My Word with Douglas E. Welch

Soft Ginger Cookie

From our annual cookie party, now in It’s 25th year!

Recipe: Soft Ginger Cookies

 and Follow

Some of my favorite cookbooks

†††

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

See all the 2017 Gift Guide Entries

21 KitchenAid Mixer | Douglas E. Welch Gift Guide 2017

While these expensive mixers aren’t necessarily an impulse buy, if you have a dedicated home baker in your life this just might be the best present ever! I have both of these mixers and both are currently installed on my counter turning out the 80 dozen or so cookies I make each year for your annual cookie party. I’ve also used them for bread, cakes, ice cream (with optional attachment) and much more. It is rare I use a hand mixer anymore as these beast do the job much better and much more quickly.

…and they come in a bunch of cool coolers, too! (SMILE) — Douglas

Check out these ways to kick up your brownie game. — Douglas

Where do your brownie loyalties lie? Are you Team Fudgy, Team Cakey, or Team In-Between-y?

I’m a fudgy-as-a-truffle gal myself (Alice Medrich’s Best Cocoa Brownies are my old faithful, preferably straight from the freezer)—but today, we’re not here to discuss that age-old question.

Instead, we’re here to take you brownie purists and turn you into brownie hedonists!!!! eccentrics. Your ordinary brownies might be extraordinarily good, but consider these tweaks—in the form of swirls, sprinkles, drops, and swooshes (smears, if you prefer)—for when you want to give your brownie a night on the town, complete with facial glitter (that’s still a thing, right?) and a thick coat of mascara.

Say you are making a beautiful carbonara. You’ve got the bacon crisping, the Parmesan shredded and at the ready, the pasta water simmering away, and—oh no. You used up all the olive oil making Maialino’s dreamy Olive Oil Cake! And all you’ve got on hand is… coconut oil. Drat. That won’t work!

Sure, it’ll fill the oily void, but the flavors of the dish will be all off. You might run out to buy more olive oil, or you might think of this instead as an opportunity for culinary experimentation. Up to you. Either way, it’s easy enough to tell that coconut oil isn’t exactly what the dish is calling for—and it’s certainly not what a nonna would reach for. At the same time, butter would be unusual in a stir-fry, and sesame oil very peculiar in a sauce for sole meunière.

With Spring here and Easter right around the corner I have been thinking about brighter recipes, recipes with lemons in particular, and with a fresh batch of homemade lemon curd and I was thinking that it would be perfect in some white chocolate chip cookies! White chocolate chip cookies are my all time favourite cookie and I usually make them with macadamia nuts so I took my favourite recipe and modified it by removing the nuts and adding plenty of lemon! I started by removing some of the butter to replace it with lemon curd and I increased the flour to compensate for the increase in moisture and I added a large heaping tablespoon of fresh lemon zest for an even more intense lemon flavour! These lemon curd white chocolate chip cookies are so quick and easy to make! Seriously! You could whip off a double batch and be thoroughly enjoying them 30 minutes from now! 

I do not excel at cookie decorating.  It’s time consuming and, normally, I’m not a fan of icing on cookies anyway.  Cookie stamps or rollers are the perfect alternative to having a ‘cute’ cookie but one that doesn’t takes a lot of time to decorate! The problem with stamped or pressed cookies is often the design isn’t clear because the cookies either spread out or rise too much and the cookie design disappears.  

This past month, I received a special surprise from my very long-time and dear friend, Monique of La Table de Nana.  It was a beautiful, wooden rolling pin engraving with the name of my blog.  You can visit Monique’s post here to find out more about the artist and the lovely variety of engraved rolling pins.  They are the perfect gift for a friend or family member who enjoys baking!

More cookies stamps

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

An interesting link found among my daily reading

Small Victories
Recipes, Advice + Hundreds of Ideas for Home-Cooking Triumphs
Julia Turshen

When reading a cookbook I don’t tend to make grand proclamations that this book is good and that book is bad. Cookbooks are all about what you take away from the book and one person’s favorite is another’s failure. For me, my like or dislike of a cookbook directly relates to how well it works for me. Does its message resonate? Are the recipes actually something I would consider making? Can I put my new found knowledge to immediate use? With those criteria in mind, Small Victories certainly worked for me on a variety of levels.

First, even though I am a bit of a fussy eater, I found many recipes I want to try out as soon as possible. Each recipe is well described and also includes several variations you might want to try. Turshen includes old standards like her take on biscuits (Everything Biscuits), roast chicken (Roast Chicken with Fennel, Rosemary + Lemon) and desserts (Berry + Buttermilk Cobbler) while also exploring further afield with Roasted Salmon with Maple + Soy, Jennie’s Chicken Pelau, and Crisply Hominy + Cheddar Fritters.

In Small Victories, you’ll find sections dedicated to Breakfast, Soups + Salads, Vegetables, (maybe even a few that I would eat) (LAUGH), Grains, Beans + Pasta, Meat + Poultry, Shellfish + Fish, Desserts, A Few Drinks + Some Things To Keep On Hand and Seven Lists — which gives some great ideas on small bites to serve with drinks, 7 Things To Do With Pizza Dough, Leftover Roast Chicken and more.

Another reason I found Small Victories so enjoyable are the excellent stories attached to each recipe. Even when I wasn’t particularly interested in a recipe, I still made a point of reading each of these descriptions almost like I would read a regular book. These descriptions also contain the “Small Victories” which are the namesake of the book. These are small tips and hints are a great addition to the cookbook and provide yet another level of value.

As Turshen writes, “Think of small victories as the corners of the puzzle, the pieces that help us become inspired, relax cooks who know how to fill in the rest.”

I found my copy of Small Victories at my local library and you might find it there, too. It’s always a great place to start when looking for new books in your life. However you get your hands on Small Victories, I highly recommend you do. I think you’ll find some interesting recipes, tips and maybe even the next step in your cooking adventures.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

The Short Stack Cookbook: Ingredients That Speak Volumes

Another new cookbook I came across in my reading. I was able to quickly and easy download the cookbook as an ebook from my local library — and perhaps you can, too. Don’t forget this excellent source for new books of all sorts.

The Short Stack Cookbook is an interesting complication — selecting 18 “essential ingredients” and then finding some of the best food writers available today to select their best and favorite recipes for that ingredient.

I found a few recipes to check out here in my own kitchen and most of the ingredients were something that I would normally cook and eat — being a bit fussy about my food choices. Brussel sprouts and squash aren’t going to show up on my table unless I am making them for family or guests, but there are plenty of other ingredients to choose from including lemon, apples, cheddar, honey, rice, tomatoes and more.

A few of the recipes I found interesting include:

• Cheddar Obatzda (Beer Cheese)
• Cheddar-Walnut Shortbread
• Lemon-Cornmeal Poundcake
• Lemony Ricotta Pancakes
• Smoked Mozzarella & Sage in Sourdough Carrozza
• Pappardelle wth Bacon & Root Vegetable Ragu
• and many more!

From Amazon.com…

The first cookbook from Short Stack Editions, an artful collection of 150 new and original recipes organized by ingredient from IACP and James Beard Award–winning cookbook authors, chefs, food writers, recipe testers, and editors.

The ethos behind Short Stack Editions is simple: Pair honest, common ingredients with trusted voices in the culinary world for inspired recipes home cooks can actually use. And for their first cookbook, Short Stack founders Nick Fauchald and Kaitlyn Goalen call upon their acclaimed contributors to extend their love letters to favorite ingredients. Exclusively created for this cookbook, these recipes–from all-star chefs, food writers, editors, and stylists–are destined to become favorites.