A few weeks ago I flew to Chicago from Oakland to visit Paulina, and in true sister weekend fashion, we ate a metric ton of food at a number of Chicago’s finest establishments, including tacos, pizza, Italian ice, Italian beef, Italian diabetes, etc. We also went to Parachute, which has a Michelin star and is getting all sorts of accolades. I’m gonna be honest with you: it was super overpriced regular Korean food; we honestly didn’t totally get the fusion aspect of it. We did not finish our goat stew, which I have had before in other places and is good but not $30+ good.
However, there was one part of our meal that blew our minds: the soft, pillowy, “oven baked potato with bacon and scallion and cream cheese”-flavored Bing Bread with the sour cream butter. We both agreed that next time, we’d just place two full size orders of the bread and get a cocktail.
As we were furiously Googling away on our phones on our ride from Parachute over to our next destination, we discovered Bon Appetit has a recipe for it so you can make it at home! BOOM. Done - go make yourself a warm batch.
Looking for Cambodian food in the East Bay? Look no further than Nyum Bai's pop up events around Oakland. Super tasty Khmer food. She and her brother(s?) usually have events at Temescal Brewing, sometimes at other places around town.
Had an awesome dinner at Homestead in Oakland the other day - they did a partnership community dinner with Allagash Brewing, which we had just recently visited in Portland, Maine with my in-laws. Lots of seafood and delicious side dishes.
These beautiful sandwiches can be found at the Pasta Shop in Berkeley. Say hello to the Asian Fried Chicken Sandwich (with fried shallots and fresh herbs) and the Cubano, which has PICKLES and HAM in it. Hold on to your hats!
The Pasta Shop
1786 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Our grandpa used to grow rhubarb in his garden in Napa, CA, and our grandma used to make these really killer rhubarb pies.
All eight of our aunts and uncles used to totally ignore the pies because they didn’t like rhubarb.
Looks like that flavor distaste skipped a generation, because I like its somewhat grassy, tart taste. I made a simple syrup so I could add it to cocktails, club soda, and ginger ale, inspired by either a Food52 or Kitchn post. You could also probably put it in plain yogurt and it would be good.
In any case, if you want to know about the fascinating history of rhubarb, check out this History.com article about it.
Ingredients
- Four cups of cleaned, chopped rhubarb (maybe about 4-6 large stalks)
- One cup of sugar
- One cup of water
Instructions
Simmer chopped rhubarb in the sugar and water (make sure you stir it all together) for 20 minutes. Strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a bowl with a spout. Push the back of a wooden spoon into the mush (I let mine go longer by accident, but I was in the kitchen to prevent splattering) to get the most amount of juice out of it. If you only simmered your rhubarb for about 20 minutes, you can probably use the leftover strained fruit as a jam of sorts, or maybe something that you forget in your fridge for upwards of four weeks until your significant other finds it and asks why the beet salad looks disgusting.
Let the strained syrup cool, and pour into a receptacle that can hold about 8oz and has a secure lid. It’ll keep for about a week.
This is a lovely light white-bean-and-chicken soup that parades around as some sort of chili, though I always categorize chili as a delicious, thickly dredged sludge-stew and this is much more liquidy. Festooned with home-fried tortilla chips and shredded Gouda, it’ll always be the East-coast Victorian Lit dandy to its Texan ground-beef tomato-chunked Ag School cousins who hang out in Frito bags, but we love them all equally.
- Paulina
White Chicken Chili
adapted from the Food Network
2 (14.5-ounce) cans white beans
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 medium jalapeno pepper, minced
2 medium poblano peppers
1 large onion, chopped to large dice
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon ancho chili powder
Splash of white wine
4 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 limes, juiced, plus lime wedges, for serving
1 rotisserie chicken, skin removed and meat shredded
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup chopped cilantro leaves
Sour cream or full-fat Greek yogurt, for topping
Fresh, small corn tortillas
Grated Gouda cheese
1. Turn your oven to 450F. Halve and remove the seeds from the poblano peppers and lay the halves, skin side down, on a sheet pan. Drizzle with a touch of olive oil and leave in the oven for 20-25 minutes. Once cool, they should peel easily; remove the skin and chop the peppers into cubes.
