Samoa Cookie Bars

Samoa Cookie Bars - made November 15, 2015, adapted from Crazy for Crust

Before I became such a cookie snob, I actually did at one time eat Samoa cookies from the Girl Scouts. During that time period when my nieces were little and were selling them for their troop. I like the flavor combination of shortbread, caramel, chocolate and coconut but as for the cookies themselves….well, cookie snob here.

But my snobbery is turned to advantage when it means I make my own version from scratch. I got this one from Crazy for Crust and it’s a simple, straightforward recipe. It’s a combination of a samoa bar cookie and a magic cookie bar. The magic cookie part being the coconut, chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk and the samoa part being the shortbread crust and the caramel bits as well. 

The only thing I changed is I went with only 1 ¼ cups of flour rather than 1 1/2, mostly because at 1 ¼ cups, the dough was still crumbly and even though it stuck together when I squeezed handfuls of it, I was afraid adding another ¼ cup would make it too dry. But there was still enough crust mixture to make a credible bottom layer. It was more like loose crumbs than actual dough but that just makes it easier to spread evenly in the pan and pat down. The crust does come together in baking so don’t worry if it doesn’t go down as a fully combined bottom layer.

The caramel bits were a nice touch although be warned that once they’re baked and cooled, they do become really chewy caramel. If you have dessert consumers who don’t have strong teeth or jaws, you might be better off melting the caramel with a little milk and making that the layer directly on top of the shortbread crust then covering that with coconut and chocolate chips before pouring the sweetened condensed milk on top. The only thing I would do differently next time is I think I would bake the bottom crust a little longer than 10 minutes. At 10 minutes, they were still rather pale-anemic looking and not even the edges were lightly browned. Subsequently, I ended up baking the whole thing a little longer after I’d added the rest of the ingredients because I wanted to make sure the bottom crust was done. But that meant the caramel baked longer as well, hence the chewiness after it had cooled. So I think it’s better to bake the crust an extra few minutes then cut a few minutes off the baking time for the second baking.

I thought this was a good homemade version of the Samoa cookie; it’s easy to make and serve and honestly, my snobby taste buds say they taste better than the GS Samoas.

1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour (adjust based on feel of the dough)
1/2 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
2 cups chocolate chips
1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
3/4 cup Kraft caramel bits
1 can (14 ounces) regular sweetened condensed milk

1. Line a 9x13” pan with foil and spray with cooking spray. Preheat oven to 350°F. 
2. Beat butter in a stand mixer until smooth. Mix in flour, sugar, and salt. Beat until the mixture is crumbly. It’s done mixing when you can press it together between your fingers and it sticks together. 
3. Press into the bottom of the prepared pan. Bake for 10 minutes. 
4. Remove hot crust from the oven and sprinkle with chocolate chips, coconut, and caramels.
5. Pour sweetened condensed milk evenly over the top. Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden around the edges. Cool completely before cutting. 

Vanilla Cinnamon Buttermilk Pancakes

Vanilla Cinnamon Buttermilk Pancakes - made November 15, 2015 from The Chunky Chef

I confess, I’m not discerning when it comes to pancake recipes. I like a good pancake as much as the next person but I’m not super picky about them. As long as they’re light and fluffy and have good flavor, that is. So I’m fairly agnostic when it comes to trying out pancake recipes. I typically only make them on weekends because that’s when I wake up and realize I don’t have any food in the house because I mostly eat at work or out with friends.

Fortunately, though, I have enough baking stock that I usually have the ingredients needed for most pancake recipes so it’s only a matter of minutes to find a new recipe and whisk it together.  This time around, as someone recommended on my last pancake post, I also tried not overheating my frying pan so I can get that smooth golden look for each pancake. Turns out how hot my pan was or wasn’t didn’t matter when it came to creating or not creating the vein-y looks in my pancakes. What mattered more was how the butter melted in the pan before I poured the batter over it. Same if I tried nonstick cooking spray.

Ultimately, the one way for me to get that smooth golden look all over the entire pancake was not to spray the pan or melt butter into it. Fortunately I had a nonstick frying pan so the results weren’t too disastrous and the pancake didn’t stick but it also didn’t flip over as gracefully as I might’ve wished. Regardless, once I was done obsessing about how to make it look a certain way, I was able to eat a couple. They were good. I don’t think they’d necessarily stand out in my mind as a go-to pancake recipe but only because I’m not that snobby about my pancakes. They’re good, they helped use up some buttermilk and they were easy to make. That’s all I ask of weekend food.

