Just out of the ordinary: Aztec Chocolate Cupcakes.

If you’re on this site, you are probably of the same mind as I am, but I’m going to just go ahead and say it out loud: I love the Internet. It’s the ultimate playground for a misanthrope with an esoteric shopping list such as myself. Seriously. It’s where I get my news, my entertainment, my lessons in cookery, my clothing, everything. It’s also where I stumble across such useful articles as this.

Fascinating!

I mean, before reading that, I had no idea that my intent was malicious when I brought in delicious baked goods to share with my colleagues. I thought I was just sharing something that I’d wanted to make; thank goodness I have the Daily Mail to tell me that secretly, what I want to do is distend the army of gorgeous women that I work with (and, in the interest of full disclosure, I work with some ridiculously beautiful women)! I feel so much more informed right now. So much more aware of who I am as a human. So full of evil glee. *ahem*

Now that I have revealed my innermost evil to you all, let’s talk about the delights that have formed the most recent weapon in my campaign to infect my colleagues with delicious treats: Aztec Chocolate Cupcakes! Essentially, it’s the gourmet Hostess cupcake of my dreams: chocolate cupcake with cinnamon and chili, topped with a luscious cinnamon-chocolate glaze. It’s a flavor combination I’d been contemplating for some time, enamored as I am with Mexican hot chocolate and all things cinnamon, and this seemed like the perfect vehicle. I was not wrong. The cinnamon and chili took what was originally just a perfect chocolate cupcake, and made it something warm and magical; the cinnamon-infused glaze gave it an unctuous richness.

Now, if chocolate and chili is not your jam, I’d still like to ask you to check out this recipe–omit the spices, and you’ve got what I consider to be a perfect chocolate cupcake base, an ideal canvas for your chocolate flights of fancy. It’s moist, has a lovely, light crumb, and takes to experimenting with enthusiasm. I personally plan to try at least a few more riffs on it in the near future, though I’m not yet sure what form or flavor profile that will take.

I’ll probably end up asking The Internet.

Read on…

The Quickest Biscuit: Blackberry-Peach Cobbler

This recipe is a game-changer. You may usually be the crumble type, or a pie person, but this cobbler may convert your dessert forever.

Let me introduce you to the quickest biscuit recipe you’ve ever met. It goes like this: self-rising flour, crème fraiche. A little sugar if you’d like. But that’s all. No worries if you don’t have self-rising flour around–it’s just a mix of flour, salt, and baking powder, in the quantities specified below. Mix ‘em up and use them to top your favorite fruit, sprinkle a little sugar over it all, and pop your cobbler in the oven. The biscuit topping emerges twenty-five minute later puffy and golden, pillowy inside, perfect to soak up the bubbling fruit below. A cinch, really.

The original Bon Appetit recipe calls for stovetop-cooked blueberries as a filling, but I bought blackberries instead–they’re Matt’s favorite. (He was pleased, though less pleased with the heat of the oven in his “office” on this 100-degree day. Oops…luckily the cooking time is short.) Precooking the fruit really isn’t necessary. Doubling the recipe might be–there’s no shame in eating leftover cobbler for breakfast, topped with a dollop of plain yogurt.

Read on…

Roasted tomato soup; or, Twitter is surprisingly useful.

I love my stand mixer.

I love it so much, I will go ahead and do something I almost never do, which is name-drop: Big Blue is a Kitchenaid. And I love it. I love it so much, that when the time came for me to invest in a food processor, I decided to stick with a name I knew, and buy a KitchenAid. Not blindly, mind you–I did my research, and ended up with a model that seemed to have garnered good reviews. I hemmed, and I hawed, and I gave in to the madness. And there was much rejoicing…

…until I discovered that the dratted thing leaked like a motherfucker. By which I mean the whole business was not sufficiently substance-tight to make breadcrumbs, much less sauce or anything else interesting, without taking down the whole kitchen. Which I didn’t think was a particularly big deal (I have never been accused of being terrifically fastidious), until I tried making tomato soup for someone I was hoping to impress.

