, but I still didn’t really get it. No flour, I’d think? More flourless chocolate cake, then! Big deal.

... Read the rest of gluten-free chocolate financiers on smittenkitchen.com

mixed berry pavlova

deb — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:34:39 +0000

I think it pretty much goes without saying that I wasn’t going to be allowed to show up to my parent’s seder tonight without one of these, but when my mother came down at the end of last week with both bronchitis and conjunctivitis in both eyes, did not consider this, perhaps, a sign from above that she would be given a pass on the thirteen-guest dinner tonight and insisted upon foraging ahead, she asked if I could attack the second dessert we’d decided upon–the mighty pavlova–as she wanted to wait until she was no longer contagious to start cooking. I thought that was mighty considerate of her, and of course, had been chomping at the bit to make it anyhow, so I didn’t mind.

Pavlovas are one of those things that I’d never heard of three months ago but have heard about almost weekly since. There was Nigella’s with passion fruit on her new show, Ina Garten’s mixed berry version and her subsequent mention that it would be included in her last meal on earth, no small feat for a woman known for starting every recipe with “beat a pound of butter in a mixer.” But the clincher was Shuna’s gorgeous guest-post on Simply Recipes a couple weeks back, and its step-by-step photos. What better to counterbalance the riches of thick swaths of whipped cream between layers of dead-serious chocolate cake but a giant meringue piled with fresh fruit? And why had I not thought to make this for Passover before?

... Read the rest of mixed berry pavlova on smittenkitchen.com

lighter-than-air chocolate cake

deb — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 03:25:46 +0000

It is clearly some sort of oversight on my part that I haven’t gotten to this before because no annals of my cooking life could ever be complete without at least a single mention of one of the greatest cakes I was introduced to growing up: the Sh*t Cake. The Sh*t Cake, you see, is a lighter-than-air chocolate roll cake with whipped cream that my mother would make each and every Passover. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever made a Yule Log or other such roulade cake knows, they crack and sever easily and often, and can be mighty frustrating because of this. A nice, sweet person like my mother, who otherwise echews displays of gutter mouth might even be so irritated by say the fourth or fifth crack or so to curse aloud while her (frankly, precious) 7-year-old daughter watches, and comes in turn to rename the cake.

But despite the annoyance of making the cake, we still go at it year after year (I’ve made it too, and it has indeed kept its nickname in the process) because the cake is really one of the best in the world. It manages to have an intense, pronounced bittersweet chocolate flavor but none of the heft of your typical flourless chocolate cake (although I love them, they are so often like gigantic truffles and less like something you can eat more than two bites of without running your fork through sauce, fruit or gulping down quantities of water). Besides having no flour, it also has no butter, milk, cream or chemical leaveners. Frankly, if you have a bag of good chocolate pieces, a dozen eggs, some sugar and salt, you could make this right this very moment, though you might need to dash to the store for some heavy cream for whipping. Mwa-ha-ha, consider chocolate cakes as you know them banished.

... Read the rest of lighter-than-air chocolate cake on smittenkitchen.com

mom’s chocolate chip meringues

deb — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:10:56 +0000

It only took us over a year, but Alex and I finally had dinner at Tia Pol, a closet-sized gem of a tapas restaurant on 10th Avenue on Saturday night. We live so close, it’s embarrassing that we hadn’t eaten there yet, but the thing with the proximity is that every time we’ve popped our heads in, taken note of the mob of people crushed against the entryway and the “at least an hour and a half” wait, we’ve rationalized that we’ll go another time — later. Well, six months had passed since our last “later,” when on Saturday, so we decided arriving at the criminally early hour of 6 p.m. would outsmart the crowds. The laugh was still on us but the 45 minutes were well worth the wait, the tight space not claustrophobic but cozy on a freezing night as we snugged into a row of coats while drinking our first then second (mon dieu!) glass of their delicious sangria. At the bar, we couldn’t resist trying one of almost everything — marcona almonds, potatoes with aioli and hot paprika, ham-wrapped artichoke hearts with manchego cheese, deep-fried spicy chickpeas and thick, fork-tender white asparagus stalks again with that blessed aioli.

By last night, it had been a whole two days since our last dose of aioli and we needed a fix. Alex grabbed some white asparagus, red potatoes and salad greens on his way home and I began mincing garlic for the sauce. Oh, how easy dinner will be, I thought… And now you see where this is going. The first aioli started out splendidly, but at some point near the end, when you start drizzling the olive oil more confidently, it split and if there’s one thing that’s impossible to fix, it’s a broken mayonnaise. Frustrated as hell, I didn’t want to associate mayonnaise-making with failure and unhappiness, and forced myself to make another, this time in the food processor. I’ve seen Emeril make his in there often (say whatever you want about the man; he always makes his mayo from scratch), and hey, isn’t that what the little drip-spout is for? This batch not only didn’t break, it didn’t come together at all. Four egg yolks, two CUPS of good olive oil, twelve cloves of garlic and any remaining joy I’d had toward cooking that night went right in the trash. I was ready to write the evening off completely — never happened, nobody needs to know, let’s not dwell on these failures, okay? — but I still had those four egg whites and I got clingy, unable to part with another ingredient.

... Read the rest of mom’s chocolate chip meringues on smittenkitchen.com