Chocolate Dipped Ice Cream and Sorbet Sandwiches

It's no surprise that we're having a hot summer here. We always do. We have had an impressive 40 days of temperatures at or above 100 degrees F though, and it's only July 25. From the looks of the weather forecast, we're about to add seven more days to that total. What this means is that all I really want to eat is food that's cold and preferably frozen. Last August, there was a photo in Bon Appetit of a stack of chocolate dipped ice cream sandwiches. The sandwiches were all different flavors, one end of each had been dipped in melted chocolate, and then sprinkled with jimmies or toffee chunks or chopped nuts. This photo had been touched up with added vapor swirls around the sandwiches to further highlight their lovely coldness and perfection as a treat during the heat of summer. That pile of extremely cold sandwiches was something I needed in my freezer. You could use whatever ice cream or sorbet you'd like for the filling, but since I'd been waiting to find fresh, organic cherries for a few weeks, there were a couple I'd had on my mind. First, I made candied cherries and used them in white chocolate cherry ice cream, and then I cooked some cherries and pureed them for cherry sorbet. Both of those recipes are from The Perfect Scoop. The fillings were already delicious on their own, but the brown-butter cookies and chocolate coating with chopped almonds didn't hurt them one bit.

Yes, that was brown-butter cookies. And, the technique, found in the Bon Appetit recipe, for making these sandwiches was an interesting one. The cookie was baked in one solid layer in a nine by thirteen inch pan. I cut the sheet of cookie into four pieces horizontally. Two were filled with white chocolate cherry ice cream, and the other two were filled with cherry sorbet. In each case, the bottom cookie sat at one edge of the pan in which it was baked, ice cream or sorbet was piled thickly on top, and the other cookie piece was placed on top of that. With an off-set spatula, you can smooth the exposed edge. Then, each long piece of filled cookie sandwich was wrapped in plastic wrap, left in the pan, and placed in the freezer to firm up. After a few hours, the cookie bars were cut into separate, little sandwiches. The great news is that these brown-butter cookies cut easily with a serrated knife. They didn't break or chip apart as I feared they might. The cut apart sandwiches were placed back in the freezer once again before the next step. Last, chocolate was melted, one end of each sandwich was dipped into the chocolate and then into chopped nuts, and they set up in the freezer until dessert time arrived.

Almost any cookie would make a good ice cream sandwich, but some are easier than others to bite into after being frozen. The cookies used here performed perfectly for filling, cutting, and biting. The process of filling a long piece of cookie and then cutting the sandwiches after they were frozen and firm worked amazingly well. I haven't decided which filling, the white chocolate cherry ice cream or the cherry sorbet, I like better, but opening the freezer to find two different options for frozen treats is certainly making our hot summer a little more bearable.

White Chocolate Hazelnut Blondies

Have you heard about the national bake sale for Japan? It’s happening in multiple cities this Saturday, April 2, and Austin is one of those cities. As soon as word started spreading about organizing a bake sale in Austin, the positive response was overwhelming. There are currently over 100 volunteer bakers and about 40 businesses contributing to the Austin event. There will be five locations around town for the sale, and all donations will go directly to Americares for relief efforts in Japan. Each location will have an incredible variety of both sweet and savory treats on offer, and for anyone who is unable to take part in Saturday’s event, there’s an online giving page with FirstGiving where all donations also go directly to Americares.

To be able to contribute, in some way, to the recovery process in Japan by baking sounded perfect to me. The timing couldn’t have been better since I just received a review copy of the new book Milk and Cookies which is from the New York bakery of the same name. The book will be released on April 20. It presents recipes for cookie dough bases from which many varieties can be made. For instance, there’s vanilla base dough, dark chocolate base dough, oatmeal, peanut butter, and sugar cookie base dough. Each base has a chapter dedicated to it with different additions for several unique cookies. From the peanut butter base dough, you might make peanut butter-milk chocolate bites or peanut butter and jelly cookies. There are also chapters for special cookies like mocha-cherry drops, carrot cake cookies, and ice cream sandwich cookies, family favorites like biscotti and sfogliati crown pastries, and brownies and bars like Kahlua brownies and pecan bars. Last weekend, I decided to test a recipe for white chocolate blondies to find out if they were bake sale-worthy. The cookie dough itself was made with melted white chocolate, and after baking, the blondies were covered with a white chocolate glaze. The cut bars were chewy, and there were hazelnuts and chocolate chips to add crunch.

