I’ve gotten to be pretty known for my “Biggie” cookies — the oversized, deli-style cookies as big as your hand. So I decided to make a rile chocolate variety of them to include with the Valentine’s Day set. As with the others, these are huge (about 4-4 1/2 inches in diameter), both crunchy on the edges and gooey in the middle. The M&Ms didn’t still particularly stick well so when I make these in the future, I think that I will still with White Chocolate Melting Wafers as the decoration.
Let’s talk about this “Cobbler” for a sec. First of all, it’s delicious. It’s modified from an America’s Test Kitchen / Cooks Country recipe, which described it as a “cobbler”. So, in my mind cobblers have the fruit on the bottom, no bottom crust and then a top crust of crumble, biscuit dough or a batter. So, it’s not really a cobbler. It’s also not really a pie, which would have at minimum a bottom crust and this has a bottom batter. I don’t really know what to call it, except yummy.
I also don’t really know when to eat it. It would be a great afternoon tea or coffee thing. It would be a great dessert thing with some ice cream and it would even make a fantastic breakfast casserole with maple syrup. So, I guess that is up to you. It comes together in a flash with mostly pantry ingredients: sweetened condensed milk, milk, butter, flour, baking power, salt and a touch of vanilla for the base. I used mixed berries, but you could also use just one berry type, or cherries or even chopped up peaches. Frozen berries / fruit work great here (bake 10 minutes or so longer) and best of all, it isn’t overly sweet.
Perhaps one of the easiest and quickest recipes I have done in a long time. I had it ready to go before the oven had even preheated.
Snowy and cold (and will soon be colder!) weekend in Maine visiting my mom, so I decided to raid the pantry to see what type of combination that I would bake with and as usual, I ended up with a crumble bar combo. As you know, they are my “go to” treat. This time with hazelnuts and apricot jam… a little bit of sunshine with the golden color and tartness of the apricots.
I’ve got an event or two coming up this week where dessert may be called for so I started off by baking this Sea Salt Caramel Apple Pie. Went a little overboard with the lattice work, but that’s ok I have a tendency to do that with pie. It’s sweet, it’s salty and I can’t wit to try it with some cinnamon or vanilla bean ice cream. Fun fact, I used Ludacrisp apples, which I had never used before, much less even hear of before. The Ludacrisp apple is a new variety and is described as “sweet, juicy, tropical-flavored hybrid (Honeycrisp/Fuji hybrid) known for its crisp texture, bold scarlet color, and unique taste reminiscent of pineapple and Juicy Fruit gum”. Really? It’s apparently a good all-around apple, great for snacking, salads, and baking, and named playfully after the rapper Ludacris, because who wouldn’t want an apple sort named after them. I wonder if there is a Katja apple.
These Raspberry Chocolate Chip Muffins with Cocoa Crumble turned out to be really, really yummy, with one caveat. They are great within a few hours coming out of the oven. The tangy raspberries play well with the chocolate chips and the crumble is a nice addition. But in a rare time that I say “eat them right away or make a half batch” they didn’t hold up well after a few hours. Mainly because the crumble got really hard, surprisingly quickly. So that was a disappointment. I suppose that you could also make them with regular (non-cocoa) crumble that doesn’t get rock hard, or just eat them very expeditiously.