2 cups flour

3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups buttermilk
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1 egg
4 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled

1. Combine dry ingredients together in one bowl.
2. Whisk together buttermilk, vanilla, egg and melted butter.
3. Pour into dry ingredients and mix lightly with fork only until barely combined.
4. Heat frying pan or griddle. Pour batter into rounds. Cook on one side until bubbles form all over. Flip over and cook until both sides are golden brown. Serve warm.

Smashburger

Smashburger - dinner on October 31, 2015

I’d heard about Smashburger from other foodies so like any good foodie lemming, I wanted to try it for myself. Much as I like burgers, I only like certain places for burgers, namely the ones that let me build my own. Because I’m such a picky eater. As in, a good burger to me is the burger and the bun. I add a slice of cheese if I want to get really crazy. Do not put condiments on my burger or I’ll never eat it. No pickles, no onions, no tomatoes either. Nothing but meat and bread. I’m okay with leaf lettuce as long as it’s not chopped like coleslaw.

You can imagine the inner eye rolls I probably get whenever I order a burger off the menu and ask for it “plain”. So I’m always pleased to find a place where I can build my own burger and don’t feel like I have to defend my plain choices. Plain eaters, rejoice, because Smashburger is such a place. They have pre-built burgers you can order but, similar to the Counter, they also let you pick and choose what you want on your burger. Or in my case, ensure they leave off what I don’t want.

For this inaugural visit, I went with the brioche bun, a 1/3-lb burger, a slice of cheese, a slice of leaf lettuce and a fried egg. That’s walking on the wild side for me. But it had everything I liked and nothing I didn’t like. Consequently, I enjoyed my burger a lot. It’s just the right size if you’re hungry, not too big or too small, and the burger was tasty. Not thin like a fast food burger but not so thick that you couldn’t eat it without feeling like a pig.

Smashburger also offers sweet potato fries which naturally I had to get. I always like sweet potato fries better than regular fries. Unfortunately, their sweet potato fries weren’t as good as their burger though. They weren’t quite cooked to mealy perfection and needed a couple more minutes in the deep fryer. They were still good but could’ve been better.

Still, this is a good place to go to for burgers and quite reasonably priced. I walked out with a burger and fries for just over $10.

Thanksgiving (non-traditional) desserts

These desserts are part of our Thanksgiving tradition but they’re each a spinoff from what might be most people’s traditional dessert bounty. If you’re already planning ahead to what you want to serve next week and are looking for something a little different, you might want to give these a try.

Instead of pecan pie, I make butter pecan tartlets – easier to consume and serve and, after a full turkey meal, much better portion control than a piece of pie without sacrificing the good elements of a pecan pie.

I’ve never liked pumpkin pie but that’s no reason not to have a pumpkin-based dessert like this Pumpkin Upside Down Cake with caramelized pecans and cranberries.

I’ve nothing against apple pie but when there’s a lot of baking going on and I don’t want to deal with the intricacies of pie crust, I go with apple crumble bars made as apple cobbler and it’s always the biggest hit at the post-dinner table.

If you can’t bear to have dessert that excludes chocolate, this Black & White Pudding Cake is super easy to make, served warm, is decadent and goes beautifully with vanilla ice cream. In fact, the ice cream might be mandatory.

Icebox Treats

Icebox Treats - visited October 24, 2015

So when you’re already full from pizza, the thing to do is go out for ice cream cookie sandwiches nearby. At least it’s the thing to do if you’re me and my cousin Christine. Especially since Icebox was on the Top 10 list of ice cream places in the South Bay. Yes, I know, me and my foodie lists. But with the plethora of places to eat around here (lucky me), you have to have some kind of criteria because there isn’t enough time, money or waistband room to go to them all.

If I thought Cicero’s was in a weird location by being in a strip mall, Icebox is even more peculiarly located by being at the corner of an office block attached, semi-attached or just in front of an apartment building. Super weird! It’s not like you’d get a lot of shopping mall traffic. But hey, they made the list so off we went.

