THE PERFECT BROWNIE

A while back, I bought a promising looking cookbook called Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. The book is a collection of greatest hits from a bakery in Red Hook, Brooklyn, (I place I never went to or even knew about while we lived in Brooklyn. So sad!) The authors claimed that their brownie was the best (Martha and Oprah both agreed), which caught my interest. At first I was skeptical; my husband and I are firm believers that no version of homemade can surpass the simple magnificence of the boxed brownie, but I decided to try it out.
We no longer doubt. These brownies are almost painfully good. Dense, rich and fudgey, while also just cakey enough to count as a brownie and not a candy bar, these will no doubt enter heavy rotation in our dessert repertoire. I recommend this book wholeheartedly; I've made a few other things from it, and they've all been dangerously, fatteningly wonderful.

THE BAKED BROWNIE
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons dark unsweetened cocoa powder
11 ounces dark chocolate (60 to 72% cacao), coarsely chopped
1 cups (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 teaspoon instant espresso powder
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
5 large eggs, at room temperature
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter the sides and bottom of a 9 by 13 inch glass or light-colored metal baking pan.
In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, salt, and cocoa powder together.
Put the chocolate, butter, and instant espresso powder in a large bowl and set it over a saucepan of simmering water, stirring occasionally, until the chocolate and butter are completely melted and smooth. Turn off the heat, but keep the bowl over the water and add the sugars. Whisk until completely combined, then remove the bowl from the pan. The mixture should be room temperature.
Add 3 eggs to the chocolate mixture and whisk until combined. Add the remaining eggs and whisk until combined. Add the vanilla and stir until completely combined. Do not overbeat the batter at this stage or your brownies will be cakey.
Sprinkle the flour mixture over the chocolate mixture. Using a spatula (not a whisk), fold the flour mixture into the chocolate mixture until just a bit of the flour mixture is visible.
Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake in the center of the oven for 30 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking time, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few moist crumbs sticking to it. Let the brownie cool completely then serve!

FIRST MORNING

We began the first day of the new year by eating some cranberry and Meyer lemon scones with tea. I made the scones from a recipe I found here with lemons from the tree in our back yard. It's a treat to have such a fruitful tree just outside the kitchen door. I use them whenever possible. Meyer lemons was pretty new to me when I first moved to California, but they are quickly becoming a favorite flavor. The tea was a souvenir from the Grande Epicerie in Paris. My favorite part of traveling to any new place, especially out of the country, is grocery shopping. We ate our little breakfast while watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an amazingly beautiful film considered to be the first full-length animated movie. It was made by Lotte Reiniger, who created the whole thing from VERY intricate hand-cut paper silhouettes! It was inspiring, colorful, and magical. A very nice start to the New Year.

CHRISTMAS CARDS

Since getting married, my husband and I have made homemade Christmas cards every year. It is so much fun and we hope that we will be able to carry on this tradition each and every Christmas. One of my favorite parts of putting these together is making stamp collages on the envelopes from old holiday postage. Below are examples of a few envelopes we mailed to ourselves at our old Brooklyn address as well as the Christmas cards from the past three years.





This was our first card. We printed red text on translucent vellum, with a hand cut snowflake in each card. The first scan above shows the front of the card. In person, you can see the snowflake faintly through the vellum, its various cuts and facets playing nicely against the spare and simple text. The next scan above shows the card open. We slipped in little personal notes typed on my (pink!) Lettera 22 on the back of slips of silver wrapping paper (not shown). The 3rd scan above shows the envelope & stamp collage.



This is the second year's card. I made a marker drawing from a photo we took, posing for this image. I think it really captures us well with very few lines. We used the Optima typeface on the card and envelope after seeing it on many '50s Christmas cards. We felt like the card had a mid-century feel. Could it be the Bertoia chair I'm sitting on? The stamp collage was a little different as we used non-Christmas stamps that had a Christmas/winter feel to them.


This is this year's card. I hand printed the red image with a lino cut I made based on this cover of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales". The text was printed on our laserjet. Unfortunately, I didn't send one to us this year (supplies were limited!), so I don't have an envelope. It was done with another stamp collage and hand-written addresses in thick red marker cursive.

A HOLIDAY TRADITION

My grandmother's gingersnap recipe is the simplest and absolutely the best I've ever had. I love looking at this photo of my Grandma Zollinger (above) and remembering all the treats she used to make for us when we visited. I've inherited the original gingersnap recipe and begun making them for family and friends at holiday time. The cookies are chewy, flavorful, and EASY. While visiting my parents for Christmas this year, I used the recipe to make gingerbread men (below). I love the look of the gingery-brown on my mom's '70s era robin-egg blue kitchen counters!



I also made two other fun holiday cookies to go with our annual viewing of A Muppet Christmas Carol (best movie ever!). The Eggnog Cookies were very pretty and really captured the taste of actual eggnog (just be sure to use fresh nutmeg). The Double Chocolate Cookies come from a Cooks Illustrated recipe that I use quite often. They are absolutely wonderful but dry out kind of quickly, so eat them lickity split.

EGGNOG COOKIES
1 3/4 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup confectioners' sugar
1 large egg yolk
RUM ICING
1 cup confectioners' sugar
2 1/2 to 3 tablespoons light rum
1 whole nutmeg, for grating on top of cookies

Whisk together flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt in medium bowl.
Beat the butter in another bowl until creamy. Add and beat in sugars, then egg yolk. Add flour mixture till just combined. Gather dough into a ball and divide in half.
Working with half the dough at a time, place on a lightly floured surface. Shape into a log and roll until the cylinder is about 6 to 7 inches long and 1 3/4 inches in diameter. Wrap in plastic. Repeat with remaining dough. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours.
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line cookie sheet with parchment paper.
Use a sharp knife to cut the slices between 1/4 and 1/3 inches think. Place on sheet 2 inches apart and bake for about 13 minutes till pale golden in color. Let cool completely.
For the icing: Whisk sugar and rum together till smooth. Spoon a little on each cookie and then grate the fresh nutmeg on top while the icing is still wet. Let dry completely.