2. Meanwhile, sauté the jalapeno, onion, and garlic in a tablespoon of oil in a large soup pot. Once soft and sweated, add your spices - cumin, coriander, and ancho chili powder. Stir for another minute, then add a little white wine and scrape to remove the brown fond from the bottom. Add the chicken broth and lime juice. and your poblano peppers once they’re roasted, seeded, peeled and chopped.
3. Drain and rinse one can of white beans and grind to a smooth paste in the food processor or blender. If it’s stubborn, add a ladle of the broth to loosen it a bit. Whisk into the soup pot, then bring the whole thing to a simmer. Drain and rinse your other can of white beans, and simmer for 20 minutes. Just before serving, add your rotisserie chicken and heat through.
4. Meanwhile, quarter the corn tortillas. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat, then add a couple tablespoons of canola or avocado oil. Fry the tortilla quarters in small batches (don’t crowd the pan or overlap!) on both sides, flipping once, until crispy; remove to a paper towel-lined plate and salt them while warm. These can be kept warm in a 200F oven while your soup finishes.
5. To serve, set up a station of chopped cilantro, sour cream, grated Gouda, and fresh-fried tortilla chips and have everyone garnish as desired.
“What is this, 2005?” you ask. “LUMP THIS RECIPE IN WITH YOUR ORZO RISOTTO AND BALSAMIC GLAZE monstrosities."
I’d like to take a moment and acknowledge this sauce for what it is, which is a wildly flexible and applicable powerhouse of slight acidity, fresh herbs, and garlic stank. Need a salad dressing? Mix in a little mayo or greek yogurt, and you have a creamy goddess-like situation. Need to perk up a flabby omelette? Drizzle this bad biznass on top. Of course, it is really delicious on steak, and cuts the richness in a really pleasing way. You could also toss roasted potatoes with this sauce and it would be good, too.
I happen to love cilantro, so I put more cilantro in than parsley.
1 cup (packed) fresh cilantro (stems are ok)
½ cup olive oil (I used half vegetable oil and half olive since my olive oil is spendy)
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
¼ cup (packed) fresh parsley, no stems
2 garlic cloves, peeled
¾ teaspoon dried crushed red pepper
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon salt
Whizz everything in a food processor. Will keep for several days, covered in the fridge. It might lose a bit of its vibrant green color, but it’ll still taste delicious.
Yours truly hosted a 1982 themed Silver Palate Cookbook dinner party a couple of weeks ago once we realized that all of our moms owned a copy of the book if not a copy split in half from overuse. There was a 1982 playlist, we wore our best dumpy-neutrals-business casual and shoulderpads, everybody brought a dish and/or bottles of cheap champagne and had a lovely time. We tried to veer into some of the grosser-sounding recipes for fun, but the reason this cookbook is such a classic is that every single one of them turned out wonderfully. It really is foolproof, and we demolished it all.
Pictured above you can see the Marbella (page 86) which I love and made for my parents as well; it's a great, easy weeknight recipe. Also: Hanna's beet-and-roquefort salad (page 218), Genna's ratatouille (page 167), Victoria's sweet potato and carrot puree (page 198), and Morgan's wildly impressive, cream-and-gelatin infused salmon mousse (page 18.)
Not pictured: Molly, Thomas, and Nora's cheese straws (page 7) and MIND-BOGGLINGLY GOOD pavlova (page 275) which I plan to make all summer; Laura's foolproof shortbread hearts (page 261) and orange mashed potatoes (page 177), and Nora's hilarious asparagus-bacon-roll-ups from the Silver Palate Good Times (page 115): bacon, asparagus, cream cheese and lemon zest rolled up into flattened, crustless white bread and run under the broiler.
A good omen: the week before the party, the Chicago Tribune's Leah Eskin published an updated version of Chicken Marbella which is totally low maintenance and great for any weeknight. You only dirty one pot (unless you make rice) and you don't even have to turn on the oven.
Chicken Marbella
Adapted from the Chicago Tribune, which was adapted from the Silver Palate
Ingredients:
5 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs, halved (keep them big because it cooks for a while. Don't do little cubes.)
1 cup white wine
1 cup pitted prunes, quartered
¼ cup brown sugar
½ cup red wine vinegar
½ cup pitted Spanish green olives, chopped
½ cup capers
¼ cup dried oregano
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
6 bay leaves
¼ cup finely chopped parsley
½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1. The night before: Combine all ingredients except parsley and lemon zest in a big gallon bag and put it in the fridge. I left out the salt, because in all likelihood your olives and capers are bringin' the brine.