Their retail concept reminds me of Cream in that you can pick your cookies and your ice cream flavors and they’ll make you an ice cream sandwich. The girl behind the counter even asked if we wanted our cookies warmed up. (YES!) Or, if you want something smaller, you could opt for macarons instead of cookies for your ice cream sandwich. Novel idea. But since I don’t like macarons, I stuck with the cookies: chocolate chip on one side and snickerdoodle on the other. 

They offered some standard ice cream flavors like chocolate and vanilla but there were also Filipino flavors like ube (purple yam) and mango, making me wonder if the owners were Filipino. I went for one of my classic favorites: coffee almond fudge. 

Having a full-size ice cream sandwich after eating pizza was not my smartest decision because I didn’t have enough room for it. In hindsight, I should have also gone with vanilla ice cream as the coffee almond fudge was more chocolate than coffee so it was a little too rich for me. Vanilla would’ve been a little less overwhelming to my taste buds. Lastly, next time I’d get the snickerdoodle for both cookies in the sandwich because it was softer, easier to eat and went better with ice cream. 

Overall, Icebox was good. I don’t know if they would stand out against Cream but if you’re not like me and want a macaron ice cream sandwich, they have something Cream doesn’t offer.

Restaurant Review: Cicero's Pizza

Cicero's Pizza - dinner on October 24, 2015

I’m still on a quest to hit all of the Top 10 Pizzerias in South Bay. Fortunately, one is near where my cousin Christine and her family live so we were able to arrange to meet for dinner there. Now, y’all know I’m not a fan of the thin crust pizza. For me, it’s thick crust all the way with some chewiness to it because, you know, bread.

But Cicero’s made the Top 10 so I was trying to be open-minded and everything. It was in a weird-to-me location of being in a strip mall next to a chain grocery store. Like the typical cookie cutter place I would likely pass by because you don’t want to take the risk it won’t be good because it looks so strip-mall conformist. But thank goodness for the internet and social media whose recommendations I can cautiously and optimistically take. Because if I hadn’t, I would’ve missed out on really good, thin crust pizza. 

Because that’s what Cicero’s was. My prejudice against thin crust pizzas is they’re either often soggy (because thin crust) or have the chewy consistency of cardboard. Or what I imagine cardboard would be like to chew on. Not so with Cicero’s. It was good! Crispy but not hard with just enough chew that it wasn’t quite a flatbread pizza but an honest-to-goodness thin crust pizza. We went with the all-meat combo (for my cousin and her son) and the Canadian bacon and pineapple for me and her husband. Although rest assured I had both and enjoyed both.

Cicero’s has a casual atmosphere. You go up to the counter, place your order, they take your name, you seat yourselves at a table then when your order is ready, they call out your name and you go back to the counter to pick up your pizza(s). While the inside of Cicero’s is still more strip mall than upscale or downscale pizzeria, their pizza is anything but strip mall. It’s really good pizza. I’m already looking forward to going back. 

New Classic Brownies

New Classic Brownies - made October 18 from Cookies and Brownies by Alice Medrich

I love Alice Medrich’s brownie recipes. They’ve always (or almost always) turned out for me. Not to mention her other recipes. So it was a surprise to me that I found one of her recipes in one of her cookbooks on my shelves that I hadn’t tried yet. In flipping through the recipe, I realized why. Mostly because it involved baking brownies then dunking the pan in an ice bath which probably seemed like a lot of trouble when I first read the recipe and I tried something simpler and more commonplace.

Some months/years later, I was in the mood for a new brownie recipe and, instead of being daunted by something new, I wanted to do something different to cut through my jaded brownie tastes. And trying a new way to make something I’ve made for years was appealing. Not to mention not a big deal at all. This basically calls for baking the brownies at a high temperature for a short period of time then dunking it immediately into an ice bath (in a larger baking pan filled with ice water; careful not to get the brownies wet) to let it cool abruptly.

The purpose of this method is to create brownies with a “crunch” on the outside but to have a moist, creamy, fudgy inside. Lo and behold, it actually worked too. The fudgy interior wasn’t new to me since that’s how I’ve always tried to make my brownies but the “shell” outside was new. It wasn’t tough or super crunchy but it did have more of a shell than the usual brownies and this contrasted nicely with the creamy fudgy goodness on the inside. 