Generally speaking, when I’m cooking a meal, I’d rather not wear it–nor do I want it to end up ALL OVER my worktop. Which, naturally, is exactly what happened, to my eternal chagrin and Peter’s sympathetic amusement. By the end of the night, I was mentally composing the hate mail I was going to write to KitchenAid chronicling the event–a letter that was probably far too satisfying to write. Then, after penning my email, I did what any self-respecting social media fiend would do: I tweeted it.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Not an hour after I posted that charming little message, I got a shout out from none other than @kitchenaid, inviting me to direct message with a customer service rep. Wholly unconvinced, I did as they suggested, figuring I had nothing to lose while waiting for a response from whomever ended up with the email I wrote. Imagine my surprise, gentle reader, when the mysterious person on the other end of that Twitter feed turned out to be both personable and genuinely helpful. By the end of the day, the lovely Cheryl had determined that it sounded like my bowl was, in fact, faulty, and that another one would be dispatched to me posthaste. It was amazing, particularly when compared with the utterly useless response I received to my email three days later, which was impersonal, kind of rude, and made it clear that my message hadn’t actually been read properly.

When I think about it, it makes perfect sense to use Twitter for customer service purposes–the public nature of it makes it easy to spot who is SERIOUSLY disgruntled (who else is going to bitch about their processor in that forum?), and equally easy to have the brief exchange necessary to sort out these kinds of problems. I’d just never seen it in action before. And I’ll say: I was impressed. I was impressed that KitchenAid had thought of this, and impressed that they actually decided to have useful customer service reps–the kind that ACTUALLY SOLVE PROBLEMS–manning the feed. Brilliant! And so, KitchenAid, I salute thee…at least until I need to avail myself of the system again.

Read on…

The Height of Summer: Savory Peach Salad

We’re at the height of it: the humidity, the sweat, the garbage baking on New York’s sidewalks. Our balcony plants are hot to the touch, and nobody can bear to sit close to the grill. I blinked sometime around spring asparagus and suddenly here we are, at peaches.

I haven’t been cooking much. We had one night of excellent hamburgers outside (the trick is a mix of ground lamb and beef) and I made a quick reprise of this scallop saute with chantarelles one night when we were reviewing sparkling wine for an article (up now at Palate Press!) but honestly, there’s been a fair amount of delivery food around here. And salad.

I made this salad twice this week, in part because I wanted to perfect it before passing it along to you, and in part because it’s awesome. Take a few super-fragrant peaches, cut them up and toss with balsamic-marinated onions, creamy feta, basil, and a sprinkle of bacon. It’s summer in a bowl.

You can add arugula to make it greener, but the key is the sweet and the savory, the balance of so-juicy-they’re-gushing-down-your-face peaches and salty feta, smoky bacon, earthy onions. It’s the best of both worlds, a refreshing dinner for the height of summer. I couldn’t resist gilding the lily with some sweet-sweet fresh corn–don’t bother to cook it; this time of year you can gnaw it raw right off the cob. Go ahead, try it.

Read on…

Some Greenery: Broccoli Rabe with Mozzarella Crema

Mario Batali wants you to eat more vegetables.

His latest cookbook, Molto Gusto, includes some simple pastas and the thin-crusted pizzas he serves at Otto in Greenwich Village, but a huge portion of the book is devoted to veggies: a rainbow of antipasti, gorgeous salads, and bruschetta piled with eggplant, or artichokes, or cabbage. (Or lardo. What, you don’t consider that a vegetable?) They’re mostly simple preparations, adding a little richness to the fresh produce, but not masking the essential flavors of good, in-season stuff. I received a review copy of the book and definitely plan to cook my way through the summer market with these recipes in mind.

I started with this broccoli rabe recipe because the dressing was so tempting: fresh mozzarella, whirred or mashed with its salty brine and a bit of grassy olive oil. Mario suggests you mash the mozz with a whisk, which did not work for me, but a little food processor or immersion blender action is just the ticket. I doubled the crema part of the recipe, though you could follow the newly-skinny Mario’s lead and halve what I’ve listed below.

It’s a good treatment to have in your back pocket no matter what greens are at the market (or in your CSA box)–I’m sure it would work brilliantly tossed with sauteed dinosaur kale or chard, a mix of beet greens, spinach, purslane, and whatever else you’ve got. If you have a handful of cherry tomatoes to add, feel free.

Read on…