2. The next evening: Slide all ingredients into a wide skillet. Bring to a boil, then cook uncovered, 8 minutes. Stir it around.
3. Reduce your sauce: Increase heat to medium-high. Cook, stirring, until chicken glistens deep brown and sauce is thick and syrupy, about 15 minutes. As the sauce caramelizes, lower heat.
4. To serve: Discard bay leaves. Heap onto a platter. Scatter on parsley and zest. Goes well with, well, all of the above - or just plain rice, or a crusty baguette.
There she was, slicing olive-oil cake in a silk jumpsuit.
Can we talk about olive oil cakes? Do you feel like they are nutritionally equivalent to a butter cake, except burdened with a grassy aftertaste and five times as expensive, so you’d rather just have an Oreo Cheesequake Blizzard if we’re gonna do this dessert thing? Could we just shove a flaxseed oil Softgel in a butter cake like the little baby on Mardi Gras and get the same effect but a better overall experience?
Secondly, when is the last time you dared to even drink water while wearing silk, let alone cook an entire meal? What is her dry-cleaning bill? What is her olive oil bill? When will we discard the arbitrary constrictions of money and become free-spirited Artist Chefs who bake grassy cakes in silk outfits?
Our Ma has made the best crêpes since we moved to France in 1990 and her friend Isabel gave her handwritten recipe that exists to this day in her recipe binder. However, it's also been published in the HIGHLY LAUDED Washington Elementary School "Just Cook It" Spring 1996 School Cookbook, a magical spellbook filled with mid-90s Midwestern suburban delights and cream of chicken soup-based dishes. The best part? The editor didn't have the heart to turn anyone down, so there are at least 9 banana breads and 4 blueberry pies.
A wonderful thing we have for dinner quite frequently, though, are these crêpes stuffed with sautéed apples, onions, sliced ham, and grated gruyere cheese. We fold them up into little pockets and hold them in the oven on low until the salad is prepared and the table is set, and the cheese melts perfectly.
You can make and freeze the crêpes well in advance and just pull them out to defrost the day you're serving.
Crêpes with Sautéed Apples and Gruyère Cheese
adapted from Williams-Sonoma
Start with:
At least 8 crêpes from the recipe above
Filling:
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 yellow onions, sliced
8 Golden Delicious apples, peeled, quartered, cored and cut into thin slices
2 oz smoked ham, slivered thinly
1/2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
Pinch of grated nutmeg
Assembly:
1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted
3 cups coarsely grated Gruyère cheese
Melt the 2 TBSP of butter over medium-low heat in a big skillet. Add the onions, cook for 5 minutes while stirring. Add the apples and cook for another 10-15 minutes, continuing to stir until everything begins to brown and is soft. Add the ham, lemon juice, nutmeg, and a pinch of salt and toss to warm it all through.
Heat a crêpe pan over medium-low heat. and lay down a crêpe to warm. Sprinkle 1/4 cup of cheese in the center, then a large spoonful of the apple filling. Fold in two opposite sides to cover the filling, then the remaining two rounded sides, forming a square envelope. Use a large spatula to life the crêpe and invert it, seam-side down, into a large serving plate or glass casserole. Cover with foil to keep warm.
Just before serving, brush the top of each crêpe-envelope with a thin film of melted butter, and spoon a big of the leftover warm apple filling on top.
Beating the dead horse of Ottolenghi praise once more, I checked out Jerusalem from the library and was pleasantly surprised at the consistently good results of every recipe attempt. It's almost easier to do a bunch of his at once, because you can bulk-chop all the herbs (the piles of herbs are truly what takes the most time. In retrospect, I would do them all in a mini food-processor.)
This is a lovely, albeit laborious dinner of three dishes: 1) the roasted cauliflower & hazelnut salad; 2) basmati and wild rice with chickpeas, currants, and herbs; crowned with 3) turkey and zucchini burgers with green onion and cumin and its accompanying addictive sour cream and yogurt sumac sauce. The hazelnuts from the cauliflower salad leak over into the rice, giving it a delicious crunch. The fried onions in the rice are insane; I did a shallow, pan-fry instead of his 3/4 cup of oil, and used cherries instead of currants and ground cumin in lieu of cumin seeds. Despite the adjustments and substitutions, the dishes turned out delicious, and have made it into my permanent collection. I've posted the recipe as I made it below; a quick Google search will give you the originals, or borrow the book from your library too.