First, a pound of white chocolate, and yes, that’s a lot but this recipe makes a lot of blondies, was melted with butter. I used Callebaut white chocolate disks. Next, flour, baking powder, and salt were combined and set aside. Six eggs were mixed in a stand mixer, sugar was added, and then the cooled white chocolate mixture was incorporated. The dry ingredients were added, and last chocolate chips and toasted, chopped hazelnuts were stirred into the dough. The dough was baked in a large sheet pan and allowed to cool before the blondies were topped with a glaze made with cream and more white chocolate.

As a white chocolate fan, these blondies were a big hit with me. The white chocolate in the dough gave the crumb of the bars a dense but tender texture. The semisweet chocolate chips and hazelnuts added crunch and kept the bars from being too sweet. These will definitely be contenders for what I bring to the bake sale, but I have my eye on that peanut butter cookie chapter too.

Chocolate Mint Sandwich Cookies

I had two cookie recipes in mind, and I was trying to decide which one to bake for a party. I called in Kurt to make the final choice. Without even asking for details, he instantly pointed straight at these chocolate mint sandwiches and said: make those. Well, that settled that, not that there was anything wrong with the other option. I knew he’d like the mint, and they do look fetching on the back cover of Chewy Gooey Crispy Crunchy Melt-in-Your-Mouth Cookies. They’re thin and crisp chocolate wafer cookies sandwiched with a layer of mint-flavored white chocolate, and this was just one of four ways these cookies were presented in the book. With several of the cookie recipes, Alice Medrich included “upgrades” or variations on the theme. In this case, the base recipe was plain chocolate wafers. The possible upgrades for these were spicy wafers with cinnamon, cayenne, and ground black pepper added to the dough, extra-bittersweet wafers with added ground unsweetened chocolate, and the version I made with white chocolate and mint sandwiched between two wafers.

The dough requires some time in the refrigerator before being cut into cookies which means it can be made well in advance. It was entirely mixed in a food processor. First, flour, cocoa, sugar, salt, and baking powder were pulsed, and then chopped, softened butter was mixed in by pulsing. Last, milk and vanilla were added through the feed tube while the machine was running. The dough was formed into a log, wrapped in parchment, and chilled for at least an hour. Possibly the most difficult part of this recipe was cutting the dough into thin rounds. The log was marked at one inch lengths, and each inch of dough was cut into six skinny, little, fragile cookies. The rounds were baked, and as soon as they came out of the oven, small circles were cut in half of them. I used the big end of a piping tip to cut the circles. When the cookies were cool, white chocolate was melted and mixed with mint extract for the filling. Scant half teaspoons of white chocolate filling were spread on half of the cookies which were topped with the ones with holes.

Naturally, I thought the half teaspoon of filling was not nearly enough. I would have preferred to slather on a thick, generous layer of mint white chocolate, but I was wrong. It was just enough to add sweetness and richness and let the chocolate of the cookies shine through. Kurt made a great choice with this one.

Ambrosia with White Chocolate Whipped Cream

When you think of Southern food, a few classic dishes like biscuits, chicken and dumplings, pimento cheese, and shrimp and grits always come to mind. A new book called Quick-Fix Southern by Rebecca Lang sets out to make those classics and several new dishes doable when time is lacking. I received a review copy of this book, and in it I found recipes for snacking, picnics, salads, parties, casseroles, and of course, Southern sweets. There are cooking tips like chopping greens into thin ribbons to speed up cooking time or cooking everything for shrimp and grits together in the oven instead of separately on top of the stove to reduce active time. And, there are some classics like fried green tomatoes and okra fritters that don’t take long to prepare anyway. Beyond the Southern classics, there are also dishes like catfish tacos, warm curried fruit, and a key lime martini. When I got to the sweets chapter, I was drawn to the ambrosia since citrus is still in season. It’s a simple salad with supremed ruby red grapefruit and navel oranges, pineapple chunks, and a layer of whipped cream.

In the book, the ambrosia is composed as a trifle, but I served it in individual portions. I also took the liberty of garnishing with pomegranate seeds because I still had a couple of homegrown, tiny pomegranates on hand. I have a dwarf pomegranate shrub which actually produced fruits, albeit very small fruits, this year, and those fruits were packed with delightful seeds. So, to begin making this dessert, fresh pineapple was cut into chunks, and navel oranges and red grapefruits were cut into segments. The fruits were placed in a sieve and allowed to drain. Be sure to save the juice that collects for another use or mix it with a little vodka for a quick cocktail. Next, white chocolate was melted and allowed to cool, and cream was whipped. There was no added sugar as the white chocolate added just enough sweetness to the cream. The whipped cream was whisked into the melted white chocolate in two steps, and then it was time to layer it with the mixed fruits.

