Chocolate-Filled Walnut Cookies

Wow.  I thought I'd like these cookies, but I didn't think they would be quite that good.  I've had these walnut cookie molds for four years now, and they sat wrapped in their plastic packaging until this week.  I don't know why it took me so long to try them out.  Of course it's not the molds that make the cookie great, but the recipe.  When filled with chocolate ganache, the flavor is reminiscent of a chocolate chip cookie with walnuts.  As good as that is, I prefer them unfilled because they actually taste close to pecan pie, with that deep brown sugar and nutty flavor.

Top-left: Shnooky with our current cat, Gandalf the Grey. Bottom-left: Shnooky (left) with his big brother, Baby.

Before I go further, I wanted to dedicate this post to my beloved cat Shnooky, whom we lost three weeks ago.  I've been feeling down and a little lost without him, and we'd been together for one-third of my life.  He was as kooky as his name, and he made me laugh a lot.  He was "little buddy" and "sweet pea" to me, and he loved sunbeams and charging squirrels and birds outside the window with his "battle cry."  I even miss him walking all over me, demanding to be fed, as I slept in the mornings.  We feel sad to have lost two cats in two years, but we try to remember them with smiles instead of tears.

Back to the less-sad subject of cookies.  Don't have walnut molds and don't want to buy them?  You don't need to.  After I filled all 50 molds, I used a cookie scoop to make 3 more mounds, and they baked up on the cookie sheet just fine.  I can't tell you about the experience of filling those with ganache, because we ate them first.  Take note, though, that you can't use those cookie scoops (even the "teaspoon-sized" ones) to fill the walnut molds; those will give you too much dough.  Use the teaspoon in your measuring spoon set.  I would have preferred the ease of a spring-loaded scoop.  I also thought I would include these in our Christmas cookie baskets this year, but they appear too fragile to hold up in the mail.  Still, they would make a lovely gift hand-delivered for the holidays.  Or just good for eating on any old afternoon.

Sarabeth's Maple Muffins

Muffins often don't impress me, but the recipe for these Maple Muffins caught my eye right away.  Joe got me Sarabeth's Bakery: From My Home to Yours as one of my Christmas gifts a year ago, and I was drawn to the photo with the golden sides and crackly tops.  I also love maple syrup as a flavoring.  On first bite, I was surprised because I expected a more assertive maple flavor.  But it's more subtle, kind of lightly perfumed with maple, and the walnuts taste a little salty by comparison.  Winner.

An additional bonus was how easy the recipe was.  Especially compared with the Pains au Chocolat (chocolate croissants) and Pains aux Raisins I made from the book earlier this year!  A negative?  Pure maple syrup is an expensive ingredient, and the Grade B (it's superior to Grade A) this recipe calls for isn't always sold in supermarkets.  My tip is to buy it at Trader Joe's if there's a location near you, since it had the Grade B available and was more affordable.

Also worth mentioning is that I made these in a cupcake pan, and the leftover batter in mini brioche molds.  I don't own a muffin pan, and even I have a limit with how much I cram in my kitchen.  Sarabeth writes that she's not a fan of paper muffin liners, and I have to agree because the muffins got the most beautiful, golden brown sides without them.  If you also opt for a cupcake pan, cut the cooking time short by 5 minutes.

Finally, the recipe also calls for some whole wheat flour.  I like King Arthur's White Whole Wheat Flour because it's got all the nutrition of whole wheat, but its taste and consistency are closer to plain white flour.  The difference is that it's made from the white wheat berry instead of the red wheat berry, which is used for the more common whole wheat flour in stores.

This post was shared with:
Tea Party Tuesday
Sweet Treats Thursday
Sweet Tooth Friday
Sweets for a Saturday

Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies

Banana-nut bread and the chocolate chip cookie make a good couple.  These Banana-Walnut Chocolate-Chunk Cookies have the flavor and lightness of banana bread, with the taste and chocolate hit of chocolate chip cookies.  They're fun and easy to make, and just what I was looking for after slightly fussier apple crostatas and bar cookies.

I've been doing more, but my baking and cooking projects don't always end up on the blog.  Some I consider too ordinary or ubiquitous.  Sometimes I neglected to take photos.  Sometimes, as in this case, the recipe just didn't work out.  I had been looking for a pumpkin biscotti recipe but they're so few.  This recipe was halfway to a disaster.  The flavor was good, but they didn't get to the correct, hard biscotti consistency and had chewy middles despite repeat stints in the oven.  I finally decided that pumpkin puree must be too wet for proper biscotti, and that the storebought variety I'd tried before probably uses some industrial powdered pumpkin flavoring.

My pumpkin-carving didn't go so great either, since I cleaned it the week before and let it sit, and it grew moldy.  In the end, I carved a simple face in a very thick gourd since stores were sold out of pumpkins.  I had to envy Joe's pumpkin (bottom right), since he did a better job and his pumpkin is still mold-free.

These cookies went waaay easier.  Surprisingly, the recipe called for oats and some whole wheat flour, and I used some white whole wheat flour I had on hand.  Everybody's favorite start to cookie dough is that mixture of butter, white sugar, and brown sugar.  The remaining ingredients are added, and then scooped onto a cookie sheet.  The cookies bake up small, but I had a big yield of over 40.  The recipe calls for cutting up your own chocolate chunks, but I didn't realize and had bought 60% cacao chocolate chips.  But they were perfect, nice and big with a deeper, grown-up flavor.

Cinnamon Walnut Monkey Bread

I was not prepared for how good this would be.  The last monkey bread I had was denser with hard, caramelized stuff on top.  This one was gooey on top, crunchy on the sides, soft inside, and cinnamon-y all over.  It seems like everybody is making monkey bread -- a pull-apart bread great for social gatherings -- and I recently saw a guest on Martha Stewart's show make a Banana Brioche Monkey Bread with Moloko Milk Stout Butterscotch and Smoked Toffee Almond Brittle. It sounded so fussy and looked like so much work, I immediately hated the idea. This version from the LA Times is more my speed, and a snap to make as far as breads go.  Walnuts, butter, and brown sugar caramelize into a syrup on the top and bottom, and each ball of bread is rolled in cinnamon sugar.  It doesn't have a 14-word name, but for me less is often more.