Also, I left the cinnamon out of the cauliflower salad because of previous traumatizing savory cinnamon experiences.
Recipes behind the cut!
Basmati and Wild Rice with Chickpeas, Currants, and Herbs
from the Guardian Online
1/2 cup wild rice
2 tbsp olive oil
1 cup basmati rice
Salt and black pepper
1.5 cups boiling water
2 tsp ground cumin
1½ tsp curry powder
1.5 cups cooked chickpeas (tinned are fine), drained
1/4 cup sunflower oil
1 medium onion, peeled and thinly sliced
½ tbsp plain flour
2/3 cup dried cherries
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 tbsp chopped coriander
1 tbsp chopped dill
Put the wild rice in a small saucepan, cover with plenty of water, bring to a boil and simmer for 40 minutes, until cooked but still quite firm. Drain and set aside.
To cook the basmati rice, pour a teaspoon of olive oil into a medium saucepan and place on high heat. Add the rice and a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and stir as it warms up. Add the boiling water, reduce the heat to minimum, cover with a tight lid and leave for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat, lift off the lid, cover the pot with a tea towel, then put the lid on top and leave to rest for 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, prepare the chickpeas. Heat the remaining olive oil in a small saucepan. Add the cumin and curry powder, and after a couple of seconds add the chickpeas and a quarter-teaspoon of salt; act fast, or the spices may burn. Stir for a minute or two, just to heat the chickpeas, then transfer to a large mixing bowl.
Pour about a cup of boiling water over the cherries; let sit for about 10 minutes until they're plump. Drain out the water and set them aside.
Wipe the pan clean, add the sunflower oil and place on a high heat. Once the oil is hot, mix the onion and flour with your hands. Take some of the mix and carefully place in the oil. Fry for two or three minutes, until golden-brown, transfer to kitchen paper and sprinkle with salt. Repeat in batches until all the onion is fried. Save the oil for frying your turkey burgers, if you're making them too.
Finally, add both types of rice to the chickpea bowl, along with the currants, herbs and fried onion. Stir and season to taste. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Roasted Cauliflower, Hazelnut and Pomegranate Seed Salad
via the NY Times Well Blog
1 head cauliflower, broken into small florets (1 1/2 pounds total)
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 large celery stalk, cut on an angle into 1/4-inch slices (2/3 cup total)
5 tablespoons hazelnuts, with skins
⅓ cup small flat-leaf parsley leaves, picked
⅓ cup pomegranate seeds (from about 1/2 medium pomegranate)
Generous 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
1 teaspoon maple syrup
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
If you bought a whole pomegranate: Slice your pomegranate in half, then in quarters. Place in a large bowl and cover with water. In about ten minutes, submerge your hands and loosen the pomegranate seeds from the fruit until you have about 1/3 cup. It's a lot easier and cleaner to extract them underwater, but still requires a lot of picking and cleaning!
Mix the cauliflower with 3 tablespoons of the olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon salt and some black pepper. Spread out in a roasting pan and roast on the top oven rack for 25 to 35 minutes, until the cauliflower is crisp and parts of it have turned golden brown. Transfer to a large mixing bowl and set aside to cool.
Decrease the oven temperature to 325 degrees. Spread the hazelnuts on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and roast for 17 minutes.
Allow the nuts to cool a little, then coarsely chop them and add to the cauliflower, along with the remaining oil and the rest of the ingredients. Stir, taste and season with salt and pepper accordingly. Serve at room temperature.
Turkey and Zucchini Burgers with Green Onion & Cumin
1 lb ground turkey
1 large or 2 medium zucchini, grated (about 9 ounces. or two cups)
3 green onions, sliced
1 large egg
2 tbsp chopped fresh mint
2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp fresh ground pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
oil for searing (use your fried onion oil from the wild rice pilaf, above!)
Sumac Sauce
2/3 cup Greek yogurt
1/2 cup sour cream
zest of 1 lemon
juice of 1/2 lemon
1 small clove garlic, minced
1 1/2 tsp olive oil
1 Tbsp sumac
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper
Stir all the ingredients for the sumac sauce together and chill. I added a touch more olive oil and lemon juice to give it flavor more punch, more you, more jizzy-jazz. Preheat your oven to 425 while you're at it, too.