Coconut usually makes an appearance in ambrosia, and I missed it here a little. Some freshly grated coconut pieces that had been toasted would have been a nice addition, but that would have made this a slightly more complicated and time-consuming dish. As it was, there were certainly no complaints. The layers of fruit and rich, white chocolate whipped cream made for a Southern-style dessert full of fresh flavors with just enough decadence.

Chocolate^2 Chip Espresso Cookies

If there is such thing as a sweet tooth, I would like to suggest that there may also be such thing as a coffee tooth. Going with that assumption, my coffee tooth has been acting up lately, and that led me to this recipe for double chocolate espresso cookies from Demolition Desserts. The cookie dough was made with cocoa powder and finely ground espresso, and dark chocolate and white chocolate chips were added. You might think a dark, chocolaty, coffee-flavored cookie like that would be slightly bitter, but this one wasn’t. I suspect it’s the brown sugar that smoothes out the flavors in the dough. The tender, almost-cakey texture is a nice surprise about them too. You can use any ratio you wish of white to dark chocolate chips, and I went with a whole cup of white to one-third cup of dark chocolate.

In the recipe, the suggested method for preparing the dough is to stir it by hand with a large wooden spoon. I prefer the hands-free method of tossing everything into a mixer, so I went that route. The flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and ground espresso were sifted while the butter and dark brown and granulated sugars were mixed. One egg, vanilla, and salt were added to the butter before the flour mixture was mixed in just until combined. I folded in the white and dark chocolate chips, and then the dough was refrigerated for 30 minutes. Small, one-inch balls of dough were formed and baked for about ten minutes.

These cookies are found at the beginning of the book with a few other versions of the chocolate chip variety like the chocolate chip cookies xs. This particular chocolate chip espresso cookie is also used in the chocolate chip mania dessert found on page 35 of the book. For that, the cookies are baked as minis and are stacked on top of a blondie with brown sugar-chocolate chunk ice cream and chipped cream with dark and white chocolate sauces. That sounds like a great way to satisfy a sweet tooth, a coffee tooth, and a chocolate tooth all at once, but for now, the cookies by themselves made me and my coffee tooth very happy.

Peanut Butter Chocolate and Chocolate White Chocolate Chunk Cookies

We were invited to a bbq today, and I volunteered to bring cookies. Being the indecisive sort and hoping to please everyone with one flavor or the other, I made two kinds. These are from Barefoot Contessa Parties!, and she actually shows three types of cookies in that book. I skipped the basic chocolate chunk cookie because I only had so much time and chocolate, and I really wanted to try the other two. The chocolate white chocolate chunk one drew me in because white chocolate is just the best, and the peanut butter chocolate chunk would obviously be delicious too.

I used Callebaut chocolates for these cookies. Their white chocolate is far and away better than other brands I’ve tried, and their 60% cacao bittersweet worked perfectly with the peanut butter. These are very straightforward cookies, and once the chocolate was chopped, it was all downhill. My peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies didn’t spread quite as much as the white chocolate chunk ones, but other than that there were no issues here. Well, there was one issue. Which flavor was better? Kurt decided the white chocolate narrowly edged out the peanut butter. I also loved the big chunks of white chocolate nestled into the cocoa-rich cookies, but the savory peanuttiness with the dark chocolate was just as appealing. Let me taste them one more time, or two more times, and I’ll get back to you about which one is better.

Gingerbread White Chocolate Blondies

Back in May, I baked a couple of things from Martha Stewart's Cookies and realized that I wanted to try every cookie in the book. They all look delectable, are simple enough to create, and all together form a great cookie baking reference. Also, my co-workers have gotten accustomed to my habit of bringing treats into the office, so it was time to grab this book again. This time, I chose the gingerbread white chocolate blondies. Because they are bar cookies, the baking time is minimized. Beyond the time required, I didn’t think too much about this choice and had no idea what I would be unleashing by making them.

Seeing molasses in the ingredient list may have somewhat influenced my decision as I think I’m developing a molasses dependency. The homemade graham crackers made with molasses started it. Then, while making these blondies, I realized that molasses and salt causes a swirling in my brain just like the effect of caramel and salt. This recipe didn’t require an inordinate amount of salt, but it was somehow more noticeable than usual as it played with the molasses flavor. And, then, there’s the white chocolate. White chocolate has always held a special place in my appetite. I used a block of Callebaut which was chopped into chunks. So, molasses, gingerbread, and white chocolate all sounded good.

Apparently, they were, in fact, freakishly good. Everyone who tried one got that jaw-dropped look of wonder. After having a sample, Kurt is searching our kitchen for more, is sure there must be some hidden somewhere, and can’t believe I took them all to work. He might be right. I definitely recommend the book, but if you need some of these cookies before you can get a copy, the recipe is also online.