Monitor the baking time carefully though. My oven tends to run a little too hot at 400 degrees and I left the brownies in there for the full 20 minutes that the recipe called for. At first I was afraid I had overbaked the brownies (OMG, overbaked! Crisis!) but the ice bath saved it and kept the brownies moist. Still, next time I’d probably shave a couple minutes off the high baking temp just in case.

4 ounces (1 stick, 1/2 cup) unsalted butter
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line an 8 x 8" baking pan with foil and lightly spray with nonstick cooking spray.
2. Melt butter and chocolate together in the top half of a double boiler over barely simmering water; whisk until smooth and completely melted. Remove from heat.
3. Stir in sugar, vanilla and salt. Add eggs, one at a time, stirring until incorporated.
4. Stir in the flour, beating with a wooden spoon until incorporated and batter is smooth and glossy.
5. Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake for 20 minutes.
6. While the brownies are baking, prepare an ice bath in a pan large enough to hold the brownie pan. Remove brownies from oven and immediately place in ice bath, taking care not to splash water onto the brownies.

Restaurant Review: Cucina Venti

Cucina Venti - dinner on October 15, 2015

Quick write up on Cucina Venti, an Italian restaurant my almost-monthly dinner club group tried out last month. It’s in a somewhat weird location, not only in a strip mall but in a strip mall surrounded by business parks. Meaning there’s not much else going on in that area other than office space.

There was some sort of large group gathering or party inside the restaurant so my friends and I opted to eat outside and had almost the entire patio area to ourselves. Which was kinda nice as we’re not known for quiet murmurings as we caught up on everyone’s news and freely exchanged (strong) opinions and (pithy) observations about mutual acquaintances. Okay, okay, we gossiped. And we weren’t that quiet about it, ha.

We carb’d up first with bread – a round, scone-like serving cut into triangles. Nothing scone-like about it though, just garlicky bready goodness. For a little protein, we had an appetizer of meatballs in a crust served with marinara sauce. In other words, totally bad for you and totally good. Isn’t that how it always is?

My memory fails me on what everyone got but at least I took a picture of each entrée to document for posterity. I can’t even remember what my own order was called but I do remember it was pretty good. The broth wasn’t as rich as an alfredo sauce (which I didn’t want) but was tangy with tomatoes and quite flavorful. While nothing quite sticks out in my memory, I did think Cucina Venti was a solid place to go for good Italian-American food. Service was great and we had very nice wait staff who wisely left us alone to our gossip, er, pithy observations and exchange of dialog.

The only disappointment I would have to log is I didn’t think their dessert choices were that compelling. I’m unmoved by tiramisu as a dessert since I’m not fond of most custard-based desserts and I thought the chocolate cake we got needed some more chocolate flavor.  It was appealingly presented though so points for the creativity on the starbursts. Or “spider webs” as one of my friends called them. 

Pancakes - the weekend breakfast

Pancakes - made October 17, 2015 from The Baker Upstairs

I meant to blog this a week and a half ago when it actually was the weekend but alas, clearly that didn't happen. But hey, here you go for this coming weekend. Although, really, pancakes are good anytime. There's no faster or easier way to use up milk in case that was your situation as well as mine.

My only "complaint" about pancakes (and yes, we're in First World territory here) is I can never make mine look like those picture perfect golden brown fluffy cakes like everyone else's blog seems to show. With a perfectly uniform golden color all around rather than a pattern of swirls and "veins". Nope, nothing like that here. I honestly don't know why. I do fry them in an ordinary frying pan, not a griddle, but I don't know why that would make a difference.

Fortunately, I'm more about taste than appearances and these tasted perfectly fine. Not quite as fluffy as the Alton Brown pancakes but good nonetheless. Oh, and if you make aesthetically pleasing pancakes, please feel free to share your how-to secrets of success.

2 cups flour

5 teaspoons baking powder
4 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
2 cups milk

1. Preheat a griddle or large skillet over medium heat,
2. Combine dry ingredients in a medium bowl and whisk with a fork to combine.
3. In a separate bowl, mix eggs, oil, and milk together until well combined. Add to dry ingredients and mix with a fork until mostly combined. Do not overmix.
4. Lightly butter the preheated griddle and pour the batter by 1/4 cup scoops onto the griddle. Cook 3-4 minutes or until there are bubbles throughout the top of the pancakes and the edges look dry. Flip over and cook for another minute or until lightly browned on the bottom.
5. Serve warm with butter or syrup. Makes 20-24 pancakes.