In a large bowl, combined all the meatball ingredients (except for the oil) and shape into about 18 burgers, at 1.5 oz each. Or do whatever size you like. Mine were closer to 3 ounces.
Pour the oil into a large frying pan to 1/16" thick layer, over very high heat. Once warm, sear the meatballs in batches on at least two sides for about 4 minutes, and transfer to a baking sheet lined with wax paper. Place in the oven for 5-7 minutes (or longer, if they're larger) until cooked through; serve with sumac sauce spooned on top or on the side.
Faux-Caccia! But nothing faux about it, I just needed to make a pun relevant to the blog name. I went to Australia after Christmas and my hostess and cherished friend Mel held a New Year's BBQ. "I can totally make bread for this," I bragged, not realizing that she didn't own measuring cups or a scale or dough hook or any of my bread-crutches, plus everything is in kilos and Coles (Australian grocery chain) didn't have any semblance of bread flour? I tried to back out, but Mel was already too emotionally invested in this endeavor. "It'll be so easy," she assured me, having never made bread in her life.
Here's how you go Above and Beyond and Defy the Circumstances: buy a kilo package of all-purpose flour, find an unconverted British Jamie Oliver recipe using 500g of flour, double it, and wing the rest. And it was SO GOOD. Do not hesitate to make this; I've converted it to volume, but if you prefer just use the original recipe source.
Rosemary-Parm Foccacia (adapted from Jamie Oliver's Three-FlavOUR Foccacia)
1 tsp yeast
1 1/4 cups (300 ml) warm water - not hot, but a little on the hotter edge of warm
1 tsp sugar, honey, or brown sugar
3 cups (500 g) of all-purpose flour
olive oil
the chunkiest sea salt you've got
1-2 oz (50g) shaved parmesan, or more to taste
2-3 sprigs of rosemary, pulled off the branch
Mix the warm water, sugar, and yeast together and let sit for 5-10 minutes until foamy.
Place your flour and a teaspoon of salt in a bowl, and add the water-yeast-sugar mix to a well in the center, mixing with your hands as you go. As soon as it's all together, pull it out of the bowl and start kneading it on the counter. It will be shaggy and all up in your hand-crevices for an unbearably long time but don't give up hope! Keep pulling in all the flour and kneading and kneading until it's a smooth ball, then knead for another 5 minutes. You will feel like a humble hobbit, just kneading their honest bread for a simple rustic meal. This is not a bad feeling.
Rinse out your bowl, throw some olive oil in there, and put your ball of dough in and cover with plastic wrap. Put it in a warm place and leave it for about an hour, until it's doubled in size.
Come back to your dough! It misses you. Did you forget about it? It's okay. Punch it down affably, Get a 9x13 casserole dish (my favorite) or just a baking tray and oil it generously (this will crisp the bottom of the bread), and shape your dough into a large, 1-2" thick rectangle, pushing it towards the edges. Turn your hands into monster claws and poke lots of big dots into the bread so it looks completely pockmarked. Sprinkle it with sea salt, another couple tablespoons of olive oil, scatter the parm and rosemary and whatever else - olives, tomatoes, feta, oregano - you'd like across it.
Preheat your oven to 425F and leave your foccacia to proof and rise up for another 20 minutes. Once it's puffed a little again, throw it in the oven for about 20-30 minutes (mine actually took 40, so just check it often.) If you're a particularly attentive person, you can turn on the broiler for the last minute or so - just keep a close eye on it the whole time, and the top and bottom will get deliciously crispy. Let it cool for a few minutes, then turn it out onto a board and slice into squares.
Wanna know about foolproof pastry? Years ago great chef Robert Carrier wrote this recipe: 8oz plain flour, 5 oz butter, 1 egg yolk and 4 tbsp water. You rub the butter into the flour, mix the egg yolk and water and mix that in. Make a dough, roll out, it works every time. If it's too soft just chill it in the fridge. Don't add more water or flour, ever. Let me know what you think and checkout my blog: I'm a food writer and novelist of many years experience. Judy
I will test this out for sure! Thank you so much for submitting this.
