salted brownies
dessert brought to you by the PMS angels. A homespun predecessor to the foodie trend of salted caramels etc, this is culinary genius, far more than the sum of its parts, and easy as pie never really is. A certain Ms. Kate Krader has been making these fudgy, sweet-salty brownies since she was 10 years old. I got the recipe from the sex librarian who immediately doles out the goods lest she eat the whole batch herself—thanks!
preheat your oven to 350°. Line a 9 inch metal cake pan (round or square) with foil and lightly butter the foil.
chop up two ounces of unsweetened fair trade chocolate.
in a fairly large saucepan over low heat, melt a stick and a half of unsalted butter—the closer to home the better, and if you know the cow, even better! Stir in the chocolate bits until they’ve melted too. Turn off the heat, and whisk in a heaping ¼ cup plus two tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa, two cups of sugar, three large eggs, and a teaspoon and a half of vanilla. Using a wooden spoon, stir in one cup of all purpose flour.
pour the shiny brown batter into your pan and smooth the surface with the back of the spoon. Sprinkle about a teaspoon of coarse sea salt across the surface. Drag a butter knife through the pan, swirling the salt just barely into the surface of the batter.
bake in the center of the oven for about half an hour, until the edge is set but the center is still a bit soft. Let the brownies cool at in the pan until room temperature. Lift the brownies from the pan and peel off the foil, slice, eat.
eat in hand broken wedges to nurse broken hearts. To seduce warming ones, serve with the simplest heavy whipped cream and raspberries.
vegan chocolate gem bites
vegan chocolate gem bites
alias pms bomblettes
½ cup veggie shortening (cold)
½ cup beet sugar
cream together and freeze for 8 minutes (I didn’t time this, but I think long enough to clean all the clothes and books and vibrators off my bed and straighten the covers, and put away a load of dishes to make way for another load in our teeny kitchen translates to about 8 minutes.)
preheat the oven to 350º
Sift together:
1 ¼ cup all purpose flour
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
2 tablespoons of cocoa powder
take the bowl from the freezer and sift the dry ingredients (sifting for the second time) into the shortening and sugar. Pour:
2 tablespoons of molasses
over the mix and stir together. Add:
1/3 cup of dark chocolate chips
stir until just combined. Wodge the dough into a mini-muffin tray greased with a little veggie oil. Depending on how much raw dough you eat, it makes about 10 mini-muffin cookies.
make a depression with your thumb in half of them (or all of them or whatever, I just like to do half and half) and spoon jam into it. I used strawberry rhubarb, which is delicious. Raspberry would be another excellent choice. I made half the strawberry-rhubarb gems with ginger spread too.
bake for 10 minutes. Let them sit in their pan on a rack until cool, about half an hour. They fall apart when they are still hot.
so – do you think they should be called vegan chocolate gems when they have jam, the jam being gem-like? And vegan chocolate bites when they are plain? Sweet semantics.
when you were small, did you sit in the ocean, the bath tub, the lake
and pour water for the sheer joy of pouring water?
peanut butter kiss cookies
it snowed two inches in chicago yesterday
— peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies —
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 cups brown sugar
- 1 cup veggie shortening
- 1 cup peanut butter (yummy crunchy or creamy)
- 5 tablespoons milk
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 2 eggs
- 3 ½ cups flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- chocolate kisses or chocolate stars
this is the kind of dough that doesn’t suffer from just dumping everything into a big bowl and running the electric hand mixer through it, but i tend to mix stuff by hand just because i like the head-time and the bowl and the hard stirring feels good in my arms. And this recipe originally (?) ran in an save-energy-to-help-the-earth calendar of recipes that encouraged hand mixing, among other energy saving tips. So to mix by hand:
using a heavy fork, cut the sugar into the shortening and peanut butter. Crack the eggs into a liquid measure or small bowl & beat, pour into the sugar & fat. Stir in the vanilla and milk. Continue stirring and sift in the dry ingredients. Stick the bowl of dough into the fridge for an hour or so.
preheat the oven to 375º and pour some sugar into a dish. Form the dough into balls, roll in the sugar, and line up on an ungreased cookie tray (i line it with parchment paper when i have it. Also, if you are using chocolate stars, it’s good to flatten your cookies a little by pressing them with the bottom of a glass or do the traditional peanut butter cookie cross-hatches by pressing the flat back of a fork onto the ball, once then again on a 90º angle). Bake for 10-12 minutes then remove the tray to the stovetop, press a chocolate piece into the top of each cookie while still warm and let sit on the tray while the second batch bakes then lift each cookie to a cooling rack.
makes about 4 dozen cookies, and the dough freezes pretty well so you don’t have to make them all at once.
