A couple of weekends ago, I went berry picking again and got a slew of red currants. Some were made into jam, so I thought I would use some of that jam to make these thumpprint cookies. You could also use raspberry jam or tart cherry jam, which also go quite nicely with the chocolate combination — the whole tart + chocolate is really nice.
I thought that I would do a quick and easy giveaway this week, using my all-around go-to brownie recipe, and this time add toffee bits and toasted pecans. I love this brownie recipe — it comes together in minutes, is a million times better than “the box” and it really versatile. And just to be creative, I used a cookie cutter to make the cuts round on these Toffee Pecan Brownie Bites.
Lovely little cookies! And a breeze to make, even if you don’t have cookie cutters handy. These are one of these aorts where you roll the cookie dough into a log and then slice, after chilling in the fridge for a while. These are so good, I might have to add them to the Christmas Cookie rotation some year (though they are very typically American, so may not meet the criteria of “old world German Christmas Cookies”. We shall see!
This might be the easiest chocolately snack ever. I decided to make a few treats to take with my on my travels and decided on this “bark”. The best part about it — besides being insanely easy to make — is that is can look neat just by breaking it into irregular pieces. It’s a little messy to eat with the caramel oozing out, and I’d suggest keeping in in the fridge when not snacking \on it, but man, is it good!
I was recently given a bottle of smoked maple syrup. Yes, I was skeptical as well, especially when I opened the bottle and it was really, really smokey. Hickory and Oak, but smoke, smoke, smoke. I thought long and hard about what I should experiment with, and ultimately, I think that it would go great simply poured over some BBQ ribs, but I thought that I would actually try it in a sweet application, so I came up with this recipe for blondies. And you know what? It worked and they are actually very good. The smoke flavor (and admittedly, I only used a few tablespoons) is really tempered by the toffee and maple and instead of it tasking like smoke, it simply has a deep, almost earthy thing going on. Really quite nice. Also, if you don’t want do the whole “smoke” thing, this recipe works just as well with regular maple syrup.