Speculaas Cookies with Almond-White Chocolate Buttercream
Upon a recent invitation to my Very First Cookie Swap (in most cultures, this is how a girl becomes a woman) I became fixated with the idea of finding the perfect cookie recipe, so much so that I lost everybody in my life and all of my material possessions. Through a series of hijinks, unexpected trips off the beaten path, and interactions with individuals who had unsavory exteriors but hearts of gold, I learned an important lesson: the perfect cookie recipe had been inside of me all along! Inside of me on the internet, I mean. They were a smash hit at the Olde Cookie Swappe, and all of my possessions and loved ones returned to me while KT Tunstall's "Suddenly I See" jangled in the background and the screen faded to black as we smiled, frozen for all eternity in happiness.
You may know speculaas by its Belgian alterego, speculoos and in the form of Trader Joe's Cookie Butter (or Lotus Speculoospasta.) It's a Dutch spiced Christmas shortbread and absofruitly delicious. This recipe is in weight, because I hate to bake in anything else. I'm sorry.
Speculoos Spice Mix (from Weekend Bakery)
Makes enough for 2-3 recipes of speculoos. If your scale doesn't do half-grams, as mine didn't, I just used a teaspoon on cardamom.
6.5 g cinnamon
2 g ground cloves
1.5 g grated nutmeg
1 g ground white pepper
1 g ginger powder
1/2 g cardamom powder
Speculaas Dough
Makes about 30 sandwiches.
8 oz of unsalted butter, room temperature or cut into small pieces
9 oz light brown sugar
16 oz pastry flour
4 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp speculoos spice
1 tsp salt
4 tbsp buttermilk
1 tsp almond extract
Cream together the butter and brown sugar for about 3 minutes. Add the buttermilk and almond extract and mix well. Sift the dry ingredients together, then add to the wet ingredients and blend until just combined. Wrap it in plastic wrap and set it in the fridge for at least a half an hour, and up to two days so the flavors can combine. (The Dutch would make them up to 30 days before St. Nicholas Eve to reaaaaally let it ferment.)
Preheat the oven to 350F and put parchment paper on two sheet pans.
After the refrigeration period, dust your counter with flour and roll the dough out to 1/4 inch thick; 1/8 inch is even better, if you can get the dough that thin. Use a wine glass or cup, or cookie cutter of your choice to cut out the dough. Place on parchment; if you have scrap dough, you can roll it out one more time and get the rest. The third time, I just baked the scrap in a weird log to make homemade cookie butter out of the crumbs.
Bake for about 15-20 minutes, rotating the pans so they get golden brown, until just set. Let cool for 5 minutes.
Almond White Chocolate Buttercream
I love this kind of cooked buttercream so much more than that confectioner's-sugar-with-butter concrete garbage, but every recipe online makes 5 pounds of it. This one is scaled for a double batch of the cookies.
1.5 sticks of butter, cubed
1/2 cup of sugar
2 oz egg whites (about two small egg whites)
1 T almond extract
4 oz white chocolate, melted in the microwave or a double boiler
In a bowl set above a pot of simmering water (a double boiler, if you will) whisk the egg whites and sugar together until the sugar dissolves and the mixture reaches about 130F. Transfer it to a stand mixer, and use a whip/whisk attachment to whisk the mixture until it doubles in size. Once it's just a little warm and no longer hot, slowly add in the butter in a few cubes at a time. My original recipe called for 2 sticks, which was faaar too buttery; I'd stop after the first stick and see how it goes. Add a pinch of salt, almond extract, and melted white chocolate and continue whipping the mixture until completely combined. Transfer to a piping bag with a large cone tip, if you have one.
Assembly
If you have a piping bag, use it to put some butter cream between your cookies and sandwich them together. Otherwise, you can easily use a knife or spoon. Once all your cookies are assembled, line them up on parchment paper. Put a few ounces of melted white chocolate in a ziploc bag and snip off just a little bit of the corner, and streak the bag across to decorate the tops.
Once the chocolate cools, store cookies in the fridge to let them set up.
(Secret Chef's tip: no egg in the cookie dough means what you think it means. Go hard, friends. Be your best self. Eat that scrap dough raw.)
Grrrr, I tried a new pastry crust method for this cashew cream vanilla apple tart, and it wouldn't come together - I ended up adding water, and of course, the whole thing was tough as hell. At least it was pretty, though. Why is pie crust so haaaard? - Nellie
Happy Thursday, Faux Pasta Tumblr fans! Just letting you know that we just created a Faux Pasta Instagram account. Be sure to follow us there for crazy tasty updates. @fauxpasta is the username.
